Claiming His Christmas Wife
Claiming His Christmas Wife
Dani Collins
It's a convenient Christmas arrangement…Until he wants her for ever!After their secret marriage ends in heartbreak, billionaire Travis Sanders never wants to see Imogen again. Yet when Imogen faints in the cold New York snow Travis is called to her very public rescue! To avoid a media scandal they must agree to a temporary reconciliation—at least until Christmas. But with their intense heat still burning Travis is tempted to reclaim his wife—for good!
It’s a convenient Christmas arrangement...
Until he wants her—forever!
After their secret marriage ended in heartbreak, billionaire Travis Sanders never wanted to see Imogen again. Yet when Imogen faints in the cold New York snow, Travis is called to her very public rescue! To avoid a media scandal, they must agree to a temporary reconciliation—at least until Christmas. But with their intense heat still burning, Travis is tempted to reclaim his wife—for good!
Enjoy this emotional Christmas reunion romance!
Canadian DANI COLLINS knew in high school that she wanted to write romance for a living. Twenty-five years later, after marrying her high school sweetheart, having two kids with him, working at several generic office jobs and submitting countless manuscripts, she got The Call. Her first Mills & Boon novel won the Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best First in Series from RT Book Reviews. She now works in her own office, writing romance.
Also by Dani Collins (#ud67e9285-3386-5fe4-ad6c-dbfbe4b448e7)
Bought by Her Italian Boss
The Secret Beneath the Veil
Consequence of His Revenge
The Secret Billionaires collection
Xenakis’s Convenient Bride
The Sauveterre Siblings miniseries
Pursued by the Desert Prince
His Mistress with Two Secrets
Bound by the Millionaire’s Ring
Prince’s Son of Scandal
Bound to the Desert King collection
Sheikh’s Princess of Convenience
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk. (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Claiming His Christmas Wife
Dani Collins
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07282-3
CLAIMING HIS CHRISTMAS WIFE
© 2018 Dani Collins
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To the wonderful team at
Mills & Boon Modern/Harlequin Presents.
I’ve had the privilege of working with
several editors in London and they’ve all been
fabulous and supportive.
Thank you for turning my imaginings into these
iconic books with the red banner and circled embrace.
It’s a dream come true! Xo
Contents
Cover (#u114414f7-b2c5-5958-bb12-e38bd6c143d8)
Back Cover Text (#u49598446-2bdc-5fe4-941a-133d7da6874c)
About the Author (#u6df60e87-6b33-5aa5-81db-54b6d760fa55)
Booklist (#uf6e70252-0c5f-5856-837a-8500e222b486)
Title Page (#u63b09403-1f0a-5e02-9110-e863b133bb2a)
Copyright (#u1c5f8ed3-f2d9-5812-ba8e-ed2c88aba48c)
Dedication (#ub5de0302-7882-5426-a99a-410d3dabbde1)
CHAPTER ONE (#ud7aae723-78fe-517a-9735-be2b6218ed18)
CHAPTER TWO (#uceebf410-db97-5d5a-a948-193ad59fceb9)
CHAPTER THREE (#ufbd98518-d68b-59f0-9fa9-751845ec7a0f)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ud67e9285-3386-5fe4-ad6c-dbfbe4b448e7)
“MR. TRAVIS SANDERS?”
“Yes,” he confirmed shortly, willing the woman to hurry to the point. His PA had interrupted a high-level meeting with this “extremely important” call. “What is this about?”
“Imogen Gantry. She’s your wife?”
Memory washed through him in a rush of heat and hunger. He tensed against it and glanced around, lowering his voice. That broken teacup had been swept firmly under the rug four years ago.
“We’re divorced. Are you a reporter?”
“I’m trying to locate her next of kin. I’m at...” She mentioned the name of one of New York’s most beleaguered public hospitals.
Whatever old anger had sent him soaring at the mention of his ex-wife exploded in a percussive flash. He was blind. Falling. Wind whistling in his ears. Air moving too fast for him to catch a gulp.
“What happened?” he managed to grit out. He was dimly aware his eyes were closed, but she was right there in front of him, laughing. Her green eyes glimmered with mischief. Her hair was a halo of flames licking at her snowy complexion. She swerved her lashes to cut him a glance. So enchantingly beautiful. Gaze clouding with arousal. Sparking with anger. Looking so wounded and vulnerable that last time he’d seen her, his heart still dipped thinking of it.
He’d quickly learned it was a lie, but that didn’t make any of this easier to accept.
Gone? He couldn’t make it fit in his head. He had told her he never wanted to see her again, but discovered he had secretly believed he would.
From far away, he heard the woman say, “She collapsed on the street. She’s feverish and unconscious. Do you know of any medication we should be aware of? She’s awaiting treatment, but—”
“She’s not dead?”
He heard how that sounded, as if that was the outcome he would have preferred, but leave it to Imogen to set him up to believe one thing, contort his emotions to unbearable degrees, then send him flying in another direction. That betraying, manipulative—If he could get his hands on her, he’d kill her himself.
“And she was taken to that hospital? Why?”
“I believe we were closest. She doesn’t seem to have a phone and yours is the only name I’ve been able to find in her bag. We need guidance on treatment and insurance. Are you able to provide that?”
“Contact her father.” He walked back toward the door to his office, saying to his PA behind her desk, “Look up Imogen Gantry’s father. He’s in publishing. Maybe starts with a W. William?” He hadn’t met the man, only heard her mention him once or twice. Hell, they’d only been married fifteen minutes. He knew next to nothing about her.
“Wallace Gantry?” His PA turned her screen. “He appears to have died a few months ago.” She pointed to the obit notice that said he was predeceased by his wife and eldest daughter, survived by his youngest daughter, Imogen.
Perfect.
He knew better than to let himself get sucked back into her orbit, but what else could he say except, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
* * *
Imogen remembered sitting down on the curb. It hadn’t been a nice, rain-washed boulevard of freshly mown grass beneath century-old elms with a stripe of sidewalk, then an empty canvas of manicured lawn to her mother’s rose garden, ending at the wide stairs to the double-door entrance of her childhood home.
No, it had been a freezing, filthy inner-city curb where the piles of snow had turned to a layer of lumpy muck atop a century’s worth of chewing gum and other disgusting things. The damp chill on the air hadn’t squelched any of the terrible smells coming off the grate at her feet. She shouldn’t have touched the post she had braced herself against and she had thought a car would likely run over her legs as she sank down. At the very least, one would drown her with a tsunami of melt from the puddles.
She hadn’t cared. The side of her head had felt like it was twice as big as the rest. Her ear, plugged and aching, had begun screaming so loud the sound had been trying to come out her mouth.
She had tried to pretend she didn’t have an ear infection because those were for children. Her sister had got them, not her. She hadn’t gone swimming recently. She hadn’t known how it could have happened, but there she’d been like a damned toddler, nearly fainting with the agony of it, dizzy and hot and sick.
She’d had to sit down before she fell down. A fever was nature’s way of killing a virus, so why hadn’t this run its course? And who passed out from such a silly thing, anyway?
Her vision had dimmed at the edges, though. She had felt so awful she hadn’t cared that the wet snow had been soaking through her clothes. Her only thought had been, This is how I die. She’d been okay with it. Her father would have loved this for her, dying like a dog in the gutter a week before Christmas. Even Travis would probably conclude that she had got what she deserved. If he ever found out, which he wouldn’t.
It had been a relief to succumb. Fighting was hard, especially when it was a losing battle. Giving up was so much easier. Why had she never tried it before?
So, she had died.
Now she was in—well, this probably wasn’t heaven, not that she expected to get in there. It might be hell. She felt pretty lousy. Her body ached and her sore ear felt full of water. The other one was hypersensitive to the rustle of clothing and a distant conversation that bounced painfully inside her skull. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t swallow. She tried to form words and all she could manage was a whimper of misery.
Something lifted off her arm, a warm weight she hadn’t recognized was there until it was gone, leaving her with a profound sense of loss. She heard footsteps, then a male voice.
“She’s waking up.”
She knew that voice. Her eyes prickled and the air she’d been breathing so easily became dense and hard to pull in. Her chest grew compressed with dread and guilt. She couldn’t move, but inwardly she shrank.
She had definitely gone to hell.
A lighter, quicker footstep came toward her. She opened her eyes, winced at the brightness, then squinted at a tastefully sterile room in placid colors that could have been the one her father had occupied the last months of his life. A private hospital room. For an ear infection? Seriously? Just give her the pink stuff and send her on her way.
“I—” I can’t afford this, she tried to say.
“Don’t try to talk yet,” the kindly nurse said. Her smile was stark white and reassuring against her dark brown skin. She took up Imogen’s wrist to check her pulse, the nurse’s hand soft and warm. Motherly. She checked her temperature and said, “Much better.”
All the while, Imogen could almost but not quite see him in her periphery. She was afraid to turn her head on the pillow and look right at him. It was going to hurt and she just didn’t have it in her yet.
“How am I here?” she managed to whisper.
“Water?” The nurse used a bendy straw, the kind Imogen had never been allowed to use because they were too common. A gimmick.
She got two gulps down her parched throat before the nurse said, “Easy now. Let me tell the doctor you’re awake, then we’ll give you more and maybe something to eat.”
“How long...?”
“You came in yesterday.”
A day and a half in a place like this? When her bank balance was already a zombie apocalypse running rivers of red?
The nurse walked out, sending a smile toward the specter on the other side of the bed.
Imogen closed her eyes again. So childish. She was that and many more things that were bad. Maybe her father was right and she was, simply and irrevocably, bad.
A shoe scuffed beside the bed. She felt him looming over her. Heard him sigh as though he knew she was avoiding him the only way she could.
“Why are you here?” she asked, voice still husky. She wanted to squirm. In her most secretive dreams, this meeting happened on neutral turf. Maybe a coffee shop or somewhere with a pretty view. She would have had a cashier’s check in hand to pay him back every cent she’d been awarded in their divorce settlement—money she knew he felt she’d conned out of him. Somehow, in her fantasy, she found the words to explain why she’d taken it and he had, if not forgiven her, at least not despised her any longer.
Maybe his feelings toward her weren’t that bad. He was here, wasn’t he? Maybe he cared a little. Had he been worried for her?
She heard a zipper, which made her open her eyes out of curiosity—
Oh, no.
“You went through my things?” She clamped her eyes shut against the small red change purse that had belonged to her mother. It held Imogen’s valuables—her driver’s license, her debit card, her room key, the only photo she had of her with her sister and mother, and the marriage certificate stating Travis Sanders was her husband.
“The nurse was looking for your next of kin.” Oh, this man had a way with disdain. It dripped from a voice which was otherwise deep and warm with an intriguing hint of Southern charm.
She was a connoisseur of disparaging tones, having experienced a lot of them in her lifetime. Neighbors. Teachers. Daddy dearest. Inured as she ought to be, this man cut into her with scalpel-like precision with his few indifferent words.
He didn’t care if he was the only person left in this world whom she had any connection to. He found his brief association with her abhorrent when he thought about her at all.
“It’s my only other piece of identification.”
“Birth certificate?” he suggested.
Burned after an argument with her father ages ago. So childish.
She wanted to throw her arm over her eyes and continue hiding, but her limbs were deadweights and the small twitch of trying to lift her arm made her aware of the tube sticking out of it.
She looked at the IV, the ceiling, him.
Oh, it hurt so badly. He had somehow improved on perfection, handsome features having grown sharper and more arrogantly powerful. He was clean-shaven, not ruggedly stubbled and human-looking the way she remembered him when she dared revisit their shared past—hair rumpled by her fingers, chest naked and hot as he pressed her into the sheets.
Whatever warmth she had ever seen in him had been iced over and hardened. He wore a tailored three-piece suit in charcoal with a tie in frosted gray. His mouth, capable of a sideways grin, was held in a short, stern firmness. Flat gray eyes took in what must appear like soggy laundry dumped out of the washer before it had even been through the rinse cycle. That’s about how appealing she felt. While he was...
Travis.
Just thinking his name made her throat flex in an agony of yearning. Remorse.
Why was she always in the wrong? Why was she always falling down and getting messy and driving people away when all she wanted was for someone, anyone, to love her just a little? Especially the people who were supposed to.
Oh, she really was a mess if she was going to get all maudlin like that.
Pull it together, Immy.
“Is there someone I should call?” Flat silver dollars, his eyes were. When she had met him, she had thought his gray eyes remarkable for being so warm and sharp. The way he had focused his gaze on her had been more than flattering. It had filled up a void of neglect inside her.
Today they were as emotionless and cold as her father’s ice-blue eyes. She was nothing to Travis. Absolutely nothing.
“You’ve done enough,” she said, certain he was the reason she was in this five-star accommodation. She flicked her gaze to the window. Snow was falling, but the view was likely a blanket of pristine white over a garden of serenity.
