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.”
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