by Dani Collins
His abdomen tightened to brace for a kick. A sizzle resounded in his ears. Adrenaline made him want to reach for his drink, but he only lifted his hand to scratch his cheek—while his mind conjured the forest of lilies that had surrounded them in his mother’s solarium as he and Poppy had made love so impulsively.
“Do you...remember her?” Sorcha asked tentatively.
Skin scented like nectarines, lush corkscrews of curly red hair filling his hands as he consumed her crimson lips. He remembered the exact pitch of her joyful cries of release, the culmination of madness like he’d never known before or since.
And he remembered vividly the ticking of the clock on the mantel as he had sat in his mother’s parlor the next morning, an itchy fire in his blood driving him mad. He’d been on the verge of going to look for her because he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Then Faustina had arrived, striking like dry lightning with sheepishly delivered news. Family obligation had crashed upon him afresh, pinning him under the weight of a wedding that had been called off, but now was back on. They would pretend the gap in the parade had never happened.
“Rico?” Sorcha prompted gently, dragging him back to the present. “I know this must be a shock.” And there was that infernal compassion again.
He swore, tired to his bones of people thinking he was mourning a baby he had already known wasn’t his. He was sorry for the loss of a life before it had had the chance to start. Of course he was. But he wasn’t grieving with the infinite heartbreak of a parent losing a child. It hadn’t been his.
And given Faustina’s trickery, he was damned cynical about whether he had conceived this one.
“Why did you jump straight to suspecting she’s mine?” he asked baldly.
Sorcha was slightly taken aback. “Well, I’m not going to suspect my own husband, am I?” Her tone warned that he had better not, either. Her chin came up a notch. “You were living in your parents’ villa at the time. Frankly, your father doesn’t seem particularly passionate about any woman, young or old. You, however, were briefly unengaged.”
Rico had long suspected the success of his parents’ marriage could be attributed to both of them being fairly asexual and lacking in passion for anything beyond cool reason and the advancement of family interests.
Sorcha’s eyes grew big and soft and filled with that excruciating pity. “I’m not judging, Rico. I know how these things happen.”
“I bet you do.” He regretted it immediately. It wasn’t him. At least, it wasn’t the man he was beneath the layer of caustic fury he couldn’t seem to shed. Sorcha certainly didn’t deserve this ugly side of him. She was kind and sensitive and everything the rest of them didn’t know how to be.
She recoiled, rightly shocked that he would deliver such a belly blow. But she hadn’t risen above the scandal of secretly delivering his brother’s baby while Cesar had been engaged to someone else without possessing truckloads of resilience.
“I meant because my mother was my father’s maid when she conceived me.” Her voice was tight and strong, but there was such a wounded shadow in her gaze, he had to look away and reach for the drink she’d poured him.
He drained it, burning away the words that hovered on his tongue. Words he couldn’t speak because he was trying to spare Faustina’s parents some humiliation when they were already destroyed by the loss of their only child.
“I’ll assume if you’re lashing out, you believe it’s possible that little girl is yours. How she came about is your business, Rico, but don’t you ever accuse me of trapping Cesar into this marriage. I left, if you recall.” She stood, hot temper well lit, but honed by her marriage to a Montero into icy severity. “And so did Poppy. Maybe ask yourself why, if you’re such a prize, she doesn’t want anything to do with you. I have an idea, if you can’t figure it out for yourself.”
She stalked to the door and swung it open, inviting him to leave using nothing more than a head held high and an expression of frosty contempt that prickled his conscience through the thick shields of indifference he had been bricking into place since Faustina had been found.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Rico ground out, mind reeling so badly as he stood, his head swam. “I was shooting the messenger.” With a missile launcher loaded with nuclear waste. “Tell Cesar what you’ve told me. I’ll let him punch me in the face for what I said to you.” He meant it.
She didn’t thaw. Not one iota. “Deal with the message. I have a stake in the outcome, as do my husband and sons.”
