A Billion-Dollar Heir for Christmas, page 1
“What exactly are you trying to say to me?”
Tiago sighed, as if Lillie was being dense. And he hated himself for that, too, when she stiffened. “This cannot be an affair, Lillie. No matter what happened between us in Spain. Do you not understand? I will have to marry you.”
Her eyes went wide. Her face paled, and not, his ego couldn’t help but note, in the transformative joy a man in his position might have expected to see after a proposal. “Marry me? Marry you? Are you mad? On the strength of one night?”
“On the strength of your pregnancy. Because the Villela heir must be legitimate.” He looked at her as if he had never seen her before and would never see her again, or maybe it was simply that he did not wish to say the thing he knew he must. But that was life, was it not? Forever forcing himself to do what was necessary, what was right. Never what he wanted. So he took a deep breath. “We will marry. Quickly. And once that happens, I will never touch you again.”
USA TODAY bestselling, RITA® Award–nominated and critically acclaimed author Caitlin Crews has written more than one hundred and thirty books and counting. She has a master’s and PhD in English literature, thinks everyone should read more category romance and is always available to discuss her beloved alpha heroes—just ask. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her comic book–artist husband, is always planning her next trip and will never, ever read all the books in her to-be-read pile. Thank goodness.
Books by Caitlin Crews
Harlequin Presents
Willed to Wed Him
A Secret Heir to Secure His Throne
What Her Sicilian Husband Desires
Innocent Stolen Brides
The Desert King’s Kidnapped Virgin
The Spaniard’s Last-Minute Wife
The Outrageous Accardi Brothers
The Christmas He Claimed the Secretary
The Accidental Accardi Heir
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
Caitlin Crews
A Billion-Dollar Heir for Christmas
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EXCERPT FROM A CHRISTMAS CONSEQUENCE FOR THE GREEK BY LUCY KING
CHAPTER ONE
LILLIE MERTON ALMOST missed the fateful newscast entirely.
She’d been faffing about in the kitchen of the shared house she’d lived in since university, washing the usual mess of dishes left in the sink no matter how many times she asked her housemates to tidy up after themselves, cleaning the surfaces because no one else could manage it—apparently—and fixing herself a bit of beans on toast as if that might take away the deep chill of a November in Aberdeen, Scotland. And once her meal was ready, she hadn’t intended to go and eat it in the shared lounge, because the reality was that she hadn’t been the least bit comfortable with her housemates since her pregnancy had started to show.
There had been house meetings without her and then house meetings with her, but in the end, everyone had agreed. Regretfully, or so they claimed, but the house was comprised of merry singletons. They were all much younger than Lillie, who had moved in here with her best mates from uni and had watched each and every one of them move out again as the years passed. To better jobs elsewhere, partners, marriages, madcap adventures abroad, and so on. Only Lillie remained, the decrepit thirty-year-old spinster who the newer housemates increasingly viewed as the de facto house mother.
Or had done until it was clear she was actually going to be a mother.
It was decided that the house was for young professionals who worked hard by day and liked a bit of a laugh by night. It was certainly no place for a baby. That was the verdict that had been delivered to her at the last house meeting with great solemnity, as if Lillie hadn’t personally accepted each and every one of them into the house in the first place since hers was the name that had been on the lease the longest.
It wasn’t as if she’d imagined she’d stay here in a house share with a wee bairn, thank you very much. She had as little desire to bung a cot and a changing table into her tiny bedroom as they did for her to parade an infant about through one of their Friday night drinking sessions before they went out to the city center bars and clubs. The same drinking sessions she always ended up cleaning up after even though she hadn’t drunk herself legless in ages.
But no one liked to be told to leave, did they? Much less given an eviction date, and not very subtle threats that she would be chucked out if she didn’t vacate on time—mostly because the ringleader of the younger set was dead set on having her best mate move in at the new year.
Needless to say, relationships had cooled all around.
Lillie was no longer cooking family-style meals for the lot of them or providing endless cups of tea and a sympathetic ear as needed. She rather thought they all regretted it. She’d seen more than one of the housemates mooning about, making big eyes in her direction while she—by far the best cook in the house, not that it was a distinction to be unduly proud of with this lot—made herself food for one and left them to their ready meals and boil-in-the-bag curries.
True, she was lonelier than she cared to admit, but at least she knew it was only going to be that way for a few more months. Then she would have a child to care for. She liked to tell herself living in this house with all these grown children was excellent preparation.
But that didn’t make sitting in her bedroom and worrying over her fast-approaching future feel any better.
She didn’t know why she stopped in the door of the lounge with her plate in hand, all that being the case. She meant to go straight on back to her room while it was still hers and settle in to watch videos on her mobile, while having a bit of the usual fret about her options.
