Dani Collins – The Maid's Spanish Secret (страница 5)

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 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.