Page 9 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

But he could see by her crestfallen expression that she had imagined exactly that. And he held back from letting himself get cold and cutting with her, as he knew he could. It would be easy enough to make it abundantly clear that he had earned every bit of his glacial reputation, but this woman was different.

Because as much as he wanted to imagine that she was a scheming, naive fool to come here and think he would simply believe her, he knew better. That long night they’d shared and the connection between them was something he still couldn’t begin to puzzle out.

But he did not need to tell her that, either.

Tiago waited until her shoulders seemed to deflate, and then nodded. “I will call my personal physician from the car.”

He thought she might argue then, but all she did was look at him as if he was coming into focus—but slowly—until he felt something in him lose its place.

A sensation he could not say he cared for in the least.

“Take all the tests you like,” she said after a moment, her voice huskier than before. Quieter. “But I shouldn’t like to miss my return flight to Aberdeen, if at all possible.”

And Tiago had not become the man he was, in this position he enjoyed, by engaging in unnecessary arguments. Even before the tests came back, he had made up his mind.

He did not share that, either. He knew it made no sense, and that in all other areas he was seen as the soul of prudence and circumspection. The world was filled with scheming people, men and women alike, forever running their little cons to better their positions. To change their lives. To get a little more and leave others with a little less. He’d seen it all in his day—and there had always been various attempts to wrap him up in such webs, too. It came with the territory.

But he was not at all surprised when the paternity test came back with the indisputable proof he hadn’t needed, because he already knew that he intended to keep her.

That was the troubling thing about Lillie.

If he’d had his way, even five months ago when he hadn’t been looking for anything but a car to take him away from that loud, garish resort, he wouldn’t have left her.

Lillie. Her name lilted inside him like a melody. It was both not at all the name he would have chosen for her and at the same time, perfect. Even the way she spelled it at the doctor’s office—not quite a flower, but something else. Somethingher.

“I hope you are not too distressed by the news,” she said in that arch, Scottish way of hers when they were back in his car and his driver was making his way through the typical snarls of London traffic.

He should have expected the question. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t. “Distressedis not the word I would choose.”

“This is slightly disappointing,” Lillie confided in him, once more as if they were the best of casual friends. “I expected at least a few accusations of whoring myself about before the results came in. Some thundering on, at the least. You seem to be accepting this rather easily. I thought men in your tax bracket were forever ranting on about bloodlines and legacies and all the rest of it.The shores of Pemberley pollutedand so on.”

And he remembered this, too. That in places where other people, and specifically other woman, might cower—Lillie had done the opposite. She got very dry. And amused. And there was something about both of those things that he found entertaining, when he had been told a thousand times by business associates and romantic assignations alike that he was bereft of even the faintest nod toward any kind of sense of humor. Something he had always chosen to wear as a badge of honor, because he was a Villela. He had things of import to accomplish in this life. Laughter was the province of the weak. He couldn’t recall ever seeing his father or mother do more than offer a genteel smile.

It was one more thing that was different with this woman.

Maybe it was in that moment that the decision he’d already made firmed into certainty.

“Until now you have perhaps not had a particularly good overview of my character, I think,” he told her then. “As you imagined me some kind of pool boy Lothario, of all things. But I hope I have never been the sort of man to deny reality when it is right there before me.”

She looked as if she wanted to say something to that, but didn’t. Her blue eyes found his, then dropped, and he found himself transfixed by the way she moved her hands over the rounded swell of her belly.

Tiago had never wanted to touch anything as much as he wanted to touch her, then. It was as if wanting his hands on her was some kind of ache within him. And he was forced to face the fact that he was not used to wanting things he could not have. For all he liked to think of himself as a man who was somehow not out of touch with the real world, despite his wealth and power, perhaps he had been fooling himself about that all along.

But he remembered too well what it had been like to lie with this woman on that bed in Spain. To explore every part of her, and let her do the same in return, and lose himself somehow in a communion that should never have affected him the way that it did.

He had not felt out of touch that night. He had felt, for the first and only time in his life, not like a Villela at all—but like a man. A regular, red-blooded man, who wanted her.

Only her, in every possible way the two of them could imagine.

But he forced himself to thrust those memories aside.

He did not reach over and touch her, though the more he yearned to do it, the more stern he was forced to get with himself. Because the way forward was clear, as he had discovered long ago. It would require self-control on his part, but that had never been something he had struggled with before—self-control was how he’d survived his childhood after his grandmother had died. His self-control was the only part of him that his parents had ever praised, and therefore he had made certain he exerted it over all aspects of his life.

A bit of deprivation was good for a man’s character. Tiago was living proof.

Surely all that was needed with Lillie was a bit of exposure therapy to weaken this hold she had on him, that was all. All he needed was to banish the ghost of her and focus on the real, live woman instead.

Because it was her memory that had haunted him. The reality of her would not—he knew this, because no real woman ever had.