Because she had options. It was just that Lillie wasn’t sure she could face moving home with her parents in their quiet village. Lovely as they were, it had always been hard to live in the shadow of their grand, life-long love story—and she expected it would be doubly hard now that she’d gone and made it clear she would not be enjoying the same great passion as a single mum. She knew there was an extra room with her name on it in her cousin’s place down in Glasgow, but she was trying to get her head around what it might be like not only to live with her very particular cousin Catriona, but what her child’s life would be like under such a regime. In Glasgow, which was, according to everyone, including Lillie, far more metropolitan than home. Catriona called weekly to remind her the room was on offer, with babysitting on tap, and Lillie had always adored her persnickety cousin. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that this wasn’t quite how Lillie had seen her life going.
Shouldn’t have gone and gotten yourself up the duff then, auld lassie, she told herself stoutly.
And by that point she’d accidentally roamed far enough into the lounge that she could see the news program playing on the telly. Her housemate Martin fancied himself a man of the world when he was all of two and twenty, and his primary way of showing this was watching a bit of news every evening when no one else bothered.
Maybe later she would think about the series of tiny events and happenstance that led her to be standing there—beans and toast in hand, a little bit flushed of cheek from both the heat of the kitchen and her own enduring indignation at her ungrateful housemates—at the precise right moment to see the next segment as it began. A little bit of chatter from the anchor, and then there he was.
And even though he was on the screen of the communal telly in the same old house in Aberdeen where Lillie had lived for some eight years now, not even in person, it was the same as it had been five months ago in Spain.
She felt...transfixed. Rooted straight to the spot, but not by concrete or the like. It was as if electricity coursed through her, connecting her to the ground below, the sky above, and yet centering like one ongoing lightning strike inside her.
Lillie forgot to breathe. She forgot to do anything at all but stare—though at least this time he wasn’t watching her do it.
There was only fresh-faced Martin as witness, turning around from his place on the sofa to frown at her.
“Why are you lurking about?” he asked crossly, because he had always been fond of Lillie and was covering his embarrassment at her visible pregnancy with bluster. It didn’t help that she knew why. It was still a lot of blustering. “You know it does my head in to have people stood about behind me.”
As if the path from the front hall to the kitchen wasn’t directly behind the sofa he liked to sit in.
“Wouldn’t want to do your head in, Martin,” Lillie had the presence of mind to reply, dryly enough so that she felt slightly less despairing of herself when she turned and left the room with no explanation.
She had no memory of moving through the house, hefting her pregnant bulk up the narrow stairs to her room and then locking herself in. So that she could stand there, back to the door, for far too long. Panting less from the exertion than her emotional response to seeing him after all this time.
&n
And then, plunking her little plate down on her desk and then forgetting all about it, she snatched up her mobile to look up the name she’d seen flashed across the screen.
Tiago Villela.
She might have stopped to think. She might have paused to breathe, even, but she didn’t have that option because typing his name auto-populated her screen without her even having to hit the search button.
It was like her bones shifted inside her. And everything else along with them.
Her eyes had not been deceiving her, there in the lounge.
It was him. It was really and truly him.
And he was not, as she’d come to tell herself over time, a pool boy who’d wandered into that particular part of the resort and found her there by the pool bar. Credulous and overwhelmed enough at a glance to take him at face value when he’d said there was no need to exchange anything more than the attraction they both felt so keenly.
She had tried to get the resort to help her once she’d faced the truth about the odd stomach issues and malaise she’d been battling as summer turned to fall, but all she could tell them was that he was dark and tall, almost supernaturally compelling, and had swept her off her feet.
“I am afraid you have described approximately ninety-seven percent of the gentlemen in Spain, madam,” the resort’s front desk had replied at last. Sniffily.
They had even gone back to her room, not his, so she didn’t even have any potential context clues to go on. She’d had to face the fact that she possessed no possible way of identifying him, much less dutifully informing him that he was the father of the baby she was carrying.
He’d been gone before she’d woken up that next morning and Lillie might not have done anything like that before in her life, but she’d told herself she was delighted that he wasn’t there for any awkward conversations that might make him seem as human as anyone. That way it had felt as if he was simply part and parcel of the Spanish adventure she’d never expected to have. She’d assured herself that she was thrilled that it was her happy little secret to keep.
She’d intended to keep it forever. Hoard it and hide it away, so she could enjoy all those blazing hot memories in the cold of Scotland that waited for her.
Alas.
