TIAGO DID NOT come to the house in Portugal as much as he had as a child, when he had spent a great many school holidays here with his grandmother. And then, after both she and his mother were gone, his father had switched off and on between this estate and the Villela land in Spain so he would be familiar with them both.
Yet these days he spent more time in London than anywhere else, so he could be closer to the office.
But he still knew every single sound that the old house could possibly make. The rattle of the breeze against the windows. The rustle of the trees outside. The way the wind moved in the courtyard that a fanciful person might imagine was an old woman, still murmuring to the flowers she’d loved to tend.
Not that Tiago allowed himself any such flights of fancy.
On this late November night, Tiago had repaired to the office that had once belonged to his grandfather and still smelled faintly of cigars and port. He sat in the old leather armchair where the old man had napped away his later years and found himself brooding in the general direction of his grandfather’s bookcase. It was packed tight with well-worn volumes of books that Tiago had been fascinated with when he was young. He’d thought the world of his grandfather. And he’d imagined that all he needed to do was read this particular selection of books and he would somehow find himself the same sort of man.
It was as close as he allowed himself to get to the memories of his grandparents he’d buried long ago, then packed down tight beneath the cool practicality that he’d been expected to embody. The composure that they had prized far above any leftover sentimentality that, these days, lived on only in the flowers out there in the courtyard.
Flowers he told himself he barely noticed some years.
But he had read all the books in this study, years ago now, and still the man he was had ignored every single lesson he’d ever been taught.
In so doing, he had failed to adequately protect both Lillie—and he still couldn’t get enough of thinking that name, her actual name when she had been nameless in his head for far too long—and his own family legacy. The very thing he had sworn to protect, always.
Now she was pregnant with his child, his heir. The future of his family was hanging in the balance. There were things he needed to do, and soon, in the wake of the knowledge she’d dropped on him today. There was no time for brooding.
But all he could think about was the night they’d shared in Spain. About the things that they could do stretched out across a bed, with nothing but their bodies moving together in the dark.
The things their bodies called out in each other, God help him.
He knew better than this. Those flowers remained not as a love letter to a grandmother long gone, but to remind him of what it had been like to give himself over to his jangling, discordant grief. He had sobbed, out in that courtyard in the rain, and his parents had left him there.
They had decamped to Spain for the rest of that season, leaving him to sort himself out—or, Leonor had told him with her usual serene demeanor despite the unusual gleam in her gaze, they would wash their hands of him.
And he had been just a boy. He had barely been able to process the loss of his favorite person, how could he lose his parents, too?
He had taught himself how to...put those things away.
To hide them as if they did not, could not, exist.
Until sometimes he believed they never had.
And thus tonight all he could do—all he would allow himself to do—was stay where he was, frowning across the room at a bookcase that had been carefully filled by a far better man, listening to the sounds of the old house as the hour grew late around him.
He could hear the wind outside, coming in from the sea. There were the usual sounds of the old house settling into another night, the groundskeeper doing his rounds in his rattly old jeep, the staff opening and closing doors in the distance.
And yet when he heard footfalls in the hall outside the study, he told himself he was imagining it. At first.
Or he wanted to be imagining it, because no staff member moved like that. He knew that without question. They all moved swiftly and almost entirely silently. Not those meandering, hesitating steps down the length of the hall that led to this office, where everyone here knew he did not like to be disturbed.
Everyone except his guest, that was.
His guest. His Lillie.
Tiago still could not understand how this was happening. Not the mechanics. He remembered those all too well, and happily.
But he had never felt such things before. Even before today, she had consumed his thoughts and he had felt things. It was an outrage.
He had told himself for months now that was all a function of the fact that he could not have her. That if she’d been there in front of him, he would have been as disinterested as he normally was after enjoying a woman. He would have politely disengaged and never thought of her again.
At the moment, Tiago could barely imagine maintaining a polite veneer in front of Lillie, much less disengaging with her. Hell, he’d brought her here, to the one place on earth he considered some kind of sanctuary, where no one who was family or someone hired by the family had set foot in ages.
Perhaps he had been lying to himself all this time.