“You’re welcome,” he pronounced derisively.
Oh, was she supposed to thank him for saving her life by further impoverishing what was left of it?
“I didn’t ask you to get involved.” She ignored the fact that she kind of had, carting around their marriage certificate instead of their divorce papers. Where had those ended up, she wondered.
“Oh, this is on me,” he said with unfettered scorn. “I came here thinking—well, it doesn’t matter, does it? I made a mistake. You, Imogen, are the only mistake I have ever made. Do you know that?”
CHAPTER TWO (#ud67e9285-3386-5fe4-ad6c-dbfbe4b448e7)
TRAVIS HEARD HER breath catch and watched her eyes widen in surprise at how ruthlessly he’d thrown that direct hit.
He didn’t feel particularly bad about knocking her when she was down. He was speaking the truth, and she was showing an annoying lack of appreciation for his helping her when he could have hung up at the sound of her name.
He should have. Imogen Gantry was the epitome of a clichéd, spoiled New York princess. Self-involved, devious and intent on a free ride.
She didn’t look like much right now, of course. What the hell had she been up to that she had wound up in an overcrowded, understaffed emergency room, unable to speak for herself?
“Be happy I had you transferred. Do you know where they took you, when they scraped your frozen body off the sidewalk? What were you doing in that part of the city anyway?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” Her green eyes met his briefly, glimmering with indecision as she wavered toward telling him something, then decided against it. The light in her gaze dimmed and she looked away.
Drugs, he had surmised darkly when he’d heard where she’d been picked up and seen how gaunt she was. It seemed the only explanation. Blood tests hadn’t found anything, however. No track marks or withdrawal symptoms, either.
She’d been raging with fever, though. Had a terrible ear infection that had thankfully responded to the intravenous antibiotics. It was something that should have been dealt with sooner, the doctor had said. She could have lost her hearing or wound up with meningitis. He’d looked at Travis as though it was his fault she was so ill.
That had been when she’d been transferred here to this enormously better-equipped private hospital. Travis had been trying to remember her birthday and searching for her details online only to discover she didn’t seem to exist anywhere but in the flesh. He’d found a handful of very old posts, selfies with other socialites at whichever clubs had been the it spot around the time they’d married, but aside from her father’s obituary, which was short and stated no service would be held, there was nothing recent about her online.
Her father’s house had been sold, he quickly discovered, and Travis hadn’t been able to find her current address. He’d had to write down his own. He had acted like her husband and approved her treatment, underwriting the cost. What else was he supposed to do?
Whatever they’d given her for the pain had knocked her out for almost twenty-four hours. Given how bedraggled she’d looked, he’d deduced she needed the sleep.
She still had dark circles around her eyes and an olive tinge in her normally ivory face. The hollows in her cheeks he put down to some women’s desire for a skeletal frame in the name of fashion, but she was overdue for a manicure and her hair was limp and dull.
Looking at her, all he felt was pity at her condition. Tired anger. He had known he was making a mistake even as he married her, so why had he gone through with it?
The doctor came in at that moment, along with the nurse who elevated her bed. The doctor wanted her to finish her course of antibiotics orally and said she was anemic. Needed iron.
“You’re run-down. Burnt out. I’m prescribing a few weeks off work, along with high-potency multivitamins and proper eating. Get your strength back.”
“Off” from what? Travis wondered acridly. She hadn’t held down a real job in her life.
“Thanks,” Imogen said with a tight smile, folding the prescription in half once, then held out her hand to Travis.
He gave her the worn silk bag that was all she’d had on her when she collapsed, like she was some kind of runaway. It might have been good quality twenty or thirty years ago, but it was frayed and faded now. Ugly.
“So, I can go?” She indicated the needle still feeding medication and fluids into her arm.
“Oh, goodness no,” the doctor said. “You’ll have another dose of antibiotics and an iron infusion. We’ll talk tomorrow about discharge, but I would think later in the week—”
“I can’t afford this,” she cut in. “Please.” She lifted her arm. “I’d rather you remove this even if I have to pay for it. I’m squeamish.”
“Mrs. Sanders—”
“Gantry,” she said at the same time Travis said, “We’re divorced.”
The doctor sent a perplexed look between them.
“My ex-husband isn’t paying for my treatment. I am.”
Travis had to raise his brows at that, but was far less surprised by her next words.
“And I can’t. So.” She crossed her arm over her body toward the nurse. “Please get me out of here as quickly and cheaply as possible.”
“You’re not well,” the doctor said firmly. “She’s not,” he insisted to Travis, causing an annoying niggle of concern to tug on his conscience.
Why did she get to him like this?
* * *
Her stupid arm was too heavy to hold up and even her head needed to flop back against the pillow. “Is this pro bono, then?”
She knew it wasn’t. She knew suggesting it put Travis in a tight spot. He’d brought her here. He would be liable if she refused to pay.
“I’ll pay for her treatment,” Travis ground out, tone so thick with contempt she cringed. His next words, resounding with sarcasm, sawed right through her breastbone to scratch themselves into her heart. “You can pay me back.”
“I’ll pay for my own treatment,” she said, capable of her own pointed disdain. If she knew nothing else, she knew that she would not go deeper into his debt. “But my bills stop now. Bring me whatever forms I need to fill out and get this needle out of my arm. Where are my clothes?”
“I threw them away,” Travis said.
“Are you serious? Who—Well, that’s just great, isn’t it? Thanks.” She looked at the nurse. “I’ll need some pajamas. Heck, throw in a hot meal, since I’m spending like a drunken sailor anyway.”
“Like an Imogen Gantry,” Travis corrected under his breath, just loud enough for her to hear it.
She glared at him. “Don’t let me keep you.”
He had the nerve to look at the doctor and jerk his head, ordering the man to confer with him outside the room.
“Don’t you talk about me,” she said to their backs. “Did you see what just happened?” she asked the nurse.
“Let’s finish this dose of medication before we talk about removing your needle. I’ll bring you some soup.”
Imogen fell asleep in the time it took the nurse to come back, but felt a little better after a bowl of soup and a glass of vegetable juice. Half her weakness in the street had been hunger, she realized. Apparently, the human body needed to eat every day, and sneaking a few maraschino cherries from the bar while she scrubbed the floor behind it didn’t count. #ThingsTheyDon’tTeachYouInSchool.
The nurse removed her needle after giving her some pills to swallow, then helped her shower and dress in a pair of drawstring pajamas and a T-shirt with yellow birds on it.
After all that activity, even finger-combing her hair was too much. Imogen used a rubber band she begged off the nurse to gather her wet hair into a messy lump, then sat in the chair, trembling with exertion, pretending she was fully on the mend, fishing for the thin slippers that would no doubt cost her a hundred dollars apiece.
She signed forms that promised the hospital both her useless arms and legs and tried to be thankful Travis hadn’t thrown out her boots with her jacket. She snuck a blanket off a linen cart on her way to the door, but it was still going to be a long, hellish walk home, looking like one of New York’s finest. It would be dark soon and was still snowing, growing dusky at three in the afternoon. Her debit card would combust if she so much as tried to put a subway fare on it. She had no choice.
“Bye now,” she said as she passed the nurses’ station with a wave. “Add this to the bill,” she added with a point at the blanket. “Thank you.”
“Ms. Gantry,” the motherly nurse said in protest. “You really should rest.”
“I will,” she lied. “Soon as I’m home.” She would swing by to see one of her employers on the way, though. See if she still had a job with the biker bar’s janitorial staff after blowing her shift last night with this unplanned excursion to the right side of town.
She walked out of the blasting heat in the space between the two sets of automatic doors, and winter slapped her in the face. It immediately sapped 90 percent of her energy, making her sob under her breath as she began putting one foot in front of the other. The cold penetrated before she took ten steps, but she pushed on, doggedly following the looped driveway toward the gilded gates that suggested this place was heaven after all.
It began to look like a really long way just to get to the road. She had to stop and brush snow off a bench dedicated to a hospital benefactor, rest there a moment. She felt so pathetic her eyes began to well. At least her ear didn’t hurt like it had. It was just a dull ache.
There was always a bright side if she looked for it.
Nevertheless, panic edged in around the meditative breaths she was blowing like smoke in front of her face. She was shivering, teeth chattering. How was she going to carry on?
One day at a time, she reminded herself, closing her eyes. One footstep at a time.
Before she could rise, a black car stopped at the curb in front of her. The chauffeur came around and opened the back door. She already knew who would get out and tried to pretend she was bored, not so very close to beaten.
Even her father hadn’t crushed her as quickly and thoroughly as one irritated look from this man did. He wore a fedora and a gorgeous wool overcoat tailored to his physique. His pants creased sharply down his shins to land neatly on what had to be Italian leather shoes.
“You look like a gangster. I don’t have your money. You’ll have to break my knees.”
“Can those knees get you into this car or do I have to do that for you, too?”
The air was so cold, breathing it to talk made her lungs hurt. “Why do you even care?”
“I don’t,” he assured her brutally.
She looked back toward the hospital doors. As usual, she’d come too far and had to live with where she had ended up.
“I told the doctor I would get you home if you insisted on leaving and make sure a neighbor checks on you.”
The drug dealer across the hall? She would love for him to come and go.
She clutched her purse against her chest, inside the blanket she clenched closed with her two hands. She stared at the flakes appearing and melting on her knees so he wouldn’t see how close to tears she was.
“I’ll find my own way home,” she insisted.
Travis, being a man of action, didn’t say a word. He swooped so fast she barely had time to realize he had picked her up before he shoved her into the back of his car and followed her in. Abject loss struck before she’d even had time to process the safe feeling of being cradled against his chest.
Dear God it was deliciously warm in here. She bit back a moan of relief.
“Now,” he said as he slammed his door and sat back, shooting his cuffs. “Where is home, exactly?”
“Didn’t the hospital tell you? They seemed so keen to share everything else about me. What is my blood type, anyway? I’ve never bothered to find out.”
He only nodded toward his driver, indicating the man was waiting with more patience than Travis possessed.
They were really doing this? Fine. A perverse urge to let him gloat over his pound of flesh gripped her. Maybe if he saw she was being thoroughly punished, he might quit acting so supercilious and resentful.
She stated her address.
The driver’s frown was reflected through the rearview mirror, matching Travis’s scowl.
“Would you be serious?” Travis muttered.
She shrugged. “You wanted to know what I was doing in that neighborhood. I live there.”
“What are you doing, Imogen?” he asked tiredly. “What’s the game? Because I’m not letting you screw me over again.”
“No lift home, then?” She put her hand on the door latch.
He sighed. “If I drive you all the way over there, what happens? You get into the bed of some sketchy thug your father didn’t approve of?” His lip curled with disgust. His eye twitched, almost as if the idea of it bothered him. “Does he spank you the way you’ve always needed?”
“Hardly necessary when you’re doing such a fine job of that.” She glared at him, but holding his gaze was hard. It felt too intimate. They had never played erotic games, but suddenly they were both thinking about it.
While she grew hot, she watched him shut down, locking her out, jaw hardening and a muscle ticking in his cheek.
She swallowed. “I plan to crawl into my own bed and hope I never wake up.”
“Tell me where you really live,” he said through his teeth.
“I just did.” She didn’t bother getting emotional about it. It was the doleful truth that her life was so firmly in the toilet, she was barely surviving it.
She let her head rest back and must have dozed, because suddenly he was saying, “We’re here,” snapping her back to awareness of being in his car.
“Okay. Thanks,” she said dumbly, looking behind her to see if it was safe to open her door against traffic.
“You’re going through with this, then.” Travis swore beside her and went out his side, then motioned her to come out his side. He had to lean down and help her climb to her feet.
She clung to his hand, shaking, longing to lean into the woolen wall of his chest. Longing to beg, “Don’t leave me here.” She was scared all the time, not that she had the dim sense to show it. It might be a different neighborhood, but the apprehension was the same as she’d always felt in her childhood. Weakness would be pounced upon. She never showed it if she could help it.
She had never been this weak, though. It took a superhuman effort to release him from that tenuous connection of grasping his hand—not just physically, but because she felt so lonely. So adrift.
Why was it so freaking cold out?
Shivering, she fumbled her key from her purse and moved to the door of her building. It wasn’t locked. Never was. The entryway smelled like sauerkraut soup, which was better than some of the other days.
Travis swore as he came in behind her and set a hand on her upper arm, steadying her as she climbed the stairs. His looming presence, intimidating as it was, also felt protective, which made her heart pang.
“Hey,” one of her neighbors said as she passed them on the stairs. She was off to work the streets in her thigh-high boots, miniskirt and fringed bra beneath a faux fur jacket. “No tricks in the rooms.”
“He’s just bringing me home.”
“Don’t get caught,” the woman advised with a shake of her head. “You’ll get kicked out.”
Imogen didn’t look at Travis, but his thunderous silence pulsed over her as she pushed her key into the lock and entered her “home.”
