“No! No, it’s not about her at all.” She touched her brow. “Elsa always comes with us when we have dinner at your mother’s. She’s acquainted with the maids there and follows some of them online.”
At the word maid a premonition danced in his periphery. He refused to reach for the drink, though. It would be a tell. Instinctively, he knew he had to maintain impassivity. He couldn’t tip his hand. Not before he knew exactly what was coming next.
“To be honest, I rarely check my social media accounts,” he said with a disinterested brush of non-existent lint from his knee. “Especially since Faustina passed. It’s very maudlin.”
“I suppose it would be.” Her expression grew pinched. She looked at the phone she held pressed between her palms. “But one way or another, I think you should be aware of this particular post.”
Biting her lips together, she touched her thumb to the sensor and the screen woke. She flicked to bring up a photo and held it out to him.
“On first glance, Elsa thought it was Mateo dressed up as a girl. That’s the only reason she took notice and showed me. She thought it was funny that it had given her a double take. I had to agree this particular photo offers a certain resemblance.”
Rico flicked a look at the toddler. He’d never seen Mateo in a pink sailor’s bib and hat, but the baby girl’s grin was very similar, minus a few teeth, to the one he had coaxed out of his nephew before the boy’s head had drooped against his chest.
“I actually keep my privacy settings locked down tight,” Sorcha said. “I’ve heard photos can be stolen and wind up in ads without permission. I thought that’s what had happened. Elsa assured me she never shares images of the boys with anyone but me or Cesar.”
The Montero fortune had been built on the development of chemicals and special alloys. Rico had learned early that certain substances, innocuous on their own, could become explosive when in proximity to one another.
Sorcha was pouring statements into beakers before him. A maid. A baby that looked like other children in the family.
He wouldn’t let those two pieces of information touch. Not yet.
“It’s said we all have a double.” His lifetime of suppressing emotion served him well. “It would seem you’ve found Mateo’s.”
“This is the only photo where she looks so much like him,” Sorcha murmured, taking back her phone. “I looked up the account. Her mother is a photographer.”
Photographer. One beaker began to tip into another.
“This is part of her portfolio for her home business. Her name is Poppy Harris. The mother, I mean. The baby is Lily.”
His abdomen tightened to brace for a kick. A sizzle resounded in his ears. Adrenaline made him want to reach for his drink, but he only lifted his hand to scratch his cheek—while his mind conjured the forest of lilies that had surrounded them in his mother’s solarium as he and Poppy had made love so impulsively.
“Do you…remember her?” Sorcha asked tentatively.
Skin scented like nectarines, lush corkscrews of curly red hair filling his hands as he consumed her crimson lips. He remembered the exact pitch of her joyful cries of release, the culmination of madness like he’d never known before or since.
And he remembered vividly the ticking of the clock on the mantel as he had sat in his mother’s parlor the next morning, an itchy fire in his blood driving him mad. He’d been on the verge of going to look for her because he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Then Faustina had arrived, striking like dry lightning with sheepishly delivered news. Family obligation had crashed upon him afresh, pinning him under the weight of a wedding that had been called off, but now was back on. They would pretend the gap in the parade had never happened.
“Rico?” Sorcha prompted gently, dragging him back to the present. “I know this must be a shock.” And there was that infernal compassion again.
He swore, tired to his bones of people thinking he was mourning a baby he had already known wasn’t his. He was sorry for the loss of a life before it had had the chance to start. Of course, he was. But he wasn’t grieving with the infinite heartbreak of a parent losing a child. It hadn’t been his.
And given Faustina’s trickery, he was damned cynical about whether he had conceived this one.
“Why did you jump straight to suspecting she’s mine?” he asked baldly.
Sorcha was slightly taken aback. “Well, I’m not going to suspect my own husband, am I?” Her tone warned that he had better not, either. Her chin came up a notch. “You were living in your parents’ villa at the time. Frankly, your father doesn’t seem particularly passionate about any woman, young or old. You, however, were briefly unengaged.”
Rico had long suspected the success of his parents’ marriage could be attributed to both of them being fairly asexual and lacking in passion for anything beyond cool reason and the advancement of family interests.
Sorcha’s eyes grew big and soft and filled with that excruciating pity. “I’m not judging, Rico. I know how these things happen.”
“I bet you do.” He regretted it immediately. It wasn’t him. At least, it wasn’t the man he was beneath the layer of caustic fury he couldn’t seem to shed. Sorcha certainly didn’t deserve this ugly side of him. She was kind and sensitive and everything the rest of them didn’t know how to be.
She recoiled, rightly shocked that he would deliver such a belly blow. But she hadn’t risen above the scandal of secretly delivering his brother’s baby while Cesar had been engaged to someone else without possessing truckloads of resilience.
“I meant because my mother was my father’s maid when she conceived me.” Her voice was tight and strong, but there was such a wounded shadow in her gaze, he had to look away and reach for the drink she’d poured him.
He drained it, burning away the words that hovered on his tongue. Words he couldn’t speak because he was trying to spare Faustina’s parents some humiliation when they were already destroyed by the loss of their only child.
“I’ll assume if you’re lashing out, you believe it’s possible that little girl is yours. How she came about is your business, Rico, but don’t you ever accuse me of trapping Cesar into this marriage. I left, if you recall.” She stood, hot temper well lit, but honed by her marriage to a Montero into icy severity. “And so did Poppy. Maybe ask yourself why, if you’re such a prize, she doesn’t want anything to do with you. I have an idea, if you can’t figure it out for yourself.”
She stalked to the door and swung it open, inviting him to leave using nothing more than a head held high and an expression of frosty contempt that prickled his conscience through the thick shields of indifference he had been bricking into place since Faustina had been found.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Rico ground out, mind reeling so badly as he stood, his head swam. “I was shooting the messenger.” With a missile launcher loaded with nuclear waste. “Tell Cesar what you’ve told me. I’ll let him punch me in the face for what I said to you.” He meant it.
She didn’t thaw. Not one iota. “Deal with the message. I have a stake in the outcome, as do my husband and sons.”
“Oh, I will,” he promised. “Immediately.”