He scowled at the books, seeing not a single one of the old, cracked, much-loved spines. He was thinking instead of Lillie moving over him in that bed in Spain, rocking her hips against his in that maddeningly lush rhythm that had undone him. He was remembering her back arched in a perfect bow, her head thrown back, and all those glorious curls moving with her.
And when he shifted his gaze to the door once more, she was there.
Quite as if he had summoned her—though Tiago already knew too well that despite his best efforts, that never worked.
It never had before.
“Oh.” She looked as startled as she sounded, but he drank her in as if she was a dose of clear, sweet water and he had been wandering for five some months in a barren desert. He felt as if that was no more than the simple truth. “Tiago.”
Her hair was haphazardly pinned up on the top of her head, as if she’d tossed it up and forgotten all about it. And he was a sophisticated man. He attended formal black-tie events as a matter of course, ate at the finest restaurants, and normally dated women who were renowned for their beauty and elegance above all else.
Yet this was the one who seemed to have taken up all the space inside his chest. With that wild hair and her siren’s eyes, too much like the sea.
She had changed into soft-looking lounging pants, obviously made of the finest cashmere with what looked like a touch of merino wool for structure, and the sort of T-shirt that looked defiantly simple yet was cut by artisans to make her curves into a song.
And there was no denying what he had already noticed—that he had found her astounding before, in Spain, but this new ripeness of hers might very well be his undoing.
When he was not a man who could be undone. Everything in his life forbade it.
“I’m sorry if I’m intruding,” she was saying, though she did not appear particularly apologetic, to his eye. “I was exploring.”
“I feel certain I made it clear that you were to be kept to your wing of the house,” he said, softly enough. And perhaps she could hear the menace in his tone. Or perhaps she had no experience with such things and couldn’t identify it when she heard it.
Whatever it was, she seemed unfazed. He was unused to...not eliciting reactions wherever he happened to find himself.
“What a lovely house,” she said instead. “I can’t wait to walk around tomorrow and pay more attention to the view. It must be epic.”
“Lillie.” And he meant to cut her off. To cut her down to size while he was at it. But instead, just as it had in Spain, his gaze...got caught. On her.
And he couldn’t seem to do a thing about it.
Because nothing in his life before or since had prepared him for the sight of her, like a sledgehammer, as he’d walked through that crowded pool area, and had seen her there.
He still wasn’t prepared.
Tiago found himself on his feet and moving toward her. When he knew that what he wanted to do was stay put. Keep his distance. That was what he needed to do. At the very least, it would be wise to avoid these interactions with her until ground rules were set out, contracts signed, and the way forward carefully plotted out and wholly understood by both parties.
What he could not understand was why this woman was the one thing on the whole of the earth that made him reckless.
And maybe she was reckless too, because surely a wise creature would take one look at him in this current, dangerous mood he was in, turn, and run.
But Lillie, his Lillie, stayed where she was. She leaned against one side of the open doorway, doing nothing at all but gazing back at him as he prowled toward her.
Tiago wished that she would say something. Point out that he should not think that he could so easily hide her away here. Fight with him. Yell at him. Hold him to account for getting her pregnant in the first place, and leaving her no possible way of finding him again.
Why didn’t she do any of these things?
But as he came to a stop before her, he knew.
He had never asked for this ability to read her, this strange woman he still barely knew. But he could.
Just as he had once before.
And so he knew that it wasn’t that she didn’t feel all of those things. She did. It was that she felt other things far more.
Damn her.
But even as he thought that, he was moving again. Closer. Much closer.
This time to do the very thing he shouldn’t, but he seemed to have no ability whatever to stop.
His hand slipped under the hem of her T-shirt, then smoothed its way over that high, round ball of her belly, finding her skin satiny and hot. And then, as he kept his hands there, he felt her shiver, too.
“You are carrying my child,” he said, his voice a mere scrape across the space between them.
Her eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted, and for once she did not laugh. “I am.”
“I want to be furious,” he told her, or perhaps he was confessing to the bump he held between his palms. “I want to rage, throw things, break whatever I get my hands upon.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I wanted to be angry. Ashamed. But instead... Tiago...”