It was the room where she slept when she wasn’t working but so depressing she would rather work. It was as clean as she could make it, given the communal broom was more of a health hazard than a gritty floor. She didn’t have much for personal effects, having sold any clothes and accessories that would bring in a few dollars.
There was a small soup pot on the only chair. It usually held a bag of rice and a box of pasta, but she had dumbly left it in the shared kitchen overnight a few days ago. She was lucky to have recovered the dirty pot. Payday wasn’t until tomorrow, which was why she hadn’t eaten when she collapsed.
Sinking onto the creaky springs and thin mattress of her low, single bed, she exchanged the damp blanket she’d been clutching around her for the folded one, giving the dry one a weak shake. “Can you leave so they don’t think I’m entertaining? I really can’t handle being kicked out right now.”
“This is where you live.” His gaze hit her few other effects: a battered straw basket holding her shampoo, toothbrush and comb, for her trips to the shared bathroom; a towel on the hook behind the door; a windup alarm clock; and a drugstore freebie calendar where she wrote her hours. “The street would be an improvement.”
“I tried sleeping on the street. Turns out they call your ex-husband and he shows up to make you feel bad about yourself.”
His “Not funny” glare was interrupted by a sharp knock and an even sharper, “No drugs, no tricks! Out!”
“Would you go?” she pleaded.
Travis snapped open the door to scowl at her landlord.
“He’s not staying—” she tried to argue, but of course she was on the bed, which looked so very bad.
“We’re leaving,” Travis said, and snapped his fingers at her.
She flopped onto her side with her back to both of them.
“Imogen.”
Oh, she hated her name when it was pronounced like that, as if she was something to be cursed into the next dimension.
“Just go,” she begged.
“I’m taking this,” he said, forcing her to roll over and see he held her red purse.
“Don’t.” She weakly shook her head. “I can’t fight you right now. You know I can’t.” She was done in. Genuinely ready to break down and cry her eyes out.
“Then you should have stayed in hospital. I’ll take you back there now.”
She rolled her back to him again. “Take it, then. I don’t even care anymore.” She really didn’t. All she wanted was to close her eyes and forget she existed.
With a string of curses, he dragged the scratchy gray blanket from her and threw it off the foot of the bed. Then he gathered her up, arms so tense beneath the thick wool that her skin felt bruised where it came in contact with his flexed muscles. He was surprisingly gentle in his fury, though, despite cussing out the landlord so he could get by and carry her down the stairs.
“Travis, stop. I’ll lose all my things.”
“What things? What the hell is going on, Imogen?”
CHAPTER THREE (#ud67e9285-3386-5fe4-ad6c-dbfbe4b448e7)
IN THE FIVE minutes they’d been upstairs, a handful of jackals had begun circling to case the car. His chauffeur stood ready to open the back door and Travis shoved her into it, wondering why he’d got out at all.
To see how far she would carry her charade, of course, never dreaming she would take him into a dingy firetrap of a room that was where she actually slept.
He couldn’t even comprehend it.
Snapping a glare at her, he saw there was no fight left in her. Her mouth was pouted, her eyes glassy with exhaustion, her hands limp in her lap.
If she weighed a hundred pounds right now, he’d be stunned. It wasn’t healthy, even for a woman barely hitting five and a half feet tall.
“I can’t afford the hospital. Can you please just tell my landlord I’m sick, not stoned, and let me sleep?”
“No.” He slammed his door and jerked his head at his driver to pull into traffic, wanting away from here. As far and fast as possible. “Do you have gambling debts? What?”
“Oh, I backed the wrong horse. That’s for sure.” She rolled her head on the back of her seat to quirk her mouth in an approximation of a smile. “What’s that old song about not being able to buy love? Turns out it’s true.”
“Which means?”
She only sighed and closed her eyes, almost as if she was trying to press back tears. “Doesn’t matter,” she murmured.
“Explain this to me. You had a lover who stole all your money? Tell me, how does that feel?” He ignored the gas-lit inferno that burst into life inside him as he thought of her with other men, feigning great interest in her reply instead.
Her brow pleated and she turned her nose to the front, eyes staying closed. Her lashes might have been damp.
“You seem obsessed with my many lovers. Accuse me of anything, Travis, but not promiscuity. You, of all people, know I don’t give it up easily.”
That took him aback a little. He didn’t understand why. They were divorced. It shouldn’t matter to him how many lovers she’d had, so why was he needling her about it? He presumed she’d taken some. With her libido?
Sexual memory seared through his blood, lifting the hairs on his body and sending a spike of desire into his loins.
He ignored how thinking of other men enjoying her passionate response put a sick knot in his gut. He had long ago decided he was remembering it wrong, anyway. He’d been high on personal achievements when they’d met, which had lent optimism and ecstasy to their physical encounters. Whatever had been roused in him hadn’t been real or wholly connected to her. It certainly hadn’t been worth all she’d cost him.
As for what she’d felt?
“Right,” he recalled scathingly. “You want a ring and a generous prenup before you sleep with a man. You haven’t found another taker for that? Of course, you only have one virginity to barter, and sex without that sweetener?” He hitched a shoulder, dismissing what had felt at the time like an ever-increasing climb of pleasure as she grew more confident with him between the sheets.
His ego needed her to believe his interest had already been waning, though. He still felt embarrassed for going blind with impulsive urgency in the first place, unable to let her get away. He had married her in a rush, on the sly, because he’d known deep down that they wouldn’t last. A fire that burned that high, that fast, guttered just as quickly, which was exactly what had happened. A blur of obsessive sex had quickly dissolved into her walking away with her prenuptial settlement and a demand for a divorce.
“Wow,” she said, voice husky. “That’s hitting below the belt, isn’t it? You’re welcome, then, for releasing you to enjoy much better sex than I was able to provide.”
He wasn’t sure how her remark caused his own to bounce back and sting him so deeply. Maybe it was the fact that, try as he might to claim disinterest, he’d never found another woman who’d inspired such a breadth of sexual hunger in him.
That was a good thing, he regularly told himself. Maybe he hadn’t erased her from his memory, but he didn’t want or need the sort of insanity she had provoked, either.
No, he had spent the last years very comfortably dating women who didn’t inspire much feeling at all, only returning to the land of turmoil when his PA had interrupted his meeting yesterday morning.
Had it only been thirty-six hours? Such was Imogen. She was a hydrogen bomb that cratered a life in seconds, completely reshaping everything around her without a moment’s regard.
He remembered her prescription and drew the paper from her purse, handing it to his driver, instructing him to drop them in the front of his building before filling it.
When they arrived at his Chelsea building, however, the doorman was busy corralling paparazzi away from the entrance. It was a common sight when one of his celebrity neighbors had just arrived home. The sidewalks were teeming with Christmas shoppers, too. Even some carolers dressed in olden days’ garb.
“Take us to the underground,” Travis instructed, beginning to feel weary himself. He had only been home for a few hours of sleep last night, arriving late and leaving early, wanting to get back to the hospital. The urgency to do so had been...disturbing. Now he was compelled to get Imogen into his apartment so he could finally relax, which was an equally unsettling impulse.
“You don’t want to be photographed with an escapee from the psych ward? Weird,” she murmured. “You realize I don’t just look like a homeless person? I am one. My landlord will have my stuff on the stoop and my room let to someone else by now. Thanks for that, by the way.”
“Still have some spit and vinegar, though.”
“Literally, all I have left. Why did you bring me here? Because I’m quite sure you’re not inviting me to live with you and I’m quite sure I won’t take you up on it if you do.”
He didn’t know what he was doing, but he hadn’t been able to leave her in that roach-infested garbage pail of a building. He imagined she would only discharge herself if he took her back to the hospital. Bringing her to his penthouse was his only choice.
“You’re going to have that nap you’re so determined to take. I’ll use the silence to figure out what to do with you when you wake up.”
* * *
Imogen wanted to sneer at him, but it took everything in her to open her door when the car stopped and it wasn’t even her own steam that did it. The driver got out and opened it for her. He helped her out and Travis came around to slide his arm across her back, helping her into the elevator where he used his fingerprint to override a security panel and take them to the top floor.
He kept his arm around her and she couldn’t help but lean into him. It felt really, really nice. For a split second, she experienced a spark of hope. Maybe he didn’t hate her. Maybe this was a chance to make amends. She couldn’t change the past, but the future was a blank whiteboard.
Then she caught sight of their reflection and her glimmer of optimism died. At one time, she had almost been his equal, when her family had had money and she had been a product—not a shining example, but at least a product—of an upper-crust upbringing.
Since then, however, he had skyrocketed from wealthy architect who dabbled in real estate to international corporate mogul, taking on prestigious projects around the globe. An honest-to-God tycoon who lived in the city’s best building on its top floor. He was way out of reach for the black-sheep daughter of a paper publisher and far, far beyond taking up with a match girl—which she could aspire to be as soon as she stole some matches.
She had thought dying in the street was rock bottom. Then Travis seeing how broke she was and the way she had been living had felt like rock bottom. But this was rock bottom. Riding an elevator up to what might have been her life if she’d played her cards differently, while she faced how completely and irrevocably she had fallen down in his estimation, was beyond demoralizing. It was shattering.
Until this moment, her life had been a mess, but her heart had held some resilience. She had possessed some spirit. Some hope that one day she would be able to face him and make amends. That belief had got her out of bed and off to her many awful, minimum-wage jobs. But that was gone now.
The doors of the elevator opened to a foyer of marble and mahogany. Floating stairs rose on the right with a bench tucked beneath. A side table stood on the other side. An impressionist painting the size of Central Park hung above it.
From inside the lounge, out of sight but not out of earshot, Imogen heard an excited voice cry, “Papa!”
As tiny footsteps hurried toward them, Imogen began to disintegrate, each particle of her breaking away and sizzling agonizingly into utter despair.
She was such a fool. This was rock bottom.
* * *
Travis bit back a curse as Imogen pulled away from him, swinging a look on him so betrayed and shattered, it cut like a scalpel directly into his heart.
He had to look away to his niece, Antonietta, as she appeared from the lounge. She came up short at the sight of them, recovered in the next second and continued her pell-mell run at him, arms up and wearing a wide smile.
“Zio!”
He picked up the three-year-old sprite.
She threw her arms around his neck and made a production of kissing his cheek with a loud, “Mmmwah!”
Gwyn, his stepsister, appeared with a sleeping Enrico drooped on her shoulder. She faltered as she took in that Travis had a woman with him, one who didn’t exactly look like his usual type. She wasn’t the judgmental sort, though. She quickly recovered with a welcoming smile. “Hi.”
“I completely forgot what day it was,” Travis told her.
“No problem. I’m Gwyn.” She came forward with her free hand extended.
Imogen’s gaze sharpened with recognition, but if she said one wrong word to Gwyn...
“You’re Travis’s sister.” Imogen unfolded one arm to shake hands. “Nice to meet you. I’m Imogen.”
“Good timing. I’ve just made coffee,” Gwyn said toward Travis. “Let me put Enrico down. I’ll be right back.”
* * *
Imogen’s brain was reengaging from its tailspin, where she had briefly been convinced Travis was married with children. She occasionally stalked him online, as one did with an ex. He dated a lot but hadn’t seemed serious about anyone, so, for a moment, she had been struck nearly dead with shock. By a loss so acute, she hadn’t been able to withstand it.
Shut up, misguided girlish fantasies.
She and Travis were so over.
As for his sister, when Gwyn had had a spot of trouble a few years ago with an international bank scandal and a global leak of nude photos, Imogen had followed it for different reasons than the rest of the world’s lurid curiosity. While she and Travis had been married, he hadn’t even mentioned he had a stepsister. It had been a shock to see his name associated with the headlines not long after their split. Imogen had combed every story she could find then, trying to figure out why he’d been so secretive about his family.
At the same time, she had drawn a line in the sand for herself. She hadn’t told her father that she had an in with that particular story. She and Travis had been firmly on the outs by then, her father’s business failing miserably, but she refused to exploit him. Between her divorce settlement and her mother’s trust fund, Imogen had been sure they were only a few short months from having her father’s company back on its feet.
The core of her reluctance to use Travis, however, had stemmed from the deep agony of rejection Travis’s letting her go had rent through her. She hadn’t even told her father she’d been married, fearful of his reaction.
He would have approved of Travis, of course, but there was no way she’d wanted Travis to meet her father. Then, when her marriage fell apart...well, who needed that sort of scathing disappointment added to her pain? Her father’s derision would have expanded exponentially under the news she had failed to hold on to him. It was bad enough she had deluded herself into believing Travis had had real feelings for her.
The entire thing became so humiliating she had preferred to be as secretive about their marriage as Travis had been.
He led the way into the lounge. It was tastefully decorated for the season with festive garlands around the windows, fairy lights winking in the potted shrubs from the terrace and a tree that looked and smelled real. The presents beneath were professionally wrapped but with cartoonish paper that would appeal to children.
