TIAGO STAGGERED FROM the patio, down the stairs, and didn’t realize he had neglected to put his shoes on until his bare feet hit the earth.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had allowed himself to go barefoot, and certainly not here in the dirt. Not here on this land of his, of his family, that had defined him for the whole of his life—both here and in Spain, where the Villela stronghold was far less pastoral.
A true steward of the land would indulge in it more, he thought. And he had the sudden memory of his grandmother kneeling in her garden, looking at him with her wise green eyes.
Dirt is medicine and water is magic, and a wise man knows how to use them both in their time, meu dengo, she had told him.
He hadn’t permitted himself such memories since he was small. And tonight, he felt neither medicine nor magic. What he felt instead was the coldness of the earth beneath his feet. Not frozen, for this was still the south of Portugal. Not frigid or too hard.
But certainly it felt dark and cold here, so far away from the woman who smiled at him, pointed fingers at him, and wrecked him by asking him to do the one thing could not.
He could not. He would not.
Tiago started forward, his usually cool and rational brain whirling around in a haze.
It wasn’t only that he felt like a stranger to himself, loud and unruly and unsteady on his own feet, but now the world seemed to feel strange around him. When whatever else he had felt, he had always been certain that he belonged right where he was.
He accepted that it was possible, as only Lillie had ever dared say, that his parents might have been miserable people. But that hadn’t mattered, not when what they had in common was this.
The family. The legacy.
These lands and what they meant, throughout time.
He didn’t know how he was meant to lose that, too—that connection to history and the future that had sustained him all his life—and his first reaction was a bright-hot fury at Lillie for holding up a mirror he never wanted to look into.
Tiago, who had always prized his own steadiness, staggered on a while longer, but then stopped again. Because suddenly the cold dirt beneath his feet, the careless stars overhead—it all seemed futile.
Because where could he go?
If there was a place on this earth where Lillie would not haunt him, wouldn’t he have found it by now?
Despite himself, despite all the promises he kept making to himself, he found himself turning back.
And then he was looking back at the house. He saw all the light, beaming out into the dark like beacons. The lights he expected to see and all the Christmas fervor Lillie had brought to this place.
All that bright and unapologetic light, and all of it reminded him of her.
The way her blue eyes lit up when she saw him. The way she smiled, heedless and wide open. That laugh of hers, infectious and bawdy and so necessary to him now that Tiago could not comprehend how he truly believed there was any way to survive without it.
No matter how he tried to castigate himself for his weakness, it remained. As stubborn as she was. As rowdy as those irrepressible curls of hers.
He let his gaze find that patio she’d taken over with that silly grotto of hers, all red and green and foolish.
It wasn’t as if his opinion on it changed, but it looked different from out here in the dark. It looked like a bright and happy bit of folly, a touch of the frozen north here, where it never snowed—except perhaps in the mountains at Monchique.
And for the first time, he wondered if it was possible that Lillie was a little bit homesick for all that cold, damp, and all-day gray.
He found himself raking his hands through his hair once more and as he did, his gaze kept moving—
Until he found her.
And his heart seemed to seize inside his chest.
Because in all the time he had known her, Tiago had seen this woman in a thousand intimate ways. In bed and out. When his doctors visited to check on the baby. At her lessons, at the table—she inhabited all the roles he threw in her with that same laugh and her careless ease, because no matter her pedigree, she possessed the confidence of a queen.
But tonight she stood on the edge of the patio, looking out into the dark.
Tiago doubted she could see him, but he could see her. Far too clearly. Because he could see the way she slumped a bit as she stood. How she wiped at her cheeks, then hugged herself again.
Because Lillie, his Lillie, was crying.
And he had told her that he was broken before. But he knew now that he hadn’t even started.
Because watching her cry was the end of him.
Everything he’d said to her, everything Tiago had believed the whole of his life—none of that held a candle to what rushed through him at the sight of this woman in pain. Weeping, because of him.
What he said. Who he was. Because of everything, perhaps.
He found himself moving again as if she’d called him to her.
And there was a part of him that wished she had, because he could have ignored it, then. He could have used it as more evidence that everything about her was wrong—that everything he’d said to her was true.
For a moment there, he tried to convince himself—
Instead, she wiped at her cheeks again and her face crumpled, and everything in him simply...ended.
And then began again.
With the breath that moved him toward her. With each step that brought him near, because the land that owned him was useless if all he could do when he stood upon it was hurt her.
Tiago took the stairs two at a time and finally found himself walking toward her, his hands already outstretched, to touch her. To hold her. To simply be near her.
As if she had been the candle in the window all along.
“Why are you crying?” he demanded, and that wasn’t what he meant to say at all. Not so harshly. So gruffly.
Lillie offered him a tremulous smile, so unlike the one he was used to, and he reached out to wipe another tear away.
“I was waiting for you,” she said, her voice thick. “I didn’t want you to get lost.”
“Benzinho, how can I get lost?” He did not drop his hand from her face, though his voice was urgent and gruff and he was sure he would not recognize himself if he looked for a reflection. “I grew up here. I know every inch of this land, backwards and forwards.”
“It’s not the land I’m worried about,” she said quietly. “It’s your poor heart, Tiago.”
He kept breaking. He kept breaking and breaking when he should have been too broken to crack apart any further.
For a moment he did not know if he could speak again, but then he did. “My grandmother did not only tend flowers,” he told her, keeping his gaze on her face. On her overbright blue eyes that showed him the only version of himself he needed to see. “She also took care with me, her only grandchild, because she said she did not like how stiff my parents were. Her Christmases were filled with light, like yours. She sang songs every day on the way to the Epiphany, and there were sweets to make the singing better. Bolo Rei and Bolo Rainha cakes to tempt anyone. Every kind of fried, breaded thing you can imagine. And always at least one lampreia de ovos. She was a disciplined woman in her way, but not when it came to Christmas.”