Something inside him felt as if it was cracking. Falling apart, crumbling—
And he knew he didn’t want her to finish that sentence.
He didn’t know why he’d started it.
So instead of continuing down this dangerous road that could not lead them anywhere good, he dropped his head and fit his mouth to hers.
And that, too, would have knocked him back if he hadn’t been holding on to her.
Because it turned out that he hadn’t been telling himself fairy stories about what it was like to kiss this woman.
She tasted like every dream he’d had about her since, and better yet.
Because she kissed him as if she’d been waiting her whole life to do nothing else. She kissed him as if they’d been crafted for this, hewn from flesh and blood precisely to drive each other mad.
And so, for those sweet, breathless moments, that was what they did.
She licked into his mouth. He angled his jaw, one hand going to slide along the side of her face, to hold her where he wanted her. To keep it hot like this. Wild and perfect and wholly theirs.
It was as if no time had passed. As if this was that morning after that they had been denied in Spain.
As if nothing had ever or could ever keep them apart.
He made a low noise in the back of his throat and moved closer, so that his body was pressed to hers again. At last. And Tiago exulted in the parts of her that would change even more, the parts that were already pressed up flush against him.
The changes that he had made in her.
Both of his hands moved to cup her face, his fingers spearing into her hair, exulting in those curls that clung to him as every strand wanted him as badly as he wanted her. And as he took the kiss deeper, more carnal, he found nothing but magic in her taste.
Just as he remembered it. As he remembered her.
She kissed him back the same way, her hands sneaking up to lace around his neck, and this was how it had started last summer. This was how it had ended up here, with the proud jut of the baby they’d made between them even now.
One kiss, and then everything had bloomed into brilliant golds and fiery reds, and he hadn’t had another coherent thought since.
Not where she was concerned.
And yet that, ironically enough, was what got through to him.
He tore his lips from hers, though everything in him resisted such violence. And for a moment, because he could not make himself step back the way he should have, he rested his head against hers.
Sharing her air. Exulting in the way she breathed. Taking pleasure in the way her breasts shuddered against his chest.
It took him far longer than it should have to disengage entirely and move back.
“That cannot happen again,” he told her. Severely.
“It seems likely to happen again and again and again,” she replied after a moment, her voice husky. Roughened in a way that made him want nothing more than to lay her out before the fire crackling in his grate, follow her down to the ground, and see if it was even possible to indulge in her enough that this hunger might somehow be sated. “Otherwise, I don’t see why you transported me all the way to this lovely, remote estate where no one could possibly hope to find me.”
“I am afraid you have the wrong idea.”
And he heard the way he said that. So stiff, so unyielding, that he might as well have been made of stone. He sounded like every lecture his father had ever given him. All that talk of duty, legacy. Responsibility. Until tonight, he had always thought those things were stamped deep on his bones. That he would not need to think of them, for he simply was them.
In every possible respect, it seemed, except where she was concerned.
Tiago expected her to react badly to what he said. To look hurt, at the very least. He braced himself for it, not sure that he would be able to handle it the way he needed to, but already lecturing himself on why it was necessary that things be done in the way he had decided earlier.
But Lillie laughed. “You think I’ve got the wrong idea, do you?” Her laughter was not helpful. It was like a bright song, filling the room and pouring through him, like the melody a wish might make as it was granted. “Do you reckon? I’m nearly five months pregnant. What wrong idea do you imagine I might have?”
“I intended to have a discussion with you tomorrow,” he said, even more stiffly than before, as if he was an awkward man. As if there had ever been a situation that he could not master.
This was the first. He disliked it, intensely.
Her brows arched as she studied him. And though she laughed again, it seemed less an expression of pure amusement—not with that new edge to it. She crossed her arms, her siren eyes looking narrower than before.
He didn’t like that either.
