Page 7 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

Or maybe it was that he had given up on this particular wish and yet here it was, granted all the same.

It made him feel...unsteady.

And Tiago was a Villela. He was made to be a mountain, as solid as sheer rock with high, proud peaks. He was bright with impassable snow.

He was notunsteady.

And yet.

“The news, yes,” she agreed. And was that the faintest hint of color on her cheeks? “I caught the program quite by accident.”

“But I am meant to be meeting with a representative of...” He trailed off, because he hadn’t committed the name to memory. He would now, however, assuming... “Is that your real name? Whatever name you used to make this appointment?”

Her cheeks took on a bit more color. “Julieta Braithwaite really is a vice president in the company, but I’m not her.”

“So these are more games. You hunted me down off a news program to turn up and continue the pretense.” Tiago reminded himself that despite the night they’d shared and the fact that it had felt more like a reunion than a first meeting, he didn’t know this woman at all. Why should he think less of her for these games? Why should he have any opinion about her at all? Still, he kept going. “Why?”

And for the first time, either that night or today, he thought she looked uneasy. “That’s a bit of delicate matter.”

It was only then, as her hands went to the wide collar of the great, shawl-like thing she wore as a coat, that he actually stopped staring at the face that had haunted his fondest dreams for so long. And took a look at the rest of her.

Even before she’d finished opening up her coat, he could see that there were changes in her body. Her breasts were so full now he felt certain they would overflow his large palms. And below, the soft belly he recalled so perfectly looked hard, high, and round.

Very much as if she was...

He became aware of harsh breathing, but he could not tell if it was hers or his. Letting his eyes move over the clear evidence he could see before him, it was clear that his mind wished to reject what he saw. To assert that he could not have been so reckless. To tell himself that he must have made certain this could not occur.

But she was wearing a soft dress that clung to her body as he had, once, and there could be no mistaking it.

The woman was pregnant.

The repercussions of that seemed to fall through him like all that hard, snow-covered stone he had only just been thinking about.

“Right,” she said with forced brightness. “I see you’ve guessed my happy news. Well. I was prepared to make a go of it on my own. I think that’s important for you to know. But I also thought that it was the moral thing to inform the father either way. I called the hotel and tried to give them some sort of description that would lead to your name, but they couldn’t help me.”

“I was not a guest of the hotel,” he said, prosaically. “I was there for a meeting.”

Because nothing at all made sense, and he could only keep staring. As if waiting to laugh at whatever joke this was that she was pulling here, even though something in him knew full well that was not likely to happen.

“Ah,” was all she said.

And he was aware of her in that same overwhelming, impossible way he had been in Spain. He could see her pulse beat in her throat. He could see how each breath she took made her breasts move. In the whole of his life, he had never found a woman ripe with child to be anything but an object of distant interest, unrelated to him in any way, but this woman was something else. He could feel his sex stir as he looked at her. At all thatroundness. At the changes her body had undergone already. Everything about her fascinated him and made his hands itch to discover how each and every bit of newness stood up to his memories.

As if she was his when she was not.

When he did not want any woman to behis, not like that, with all that need and longing and the sort of mad passion that ruined men entirely.

“I was weighing up my options,” she told him, speaking into that loud, ringing silence between them. “But I really do think the best course of action is to take the spare room in my cousin’s flat in Glasgow. She likes bit of company, mine in particular, though she can be a fussy,fykiesort. And she’s quite committed to staying single as well, so between the two of us I reckon we can make our own family.” She swallowed, as if this was hard for her when it didn’t sound as if it was. Just as she had that night, she talked to him as if he was a regular man. As if they were already in the middle of a conversation and could pick it up and put it down as they chose. But he did not wish to be charmed by her. Not now. “Still, when I saw you on the telly I knew that regardless of any plans I might or might not have made, I had to do the right thing.”

He moved closer then, and though what he longed to do was run his hands over that tempting bump of hers, he refrained. That felt too intimate. As if it would be straying too far into the realm of something he couldn’t take back. Some terrible longing he did not wish to face.

As if this mattered in ways he did not wish to acknowledge. Already.

Still,something in him corrected.

He ignored it, reaching over and taking her chin in his hand. And he could feel the sharp little breath she took, as if she could feel that touch the same way he did. All of that instant heat, like a flash that illuminated them both.

“Your name,” he commanded her, in a voice that sounded nothing at all like his. “Tell me your name.”