by Dani Collins
“Sorcha saw a photo you posted of a baby who looks like Mateo. I investigated.”
Odd details from the last two weeks fell into place. She dropped her chin in outrage. “That new dad at the day care! I thought he was hitting on me, asking all those questions.”
Rico’s dark brows slammed together. “He came on to you?”
“He said he took Lily’s cup by mistake, but it was an excuse to talk to me.” Poppy was obviously still batting a thousand where her poor judgement of men was concerned.
“He took it for a DNA sample.”
“That is just plain wrong,” she said indignantly.
“I agree that I shouldn’t have to resort to such measures to learn I have a child. Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked through clenched teeth.
He had some right to the anger he poured over ice. She acknowledged that. But she wasn’t a villain. Just a stupid girl who’d gotten herself in trouble by the wrong man and had made the best of a difficult situation.
“I didn’t realize I was pregnant until you were married. By then, it was all over the gossip sites that Faustina was also expecting.”
It shouldn’t have been such a blow when she’d read that. His wedding had been called off for a day. Loads of people had a moment of cold feet before they went through with the ceremony. She accepted she was collateral damage to that.
She had been feeling very down on herself by then, though. She ought to have known better than to let herself get carried away. She hadn’t taken any precautions. She had been careless and foolish, believing him when he had told her that he and his fiancée hadn’t been sleeping together.
The whole thing had made her feel so humiliatingly stupid. She had hoped never to have to face him or her gullibility ever again.
So much for that.
And facing him was so hard. He was so hard. A muscle was pulsing in his jaw, but the rest of him was like concrete. Pitiless and unmoved.
“Faustina died a year ago last September,” he said in that gritty tone. “You’ve had ample opportunity to come forward.”
As she recalled the terrible headlines she’d read with morbid anguish, her heart turned inside out with agony for him. She had nursed thoughts every day of telling him he had a child after all, but...
“I’m sorry for your loss.” She truly was. No matter what he’d felt for his wife, losing his child must have been devastating.
His expression stiffened and he recoiled slightly at her words of condolence.
“My grandfather was quite ill,” she continued huskily. “If you recall, that’s why I came home. He passed just before Christmas. Gran needed me. There hasn’t been a right time to shake things up.”
His expression altered slightly as he absorbed that.
She imagined his sorrow to be so much more acute than hers. She mourned a man who had lived a full life and who had passed without pain or regret. They’d held a service that had been a true celebration of his long life.
While Rico’s baby had been cheated of even starting its own.
Rico nodded acceptance of her excuse with only a pained flicker as acknowledgment of what must have been his very personal and intensely painful loss.
Had grief driven him here? Was he trying to replace his lost child with his living one? No. The thought of it agonized her. Lily wasn’t some placeholder for another child. It cracked her heart in half that he might think she could be.
Before she could find words to address that fear, the timer beeped in the kitchen.
Lily had become very quiet, too, which was a sure sign of trouble. Poppy turned to glance around the doorframe. Lily sat with one finger poking at the tiny hole on a bowl’s rim, where the bowl was meant to be hung on a nail.
Firm hands settled on her shoulders. Rico’s untamed scent and the heat of his body surrounded her. He looked past her into the kitchen. At his daughter.
Poppy told herself not to look, but she couldn’t help it. She was afraid he would be resentful that Lily had lived when his other baby hadn’t. Even as she feared he was planning to steal her, she perversely would be more agonized if he rejected her. He had come all this way. That meant he felt something toward her, didn’t it? On some level, he wanted her?
His expression was unreadable, face so closed and tense, her heart dropped into her shoes.
Love her, she wanted to beg. Please.
His breath sucked in with an audible hiss. He took in so much air, his chest swelled to brush against her back. His hands tightened on her shoulders.
At the subtle noise, Lily lifted her gorgeous gray eyes, so like her father’s. A huge smile broke across her face.
“Mama.” The bowls were forgotten and she crawled toward them, pulling herself up on the gate.
Lily’s smile propelled Poppy through all her hard days. She was Poppy’s world. Poppy’s parents were distant, her grandfather gone, her grandmother... Well, Poppy didn’t want to think about losing her even though she knew it was inevitable.
But she had this wee girl and she was everything.
“Hello, button.” Poppy scooped up her daughter and kissed her cheek, never able to resist that soft, plump bite of sweet-smelling warmth. Then she brushed at Lily’s hands because it didn’t matter how many times she swept or vacuumed, Lily found the specks and dust bunnies in her eager exploration of her world.
This time when Poppy looked to Rico, she saw his reaction more clearly. He was trying to mask it with stoicism, but the intensity in his gaze ate up Lily’s snowy skin and cupid’s-bow mouth.
Her emotions seesawed again. She had needed this. Her heart had needed to see him accept his daughter, but he was a threat, too.
“This is Lily.” Her name was tellingly sentimental, not the sort of romantic notion Poppy should have given in to, but since her own name was a flower, it had seemed right.
Poppy faltered, not ready to tell Lily this was Daddy.
Lily brought her fingers to her mouth and said, “Ee.”