“Oh, I will,” he promised. “Immediately.”
CHAPTER ONE
POPPY HARRIS FILLED the freshly washed sippy cup with water only to have Lily ignore it and keep pointing at the shelf.
“You want a real cup, don’t you?”
Two weeks ago, Lily’s no-spill cup had gone missing from daycare. Poppy’s grandmother, being old-school, thought cups with closed lids and straws were silly. Back in her day, babies learned to drink from a proper cup.
Since she was pinching pennies, Poppy hadn’t bought a new one. She had spent days mopping dribbles instead, and she’d been so happy when the cup had reappeared today.
Unfortunately, Lily was a big girl now. She wanted an open cup. Thanks, Gran.
Poppy considered whether a meltdown right before dinner was worth the battle. She compromised by easing Lily’s grip off her pant leg and then sat her gently onto her bottom, unable to resist running affectionate fingertips through Lily’s fine red-gold curls. She handed her both the leakproof cup and an empty plastic tumbler. Hopefully that would keep her busy for a few minutes.
“I’m putting the biscuits in the oven, Gran,” Poppy called as she did it.
She scooped a small portion of leek-and-potato soup from the slow cooker into a shallow bowl. She had started the soup when she raced home on her lunch break to check on her grandmother. Every day felt like a flat-out run, but she didn’t complain. Things could be worse.
She set the bowl on the table so it would be cool enough for Lily to eat when they sat down.
“The fanciest car has just pulled in, Poppy,” her grandmother said in her quavering voice. Her evening game shows were on, but she preferred to watch the comings and goings beyond their front room window. “Is he one of your models needing a head shot? He’s very handsome.”
“What?” Poppy’s stomach dropped. It was completely instinctive and she made herself take a mental step back. There was no reason to believe it would be him.
Even so, she struggled to swallow a jagged lump that lodged in her suddenly arid throat. “Who—?”
The doorbell rang.
Poppy couldn’t move. She didn’t want to see. If it wasn’t Rico, she would be irrationally disappointed. If it was him...
She looked to her daughter, instantly petrified that he was here to claim her. What would he say? How could she stop him? She couldn’t.
It wasn’t him, she told herself. It was one of those prophets in a three-piece suit who hand-delivered pamphlets about the world being on the brink of annihilation.
Her world was fine, she reassured herself, still staring at the sprite who comprised the lion’s share of all that was important to her. Lily tipped her head back in an effort to drain water from an empty cup.
The bell rang again.
“Poppy?” her grandmother prompted, glancing her direction. “Will you answer?”
Mentally, Gran was sharp as a tack. Her vision and hearing never failed her. Osteoporosis, however, had impacted her mobility. Her bones were so fragile, Poppy had to be ever vigilant that Lily and her toys weren’t underfoot. Her gran would break a hip or worse if she ever stumbled.
There were a lot of things about this living arrangement that made it less than ideal, but both she and Gran were maintaining the status quo, kidding themselves that Gramps was only down at the hardware store and would be
back any minute.
“Of course.” Poppy snapped out of her stasis and glanced over to be sure the gates on both doorways into the kitchen were closed. All the drawers and cupboards had locks except the one where the plastic dishes were kept. The mixing bowls were a favorite for being dragged out and nested, filled with toys and measuring cups, then dumped without ceremony.
“Keep an eye this way, Gran?” Poppy murmured as she stepped over the gate into the front room, then moved past her seated grandmother to the front door.
Her glance out the side window struck a dark brown bomber jacket over black jeans, but she knew that head, that back with the broad shoulders, that butt and long legs.
His arrival struck like a bus. Like a train that derailed her composure and rattled on for miles, piling one broken thought onto another.
OhGodohGodohGod... Breathe. All the way in, all the way out, she reminded herself. But she had always imagined that if this much money showed up on her doorstep, it would be with an oversize check and a television crew. Not him.