“I’ve ruined everything by not staying locked up in my room like a naughty child, clearly,” she said, and then she even rolled her eyes. As if that was something people could just...do at him. “You really don’t seem to like it much when things don’t go according to your plan, do you? I expect that’s all the money. It makes a person imagine that everything they think and do is more important. And that if others don’t fall in line, that it’s necessary to maneuver them into whatever it is you think they should do. No one likes to be maneuvered, Tiago. Maybe you don’t know that, having grown up like this. I accept that it’s possible no one has told you. Likely because they work for you and are too scared to tell you much of anything, if you want my opinion.”
“I do not,” he grated out. “And as it happens, Lillie, you are the only thing that has ever failed to go according to plan.”
She didn’t ask him if he meant tonight, or five months ago. But then, he knew she didn’t need to. Because he knew that she possessed the same confounding skill that he did, but in reverse. He knew this woman was perhaps the only person alive who could read him with a glance.
He didn’t care for that, either. But he comforted himself that at least he wasn’t meeting her in a delicate contract negotiation where his ability to bluff his way into a better position would be at risk.
“I hope you don’t think I’m going to apologize for that,” she said, after spending too long looking for God only knew what on his face. “Besides, this is all you playing catch-up. I can assure you, falling pregnant after one night on a Spanish vacation was not in my plans, either. And until yesterday, I assumed that was a responsibility I’d be taking on all alone.”
“That obviously won’t be necessary.” He could taste her, was the thing. That made it feel like nothing short of an indignity that he could not go to her, strip her naked, and taste her everywhere else, too. But he didn’t do it. Somehow. He moved, though his body felt as if it was fighting him every step of the way, and located himself behind the desk over against one wall. So he could at least attempt to feel more in control. “I’m a man of limitless resources. There is no need for you to struggle ever again, and indeed, I intend to see to it that you do not.”
But she did not look even remotely relieved. Or grateful. She scowled at him. “I didn’t seek you out for a payday.”
Tiago raised a brow. “Did you not? Then you would be the first.”
“I sought you out,” she said, very primly, “because it was the right thing to do.”
“And the fact that I am a wealthy man by any standard played no part in your decision to turn up in my office, I am certain.”
She stared at him for a moment, and he realized that she wasn’t coming back at him with a knee-jerk response. It looked as if she was considering what he’d said. “No, you’re right. I thought you were the pool boy, after all. It was a pleasant surprise to find that if you chose to take responsibility, this baby would be well looked after.”
And that was what he wanted her to say, surely. It was what he’d expected her to say from the start. But now that she’d said it, he found it rang false. It sat in him wrong, and he had long considered himself a finely tuned instrument when it came to other people’s veracity. It was part of what made him such an excellent businessman, capable of keeping his fingers in a great many pies at once, secure in the knowledge that it was a very difficult thing indeed for anyone to fool him.
He could not say that what he felt at the moment was secure.
“There is obviously a great deal of chemistry between us,” he said baldly, because he was always good at that, too. Never one for messing about with thinly veiled this and implications of that, not when he could aim straight at it instead. He saw her eyes widen and could not have said if the sensation that seemed to punch through him was delight that he had gained ground, or a strange regret. “But that is not something I choose to indulge in when it comes to matters of business.”
“Matters of business?” she echoed, sounding as if she wanted to laugh but couldn’t quite get there. “Are you referring to your child as part of your...business?”
“The child will not simply be a baby, Lillie.” He sounded forbidding, he knew, but he leaned into it. Because she needed to hear this. She needed to fully take the reality of the situation on board. “This child will be the heir to two great dynasties. Both come with their own august legacies and considerable mythologies, which would be burden enough. But both also come with significant fortunes attached, and that, like it or not, is business. For if it is not, it will soon be a moot point. It will all disappear. The work of generations, that easily.”
There was something in her gaze then, making all that bright blue turn dark. “What exactly are you trying to say to me?”
Tiago sighed, as if she 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 could not 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.”
He didn’t know what he expected her to do. Cry, perhaps. Look torn apart by such declaration.
Make it clear that she thought that was as much of an injustice as he did.
But instead she straightened against the doorjamb. Then she glared at him as if she was the one in charge here. As if she had the power.
“Good,” she said, her eyes flashing. “Let’s hurry up and marry, then.”