“Eat?” Poppy asked and slid her hand down from her throat. “You’re hungry?”
Lily nodded.
“Sign language?” Rico asked, voice sharpening with concern. “Is she hearing impaired?”
“It’s sign language for babies. They teach it at day care. She’s trying to say words, but this works for now.” Poppy stepped over the gate into the kitchen and snapped off the oven. “Do you, um...” She couldn’t believe this was happening, but she wanted to put off the hard conversations as long as possible. “Will you join us for dinner?”
A brief pause, then, “You don’t have to cook. I can order something in.”
“From where?” Poppy chuckled dryly as she set Lily in her chair. “We have Chinese takeout and a pizza palace.” Not his usual standard. “The soup is already made.”
She tied on Lily’s bib and set the bowl of cooled soup and a small flat spoon in front of her.
Lily grabbed the spoon and batted it into the thick soup.
“Renting the car was a challenge for my staff,” he mentioned absently, frowning as Lily missed her mouth and smeared soup across her own cheek.
“Gran said you’re driving something fancy,” Poppy recalled. She had forgotten to look, unable to see past the man to anything else.
“An Alfa Romeo, but it’s a sedan.”
With a car seat? Poppy almost bobbled the sheet of biscuits as she took them from the oven. “Are you, um, staying at the motel?”
He snorted. “No. My staff have taken a cottage an hour from here so I have a bed if I decide to stay.”
Poppy tried to read his expression, but he was watching Lily, frowning with exasperation as Lily turned her head, open mouth looking for the end of the spoon.
In a decisive move, he removed his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he picked up the teaspoon beside Poppy’s
setting and turned the chair to face Lily. He sat and began helping her eat.
Poppy caught her breath, arrested by the sight of this dynamic man feeding their daughter. His strapping muscles strained the seams in his shirt, telling of his tension, but he calmly waited for Lily to try before he gently touched the tip of his teaspoon to her bottom lip. He let Lily lean into eating it before they both went after the next spoonful in the bowl.
Had she dreamed of this? Was she dreaming? It was such a sweet sight her ovaries locked fresh eggs into their chambers, preparing to launch and create another Lily or five. All she needed was one glance from him that contained something other than accusation or animosity.
“You said the timing was wrong.”
It took her a moment to realize he was harking back to the day they’d conceived her. She could only stand there in chagrined silence while a coal of uncomfortable heat burned in her middle, spreading a blush upward, into her throat and cheeks and ending in a pressure behind her eyes.
He glanced at her. “When we—”
“I know what you mean,” she cut him off, turning away to stack hot biscuits onto a plate, suffused in virginal discomfiture all over again. He’d noticed blood and asked if she had started her cycle. She’d been too embarrassed to tell him it was her first time. She was too embarrassed to say it now.
“I should have taken something after.” She didn’t tell him she had hung around in Spain an extra day, hoping he would come find her only to hear the wedding was back on.
That news had propelled her from the scene, consuming her with thoughts of what a pushover she’d been for a man on a brief furlough from his engagement. Contraception should have been top of mind, but...
“I was traveling, trying to make my flight.” Poppy hugged herself, trying to keep the fissure in her chest from widening. She felt so exposed right now and couldn’t meet his penetrating stare. “I honestly did think the timing was wrong. I didn’t even realize I was pregnant until I was starting to show. I had next to no symptoms.” There’d even been a bit of spotting. “I thought the few signs I did have were stress related. Gramps’s health was deteriorating. By the time it was confirmed, you were married.” She finally looked at him and let one hand come out, palm up, beseeching for understanding.
There was no softening in his starkly unforgiving expression.
“I didn’t think you would—” She couldn’t say aloud that she had worried he wouldn’t want his daughter. Not when he was feeding Lily with such care.
Helpless tears pressed behind her eyes.
He knew what she had almost said and sent her another flat stare of muted fury. “I want her, Poppy. That’s why I’m here.”
Her heart swerved in her chest. The pressure behind her eyes increased.
“Don’t look so terrified.” He returned his attention to Lily, who was waiting with an open mouth like a baby bird. “I’m not here to kidnap her.”
“What, then?” She clung tight to her elbows, needing something to anchor her. Needing to know what was going to happen.
“Am I supposed to ignore her?”
“No.” His question poked agonizing pins into the most sensitive spots on her soul. “But I was afraid you might,” she admitted. “I thought it would be easier on both of us if you didn’t know, rather than if you did, but didn’t care.”
Another wall-of-concrete stare, then a clearly pronounced, “I care.” He scraped the spoon through the thick soup. “And not only because the maids in my mother’s house are bound to recognize the resemblance the way Sorcha’s nanny did and begin to talk. She’s a Montero. She’s entitled to the benefits that brings.”
Now he stood directly on Poppy’s pride.
“We don’t need help, Rico. That’s another reason I never told you. I didn’t want you to think I was looking for a handout. We’re fine.”
“The day care with the nonexistent security is ‘fine’? What happens when it’s known her father is wealthy? We take basic precautions, Poppy. You don’t even have an alarm system. I didn’t hear you click a lock when you opened the front door.”