“Because Christmas is no time for discipline, Tiago,” Lillie said with mock severity. “Magic requires comfort food. Everyone knows that.”
There was no reason his throat should feel as tight as it did then. “When she died, my mother wasted no time in ridding the house of all the things that brought my grandmother, and me, that joy. She told me it was childish. That she, too, had enjoyed such things as a foolish child, but she had grown up.” He watched her intently, desperate for her to understand. Or maybe it was that he wished to understand himself, with every word he said. “Over time, I began to see even the hint of happiness as the same kind of thing. Childish. Embarrassing, because joy and light were for fools. And one thing I could never be, with all the responsibilities that waited for me, was a fool.”
“Tiago,” she began, but her voice cracked, so he did, too.
“I never saw you coming,” he blurted out, the words too gruff to keep to himself. “I’m ashamed to say I would have run from you if I had. I never wanted this, Lillie. I wanted to stay as I was, wrapped up tight in the armor I’ve worn almost all my life, secure in the knowledge that nothing and no one could ever affect me. I learned, year after frigid year, how to make sure I loved nothing. My parents taught me well. They did not love each other or anything else. They did not love me. I told myself I had no need of such nonsense. That it had been the immature longings of a child that I had ever imagined otherwise, and I had outgrown it. I had come to think myself invulnerable. And then there you were.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered, her lips curving again. “Maybe it was the sangria after all.”
“I kept making boundaries and then breaking them myself,” Tiago said in that same rough way, as if this kind of honesty hurt, so raw and real. No ice involved. “I thought if I pushed you away by day, it could erase what happened in the night. But it never did.”
“Nothing could erase you,” she said softly. “Nothing ever did.”
“And despite all the things I did to you, so desperate to keep you at a distance, to make you pay for the things I did not wish to feel, here you are.” He shook his head, all those cracks inside him filling, then, with wonder. With her. Siren blue eyes and all that bright light, even in the dark. “Standing before me, worrying about the state of my heart.”
“The thing about hearts,” Lillie said with as much sternness as she could muster, “is that they beat whether you want them to or not. And they keep on beating no matter how sternly you tell them to stop. And I’m afraid that that’s what love is like as well, Tiago. It doesn’t give you choices. It just allows you opportunities. If you dare.”
Tiago did the only thing that felt right, then. He swept her up in his arms and held her there, his face close to hers. He looked deep into her fathomless gaze, losing and finding himself there the way he had since that very first moment.
He saw her tears, her fierce determination, so much of her light—and saw, too, her hope.
So much hope, and nothing could have humbled him more.
He shifted her, setting her down so that she leaned back against the balustrade. Then he stood there before her, letting his hands frame her lovely face. Then tracing patterns down her sweet neck, along her arms wrapped in soft velvet.
He smoothed his palms over that firm, round belly where his child grew.
“I’m not sure I believe that I have a heart,” he told her in a low voice, a confession he would make to her only. “But I have no need of it. Because our baby’s heart beats right here.” He leaned down and pressed his lips to her belly, feeling more than hearing the little sob she let out. Then he straightened, settling his hand in that sweet space between her breasts. “And your heart beats here. And I have to believe that I will learn enough to find my own, in time. If you let me try.”
“I love you,” she whispered. “And I already know where your heart is, Tiago. I always have.”
“I would have told you that I could never love.” But he gathered her close, and she melted into his arms. “Yet since the moment I laid eyes on you, I have never been without you. In those five months when you were lost to me, I carried you inside me. And just like now, every night, you wanted me. While I was asleep. While I was awake. Every night, I woke with your taste on my lips. Back then I wished I knew your name. Now I do, and it is like a song in me.”
“I love you too,” she said, and as he watched—though her cheeks were still damp and her eyes were too bright—she gifted him with that smile.
That big, beautiful, wide smile that felt like laughter inside him and made him feel that he belonged in a way that land never could.
He understood, now. All he had to do was love her, and he would always fit. All he needed was her, the family they made, and he would never be cold again.
For a man who had always believed himself impervious to the vagaries of weather, Tiago understood then that all he’d wanted, all his life, was warmth.
Light. Joy.
All those things he had locked away.
As if all along, he’d been waiting for the key.
For a woman with a siren’s eyes and chaotic hair to upend all his preconceptions and bring him home.
“You will have to teach me, minha vida,” he said.
My life, he’d called her, and she was. He leaned down to kiss her on the forehead, the tip of her nose so that she laughed, and then, finally on her mouth. Like a vow.
“I want to live like you do. So brave. So open. I want to learn how to love as you do, beyond all reason.”
She tipped her head back and slid her hands up along his chest, making him realize he had been walking around with his shirt wide open, which was something he would never have dreamed of doing before. And now he couldn’t imagine why.
He was Tiago Villela, was he not? He could do as he pleased. And he thought it was about time he started.
Especially when he watched his wife, his Lillie, light up there before him, and then laugh as if she’d known how this would be all along. The two of them like this, their baby on the way, and nothing but choirs singing in between them.
“I’ll tell you right now,” Lillie told him when the laughter danced away into the pine trees standing tall around them this Christmas Eve. “It’s as easy and as hard as this. All you do is look for the light and the joy no matter how it scares you. And hold on to me, just like this.” She reached down and took his hands in hers, lacing their fingers together. “And then we’ll do it together.”
And they did.
Starting right then and there, bright all the way through.