Rico pivoted from surveying her neighbor’s fence and the working grain elevator against the fading Saskatchewan sky. His profile was knife sharp, carved of titanium and godlike. A hint of shadow was coming in on his jaw, just enough to bend his angelic looks into the fallen kind.
He knocked.
“Poppy—?” her grandmother prompted, tone perplexed by the way she was acting. Or failing to.
How? How could he know? Poppy had no doubt that he did. There was absolutely no other reason for this man to be this far off the beaten track. He sure as hell wasn’t here to see her.
Blood searing with fight or flight, heart pounding, she opened the door.
The full force of his impact slammed through her. The hard angle of his chin, the stern cast of his mouth, his wide shoulders and long legs, and hands held in tense, almost fists.
His jaw hardened as he took her in through mirrored aviators. Their chrome finish was cold and steely. If he’d had a fresh haircut, it had been ruffled by the wind. His boots were alligator, his cologne nothing but crisp, snow-scented air and fuming suspicion.
Poppy lifted her chin and pretended her heart wasn’t whirling like a Prairie tornado in her chest.
“Can I help you?” she asked, exactly as she would if he had been a complete stranger.
His hand went to the doorframe. His nostrils twitched as he leaned into the space. “Really?” he asked in a tone of lethal warning.
“Who is it, Poppy?” her grandmother asked.
He stiffened slightly, as though surprised she wasn’t alone. Then his mouth curled with disparagement, waiting to see if she would lie.
Poppy swallowed, her entire body buzzing, but she held his gaze through those inscrutable glasses while she said in a strong voice, “Rico, Gran. The man I told you about. From Spain.”
There, she silently conveyed. What do you think of that?
It wasn’t wise to defy him. She knew that by the roil of threat in the pit of her stomach, but she had had to grow up damned fast in the last two years. She was not some naive traveler succumbing to a charmer who turned out to be a thief, or even the starry-eyed maid who had encouraged a philandering playboy to seduce her.
She was a grown woman who had learned how to face her problems head-on.
“Oh?” Gran’s tone gave the whole game away in one murmur. There was concern beneath her curiosity. Knowledge. It was less a blithe, isn’t that nice that your friend turned up. More an alarmed, Why is he here?
There was no hiding. None. Poppy might not be able to read this man’s eyes, but she read his body language. He wasn’t here to ask questions. He was here to confront.
Because he knew she’d had his baby.
Her eyes grew wet with panic, but through her shock, she reacted to seeing her lover, her first and only lover twenty months after they had conceived their daughter. She had thought her brief hour with him a moment of madness. A rush of sex hormones born of dented self-esteem and grand self-delusion.
Since then, her body had been taken over by their daughter. Poppy had been sure her sex drive had dried up and blown away on the Prairie winds. Or at least was firmly in hibernation.
As it turned out, her libido was alive and well. Heat flooded into her with the distant tingles of intimate, erotic memories. Of the cold press of his belt buckle trapped against her thigh, the dampness of perspiration in the hollow of his spine when she ran her hands beneath his open shirt to clutch at him with encouragement. She recalled exactly the way he had kissed the whisker burn on her chin so tenderly, with a growl of apology in his throat. The way he had cupped her breast with restraint, then licked and sucked at her nipple until she was writhing beneath him.
She could feel anew the sharp sensation of him possessing her, so intimate and satisfying, both glorious and ruinous all at once.
She blushed. Hard. Which made the blistering moment feel like hours. She was overflowing at the edges with mortifying awkwardness, searching her mind for something to say, a way to dissemble so he wouldn’t know how far he’d thrown her.
“Invite him in, Poppy,” her grandmother chided. “You’re going to melt the driveway.”
She meant because she was letting the heat out, but her words made Poppy blush harder. “Of course,” she muttered, flustered. “Come in.”