“Mama said I have to ask you if those are for me,” the little girl said, one arm still firmly around Travis’s neck as she fixed her gaze on the gifts.
“And Enrico, yes.”
“Can I open them? Per favore,Zio?” she asked very sweetly.
“Not yet.”
She gave a little pout of disappointment.
Italian? Imogen sank down on the sofa so she wouldn’t fall down.
“You never mentioned your sister,” she commented. All he’d told her was that he was close with his father, who lived in Charleston, and didn’t see much of his mother, but she also lived in that city.
“Gwyn’s mother married my father while I was at university, but passed away soon after. Gwyn and I didn’t grow up together.”
They seemed close now, if he was giving the woman access to his apartment when he wasn’t even here. He’d been cautious about letting his wife into his personal space, constantly picking up behind her and uptight that the few things she’d brought with her hadn’t fit with his existing decor. At the time, she had put it down to the shift from bachelorhood to living with someone, but she knew now it had been more than a territorial thing. He hadn’t wanted her there at all. It still made her throat raw to think of it.
“This is Antonietta.” He was still holding her. “We call her Toni.”
The little girl cupped her hand near his ear and whispered something.
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Toni Baloney.”
Toni giggled and hunched her shoulders up to her ears. “What’s your name?”
“Imogen. My sister used to call me Imogen the Imagination Magician.”
Toni widened her eyes in excited wonder. “I love that name.”
He didn’t just have family, but a fun and loving one. Huh. Why would he have felt a need to hide that from her?
“Come eat your apples and cheese, topolina,” Gwyn said as she returned, waving Toni toward the snack at the elegant glass-topped pedestal dining table.
Travis set the girl on her feet and she skipped across to climb up and kneel on a velvet-upholstered chair.
Imogen hadn’t been allowed at the grown-up table until she was twelve.
“The doorman let us up because you left notice that we would arrive today.” Gwyn came over with coffee, cream and sugar, then seated herself where she could watch Toni. “I thought that meant you remembered we were coming. I was going to text, but I got busy with the kids. If we’re imposing, I’ll ask Vito to move us to a hotel.”
“It’s one night. I forgot, that’s all.” Travis seemed to blame Imogen for his absentmindedness with the cool glance he flicked her way as he sat.
Imogen lifted her brows, wondering how he was going to explain her presence now that his worlds had collided.
He didn’t bother, only sat back with his black coffee. “Vito had meetings?”
After a beat of surprise, Gwyn nodded. She smiled at Imogen. “We just got in from Italy. My husband often has business in New York, so we make a stop here, adjust to the jet lag, let the kids leave fingerprints all over Zio’s furniture, then head to Charleston.”
“To see Travis’s father?”
“Henry, yes. And the bank has offices there. Vito checks in and works on and off while we visit Nonno. For the last few years, Henry has been coming to us for the holidays, but this year is his seventieth birthday. It’s right before Christmas and he’s having a party, so we came to him.”
“Sounds fun.” Imogen deliberately offered nothing about herself.
“It should be.”
Silence reigned as they all blew across coffee that was too hot to drink.
The corners of Gwyn’s mouth wore the tiniest curl. She was clearly dying to pry, but was far too polite to ask. Or knew Travis would talk when he was ready and not before. Imogen had come up against that perversely closed-off side of him herself. In fact, the things Gwyn had just told her were probably the most she’d ever learned about his personal life.
“Toni, do you see an elephant in this room?” Imogen turned her head to ask.
Gwyn snorted and almost spilled her coffee.
Toni sat up on her knees and swung her head this way and that. “No.”
“Mmm... My mistake. I thought there was one.”
Travis sent her a warning look.
“We’ve taken up both guest rooms, but the kids can come into our room if need be,” Gwyn said mildly.
“Is there an aquarium?” Imogen asked Toni. “Because I feel like someone is fishing.”
Gwyn had to scratch her nose to hide the laugh she suppressed.
Toni cocked her head, sensing opportunity. “We can pretend to fish in the pool.”
“It’s too cold, topolina,” Gwyn said. “When Papa gets back and Enrico is awake, we could maybe go to the indoor one downstairs. You and I are going to have a little sleep first, though. Soon as you finish your snack.”
“And Imogen?”
Imogen plucked at the pajamas she was wearing, certain that was what had prompted Toni’s question. “I’m going to nap, too, but by myself.”
Travis looked at Gwyn. “Would you have something that Imogen could wear when she wakes?”
“Of course. I’ll find something right now.”
* * *
Gwyn took Toni upstairs and Travis finished his coffee, watching Imogen while wishing for something stronger in his cup. He knew he should check his phone. He’d been ignoring it since walking out of that meeting yesterday. Finding Gwyn here reminded him he had a life beyond Imogen. A trip to Charleston in a few days for his father’s birthday and the family Christmas celebrations.
He couldn’t think of anything, however, except the woman who had had a way of consuming his thoughts from the moment he’d met her. She had walked into his brand-new offices here in New York four years ago, as he’d been expanding beyond Charleston, starting some of his most prestigious architectural projects to date.
She’d introduced herself as a writer for one of the cornerstone publications in New York and proceeded to interview him. Her auburn hair had rippled in satin waves as she’d canted her head at him, listening in a way that had made him feel ten feet tall.
“Let’s talk more over dinner,” he had suggested after an hour of growing ever more fascinated by her engaging curiosity and earnest little frowns. Her legs were lithe stems beneath a black miniskirt, propping up a notebook where her handwriting looped in big swirls and t’s that she crossed with a sweep of her slender wrist. Her breasts had looked to be the exact fit for his palms. Everything about her had looked like a perfect fit. She had been, not that he had had confirmation that first night. Dinner had turned into an invitation back to his old apartment, which was when she had confessed to being a virgin.
“At twenty?” he’d chided with skepticism. “How is that possible?”
“Probably because I don’t know what I’m missing,” she had shot back, laughing at herself yet surprising him into laughing, as well.
That quick wit, that unvarnished honesty, had convinced him she was exactly what she appeared—a journalism student from a good family with a bright mind and a cheeky wit that would keep him on his toes. There was absolutely nothing to dislike in that package.
The packaging had been the lie, of course. Mislabeled. Ingredients not as advertised. Definitely looking shopworn these days.
Finishing her coffee, she set down her cup, bringing him back to the present.
“You don’t want me here. I’ll go.” She looked around, frowning. She was probably looking for her purse, which was in the pocket of his overcoat. He’d hung it in the closet at the door. It could stay there for now.
“Where to?” he prompted. Goaded. He was fed up with her thinking she had options when clearly neither of them did.
She swallowed. “I’ll talk to my landlord—”
“No,” he cut in.
She turned a look on him that sparked with temper. “What do you want from me, Travis?”
“Let’s start with an explanation. Where did all my money go?” He waved at the fact her worldly possessions consisted of pajamas she hadn’t been able to pay for out of her own pocket. “Where did yours go?” She hadn’t been rich, but she hadn’t been destitute.
She blew out a breath and sagged into the sofa, pulling a tasseled cushion into her middle.
He braced, waiting to see if she would tell the truth or lie yet again. Wondering if he would be able to tell the difference.
“I was trying to save Dad’s business.”
“Publishing,” he recalled.
“Newspapers and magazines.” She gave him a pained smile. “Print media.”
He recalled what she’d said in the car. “‘The wrong horse.’”
“Such a dead one, yet I beat it like you can’t even imagine. Your money, my trust fund. Dad sold the house and liquidated anything that wasn’t already in the business. We threw every penny we had at it. Then he went into care, which was another bunch of bills. My name wound up on everything. I couldn’t declare bankruptcy while he was alive. It was too humiliating for him. We were pretending it was all systems go while I sold furniture and clothes and Mom’s jewelry to make ends meet. His cremation was the final straw. I was behind on rent and got evicted. I wasn’t really keeping up on friendships by then and owed money to the few friends I had left. I wanted to start over on my own terms, so I found something I could afford and that’s what I’m doing.”
“That roach-infested brothel is your idea of a fresh start? Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Oh, that’s funny,” she said with an askance look. “What would you have said?”
Everything he was saying now, but he wouldn’t have let her get to where she was passing out on the street from neglecting her health.
“You married me to get your hands on your trust fund. Didn’t you?” She had never admitted it, but he was convinced of it.
She hesitated very briefly before nodding, eyes downcast. Guilt? Or hiding something?
“I wanted access to it so I could help Dad.” She had the humility to shake her head and quirk her mouth in self-contempt. “Not exactly an economist over here. I knew better. Digital publishing was all I learned at school, which he thought was useless.” She shrugged. “I tried to convince him to start doing things online, but old dogs...” She smiled without humor. “It would have been too little, too late, even if he’d bought in.”
“So, you’re broke.”
“I’m in a hole so deep all I see is stars.”
“You’re telling me the truth? Because if it’s addiction or something, tell me. I’ll get you help.”
“I wish it was. There would be pain relief, at least. Escape.” Her smile was a humorless flat line.
He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, frustrated by what sounded like brutal honesty. Nevertheless, he muttered, “God, I wish I could trust you.”
“What does it matter if you do or don’t? I mean, thanks for the hospital, I guess. I’ll try to pay you back someday, when I can afford a lottery ticket and happen to win the jackpot, but—” she flicked a helpless hand in the air “—our lives won’t intersect after today, so...”
* * *
Her heart lurched as she said those words, trying to be laissez-faire about it.
He narrowed his eyes. “That would be nice if it were true, but I’ve just taken responsibility for your hospital bills. For you. What am I going to do? Turn you out on the street? In the middle of winter? I happen to possess a conscience.”
“Meaning I don’t?”
“It was pretty damned calculating, what you did.”
“You’re the one who set the terms of the prenup,” she reminded him. “That was all you. All I did was sign it.”
“And took the money after three weeks of marriage.”
“Oh, I should have given you my virginity for the bragging rights of saying I was once Travis Sanders’s lay of the day?” She blinked her lashes at him, pretending her shields were firmly in place when she was silently begging him to contradict her. To say she had meant more to him than that.
She had been willing to give it up without a ring in the heat of passion, if he would only remember. He was the one who had proposed and led her to believe he cared.
A muscle pulsed in his jaw. “I’m surprised you haven’t sold our story, if you needed money so badly.”
She pressed her lips together, but he was quick enough to read her expression.
“Considered it, did you? I cannot believe I thought we had a shot,” he muttered.
“Oh, did you?” She leaped on that. “Did you really? How about you step off your high horse a minute and be honest about your own motives. Why did you marry me?”
“You know why. You refused to sleep with me until I put a ring on it.”
“And you wanted in my pants so bad, you wanted bragging rights to my virginity so bad, you made our quickie marriage happen.” They’d known each other a week. “Then what? Did you take me home to meet this wonderful family of yours, all flushed with pride in your darling bride? You didn’t even tell me you had a sister.” She thumbed toward the stairs. “She hasn’t got a clue who I am. Does your dad?”
His stony expression told her that was a hard no.
“At no point did you think we had a shot.” The words were coming out thick and scathing, but they tore up her insides, sharp as barbed wire, seeming to affect her far more than him. “You were mortified that you’d succumbed to marriage. Every time I said, ‘Let’s go out,’ you said, ‘Let’s stay in.’ The one time we ran into someone you knew, you didn’t even introduce me. You didn’t just skip the part that I was your wife. You didn’t acknowledge me to them at all.”
His cheek ticked and he looked away, not offering an explanation, which scored another fresh line down her heart.
“You wouldn’t let me change my status online and said it was because you wanted me to yourself. Then you went to work every day, leaving me alone in that big apartment where I wasn’t allowed to touch anything.”
“You claimed to be writing for your father, if I recall. Why did I never see any of those articles?” So scathing.
Her face stung, but she wasn’t about to get into her father’s lack of love for her. One spurn was all she could relive at a time, thanks.
“You were planning our divorce before you said, ‘I do.’ That’s why you drew up the prenup. All you cared about was keeping the damage to your reputation at a minimum. You invested nothing in our relationship except what I took when I left, certainly not your heart. Our marriage was as much a transaction on your side as mine. I bruised your ego by walking out before you told me to leave, not your feelings. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Please. She silently begged him to give her a rosier view of their flash-in-the-pan romance. Her whole body tingled, ions reaching out for a positive against this negative charge consuming her.
“Fine,” he bit out. “You’re right. I knew it was a mistake even as I was saying the words.”
His words skewered into her. She swallowed, wishing she had died in the gutter, rather than survive to face this.
“You’re welcome for remaining your dirty little secret, then,” she snapped. “For what it’s worth, you’re one of thousands of mistakes I’ve made. Not unique or special at all.”
“You don’t know when to quit, do you?” he said in a dangerous voice. “Aside from the day you walked out, of course.”
