by Dani Collins
The rest of her was cute as hell, too, if a bit skinny and young. Maybe it was her lack of makeup. That mouth, unpainted, but with a plump bottom lip and a playful top was all woman. Her brows were so light, they were almost blond, her chin pert, her eyes a gentle yet very direct dark ale-brown.
No, he reminded himself. He was engaged.
Actually, he absorbed with a profound sense of liberation, he wasn’t. Faustina had firmly and unequivocally ended their engagement, despite his mother’s best efforts to talk her back on board.
His mother had retired with a wet compress and a migraine tablet. He had come in here because he couldn’t go home. His house was being renovated for the bride who was now refusing to share her life with him. Driving all the way to his brother’s house to get blind drunk had felt like an unnecessary delay.
“I don’t smoke.” He dropped the empty pack and picked up his drink. “I rebelled for a year or so when I was a teen, but it seemed like a good excuse to talk with Ernesto about football and other inconsequential topics.” He was sick to death of jabbering about weddings and duty and the expected impact on the family fortune.
Her shoulders softened and her red-gold brows angled with sympathy. “I’m really sorry.” She sounded adorably sincere. “I’ll, um, give you privacy to...”
“Wallow in heartbreak? Unnecessary.” Faustina’s outburst had been the sum total of passion their marriage was likely to have borne. “I don’t want to chase you away if you’re on your break.”
“No, I’m done. I know we’re not supposed to cut through here to get to the change rooms over the garage, but I was hoping to catch Ernesto myself. He gives me a lift sometimes.”
“Are you American?” he asked.
Her strawberry blond lashes flickered in surprise, her expression growing shy. Aware.
An answering awareness teased through him, waking the wolf inside him. That starved beast had been locked inside a cave the last six months, but unexpectedly found himself free of the heavy chain he’d placed around his own neck. The sun was in his eyes, the wind was ruffling his fur and he was picking up the scent of a willing female. He was itching to romp and tumble and mate.
“Canada.” She cleared her throat. “Saskatchewan. A little town with nothing but canola fields and clouds.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
“How did you wind up here?”
“I’d tell you, but I’d bore you to death.” Despite her words, a pretty smile played around her mouth and a soft blush of pleasure glowed under her skin.
“I came out here to smoke. Clearly I have a death wish.”
After a small chuckle, she cautioned, “Okay, but stop me if you feel light-headed.”
Definitely not bored, he thought with a private smile. She wasn’t merely a first cigarette years after quitting, either. To be sure he was drawing in this lighthearted flirting with avid greed, but he found himself enjoying her wit. He was genuinely intrigued by her.
“I saved up to trek around Europe with a friend, but she broke her ankle on the second day and flew home.” She folded her arms, protective or defensive, maybe. “I tagged along with some students from a hostel coming here, but a few days after we arrived, one of them stole everything I had.” She slapped a what-can-you-do? smile on it, but the tension around her eyes and mouth told him she was still upset.
He frowned. “Did you go to the police?”
“It was my fault.” She flinched with self-recrimination. “I gave him my card to get some cash for me one morning. He must have made a copy or something. Three days later he’d syphoned all of my savings and was gone. I had my passport, a bag of raisins and my hairbrush. Losing my camera gutted me the most. It was a gift and my memory card was still in it, not that I’d had the chance to fill it. It was a huge bummer.” She summed up with philosophical lightness.
“You’re a photographer?”
“Not anymore,” she asserted with disgust, then shrugged it off. “At least I had prepaid for a week at the hostel. I asked around and got on with a temp agency. I was brought in to help clean the pool house and guest cottage. Darna liked my work and asked me to stay on full-time in the big house. I’ve been saving for a ticket home ever since.”
“How much do you need?” He reached into his pocket.
“Oh, no!” She halted him, horrified. “I have enough. I just worked it out with Darna that today was my last day. She thought she would need me through the rest of June for—” She halted, wincing as she realized who she was talking to.
Rico let the awkwardness hang in the air, not to punish, but because he was finding her candor so refreshing.
“It seemed like the wedding was going to be really beautiful.” She sounded apologetic. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
He wasn’t. That was the naked truth, but he deflected by saying, “I’ve heard that Canadians apologize a lot. I didn’t believe it.”
“We do. Sorry.” She winked on that one.
Was she sorry?
Rico came back to the tap of a dirty spoon against the back of his knuckles.
Poppy had been twenty-two, disillusioned after being shortchanged on chasing her dreams, yet willing to come home to fulfill family obligations. He had understood that pressure and had confided his own reasons for going along with family expectations.
That affinity had led to a kiss and his feet had somehow carried her to the sheet-draped furniture hidden amongst the jungle of fragrant lilies.
Since learning about Lily, he’d been convinced Poppy had somehow tricked him the way Faustina had, for her own nefarious ends.
That suspicion wasn’t playing as strongly now that he was here. Her home was unpretentious, dated and showing signs of age, but neat and well cared for. Her bond with her grandmother and daughter seemed genuine and from the reports he’d commissioned, she was this side of financially solvent. She didn’t even have a speeding ticket on her record.
