Page 46 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

Despite himself, despite all the promises he kept making to himself, he found himself turning back.

And then he was looking back at the house. He saw all the light, beaming out into the dark like beacons. The lights he expected to see and all the Christmas fervor Lillie had brought to this place.

All that bright and unapologetic light, and all of it reminded him of her.

The way her blue eyes lit up when she saw him. The way she smiled, heedless and wide open. That laugh of hers, infectious and bawdy and so necessary to him now that Tiago could not comprehend how he truly believed there was any way to survive without it.

No matter how he tried to castigate himself for his weakness, it remained. As stubborn as she was. As rowdy as those irrepressible curls of hers.

He let his gaze find that patio she’d taken over with that silly grotto of hers, all red and green and foolish.

It wasn’t as if his opinion on it changed, but it looked different from out here in the dark. It looked like a bright and happy bit of folly, a touch of the frozen north here, where it never snowed—except perhaps in the mountains at Monchique.

And for the first time, he wondered if it was possible that Lillie was a little bit homesick for all that cold, damp, and all-day gray.

He found himself raking his hands through his hair once more and as he did, his gaze kept moving—

Until he found her.

And his heart seemed to seize inside his chest.

Because in all the time he had known her, Tiago had seen this woman in a thousand intimate ways. In bed and out. When his doctors visited to check on the baby. At her lessons, at the table—she inhabited all the roles he threw in her with that same laugh and her careless ease, because no matter her pedigree, she possessed the confidence of a queen.

But tonight she stood on the edge of the patio, looking out into the dark.

Tiago doubted she could see him, but he could see her. Far too clearly. Because he could see the way she slumped a bit as she stood. How she wiped at her cheeks, then hugged herself again.

Because Lillie,his Lillie, was crying.

And he had told her that he was broken before. But he knew now that he hadn’t even started.

Because watching her cry was the end of him.

Everything he’d said to her, everything Tiago had believed the whole of his life—none of that held a candle to what rushed through him at the sight of this woman in pain. Weeping, because of him.

What he said. Who he was. Because of everything, perhaps.

He found himself moving again as if she’d called him to her.

And there was a part of him that wished she had, because he could have ignored it, then. He could have used it as more evidence that everything about her was wrong—that everything he’d said to her was true.

For a moment there, he tried to convince himself—

Instead, she wiped at her cheeks again and her face crumpled, and everything in him simply...ended.

And then began again.

With the breath that moved him toward her. With each step that brought him near, because the land that owned him was useless if all he could do when he stood upon it was hurt her.

Tiago took the stairs two at a time and finally found himself walking toward her, his hands already outstretched, to touch her. To hold her. To simply be near her.

As if she had been the candle in the window all along.

“Why are you crying?” he demanded, and that wasn’t what he meant to say at all. Not so harshly. So gruffly.

Lillie offered him a tremulous smile, so unlike the one he was used to, and he reached out to wipe another tear away.

“I was waiting for you,” she said, her voice thick. “I didn’t want you to get lost.”