Five months ago, she’d been set to have her usual chilly summer holiday. She normally spent a few days with her parents, wishing she could find that kind of love and life’s purpose, then visited Catriona in Glasgow for a taste of the high life for a day or two. But as she’d been beginning to make her actual plans instead of daydreaming about, say, a flash holiday to New York City or the like that she would never really do, her longtime supervisor, the sleek and ferocious Patricia, had called her in all of a sudden one Tuesday morning.
Lillie had obviously assumed she was being summarily sacked.
Instead, Patricia had informed her that the company retreat had been moved at the last minute and Patricia had sadly already booked a week’s holiday in Spain for the very same span of days. Lillie had then assumed that she’d be sent down to the dreary so-called retreat in Swindon in her boss’s place because she couldn’t imagine Patricia—shaped like a gazelle’s front leg and sporting that jet black, always perfectly sleek hair—going without one of her precious weeks in the sun. Because Lillie had been Patricia’s assistant for going on four years now and she’d shown up in her place before, if not at the same high executive level.
But that day Patricia had sighed and said that, sadly, her actual presence was required at Swindon and her assistant would not be able to fill in for her. She’d asked. What she wondered, she’d said then, was if Lillie might like to take her place in the pre-booked accommodation that Patricia would simply lose if she didn’t use it?
“I would love to,” Lillie had said frankly, “but I can’t possibly pay for it.”
Patricia had smiled in her usual way, a bit of a quirk of a closed mouth, nothing more. Her head had inclined slightly.
“You can consider it a bonus for your dedication these last years,” she said. “One of us might as well have fun.”
In the months since, Lillie had wondered what her boss’s life—so seemingly glamorous from the outside—was actually like if her assistant was the only one she could think of to offer such a gift. Then again, the friends she knew of that Patricia had were as sharp and brittle as she was. She could see all too easily how Patricia might not wish to offer any of the lot of them any kind of gift of all.
For her part, Lillie didn’t need to be asked twice. That was how she found herself in a flash resort in Spain for the most outrageous week of her life.
She hadn’t meant to assume Patricia’s identity. It was only that when she’d checked in, the staff had made that mistake and she hadn’t corrected them. And then it had seemed as if pretending to be Patricia made everything that much more magical. Because while Lillie might not have gone ahead and taken part in the various activities offered of her own volition, she reckoned Patricia certainly would have.
So she did.
There were daytime excursions to Spanish sites, pools to visit, and boats to set sail on. There was dancing with strangers beneath the stars. There were yoga classes and massages, and Lillie indulged in them all. Because she was certain Patricia would have if she’d been there.
That was how she found herself slinking about in a bikini and a sarong on her last night there, as if she was the sort of person who wore such things, with her usually wild and unmanageable curly hair in a state of epic disarray that she’d decided was a statement. It had been one final and glorious evening in paradise. She’d gone to a cocktail hour gathering at the adults-only resort’s prettiest poolside bar, so she could sip on the resort sangria that had helped keep her delightfully happy the whole week through.
One last night of glory, she’d told herself.
And that was where she’d met him.
Tiago Villela, who hadn’t given her his name.
She stopped this little trip down memory lane, thanks to all the pictures of him on her mobile screen, because she needed a bit of reminding that she was still there in her same old bedroom in the same shared house in Aberdeen. Not in Spain again. Not sunburnt everywhere with freckles she’d never seen in the weak Scottish sun, her hair a mess of snarls and salt, more drunk on the sea air and soft breezes than the all-inclusive drinks.
Lillie wasn’t surprised to find herself breathing a bit too quickly, her head going a little funny. That was how she’d felt then, too.
She went and sank down on her bed. And because she was alone, locked away from prying eyes and not required to make the best of anything, she let the full scope of the emotions that buffeted her take hold.
Because she’d pretended all this time that it had all been a bit of fun. Once she’d gotten the test results and had fully accepted that they were real, she’d understood at once that she would be keeping the baby. She had never considered any other path.
People would think whatever they would think, she’d told herself. And mostly it turned out that they thought she was seizing the only chance she’d ever have to be a mother—which was insulting—but then, so was the clear speculation on the part of every person she knew that she might have ditched the Spanish holiday altogether and got herself a turkey baster baby at a clinic. So impossible was it, her meanest housemate informed her, to imagine Lillie actually naked and having it off with a man.
“You’re not really the sort, are you?” she’d asked pityingly, as if Lillie was making up stories. “It’s horrible to think of it.”
“Then perhaps don’t strain yourself thinking about it,” Lillie had replied, half laughing at the affront of it all from this girl whose hair she’d held back while she was sick after too many Saturday nights out to count. “If it’s so horrible. Heaven forfend.”
But she alone knew that her desire to be a mother had nothing to do with the spinsterhood that seemed top of mind to all and sundry. It was that it was his baby.
That they had made the child together on the most magical night of Lillie’s life.
