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 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