“Oh, you started that. You know you did.”
“A husband is allowed to ask his wife why he needs to top up her credit card before it’s a month old,” he said through his teeth.
“Your exact words were, ‘I don’t care where it went.’ You didn’t want to know about my life any more than you wanted to share details about yours. I quit kidding myself at that point. It wasn’t a marriage if you were suffering buyer’s remorse. I did you a favor by walking out.”
“That’s one way to frame it.”
“Yeah, well, I keep trying to do you the favor of walking away again, but you keep forcing me to sit my butt back down. Why is that?”
“Because you owe me, Imogen.” He leaned forward, hand gripping the arm of his chair as though trying to keep himself in it.
“I owe a lot of people. Get in line.”
The sound of the elevator had them both holding their stare but clamming up while the animosity cracked and bounced between them.
A superbly handsome man appeared in a bespoke suit. Little sparkles came off him where snowflakes had melted across his shoulders and in his dark hair. He was clean-shaven, calm and confident, not taken aback in the least by the sight of an orphan in hospital pajamas huddling on Travis’s designer sofa.
“You must be Imogen,” he said with a heart-melting Italian accent, coming forward to take her hand in a gentlemanly shake. “No, don’t get up. Vittorio Donatelli. Vito, per favore.”
“Gwyn texted you?” Travis surmised.
“And the photographers downstairs inform me that Imogen is your wife. Congratulazioni,” he said to Travis with a blithe smile. “They asked for a comment. I told them I’m very happy for you, of course.”
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Dani Collins
It's a convenient Christmas arrangement…Until he wants her for ever!After their secret marriage ends in heartbreak, billionaire Travis Sanders never wants to see Imogen again. Yet when Imogen faints in the cold New York snow Travis is called to her very public rescue! To avoid a media scandal they must agree to a temporary reconciliation—at least until Christmas. But with their intense heat still burning Travis is tempted to reclaim his wife—for good!
It’s a convenient Christmas arrangement...
Until he wants her—forever!
After their secret marriage ended in heartbreak, billionaire Travis Sanders never wanted to see Imogen again. Yet when Imogen faints in the cold New York snow, Travis is called to her very public rescue! To avoid a media scandal, they must agree to a temporary reconciliation—at least until Christmas. But with their intense heat still burning, Travis is tempted to reclaim his wife—for good!
Enjoy this emotional Christmas reunion romance!
Canadian DANI COLLINS knew in high school that she wanted to write romance for a living. Twenty-five years later, after marrying her high school sweetheart, having two kids with him, working at several generic office jobs and submitting countless manuscripts, she got The Call. Her first Mills & Boon novel won the Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best First in Series from RT Book Reviews. She now works in her own office, writing romance.
Also by Dani Collins (#ud67e9285-3386-5fe4-ad6c-dbfbe4b448e7)
Bought by Her Italian Boss
The Secret Beneath the Veil
Consequence of His Revenge
The Secret Billionaires collection
Xenakis’s Convenient Bride
The Sauveterre Siblings miniseries
Pursued by the Desert Prince
His Mistress with Two Secrets
Bound by the Millionaire’s Ring
Prince’s Son of Scandal
Bound to the Desert King collection
Sheikh’s Princess of Convenience
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk. (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Claiming His Christmas Wife
Dani Collins
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07282-3
CLAIMING HIS CHRISTMAS WIFE
© 2018 Dani Collins
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To the wonderful team at
Mills & Boon Modern/Harlequin Presents.
I’ve had the privilege of working with
several editors in London and they’ve all been
fabulous and supportive.
Thank you for turning my imaginings into these
iconic books with the red banner and circled embrace.
It’s a dream come true! Xo
Contents
Cover (#u114414f7-b2c5-5958-bb12-e38bd6c143d8)
Back Cover Text (#u49598446-2bdc-5fe4-941a-133d7da6874c)
About the Author (#u6df60e87-6b33-5aa5-81db-54b6d760fa55)
Booklist (#uf6e70252-0c5f-5856-837a-8500e222b486)
Title Page (#u63b09403-1f0a-5e02-9110-e863b133bb2a)
Copyright (#u1c5f8ed3-f2d9-5812-ba8e-ed2c88aba48c)
Dedication (#ub5de0302-7882-5426-a99a-410d3dabbde1)
CHAPTER ONE (#ud7aae723-78fe-517a-9735-be2b6218ed18)
CHAPTER TWO (#uceebf410-db97-5d5a-a948-193ad59fceb9)
CHAPTER THREE (#ufbd98518-d68b-59f0-9fa9-751845ec7a0f)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ud67e9285-3386-5fe4-ad6c-dbfbe4b448e7)
“MR. TRAVIS SANDERS?”
“Yes,” he confirmed shortly, willing the woman to hurry to the point. His PA had interrupted a high-level meeting with this “extremely important” call. “What is this about?”
“Imogen Gantry. She’s your wife?”
Memory washed through him in a rush of heat and hunger. He tensed against it and glanced around, lowering his voice. That broken teacup had been swept firmly under the rug four years ago.
“We’re divorced. Are you a reporter?”
“I’m trying to locate her next of kin. I’m at...” She mentioned the name of one of New York’s most beleaguered public hospitals.
Whatever old anger had sent him soaring at the mention of his ex-wife exploded in a percussive flash. He was blind. Falling. Wind whistling in his ears. Air moving too fast for him to catch a gulp.
“What happened?” he managed to grit out. He was dimly aware his eyes were closed, but she was right there in front of him, laughing. Her green eyes glimmered with mischief. Her hair was a halo of flames licking at her snowy complexion. She swerved her lashes to cut him a glance. So enchantingly beautiful. Gaze clouding with arousal. Sparking with anger. Looking so wounded and vulnerable that last time he’d seen her, his heart still dipped thinking of it.
He’d quickly learned it was a lie, but that didn’t make any of this easier to accept.
Gone? He couldn’t make it fit in his head. He had told her he never wanted to see her again, but discovered he had secretly believed he would.
From far away, he heard the woman say, “She collapsed on the street. She’s feverish and unconscious. Do you know of any medication we should be aware of? She’s awaiting treatment, but—”
“She’s not dead?”
He heard how that sounded, as if that was the outcome he would have preferred, but leave it to Imogen to set him up to believe one thing, contort his emotions to unbearable degrees, then send him flying in another direction. That betraying, manipulative—If he could get his hands on her, he’d kill her himself.
“And she was taken to that hospital? Why?”
“I believe we were closest. She doesn’t seem to have a phone and yours is the only name I’ve been able to find in her bag. We need guidance on treatment and insurance. Are you able to provide that?”
“Contact her father.” He walked back toward the door to his office, saying to his PA behind her desk, “Look up Imogen Gantry’s father. He’s in publishing. Maybe starts with a W. William?” He hadn’t met the man, only heard her mention him once or twice. Hell, they’d only been married fifteen minutes. He knew next to nothing about her.
“Wallace Gantry?” His PA turned her screen. “He appears to have died a few months ago.” She pointed to the obit notice that said he was predeceased by his wife and eldest daughter, survived by his youngest daughter, Imogen.
Perfect.
He knew better than to let himself get sucked back into her orbit, but what else could he say except, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
* * *
Imogen remembered sitting down on the curb. It hadn’t been a nice, rain-washed boulevard of freshly mown grass beneath century-old elms with a stripe of sidewalk, then an empty canvas of manicured lawn to her mother’s rose garden, ending at the wide stairs to the double-door entrance of her childhood home.
No, it had been a freezing, filthy inner-city curb where the piles of snow had turned to a layer of lumpy muck atop a century’s worth of chewing gum and other disgusting things. The damp chill on the air hadn’t squelched any of the terrible smells coming off the grate at her feet. She shouldn’t have touched the post she had braced herself against and she had thought a car would likely run over her legs as she sank down. At the very least, one would drown her with a tsunami of melt from the puddles.
She hadn’t cared. The side of her head had felt like it was twice as big as the rest. Her ear, plugged and aching, had begun screaming so loud the sound had been trying to come out her mouth.
She had tried to pretend she didn’t have an ear infection because those were for children. Her sister had got them, not her. She hadn’t gone swimming recently. She hadn’t known how it could have happened, but there she’d been like a damned toddler, nearly fainting with the agony of it, dizzy and hot and sick.
She’d had to sit down before she fell down. A fever was nature’s way of killing a virus, so why hadn’t this run its course? And who passed out from such a silly thing, anyway?
Her vision had dimmed at the edges, though. She had felt so awful she hadn’t cared that the wet snow had been soaking through her clothes. Her only thought had been, This is how I die. She’d been okay with it. Her father would have loved this for her, dying like a dog in the gutter a week before Christmas. Even Travis would probably conclude that she had got what she deserved. If he ever found out, which he wouldn’t.
It had been a relief to succumb. Fighting was hard, especially when it was a losing battle. Giving up was so much easier. Why had she never tried it before?
So, she had died.
Now she was in—well, this probably wasn’t heaven, not that she expected to get in there. It might be hell. She felt pretty lousy. Her body ached and her sore ear felt full of water. The other one was hypersensitive to the rustle of clothing and a distant conversation that bounced painfully inside her skull. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t swallow. She tried to form words and all she could manage was a whimper of misery.
Something lifted off her arm, a warm weight she hadn’t recognized was there until it was gone, leaving her with a profound sense of loss. She heard footsteps, then a male voice.
“She’s waking up.”
She knew that voice. Her eyes prickled and the air she’d been breathing so easily became dense and hard to pull in. Her chest grew compressed with dread and guilt. She couldn’t move, but inwardly she shrank.
She had definitely gone to hell.
A lighter, quicker footstep came toward her. She opened her eyes, winced at the brightness, then squinted at a tastefully sterile room in placid colors that could have been the one her father had occupied the last months of his life. A private hospital room. For an ear infection? Seriously? Just give her the pink stuff and send her on her way.
“I—” I can’t afford this, she tried to say.
“Don’t try to talk yet,” the kindly nurse said. Her smile was stark white and reassuring against her dark brown skin. She took up Imogen’s wrist to check her pulse, the nurse’s hand soft and warm. Motherly. She checked her temperature and said, “Much better.”
All the while, Imogen could almost but not quite see him in her periphery. She was afraid to turn her head on the pillow and look right at him. It was going to hurt and she just didn’t have it in her yet.
“How am I here?” she managed to whisper.
“Water?” The nurse used a bendy straw, the kind Imogen had never been allowed to use because they were too common. A gimmick.
She got two gulps down her parched throat before the nurse said, “Easy now. Let me tell the doctor you’re awake, then we’ll give you more and maybe something to eat.”
“How long...?”
“You came in yesterday.”
A day and a half in a place like this? When her bank balance was already a zombie apocalypse running rivers of red?
The nurse walked out, sending a smile toward the specter on the other side of the bed.
Imogen closed her eyes again. So childish. She was that and many more things that were bad. Maybe her father was right and she was, simply and irrevocably, bad.
A shoe scuffed beside the bed. She felt him looming over her. Heard him sigh as though he knew she was avoiding him the only way she could.
“Why are you here?” she asked, voice still husky. She wanted to squirm. In her most secretive dreams, this meeting happened on neutral turf. Maybe a coffee shop or somewhere with a pretty view. She would have had a cashier’s check in hand to pay him back every cent she’d been awarded in their divorce settlement—money she knew he felt she’d conned out of him. Somehow, in her fantasy, she found the words to explain why she’d taken it and he had, if not forgiven her, at least not despised her any longer.
Maybe his feelings toward her weren’t that bad. He was here, wasn’t he? Maybe he cared a little. Had he been worried for her?
She heard a zipper, which made her open her eyes out of curiosity—
Oh, no.
“You went through my things?” She clamped her eyes shut against the small red change purse that had belonged to her mother. It held Imogen’s valuables—her driver’s license, her debit card, her room key, the only photo she had of her with her sister and mother, and the marriage certificate stating Travis Sanders was her husband.
“The nurse was looking for your next of kin.” Oh, this man had a way with disdain. It dripped from a voice which was otherwise deep and warm with an intriguing hint of Southern charm.
She was a connoisseur of disparaging tones, having experienced a lot of them in her lifetime. Neighbors. Teachers. Daddy dearest. Inured as she ought to be, this man cut into her with scalpel-like precision with his few indifferent words.
He didn’t care if he was the only person left in this world whom she had any connection to. He found his brief association with her abhorrent when he thought about her at all.
“It’s my only other piece of identification.”
“Birth certificate?” he suggested.
Burned after an argument with her father ages ago. So childish.
She wanted to throw her arm over her eyes and continue hiding, but her limbs were deadweights and the small twitch of trying to lift her arm made her aware of the tube sticking out of it.
She looked at the IV, the ceiling, him.