Explanations crowded her tongue as she backed up a step, but stammering them out wouldn’t make a difference to a man like him. He might have seemed human and reachable for that stolen hour in his mother’s solarium, but she’d realized afterward exactly how ruthless and single-minded he truly was. The passion she’d convinced herself was mutual and startlingly sweet had been a casual, effortless, promptly forgotten seduction on his part.
He’d mended fences with his fiancée the next morning—a woman Poppy knew for a fact he hadn’t loved. He’d told Poppy that he’d only agreed to the marriage to gain the presidency of a company and hadn’t seemed distressed in the least that the wedding had been called off.
Embarrassment at being such an easy conquest had her staring at his feet as she closed the door behind him. “Will you take off your boots, please?”
Her request gave him pause. In his mother’s house, everyone wore shoes, especially guests. A single pair of their usual footwear cost more than Poppy had made in her four months of working in that house.
Rico toed off his boots and set them against the wall. Then he tucked his sunglasses into his chest pocket. His eyes were slate-gray with no spark of blue or flecks of hot green that had surrounded his huge pupils that day in the solarium.
After setting his cold, granite gaze against her until she was chilled through, he glanced past her, into the front room of the tiny bungalow her grandfather had built for his wife while working as a linesman for the hydro company. It was the home where Gramps had brought his bride the day they married. It was where they had brought home their only son and where they had raised their only grandchild.
Seeing him in it made Poppy both humble and defensive. It didn’t compare to the grandiose villa he’d been raised in, but it was her home. Poppy wasn’t ashamed of it, only struck by how he could so easily jeopardize all of this with a snap of his fingers. This house wasn’t even hers. If he had come here to claim Lily, she had very few resources at her disposal. Maybe it would even be held against her that she didn’t have much and he could offer so much more.
“Hello,” he greeted her grandmother as she muted the television and set the remote aside.
“This is Rico Montero, Gran. My grandmother, Eleanor Harris.”
“The Rico?”
“Yes.”
Rico’s brows went up a fraction, making Poppy squirm.
“It’s nice to meet you. Finally.” Gran started to rise.
Poppy stepped forward to help her, but Rico was quick to touch her grandmother’s arm an
d say, “Please. There’s no need to stand. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Oh, he knew how to use the warmth of his accented voice to slay a woman, young or old. Poppy almost fell for it herself, thinking he sounded reassuring when he was actually here to destroy their small, simple world.
Yet she had to go through the motions of civility. Pretend he was simply a guest who had dropped by.
Gran smiled up at him with glimmers of adoration. “I was getting up to give you privacy to talk. I imagine you’ll want that.”
“In that case, yes please. Allow me to help you.” Rico moved to her side and supported her with gentle care.
Don’t leave me alone with him, Poppy wanted to cry, but she slid Gran’s walker in front of her. “Thank you, Gran.”
“I’ll listen to the radio in my room until you come for me.” Her grandmother nodded and shuffled her way into the hall. “Remember the biscuits.”
The biscuits. The least of her worries. Poppy couldn’t smell them yet, but the timer would go off any second. She moved her body into the path toward the kitchen door, driven by mother-bear instincts.
“Why are you here?” Her voice quavered with the volume of emotions rocketing through her—shock and protectiveness and fear. Culpability and anger and other deeper yearnings she didn’t want to acknowledge.
“I want to see her.” He set his shoulders in a way that told her he wasn’t going anywhere until he did.
Behind her, the sound of bowls coming out of the cupboard and being knocked around reassured her that Lily was perfectly fine without eyes on her.
A suffocating feeling sat on her chest and kept a vise around her throat. She wanted him to answer the rest of her question. What was he going to do about this discovery? She wasn’t ready to face the answer.
Playing for time, she strangled out, “How did you find out?”
If they hadn’t been standing so close, she might have missed the way his pupils dilated and his breath seemed to catch as though taking a blow. In the next second, the impression of shock was gone. A fierce, angry light of satisfaction gleamed in his eyes.