He’d picked up two on his way here, but that was beside the point.
In the past, he had seen what he wanted to see. He couldn’t allow himself to be so credulous again.
He made himself take a cool moment to watch Lily’s concentrated effort to touch the end of her spoon into the soup and bring the taste to her mouth. She grinned as she succeeded, spoon caught between her tiny white teeth.
He had no proof, but he was convinced she was his. He had to claim her.
As for Poppy, he was still absorbing the impact she continued to have on him. He still reacted physically to her. One look at her in jeans and a loose pullover and his mouth had started to water. No makeup, hair gathered into a messy knot of kinks on her head, wariness like a halo around her, yet he’d had to restrain himself from reaching for her. Not to grab or take possession, but simply to touch. Fill his hands with the textures of her.
Was her skin as smooth and soft as his erotic dreams replayed? Would her nipples tighten if he licked then blew lightly again? Did her voice still break in orgasm and would that sound once again send pleasurable shivers down his back?
That chemistry was a weakness, one that warned him to keep his guard up, but it didn’t deter him from his plan one iota.
In fact, it stoked a fire of anticipation deep in the pit of his belly.
* * *
Poppy’s tension remained through dinner, even though Rico went on a charm offensive against her grandmother, breaking out levels even Poppy hadn’t realized he possessed, asking after her health and offering condolences over Gramps.
“I’m very sorry to hear you lost him. I remember Poppy saying he wasn’t well, just before she left Spain.”
Poppy released a subtle snort, suspecting he only recalled that detail because she had reminded him of it an hour ago.
He frowned with affront. “I asked you why you weren’t using the money you’d saved to see more of Eur
ope. You said your grandparents needed help moving into a care facility.”
For one second, she saw glints of blue and green in his irises, telling her he remembered everything about that day.
A spike of tingling heat drove sharp as a lance through her. She crossed her legs, bumping her foot against his shin in the process and sending a reverberation of deeper awareness through her whole body.
“We were talking about moving,” Gran said, forcing Rico to break their eye contact. “I couldn’t look after Bill myself, but having Poppy here bought us an extra year in our home.” Gran squeezed her hand over Poppy’s, the strength in her grip heart-wrenchingly faint. “He would have faded all the faster if we’d been forced to leave this house. I’ll always be grateful to her for giving us that. I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t been here in the months since he’s been gone, either. She’s been our special blessing her whole life.”
“Gran.” Poppy teared up. She knew darned well she’d been more of a burden.
“And Lily is ever so precious, too.” Gran smiled at the baby. “But it’s time.”
“Time?” Poppy repeated with muted alarm.
“I’ll call your aunt Sheila in the morning,” she said of her sister, patting Poppy’s hand before she removed her touch. “I’m on the top of the list at that facility near her apartment. I’m sure I can stay with her until a room opens up.”
“Gran, no.”
“Poppy. We both know I shouldn’t have been here this winter, making more work for you on top of looking after the baby. You were shoveling the drive on your one day off to get me to the doctor’s office. I have no business near that ice by the front steps, either. You’re penning up Lily, worrying I’ll trip over her. I’m worried. No, I don’t want to hold you back from the life you ought to be leading.”
“This is the life I want to lead.” Poppy’s chin began to crinkle the way Lily’s did when she was coming down with a cold and Poppy had to leave her at day care.
“Oh, is your fancy man moving in with us, then?” Gran asked.
“I see where Poppy gets her spark.” A faint smile touched Rico’s lips. “Poppy and I have details to work out, but you’re right that my life is in Spain. I’m here to marry her and take Poppy and Lily home with me.”
After a brief, illogical spike of elation, Poppy’s heart fell with that bombshell news. Her mind exploded. He wasn’t wrenching their daughter from her arms, but she wasn’t relieved in the least. She immediately knew this wasn’t about her. He’d married for coldly practical reasons the first time. He might dazzle her grandmother with kindness and charisma, but it was a dispassionate move to get what he wanted by the quickest, most efficient means. She shouldn’t be shocked at all by his goal or his methods.
“My life is here with Gran,” Poppy insisted shakily. “She needs me nearby, even if she moves into assisted care.”
“Poppy.” The fragility of her grandmother’s hand draped over hers again. “What I need is to know that when I’m gone, you’re settled with someone who will take care of you and Lily. That person ought to be her father.” She patted lightly, saying with quiet power, “I know what this would have meant to you.”
If her own father had shown up to take her home, Gran meant. The hot pressure behind her eyes increased.
Even so, there was a part of Poppy that simply heard it as her grandmother wishing Poppy would cease to be a burden upon her.
A spiked ball lodged behind Poppy’s breastbone, one she couldn’t swallow away. It was so sharp it made tears sting her eyes.
“It’s obvious Poppy won’t be comfortable unless you’re comfortable, Eleanor. Give us a chance to finish our talk. Then you and I will discuss your options. I’m sure we can find solutions that satisfy all of us.”
Poppy wanted to shout a giant, scoffing, Ha! She rose to clear the table.
