Page 8 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

“Lillie,” she whispered back, her eyes like the sky in the lands he was from and nearly as wide. “Lillie Elizabeth Merton. Lately of Aberdeen, Scotland.”

Many things surged in him then. Memories of that night when Tiago had acted so unlike himself that it had haunted him ever since.

Though he could admit, now, that he had also allowed himself a measure of relief that it really had been as if he’d created her in his own mind. As if he’d dreamed the whole thing, after all.

Only now did he understand what a gift that had been.

Because he had no place in his life for this. Forher. For that unquenchable fire that had swept over both of them on that poolside terrace in Spain and had been firing sparks at him from his own, treacherous memory ever since.

He made himself let go of her chin, because the touch of her skin radiated through him, making him question everything he’d ever thought about what he would and would not accept. Who he would and would not allow himself to become.

What he was even capable of feeling.

“Lillie,” he said, as if tasting the name.

And he set aside all of the things he should have told her then. About who he was. About what his family had always expected of him. What the weight of his legacy meant and what he did to manage it.

These things that could not change, that would not change as long as he lived, and yet all he could seem to do was repeat her name.

Like some kind of prayer of deliverance.

When he knew better.

Villelas cannot be men of passion, his quietly stern father had told him many years ago.It is not who we are. It is not what is expected of us. We must hold ourselves to a higher level. We must exhort ourselves to become a credit to our bloodline. Your mother is my bride because her family is like ours and thus she understands the traditions that shape and guide us. Because of this basic understanding, there is nothing in our relationship that could ever threaten our dual legacy. Do you understand?

Tiago had not been raised to entertain the sort of feelings that felled so many of his peers. The only person he had ever loved, and who had loved him back, was the grandmother he’d lost when he was young—and he had quickly learned what a liability that was. What a terrible carnage grief was, on the inside.

And so he comprehended what his father had been telling him all too well now.

Lust. Passion. Greed. These were things that led venal men to murder and great men to stumble, but he would not allow any of them to do such things tohim. He had always handled his body’s needs with women who understood there was nothing more to be had from him than the fleeting pleasure they shared. He took pains to never, ever let greed dictate his decisions. He treated the power in his name like a kind of volatile poison that could kill him as easily as it could gain him anything, and there was only one night in his entire life he had ever risked any of it.

He would not do it again.

Tiago did not trouble himself with emotion, passion, or any of the things that made humans act so contrary to their own interests. He did not need to learn his lessons more than once.

He should not have required the reminder.

And so even though it felt a bit too little, too late, he stepped back then. He looked at Lillie for a long moment, then reached around her to open up his office door.

“Caroline, if you please,” he said to his secretary in the next room, “have the plane waiting for me. And cancel the rest of my day.”

That was unusual, but the unflappable Caroline had been with him for over a decade, and she did not so much as blink. “Right away, Mr. Villela.”

“You could have sent a letter,” he said to Lillie when he closed the door again, and he told himself it was only right that he let his gaze go cool and assessing. Not only was it right, but it also felt far more rational that he could trust himself to take one look at her without the whole world getting knocked back on its axis, for a change. “Instead, you chose to come in person. To my place of business, under an assumed name. In a pretty dress, no less.”

She blinked, and looked down at her dress. “It seemed like the sort of thing people wear in giddy London.” She ran her hands down the dress as if she’d only just seen it for the first time, then looked back at him, her eyes sparkling. “Is it not? I wouldn’t want to seem a Scottish country mouse. Not while informing a man that he’s the father of my baby. That would be a tragedy, I’m sure.”

And he really, truly could have done without the reminder that she was this charming. That she alone seemed so capable of charminghim, when no one else had ever seemed to possess the faintest shred of the ability.

“We are going to have to come to terms, you and I,” he told her, channeling his father’s deliberate sternness.

Her eyes did not dim, precisely. But she did hitch her chin up a notch or two, so in the end, perhaps it was the same thing. “I don’t know what sort of terms you mean.”

“There will have to be tests. I mean no disrespect, but I’m sure you understand that we must both be certain.”

That time, there was no question that she looked dimmer, and it was shocking to him that he disliked it. Intensely. “Do you mean a paternity test?”

“Benzinho, you know who I am now,” Tiago said. Kindly, he thought. “You cannot imagine that a man in my position can simply take it on faith when told he is unexpectedly a father, can you?”