They lived in rural Canada. People worried about squirrels in the attic, not burglars in the bedroom.
“No one knows you’re rich. Gran is the only person who even knows your name and I wasn’t entirely forthcoming about...who you really are.” Poppy gave a tendril of hair a distracted brush so it tucked behind her ear for all of five seconds. “Do you mind if I get her? She takes medication on a schedule and needs to eat beforehand. We try to stick to a routine.”
“Of course.” He lifted two fingers off the bowl he still held steady for Lily’s jabs of her own spoon. “We’ll discuss how we’ll proceed after Lily is in bed.”
CHAPTER TWO
POPPY OPENED THE GATE and set it aside, leaving Rico to continue feeding his daughter.
He had watched Sorcha and Cesar do this countless times with their sons. He’d always thought it a messy process best left to nannies, but discovered it was oddly satisfying. His older nephew, Enrique, had reached an age where he held conversations—some that were inadvertently amusing—but babies had always struck Rico as something that required a lot of intensive care without offering much in return.
Sorcha had pressed her sons onto him over the years, which had achieved her goal of provoking feelings of affection in him, but, like his parents, he viewed children as something between a duty and a social experiment. Even when he had briefly believed Faustina had been carrying his heir, the idea of being a father had only been that—an idea. Not a concept he had fully internalized or a role he understood how to fulfill effectively. Fatherhood hadn’t been something he had viewed with anticipation the way other creative projects had inspired him.
But here he sat, watching eyes the same color as his own track to the doorway where Poppy had disappeared. A wet finger pointed. “Mama.”
“She’ll be right back.” He imagined Poppy would actually spend a few minutes talking to her grandmother in private.
Lily smiled before she leaned forward, mouth open.
Damn, she was beautiful. It wasn’t bias, either. Or his fondness for the nephews she resembled. She had her mother’s fresh snowy skin and red-gold lashes, healthy round cheeks and a chin that suggested she had his stubbornness along with his eyes.
A ridiculous swell of pride went through him even as he reminded himself that he didn’t know conclusively that she was his. The DNA test off the cup had been a long shot and hadn’t proved paternity either way.
Nevertheless, he’d been propelled as much by the absence of truth as he would have been by the presence of it. From the time Sorcha had revealed her suspicion, a ferocious fire had begun to burn in him, one stoked by yet another female keeping secrets from him. Huge, life-altering secrets.
He hadn’t wanted to wait for more tests, or hire lawyers, or even pick up the phone and ask. He had needed to see for himself.
Who? a voice asked in the back of his head.
Both, he acknowledged darkly. He had needed to set eyes on the baby, whom he recognized on a deeply biological level, and on the woman who haunted his memories.
Poppy had seemed so guileless. So refreshingly honest and real.
He thought back to that day, searching for the moment where he’d been tricked into making a baby with a woman who had then kept her pregnancy a secret.
He remembered thinking his mother wouldn’t appreciate him popping a bottle of the wedding champagne—even though she’d procured a hundred cases that had been superfluous because the wedding had been called off.
Rico had helped himself to his father’s scotch in the billiards room instead. He had taken it through to the solarium, planning to bum a cigarette from the gardener. It was a weakness he had kicked years ago, but the craving still hit sometimes, when his life went sideways.
It was the end of the day, though
. The sun-warmed room was packed to the gills with lilies brought in to replace the ones damaged by a late frost. The solarium was deserted and the worktable in the back held a dirty ashtray and a cigarette pack that was empty.
“Oh! I’m so sorry.”
The woman spoke in English, sounding American, maybe. He turned to see the redheaded maid who’d been on the stairs an hour earlier, when Faustina had been throwing a tantrum that had included one of his mother’s Wedgwoods, punctuating the end of their engagement. He would come to understand much later what sort of pressure Faustina had been under, but at the time, she’d been an unreasonable, clichéd diva of a bride by whom he’d been relieved to have been jilted.
And the interruption by the fresh-faced maid had been a welcome distraction.
Her name was Poppy. He knew that without looking at the embroidered tag on her uniform. She stared with wide doe eyes, the proverbial deer in headlights, startled to come upon him pilfering smokes as though he was thirteen again.
“I mean...um...perdón.” She pivoted to go back the way she’d come.
“Wait. Do you have a cigarette?” he asked in English.
“Me? No.” She swung back around. “Do I look like a smoker?”
Her horror at resembling such a thing amused him.
“Do I?” he drawled. “What do we look like? The patriarchy?”
“I don’t know.” She chuckled and blushed slightly, her clear skin glowing pink beneath the gold of filtered sunlight, like late afternoon on untouched ski slopes. “I, um, didn’t know you smoked.” She swallowed and linked her hands shyly before her.
Ah. She’d been watching him, too, had she?
His mother’s staff had been off-limits since his brother’s first kiss with a maid before Rico had even had a shot at one. He didn’t usually notice one from another, but Poppy had snagged his attention with her vibrant red hair. Curls were springing free of the bundle she’d scraped it into, teasing him with fantasies of releasing the rest and digging his hands into the kinky mass.