Oh, it hurt so badly. He had somehow improved on perfection, handsome features having grown sharper and more arrogantly powerful. He was clean-shaven, not ruggedly stubbled and human-looking the way she remembered him when she dared revisit their shared past—hair rumpled by her fingers, chest naked and hot as he pressed her into the sheets.
Whatever warmth she had ever seen in him had been iced over and hardened. He wore a tailored three-piece suit in charcoal with a tie in frosted gray. His mouth, capable of a sideways grin, was held in a short, stern firmness. Flat gray eyes took in what must appear like soggy laundry dumped out of the washer before it had even been through the rinse cycle. That’s about how appealing she felt. While he was...
Travis.
Just thinking his name made her throat flex in an agony of yearning. Remorse.
Why was she always in the wrong? Why was she always falling down and getting messy and driving people away when all she wanted was for someone, anyone, to love her just a little? Especially the people who were supposed to.
Oh, she really was a mess if she was going to get all maudlin like that.
Pull it together, Immy.
“Is there someone I should call?” Flat silver dollars, his eyes were. When she had met him, she had thought his gray eyes remarkable for being so warm and sharp. The way he had focused his gaze on her had been more than flattering. It had filled up a void of neglect inside her.
Today they were as emotionless and cold as her father’s ice-blue eyes. She was nothing to Travis. Absolutely nothing.
“You’ve done enough,” she said, certain he was the reason she was in this five-star accommodation. She flicked her gaze to the window. Snow was falling, but the view was likely a blanket of pristine white over a garden of serenity.
“You’re welcome,” he pronounced derisively.
Oh, was she supposed to thank him for saving her life by further impoverishing what was left of it?
“I didn’t ask you to get involved.” She ignored the fact that she kind of had, carting around their marriage certificate instead of their divorce papers. Where had those ended up, she wondered.
“Oh, this is on me,” he said with unfettered scorn. “I came here thinking—well, it doesn’t matter, does it? I made a mistake. You, Imogen, are the only mistake I have ever made. Do you know that?”
CHAPTER TWO (#ud67e9285-3386-5fe4-ad6c-dbfbe4b448e7)
TRAVIS HEARD HER breath catch and watched her eyes widen in surprise at how ruthlessly he’d thrown that direct hit.
He didn’t feel particularly bad about knocking her when she was down. He was speaking the truth, and she was showing an annoying lack of appreciation for his helping her when he could have hung up at the sound of her name.
He should have. Imogen Gantry was the epitome of a clichéd, spoiled New York princess. Self-involved, devious and intent on a free ride.
She didn’t look like much right now, of course. What the hell had she been up to that she had wound up in an overcrowded, understaffed emergency room, unable to speak for herself?
“Be happy I had you transferred. Do you know where they took you, when they scraped your frozen body off the sidewalk? What were you doing in that part of the city anyway?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” Her green eyes met his briefly, glimmering with indecision as she wavered toward telling him something, then decided against it. The light in her gaze dimmed and she looked away.
Drugs, he had surmised darkly when he’d heard where she’d been picked up and seen how gaunt she was. It seemed the only explanation. Blood tests hadn’t found anything, however. No track marks or withdrawal symptoms, either.
She’d been raging with fever, though. Had a terrible ear infection that had thankfully responded to the intravenous antibiotics. It was something that should have been dealt with sooner, the doctor had said. She could have lost her hearing or wound up with meningitis. He’d looked at Travis as though it was his fault she was so ill.
That had been when she’d been transferred here to this enormously better-equipped private hospital. Travis had been trying to remember her birthday and searching for her details online only to discover she didn’t seem to exist anywhere but in the flesh. He’d found a handful of very old posts, selfies with other socialites at whichever clubs had been the it spot around the time they’d married, but aside from her father’s obituary, which was short and stated no service would be held, there was nothing recent about her online.
Her father’s house had been sold, he quickly discovered, and Travis hadn’t been able to find her current address. He’d had to write down his own. He had acted like her husband and approved her treatment, underwriting the cost. What else was he supposed to do?
Whatever they’d given her for the pain had knocked her out for almost twenty-four hours. Given how bedraggled she’d looked, he’d deduced she needed the sleep.
She still had dark circles around her eyes and an olive tinge in her normally ivory face. The hollows in her cheeks he put down to some women’s desire for a skeletal frame in the name of fashion, but she was overdue for a manicure and her hair was limp and dull.
Looking at her, all he felt was pity at her condition. Tired anger. He had known he was making a mistake even as he married her, so why had he gone through with it?
The doctor came in at that moment, along with the nurse who elevated her bed. The doctor wanted her to finish her course of antibiotics orally and said she was anemic. Needed iron.
“You’re run-down. Burnt out. I’m prescribing a few weeks off work, along with high-potency multivitamins and proper eating. Get your strength back.”
“Off” from what? Travis wondered acridly. She hadn’t held down a real job in her life.
“Thanks,” Imogen said with a tight smile, folding the prescription in half once, then held out her hand to Travis.
He gave her the worn silk bag that was all she’d had on her when she collapsed, like she was some kind of runaway. It might have been good quality twenty or thirty years ago, but it was frayed and faded now. Ugly.
“So, I can go?” She indicated the needle still feeding medication and fluids into her arm.
“Oh, goodness no,” the doctor said. “You’ll have another dose of antibiotics and an iron infusion. We’ll talk tomorrow about discharge, but I would think later in the week—”
“I can’t afford this,” she cut in. “Please.” She lifted her arm. “I’d rather you remove this even if I have to pay for it. I’m squeamish.”
“Mrs. Sanders—”
“Gantry,” she said at the same time Travis said, “We’re divorced.”
The doctor sent a perplexed look between them.
“My ex-husband isn’t paying for my treatment. I am.”
Travis had to raise his brows at that, but was far less surprised by her next words.
“And I can’t. So.” She crossed her arm over her body toward the nurse. “Please get me out of here as quickly and cheaply as possible.”
“You’re not well,” the doctor said firmly. “She’s not,” he insisted to Travis, causing an annoying niggle of concern to tug on his conscience.
Why did she get to him like this?
* * *
Her stupid arm was too heavy to hold up and even her head needed to flop back against the pillow. “Is this pro bono, then?”
She knew it wasn’t. She knew suggesting it put Travis in a tight spot. He’d brought her here. He would be liable if she refused to pay.
“I’ll pay for her treatment,” Travis ground out, tone so thick with contempt she cringed. His next words, resounding with sarcasm, sawed right through her breastbone to scratch themselves into her heart. “You can pay me back.”
“I’ll pay for my own treatment,” she said, capable of her own pointed disdain. If she knew nothing else, she knew that she would not go deeper into his debt. “But my bills stop now. Bring me whatever forms I need to fill out and get this needle out of my arm. Where are my clothes?”
“I threw them away,” Travis said.
“Are you serious? Who—Well, that’s just great, isn’t it? Thanks.” She looked at the nurse. “I’ll need some pajamas. Heck, throw in a hot meal, since I’m spending like a drunken sailor anyway.”
“Like an Imogen Gantry,” Travis corrected under his breath, just loud enough for her to hear it.
She glared at him. “Don’t let me keep you.”
He had the nerve to look at the doctor and jerk his head, ordering the man to confer with him outside the room.
“Don’t you talk about me,” she said to their backs. “Did you see what just happened?” she asked the nurse.
“Let’s finish this dose of medication before we talk about removing your needle. I’ll bring you some soup.”
Imogen fell asleep in the time it took the nurse to come back, but felt a little better after a bowl of soup and a glass of vegetable juice. Half her weakness in the street had been hunger, she realized. Apparently, the human body needed to eat every day, and sneaking a few maraschino cherries from the bar while she scrubbed the floor behind it didn’t count. #ThingsTheyDon’tTeachYouInSchool.
The nurse removed her needle after giving her some pills to swallow, then helped her shower and dress in a pair of drawstring pajamas and a T-shirt with yellow birds on it.
After all that activity, even finger-combing her hair was too much. Imogen used a rubber band she begged off the nurse to gather her wet hair into a messy lump, then sat in the chair, trembling with exertion, pretending she was fully on the mend, fishing for the thin slippers that would no doubt cost her a hundred dollars apiece.
She signed forms that promised the hospital both her useless arms and legs and tried to be thankful Travis hadn’t thrown out her boots with her jacket. She snuck a blanket off a linen cart on her way to the door, but it was still going to be a long, hellish walk home, looking like one of New York’s finest. It would be dark soon and was still snowing, growing dusky at three in the afternoon. Her debit card would combust if she so much as tried to put a subway fare on it. She had no choice.
“Bye now,” she said as she passed the nurses’ station with a wave. “Add this to the bill,” she added with a point at the blanket. “Thank you.”
“Ms. Gantry,” the motherly nurse said in protest. “You really should rest.”
“I will,” she lied. “Soon as I’m home.” She would swing by to see one of her employers on the way, though. See if she still had a job with the biker bar’s janitorial staff after blowing her shift last night with this unplanned excursion to the right side of town.
She walked out of the blasting heat in the space between the two sets of automatic doors, and winter slapped her in the face. It immediately sapped 90 percent of her energy, making her sob under her breath as she began putting one foot in front of the other. The cold penetrated before she took ten steps, but she pushed on, doggedly following the looped driveway toward the gilded gates that suggested this place was heaven after all.
It began to look like a really long way just to get to the road. She had to stop and brush snow off a bench dedicated to a hospital benefactor, rest there a moment. She felt so pathetic her eyes began to well. At least her ear didn’t hurt like it had. It was just a dull ache.
There was always a bright side if she looked for it.
Nevertheless, panic edged in around the meditative breaths she was blowing like smoke in front of her face. She was shivering, teeth chattering. How was she going to carry on?
One day at a time, she reminded herself, closing her eyes. One footstep at a time.
Before she could rise, a black car stopped at the curb in front of her. The chauffeur came around and opened the back door. She already knew who would get out and tried to pretend she was bored, not so very close to beaten.
Even her father hadn’t crushed her as quickly and thoroughly as one irritated look from this man did. He wore a fedora and a gorgeous wool overcoat tailored to his physique. His pants creased sharply down his shins to land neatly on what had to be Italian leather shoes.
“You look like a gangster. I don’t have your money. You’ll have to break my knees.”
“Can those knees get you into this car or do I have to do that for you, too?”
The air was so cold, breathing it to talk made her lungs hurt. “Why do you even care?”
“I don’t,” he assured her brutally.
She looked back toward the hospital doors. As usual, she’d come too far and had to live with where she had ended up.
“I told the doctor I would get you home if you insisted on leaving and make sure a neighbor checks on you.”
The drug dealer across the hall? She would love for him to come and go.
She clutched her purse against her chest, inside the blanket she clenched closed with her two hands. She stared at the flakes appearing and melting on her knees so he wouldn’t see how close to tears she was.
“I’ll find my own way home,” she insisted.
Travis, being a man of action, didn’t say a word. He swooped so fast she barely had time to realize he had picked her up before he shoved her into the back of his car and followed her in. Abject loss struck before she’d even had time to process the safe feeling of being cradled against his chest.
Dear God it was deliciously warm in here. She bit back a moan of relief.
“Now,” he said as he slammed his door and sat back, shooting his cuffs. “Where is home, exactly?”
“Didn’t the hospital tell you? They seemed so keen to share everything else about me. What is my blood type, anyway? I’ve never bothered to find out.”
He only nodded toward his driver, indicating the man was waiting with more patience than Travis possessed.
They were really doing this? Fine. A perverse urge to let him gloat over his pound of flesh gripped her. Maybe if he saw she was being thoroughly punished, he might quit acting so supercilious and resentful.
She stated her address.
The driver’s frown was reflected through the rearview mirror, matching Travis’s scowl.
“Would you be serious?” Travis muttered.
She shrugged. “You wanted to know what I was doing in that neighborhood. I live there.”
“What are you doing, Imogen?” he asked tiredly. “What’s the game? Because I’m not letting you screw me over again.”
“No lift home, then?” She put her hand on the door latch.
He sighed. “If I drive you all the way over there, what happens? You get into the bed of some sketchy thug your father didn’t approve of?” His lip curled with disgust. His eye twitched, almost as if the idea of it bothered him. “Does he spank you the way you’ve always needed?”
“Hardly necessary when you’re doing such a fine job of that.” She glared at him, but holding his gaze was hard. It felt too intimate. They had never played erotic games, but suddenly they were both thinking about it.
While she grew hot, she watched him shut down, locking her out, jaw hardening and a muscle ticking in his cheek.
She swallowed. “I plan to crawl into my own bed and hope I never wake up.”
“Tell me where you really live,” he said through his teeth.
“I just did.” She didn’t bother getting emotional about it. It was the doleful truth that her life was so firmly in the toilet, she was barely surviving it.
She let her head rest back and must have dozed, because suddenly he was saying, “We’re here,” snapping her back to awareness of being in his car.
“Okay. Thanks,” she said dumbly, looking behind her to see if it was safe to open her door against traffic.
