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 and 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.
“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
