Page 47 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

“Benzinho, how can I get lost?” He did not drop his hand from her face, though his voice was urgent and gruff and he was sure he would not recognize himself if he looked for a reflection. “I grew up here. I know every inch of this land, backwards and forwards.”

“It’s not the land I’m worried about,” she said quietly. “It’s your poor heart, Tiago.”

He kept breaking. He kept breaking and breaking when he should have been too broken to crack apart any further.

For a moment he did not know if he could speak again, but then he did. “My grandmother did not only tend flowers,” he told her, keeping his gaze on her face. On her overbright blue eyes that showed him the only version of himself he needed to see. “She also took care with me, her only grandchild, because she said she did not like how stiff my parents were. Her Christmases were filled with light, like yours. She sang songs every day on the way to the Epiphany, and there were sweets to make the singing better.Bolo ReiandBolo Rainhacakes to tempt anyone. Every kind of fried, breaded thing you can imagine. And always at least onelampreia de ovos. She was a disciplined woman in her way, but not when it came to Christmas.”

“Because Christmas is no time for discipline, Tiago,” Lillie said with mock severity. “Magic requires comfort food. Everyone knows that.”

There was no reason his throat should feel as tight as it did then. “When she died, my mother wasted no time in ridding the house of all the things that brought my grandmother, and me, that joy. She told me it was childish. That she, too, had enjoyed such things as a foolish child, but she had grown up.” He watched her intently, desperate for her to understand. Or maybe it was that he wished to understand himself, with every word he said. “Over time, I began to see even the hint of happiness as the same kind of thing. Childish. Embarrassing, because joy and light were for fools. And one thing I could never be, with all the responsibilities that waited for me, was a fool.”

“Tiago,” she began, but her voice cracked, so he did, too.

“I never saw you coming,” he blurted out, the words too gruff to keep to himself. “I’m ashamed to say I would have run from you if I had. I never wanted this, Lillie. I wanted to stay as I was, wrapped up tight in the armor I’ve worn almost all my life, secure in the knowledge that nothing and no one could ever affect me. I learned, year after frigid year, how to make sure I loved nothing. My parents taught me well. They did not love each other or anything else. They did not love me. I told myself I had no need of such nonsense. That it had been the immature longings of a child that I had ever imagined otherwise, and I had outgrown it. I had come to think myself invulnerable. And then there you were.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, her lips curving again. “Maybe it was the sangria after all.”

“I kept making boundaries and then breaking them myself,” Tiago said in that same rough way, as if this kind of honesty hurt, so raw and real. No ice involved. “I thought if I pushed you away by day, it could erase what happened in the night. But it never did.”

“Nothing could erase you,” she said softly. “Nothing ever did.”

“And despite all the things I did to you, so desperate to keep you at a distance, to make you pay for the things I did not wish to feel, here you are.” He shook his head, all those cracks inside him filling, then, with wonder. With her. Siren blue eyes and all that bright light, even in the dark. “Standing before me, worrying about the state of my heart.”

“The thing about hearts,” Lillie said with as much sternness as she could muster, “is that they beat whether you want them to or not. And they keep on beating no matter how sternly you tell them to stop. And I’m afraid that that’s what love is like as well, Tiago. It doesn’t give you choices. It just allows you opportunities. If you dare.”

Tiago did the only thing that felt right, then. He swept her up in his arms and held her there, his face close to hers. He looked deep into her fathomless gaze, losing and finding himself there the way he had since that very first moment.

He saw her tears, her fierce determination, so much of her light—and saw, too, her hope.

So much hope, and nothing could have humbled him more.

He shifted her, setting her down so that she leaned back against the balustrade. Then he stood there before her, letting his hands frame her lovely face. Then tracing patterns down her sweet neck, along her arms wrapped in soft velvet.

He smoothed his palms over that firm, round belly where his child grew.

“I’m not sure I believe that I have a heart,” he told her in a low voice, a confession he would make to her only. “But I have no need of it. Because our baby’s heart beats right here.” He leaned down and pressed his lips to her belly, feeling more than hearing the little sob she let out. Then he straightened, settling his hand in that sweet space between her breasts. “And your heart beats here. And I have to believe that I will learn enough to find my own, in time. If you let me try.”

“I love you,” she whispered. “And I already know where your heart is, Tiago. I always have.”

“I would have told you that I could never love.” But he gathered her close, and she melted into his arms. “Yet since the moment I laid eyes on you, I have never been without you. In those five months when you were lost to me, I carried you inside me. And just like now, every night, you wanted me. While I was asleep. While I was awake. Every night, I woke with your taste on my lips. Back then I wished I knew your name. Now I do, and it is like a song in me.”

“I love you too,” she said, and as he watched—though her cheeks were still damp and her eyes were too bright—she gifted him with that smile.

That big, beautiful, wide smile that felt like laughter inside him and made him feel that he belonged in a way that land never could.

He understood, now. All he had to do was love her, and he would always fit. All he needed was her, the family they made, and he would never be cold again.

For a man who had always believed himself impervious to the vagaries of weather, Tiago understood then that all he’d wanted, all his life, was warmth.

Light. Joy.

All those things he had locked away.

As if all along, he’d been waiting for the key.

For a woman with a siren’s eyes and chaotic hair to upend all his preconceptions and bring him home.

“You will have to teach me,minha vida,” he said.