“You’re going through with this, then.” Travis swore beside her and went out his side, then motioned her to come out his side. He had to lean down and help her climb to her feet.
She clung to his hand, shaking, longing to lean into the woolen wall of his chest. Longing to beg, “Don’t leave me here.” She was scared all the time, not that she had the dim sense to show it. It might be a different neighborhood, but the apprehension was the same as she’d always felt in her childhood. Weakness would be pounced upon. She never showed it if she could help it.
She had never been this weak, though. It took a superhuman effort to release him from that tenuous connection of grasping his hand—not just physically, but because she felt so lonely. So adrift.
Why was it so freaking cold out?
Shivering, she fumbled her key from her purse and moved to the door of her building. It wasn’t locked. Never was. The entryway smelled like sauerkraut soup, which was better than some of the other days.
Travis swore as he came in behind her and set a hand on her upper arm, steadying her as she climbed the stairs. His looming presence, intimidating as it was, also felt protective, which made her heart pang.
“Hey,” one of her neighbors said as she passed them on the stairs. She was off to work the streets in her thigh-high boots, miniskirt and fringed bra beneath a faux fur jacket. “No tricks in the rooms.”
“He’s just bringing me home.”
“Don’t get caught,” the woman advised with a shake of her head. “You’ll get kicked out.”
Imogen didn’t look at Travis, but his thunderous silence pulsed over her as she pushed her key into the lock and entered her “home.”
It was the room where she slept when she wasn’t working but so depressing she would rather work. It was as clean as she could make it, given the communal broom was more of a health hazard than a gritty floor. She didn’t have much for personal effects, having sold any clothes and accessories that would bring in a few dollars.
There was a small soup pot on the only chair. It usually held a bag of rice and a box of pasta, but she had dumbly left it in the shared kitchen overnight a few days ago. She was lucky to have recovered the dirty pot. Payday wasn’t until tomorrow, which was why she hadn’t eaten when she collapsed.
Sinking onto the creaky springs and thin mattress of her low, single bed, she exchanged the damp blanket she’d been clutching around her for the folded one, giving the dry one a weak shake. “Can you leave so they don’t think I’m entertaining? I really can’t handle being kicked out right now.”
“This is where you live.” His gaze hit her few other effects: a battered straw basket holding her shampoo, toothbrush and comb, for her trips to the shared bathroom; a towel on the hook behind the door; a windup alarm clock; and a drugstore freebie calendar where she wrote her hours. “The street would be an improvement.”
“I tried sleeping on the street. Turns out they call your ex-husband and he shows up to make you feel bad about yourself.”
His “Not funny” glare was interrupted by a sharp knock and an even sharper, “No drugs, no tricks! Out!”
“Would you go?” she pleaded.
Travis snapped open the door to scowl at her landlord.
“He’s not staying—” she tried to argue, but of course she was on the bed, which looked so very bad.
“We’re leaving,” Travis said, and snapped his fingers at her.
She flopped onto her side with her back to both of them.
“Imogen.”
Oh, she hated her name when it was pronounced like that, as if she was something to be cursed into the next dimension.
“Just go,” she begged.
“I’m taking this,” he said, forcing her to roll over and see he held her red purse.
“Don’t.” She weakly shook her head. “I can’t fight you right now. You know I can’t.” She was done in. Genuinely ready to break down and cry her eyes out.
“Then you should have stayed in hospital. I’ll take you back there now.”
She rolled her back to him again. “Take it, then. I don’t even care anymore.” She really didn’t. All she wanted was to close her eyes and forget she existed.
With a string of curses, he dragged the scratchy gray blanket from her and threw it off the foot of the bed. Then he gathered her up, arms so tense beneath the thick wool that her skin felt bruised where it came in contact with his flexed muscles. He was surprisingly gentle in his fury, though, despite cussing out the landlord so he could get by and carry her down the stairs.
“Travis, stop. I’ll lose all my things.”
“What things? What the hell is going on, Imogen?”
CHAPTER THREE (#ud67e9285-3386-5fe4-ad6c-dbfbe4b448e7)
IN THE FIVE minutes they’d been upstairs, a handful of jackals had begun circling to case the car. His chauffeur stood ready to open the back door and Travis shoved her into it, wondering why he’d got out at all.
To see how far she would carry her charade, of course, never dreaming she would take him into a dingy firetrap of a room that was where she actually slept.
He couldn’t even comprehend it.
Snapping a glare at her, he saw there was no fight left in her. Her mouth was pouted, her eyes glassy with exhaustion, her hands limp in her lap.
If she weighed a hundred pounds right now, he’d be stunned. It wasn’t healthy, even for a woman barely hitting five and a half feet tall.
“I can’t afford the hospital. Can you please just tell my landlord I’m sick, not stoned, and let me sleep?”
“No.” He slammed his door and jerked his head at his driver to pull into traffic, wanting away from here. As far and fast as possible. “Do you have gambling debts? What?”
“Oh, I backed the wrong horse. That’s for sure.” She rolled her head on the back of her seat to quirk her mouth in an approximation of a smile. “What’s that old song about not being able to buy love? Turns out it’s true.”
“Which means?”
She only sighed and closed her eyes, almost as if she was trying to press back tears. “Doesn’t matter,” she murmured.
“Explain this to me. You had a lover who stole all your money? Tell me, how does that feel?” He ignored the gas-lit inferno that burst into life inside him as he thought of her with other men, feigning great interest in her reply instead.
Her brow pleated and she turned her nose to the front, eyes staying closed. Her lashes might have been damp.
“You seem obsessed with my many lovers. Accuse me of anything, Travis, but not promiscuity. You, of all people, know I don’t give it up easily.”
That took him aback a little. He didn’t understand why. They were divorced. It shouldn’t matter to him how many lovers she’d had, so why was he needling her about it? He presumed she’d taken some. With her libido?
Sexual memory seared through his blood, lifting the hairs on his body and sending a spike of desire into his loins.
He ignored how thinking of other men enjoying her passionate response put a sick knot in his gut. He had long ago decided he was remembering it wrong, anyway. He’d been high on personal achievements when they’d met, which had lent optimism and ecstasy to their physical encounters. Whatever had been roused in him hadn’t been real or wholly connected to her. It certainly hadn’t been worth all she’d cost him.
As for what she’d felt?
“Right,” he recalled scathingly. “You want a ring and a generous prenup before you sleep with a man. You haven’t found another taker for that? Of course, you only have one virginity to barter, and sex without that sweetener?” He hitched a shoulder, dismissing what had felt at the time like an ever-increasing climb of pleasure as she grew more confident with him between the sheets.
His ego needed her to believe his interest had already been waning, though. He still felt embarrassed for going blind with impulsive urgency in the first place, unable to let her get away. He had married her in a rush, on the sly, because he’d known deep down that they wouldn’t last. A fire that burned that high, that fast, guttered just as quickly, which was exactly what had happened. A blur of obsessive sex had quickly dissolved into her walking away with her prenuptial settlement and a demand for a divorce.
“Wow,” she said, voice husky. “That’s hitting below the belt, isn’t it? You’re welcome, then, for releasing you to enjoy much better sex than I was able to provide.”
He wasn’t sure how her remark caused his own to bounce back and sting him so deeply. Maybe it was the fact that, try as he might to claim disinterest, he’d never found another woman who’d inspired such a breadth of sexual hunger in him.
That was a good thing, he regularly told himself. Maybe he hadn’t erased her from his memory, but he didn’t want or need the sort of insanity she had provoked, either.
No, he had spent the last years very comfortably dating women who didn’t inspire much feeling at all, only returning to the land of turmoil when his PA had interrupted his meeting yesterday morning.
Had it only been thirty-six hours? Such was Imogen. She was a hydrogen bomb that cratered a life in seconds, completely reshaping everything around her without a moment’s regard.
He remembered her prescription and drew the paper from her purse, handing it to his driver, instructing him to drop them in the front of his building before filling it.
When they arrived at his Chelsea building, however, the doorman was busy corralling paparazzi away from the entrance. It was a common sight when one of his celebrity neighbors had just arrived home. The sidewalks were teeming with Christmas shoppers, too. Even some carolers dressed in olden days’ garb.
“Take us to the underground,” Travis instructed, beginning to feel weary himself. He had only been home for a few hours of sleep last night, arriving late and leaving early, wanting to get back to the hospital. The urgency to do so had been...disturbing. Now he was compelled to get Imogen into his apartment so he could finally relax, which was an equally unsettling impulse.
“You don’t want to be photographed with an escapee from the psych ward? Weird,” she murmured. “You realize I don’t just look like a homeless person? I am one. My landlord will have my stuff on the stoop and my room let to someone else by now. Thanks for that, by the way.”
“Still have some spit and vinegar, though.”
“Literally, all I have left. Why did you bring me here? Because I’m quite sure you’re not inviting me to live with you and I’m quite sure I won’t take you up on it if you do.”
He didn’t know what he was doing, but he hadn’t been able to leave her in that roach-infested garbage pail of a building. He imagined she would only discharge herself if he took her back to the hospital. Bringing her to his penthouse was his only choice.
“You’re going to have that nap you’re so determined to take. I’ll use the silence to figure out what to do with you when you wake up.”
* * *
Imogen wanted to sneer at him, but it took everything in her to open her door when the car stopped and it wasn’t even her own steam that did it. The driver got out and opened it for her. He helped her out and Travis came around to slide his arm across her back, helping her into the elevator where he used his fingerprint to override a security panel and take them to the top floor.
He kept his arm around her and she couldn’t help but lean into him. It felt really, really nice. For a split second, she experienced a spark of hope. Maybe he didn’t hate her. Maybe this was a chance to make amends. She couldn’t change the past, but the future was a blank whiteboard.
Then she caught sight of their reflection and her glimmer of optimism died. At one time, she had almost been his equal, when her family had had money and she had been a product—not a shining example, but at least a product—of an upper-crust upbringing.
Since then, however, he had skyrocketed from wealthy architect who dabbled in real estate to international corporate mogul, taking on prestigious projects around the globe. An honest-to-God tycoon who lived in the city’s best building on its top floor. He was way out of reach for the black-sheep daughter of a paper publisher and far, far beyond taking up with a match girl—which she could aspire to be as soon as she stole some matches.
She had thought dying in the street was rock bottom. Then Travis seeing how broke she was and the way she had been living had felt like rock bottom. But this was rock bottom. Riding an elevator up to what might have been her life if she’d played her cards differently, while she faced how completely and irrevocably she had fallen down in his estimation, was beyond demoralizing. It was shattering.
Until this moment, her life had been a mess, but her heart had held some resilience. She had possessed some spirit. Some hope that one day she would be able to face him and make amends. That belief had got her out of bed and off to her many awful, minimum-wage jobs. But that was gone now.
The doors of the elevator opened to a foyer of marble and mahogany. Floating stairs rose on the right with a bench tucked beneath. A side table stood on the other side. An impressionist painting the size of Central Park hung above it.
From inside the lounge, out of sight but not out of earshot, Imogen heard an excited voice cry, “Papa!”
As tiny footsteps hurried toward them, Imogen began to disintegrate, each particle of her breaking away and sizzling agonizingly into utter despair.
She was such a fool. This was rock bottom.
* * *
Travis bit back a curse as Imogen pulled away from him, swinging a look on him so betrayed and shattered, it cut like a scalpel directly into his heart.
He had to look away to his niece, Antonietta, as she appeared from the lounge. She came up short at the sight of them, recovered in the next second and continued her pell-mell run at him, arms up and wearing a wide smile.
“Zio!”
He picked up the three-year-old sprite.
She threw her arms around his neck and made a production of kissing his cheek with a loud, “Mmmwah!”
Gwyn, his stepsister, appeared with a sleeping Enrico drooped on her shoulder. She faltered as she took in that Travis had a woman with him, one who didn’t exactly look like his usual type. She wasn’t the judgmental sort, though. She quickly recovered with a welcoming smile. “Hi.”
“I completely forgot what day it was,” Travis told her.
“No problem. I’m Gwyn.” She came forward with her free hand extended.
Imogen’s gaze sharpened with recognition, but if she said one wrong word to Gwyn...
“You’re Travis’s sister.” Imogen unfolded one arm to shake hands. “Nice to meet you. I’m Imogen.”
“Good timing. I’ve just made coffee,” Gwyn said toward Travis. “Let me put Enrico down. I’ll be right back.”
* * *
Imogen’s brain was reengaging from its tailspin, where she had briefly been convinced Travis was married with children. She occasionally stalked him online, as one did with an ex. He dated a lot but hadn’t seemed serious about anyone, so, for a moment, she had been struck nearly dead with shock. By a loss so acute, she hadn’t been able to withstand it.
Shut up, misguided girlish fantasies.
She and Travis were so over.
