Page 6 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

He was rising, then, without thought. His gaze was fixed on the face of the woman who stood just inside his office, as if she was a ghost.

Wasshe a ghost?

But her eyes were too big and too blue, just as he remembered. Just as he’d replayed in his head so many times since. He had seen them hot with need and bright with laughter, but he knew them even now, far more cool and solemn, and yet too filled with life to be anything likespectral.

He would know her face anywhere. A narrow oval, no longer bright with too much sun or sprinkled with freckles on either side of her nose, each and every one of which he had tasted and committed to memory. Today she looked pale, and paler still as she stood there and regarded him with such determination. But most of all, he recognized that hair. Her riot of dark blond and brown spirals was far more subdued today than he remembered them, but still clearlyhers. For he could still feel the soft coils against his palms, having held her tight with his fingers sunk deep in her curls while he’d driven into her again and again and again—

God, the ways this woman hadhauntedhim, ghost or memory, did not bear thinking of in the light of day.

“Your name is not Patricia MacDonald,” he grated out. “Your room was in her name.”

And he was Tiago Villela. He had inherited fortunes from both sides of his family and made his own to match. His name was whispered in corridors of power and invoked in corporate boardrooms from London to Hong Kong, then back again. He had no need to waste his talents playing games like poker, no matter how sweet the pot—not when there were corporate negotiations with far higher stakes that he could win.

And did.

All that and yet he—praised far and wide as a man who might as well have been a glacier, with whole winters running through his veins—had given away his obsession with this woman without even being prompted.

He expected her to look triumphant, as people in his world so rarely did in his presence, but she floored him by smiling instead.

As if he was still deep inside her.

“At least you had a name to go on,” she replied, and it was that voice again.Hervoice. Slightly husky and shaping words in a way that sounded like music to his ears. That same voice that seemed equal parts sex and laughter, like a punch in the gut. And a much harder sucker punch lower still. “I thought you were the pool boy.”

Tiago was certain that every member back down along his ancestral lines, Spanish and Portuguese alike, had a bit of a communal roll in their assorted mausoleums at that.

But he couldn’t seem to muster up the appropriate level of outrage.

Not when he could feel his heartbeat inside his chest like it was fighting to get out and more, had a decent chance of winning. The whole of his body had gone taut and wild, as if he was still in that appalling hotel in the part of Spain he usually tried to avoid—overrun as it was by entirely too many tourists—after concluding a wholly unsatisfactory business meeting. He could still remember it entirely too well. One moment he had been annoyed beyond reason at the waste of his time and the next he’d been captivated by her face. That impossibly compellingfacethat he had spent a great deal of energy since convincing himself could not possibly have been real.

Because he had not been able to find her, and that was an unacceptable outcome, so it had been much preferable to imagine he’d perhaps allowed himself to be overserved in the hotel bar that night. He, who never allowed that kind of loss of control. He, who had never had trouble maintaining a grip on reality in all his days.

Still. These were the things he had attempted to convince himself, and staring at her now,right here in his office, he understood why.

If anything, she was even more compelling than he’d allowed himself to recall.

“I looked for you,” he told her, his voice darker now. Almost as if he was straying into the realms of temper, when he did not typically allow himself such indulgences. It was thatfaceof hers. He could not imagine how she lived a whole lifesomewhere, walking around just...lookinglike that, without a warning label. It was unconscionable. “It was apparent at once that you did not use your own name.”

“You can’t have looked too hard, then, can you,” she replied, cheerfully enough, as if that changed the fact that she was insulting him. “Since I work with the real Patricia MacDonald. It was her holiday, you see. She pre-booked. And who was I to argue when everyone kept calling me by her name?”

“I looked for you,” he said again, and this time it felt like a relief to feel the stirring of what he assumed was temper, somewhere deep within him. Because that felt right in these unprecedented circumstances. It felt more like him, at any rate. Because he was not a man who everfeltmuch of anything around women. They came and went like hours in the day, and he thought as much of them when they were gone.

For his had always been a life of duty and accomplishments, not dissolution and selfishness. The Villelas were not raised to rest on their laurels. No idle sons of wealth cluttered uphisfamily tree. While there might have been a questionable cousin or status-obsessed great-uncle on his mother’s more easygoing side, the Villelas had produced generation upon generation of heirs who knew full well that their role upon this planet was to act as steward of what had come before as well as the legacy and nobility of the Villela name. And more, that the power that name wielded should only and ever be used for good.

It was true that some of his forebears had looked for some wiggle room in that last directive, but Tiago wasn’t one of them. He had always taken his responsibilities seriously.

And in all that time, this woman was the only thing that had ever worked its way beneath his skin, like a sharp bit of wood that wouldn’t come out. He had not forgotten her. He had not spent a single night since meeting her without wondering where she was.

She had made him do things he would have sworn he would never, ever do, or even conceive of doing—like send one of his men to a dreary oil-industry-adjacent conference in Swindon to intercept a woman who didn’t exist.

“Right name, wrong face,”he’d growled when they’d sent him a shot of the wrong woman.

And had not liked how difficult that was for him to accept when he had not exactly furnished her with his contact details that night.

He realized that he was staring at her—at that impossible face of hers that he had imagined, and taken apart, and imagined anew too many times to count in the months since the night they’d shared.

“How did you find me?” he asked in the same dark manner, because she didn’t need to know anything about what had happened since that night. Only that they hadn’t exchanged names. But as she looked back at him, he knew the answer. “That news program.”

He said it with something near enough to disgust, though that wasn’t his prevailing feeling in this moment. It was only that this was too unsettling, after so long. It was too much. He had too many memories as it was and he didn’t want them.