CHAPTER THREE
POPPY BATHED LILY and put her to bed, not giving her daughter the attention she deserved because her mind was still whirling with Rico showing up and demanding more than his daughter. Marriage.
Had she spun that fantasy in her girlish mind? Yes. Even before she slept with him. She had been fascinated by him for weeks, acutely aware of him whether he was making a dry comment or sipping a glass of orange juice. He’d seemed aloof, but in a laid-back way. When she had overheard Faustina going full Bridezilla, shattering a vase and screaming that their wedding was off, Rico had only said in a calm voice, “Let me have the bottom of that. I’ll have to replace it.”
Deep down, she’d been thrilled that Faustina had ended things. Happy for him.
In the solarium, he’d been that charming man she’d seen tonight at dinner, the one who expressed so much interest in others, it was easy to miss that he gave away very little about himself.
He had told her enough that day, however. Enough that she had been fooled into thinking he liked her. That there was a spark of...something.
She’d been wrong. This was the real man. He was severe and intimidating, not raising his voice because he didn’t have to. His wishes, delivered in that implacable tone, were sheer power. She instinctively knew there was no shifting him on the course he had decided.
He didn’t want her, though. She was merely an obstacle he was overcoming as expediently as possible. Her grandmother would see this marriage as a move toward security, but Poppy refused to trust his offer so easily. What if he got her over there and promptly divorced her? Took her to court for custody? There was no way she could survive without Lily.
Lily settled and Poppy went to the front room. Rico had finished the calls he’d been making and was chatting with her grandmother.
Having him in her home made her squirm. It was her private space where she revealed her true self in faded, toothless photos on the wall next to some of her earliest photography efforts. She and Gran had been working their way through a box of paperback romances that Poppy had picked up at a garage sale and Poppy’s latest passionate cover was splayed open on the coffee table.
On the mantel stood Poppy’s framed employee of the month certificate. Her boss at the bus depot had given it to her as a joke. Aside from him, she was the only employee and she was part-time. Gran had had her first good laugh in ages when Poppy had brought it home. Then they’d wept because Gramps would have enjoyed it, too.
Beside the certificate stood a generic birthday card from last month signed, Love, Mom. It was the only message besides the preprinted poem.
Rico was seeing far too much of her in this space. Maybe gathering ammunition for why his daughter couldn’t stay here. A man so low on sentiment wouldn’t recognize the comfort in the worn furniture and the value of memory-infused walls.
“The weatherman said it’s a good night for stargazing,” Gran was telling Rico while nodding at the television. “You might even see the northern lights.”
“It’s freezing outside,” Poppy protested. “Literally.” Spring might be a few days away on the calendar, but there was still thick frost on her windshield every morning.
“Bundle up.” Gran dismissed Poppy’s argument with the hardy practicality of a woman who’d lived on the prairies her whole life. “Your grandfather and I always came to agreement walking around Fisher’s Pond. I have the phone right here.” She touched the table where the cordless phone lived. “I’ll call if Lily wakes and fusses.”
Poppy glanced at Rico, hoping he would say it was late and he would come back tomorrow.
“I left my gloves in the car. I’ll collect them on my way.”
She bit back a huff and layered up, pulling on boots, mittens and a toque before tramping into what was actually a fairly mild night, considering the sky was clear and there was still snow on the ground.
The moon turned the world a bluish daylight and her footsteps crunched after Rico as they started away from the car. He wound a red scarf around his neck
as they walked.
“Before today, I had only flown over prairies, never driven through them.” His breath clouded as he spoke.
“Were you fighting to stay awake?”
“No, but it’s very relaxing. Gives you time and space to think.”
She didn’t ask him what he’d been thinking about, just took him past the last house on their street, then along the path in the snow toward the depression that was Fisher’s Pond.
It was a busy place midwinter. Neighborhood children played hockey every chance they got, but signs were posted now that the ice was thinning and no longer safe. The makeshift benches and lights were gone leaving only the trampled ring around the pond that was popular with dog walkers in summer. Tonight, they had the place to themselves.
“I haven’t seen the Milky Way like that, either,” he said, nodding at the seam of stars ripped open across the sky. “Not clear and massive like that.”
“Rico, I can’t go to Spain with you.”
“I can hire a live-in care aid.” His tone became very businesslike. “Or support her in any facility she chooses. You can be back here within a day if concerns arise. Do not use your grandmother as an excuse to keep my daughter from me.”
Wow. She rubbed her mitten against her cold nose, trying to keep the tip of it from growing numb.
“She’s not an excuse. She’s my family.”
He absorbed that, then asked, “Where are your parents? Why has it fallen on you to look after your grandparents?”
“I wanted to.” She hugged herself. “They’ve always been good to me. Even when I came home pregnant.”
Especially then. Buying the assisted-living unit would have required selling the house, leaving Poppy without anywhere to live. It had been everyone’s wish that they stay together in that house while Gramps was so sick, but Gran was right. They couldn’t sustain this. Poppy had been mentally preparing herself for spending the summer clearing out the house. That didn’t mean she was ready to move with her daughter around the globe, though.