As for his sister, when Gwyn had had a spot of trouble a few years ago with an international bank scandal and a global leak of nude photos, Imogen had followed it for different reasons than the rest of the world’s lurid curiosity. While she and Travis had been married, he hadn’t even mentioned he had a stepsister. It had been a shock to see his name associated with the headlines not long after their split. Imogen had combed every story she could find then, trying to figure out why he’d been so secretive about his family.
At the same time, she had drawn a line in the sand for herself. She hadn’t told her father that she had an in with that particular story. She and Travis had been firmly on the outs by then, her father’s business failing miserably, but she refused to exploit him. Between her divorce settlement and her mother’s trust fund, Imogen had been sure they were only a few short months from having her father’s company back on its feet.
The core of her reluctance to use Travis, however, had stemmed from the deep agony of rejection Travis’s letting her go had rent through her. She hadn’t even told her father she’d been married, fearful of his reaction.
He would have approved of Travis, of course, but there was no way she’d wanted Travis to meet her father. Then, when her marriage fell apart...well, who needed that sort of scathing disappointment added to her pain? Her father’s derision would have expanded exponentially under the news she had failed to hold on to him. It was bad enough she had deluded herself into believing Travis had had real feelings for her.
The entire thing became so humiliating she had preferred to be as secretive about their marriage as Travis had been.
He led the way into the lounge. It was tastefully decorated for the season with festive garlands around the windows, fairy lights winking in the potted shrubs from the terrace and a tree that looked and smelled real. The presents beneath were professionally wrapped but with cartoonish paper that would appeal to children.
“Mama said I have to ask you if those are for me,” the little girl said, one arm still firmly around Travis’s neck as she fixed her gaze on the gifts.
“And Enrico, yes.”
“Can I open them? Per favore,Zio?” she asked very sweetly.
“Not yet.”
She gave a little pout of disappointment.
Italian? Imogen sank down on the sofa so she wouldn’t fall down.
“You never mentioned your sister,” she commented. All he’d told her was that he was close with his father, who lived in Charleston, and didn’t see much of his mother, but she also lived in that city.
“Gwyn’s mother married my father while I was at university, but passed away soon after. Gwyn and I didn’t grow up together.”
They seemed close now, if he was giving the woman access to his apartment when he wasn’t even here. He’d been cautious about letting his wife into his personal space, constantly picking up behind her and uptight that the few things she’d brought with her hadn’t fit with his existing decor. At the time, she had put it down to the shift from bachelorhood to living with someone, but she knew now it had been more than a territorial thing. He hadn’t wanted her there at all. It still made her throat raw to think of it.
“This is Antonietta.” He was still holding her. “We call her Toni.”
The little girl cupped her hand near his ear and whispered something.
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Toni Baloney.”
Toni giggled and hunched her shoulders up to her ears. “What’s your name?”
“Imogen. My sister used to call me Imogen the Imagination Magician.”
Toni widened her eyes in excited wonder. “I love that name.”
He didn’t just have family, but a fun and loving one. Huh. Why would he have felt a need to hide that from her?
“Come eat your apples and cheese, topolina,” Gwyn said as she returned, waving Toni toward the snack at the elegant glass-topped pedestal dining table.
Travis set the girl on her feet and she skipped across to climb up and kneel on a velvet-upholstered chair.
Imogen hadn’t been allowed at the grown-up table until she was twelve.
“The doorman let us up because you left notice that we would arrive today.” Gwyn came over with coffee, cream and sugar, then seated herself where she could watch Toni. “I thought that meant you remembered we were coming. I was going to text, but I got busy with the kids. If we’re imposing, I’ll ask Vito to move us to a hotel.”
“It’s one night. I forgot, that’s all.” Travis seemed to blame Imogen for his absentmindedness with the cool glance he flicked her way as he sat.
Imogen lifted her brows, wondering how he was going to explain her presence now that his worlds had collided.
He didn’t bother, only sat back with his black coffee. “Vito had meetings?”
After a beat of surprise, Gwyn nodded. She smiled at Imogen. “We just got in from Italy. My husband often has business in New York, so we make a stop here, adjust to the jet lag, let the kids leave fingerprints all over Zio’s furniture, then head to Charleston.”
“To see Travis’s father?”
“Henry, yes. And the bank has offices there. Vito checks in and works on and off while we visit Nonno. For the last few years, Henry has been coming to us for the holidays, but this year is his seventieth birthday. It’s right before Christmas and he’s having a party, so we came to him.”
“Sounds fun.” Imogen deliberately offered nothing about herself.
“It should be.”
Silence reigned as they all blew across coffee that was too hot to drink.
The corners of Gwyn’s mouth wore the tiniest curl. She was clearly dying to pry, but was far too polite to ask. Or knew Travis would talk when he was ready and not before. Imogen had come up against that perversely closed-off side of him herself. In fact, the things Gwyn had just told her were probably the most she’d ever learned about his personal life.
“Toni, do you see an elephant in this room?” Imogen turned her head to ask.
Gwyn snorted and almost spilled her coffee.
Toni sat up on her knees and swung her head this way and that. “No.”
“Mmm... My mistake. I thought there was one.”
Travis sent her a warning look.
“We’ve taken up both guest rooms, but the kids can come into our room if need be,” Gwyn said mildly.
“Is there an aquarium?” Imogen asked Toni. “Because I feel like someone is fishing.”
Gwyn had to scratch her nose to hide the laugh she suppressed.
Toni cocked her head, sensing opportunity. “We can pretend to fish in the pool.”
“It’s too cold, topolina,” Gwyn said. “When Papa gets back and Enrico is awake, we could maybe go to the indoor one downstairs. You and I are going to have a little sleep first, though. Soon as you finish your snack.”
“And Imogen?”
Imogen plucked at the pajamas she was wearing, certain that was what had prompted Toni’s question. “I’m going to nap, too, but by myself.”
Travis looked at Gwyn. “Would you have something that Imogen could wear when she wakes?”
“Of course. I’ll find something right now.”
* * *
Gwyn took Toni upstairs and Travis finished his coffee, watching Imogen while wishing for something stronger in his cup. He knew he should check his phone. He’d been ignoring it since walking out of that meeting yesterday. Finding Gwyn here reminded him he had a life beyond Imogen. A trip to Charleston in a few days for his father’s birthday and the family Christmas celebrations.
He couldn’t think of anything, however, except the woman who had had a way of consuming his thoughts from the moment he’d met her. She had walked into his brand-new offices here in New York four years ago, as he’d been expanding beyond Charleston, starting some of his most prestigious architectural projects to date.
She’d introduced herself as a writer for one of the cornerstone publications in New York and proceeded to interview him. Her auburn hair had rippled in satin waves as she’d canted her head at him, listening in a way that had made him feel ten feet tall.
“Let’s talk more over dinner,” he had suggested after an hour of growing ever more fascinated by her engaging curiosity and earnest little frowns. Her legs were lithe stems beneath a black miniskirt, propping up a notebook where her handwriting looped in big swirls and t’s that she crossed with a sweep of her slender wrist. Her breasts had looked to be the exact fit for his palms. Everything about her had looked like a perfect fit. She had been, not that he had had confirmation that first night. Dinner had turned into an invitation back to his old apartment, which was when she had confessed to being a virgin.
“At twenty?” he’d chided with skepticism. “How is that possible?”
“Probably because I don’t know what I’m missing,” she had shot back, laughing at herself yet surprising him into laughing, as well.
That quick wit, that unvarnished honesty, had convinced him she was exactly what she appeared—a journalism student from a good family with a bright mind and a cheeky wit that would keep him on his toes. There was absolutely nothing to dislike in that package.
The packaging had been the lie, of course. Mislabeled. Ingredients not as advertised. Definitely looking shopworn these days.
Finishing her coffee, she set down her cup, bringing him back to the present.
“You don’t want me here. I’ll go.” She looked around, frowning. She was probably looking for her purse, which was in the pocket of his overcoat. He’d hung it in the closet at the door. It could stay there for now.
“Where to?” he prompted. Goaded. He was fed up with her thinking she had options when clearly neither of them did.
She swallowed. “I’ll talk to my landlord—”
“No,” he cut in.
She turned a look on him that sparked with temper. “What do you want from me, Travis?”
“Let’s start with an explanation. Where did all my money go?” He waved at the fact her worldly possessions consisted of pajamas she hadn’t been able to pay for out of her own pocket. “Where did yours go?” She hadn’t been rich, but she hadn’t been destitute.
She blew out a breath and sagged into the sofa, pulling a tasseled cushion into her middle.
He braced, waiting to see if she would tell the truth or lie yet again. Wondering if he would be able to tell the difference.
“I was trying to save Dad’s business.”
“Publishing,” he recalled.
“Newspapers and magazines.” She gave him a pained smile. “Print media.”
He recalled what she’d said in the car. “‘The wrong horse.’”
“Such a dead one, yet I beat it like you can’t even imagine. Your money, my trust fund. Dad sold the house and liquidated anything that wasn’t already in the business. We threw every penny we had at it. Then he went into care, which was another bunch of bills. My name wound up on everything. I couldn’t declare bankruptcy while he was alive. It was too humiliating for him. We were pretending it was all systems go while I sold furniture and clothes and Mom’s jewelry to make ends meet. His cremation was the final straw. I was behind on rent and got evicted. I wasn’t really keeping up on friendships by then and owed money to the few friends I had left. I wanted to start over on my own terms, so I found something I could afford and that’s what I’m doing.”
“That roach-infested brothel is your idea of a fresh start? Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Oh, that’s funny,” she said with an askance look. “What would you have said?”
Everything he was saying now, but he wouldn’t have let her get to where she was passing out on the street from neglecting her health.
“You married me to get your hands on your trust fund. Didn’t you?” She had never admitted it, but he was convinced of it.
She hesitated very briefly before nodding, eyes downcast. Guilt? Or hiding something?
“I wanted access to it so I could help Dad.” She had the humility to shake her head and quirk her mouth in self-contempt. “Not exactly an economist over here. I knew better. Digital publishing was all I learned at school, which he thought was useless.” She shrugged. “I tried to convince him to start doing things online, but old dogs...” She smiled without humor. “It would have been too little, too late, even if he’d bought in.”
“So, you’re broke.”
“I’m in a hole so deep all I see is stars.”
“You’re telling me the truth? Because if it’s addiction or something, tell me. I’ll get you help.”
“I wish it was. There would be pain relief, at least. Escape.” Her smile was a humorless flat line.
He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, frustrated by what sounded like brutal honesty. Nevertheless, he muttered, “God, I wish I could trust you.”
“What does it matter if you do or don’t? I mean, thanks for the hospital, I guess. I’ll try to pay you back someday, when I can afford a lottery ticket and happen to win the jackpot, but—” she flicked a helpless hand in the air “—our lives won’t intersect after today, so...”
* * *
Her heart lurched as she said those words, trying to be laissez-faire about it.
He narrowed his eyes. “That would be nice if it were true, but I’ve just taken responsibility for your hospital bills. For you. What am I going to do? Turn you out on the street? In the middle of winter? I happen to possess a conscience.”
“Meaning I don’t?”
“It was pretty damned calculating, what you did.”
“You’re the one who set the terms of the prenup,” she reminded him. “That was all you. All I did was sign it.”
“And took the money after three weeks of marriage.”
“Oh, I should have given you my virginity for the bragging rights of saying I was once Travis Sanders’s lay of the day?” She blinked her lashes at him, pretending her shields were firmly in place when she was silently begging him to contradict her. To say she had meant more to him than that.
She had been willing to give it up without a ring in the heat of passion, if he would only remember. He was the one who had proposed and led her to believe he cared.
A muscle pulsed in his jaw. “I’m surprised you haven’t sold our story, if you needed money so badly.”
She pressed her lips together, but he was quick enough to read her expression.
“Considered it, did you? I cannot believe I thought we had a shot,” he muttered.
“Oh, did you?” She leaped on that. “Did you really? How about you step off your high horse a minute and be honest about your own motives. Why did you marry me?”
“You know why. You refused to sleep with me until I put a ring on it.”
“And you wanted in my pants so bad, you wanted bragging rights to my virginity so bad, you made our quickie marriage happen.” They’d known each other a week. “Then what? Did you take me home to meet this wonderful family of yours, all flushed with pride in your darling bride? You didn’t even tell me you had a sister.” She thumbed toward the stairs. “She hasn’t got a clue who I am. Does your dad?”
His stony expression told her that was a hard no.
“At no point did you think we had a shot.” The words were coming out thick and scathing, but they tore up her insides, sharp as barbed wire, seeming to affect her far more than him. “You were mortified that you’d succumbed to marriage. Every time I said, ‘Let’s go out,’ you said, ‘Let’s stay in.’ The one time we ran into someone you knew, you didn’t even introduce me. You didn’t just skip the part that I was your wife. You didn’t acknowledge me to them at all.”
His cheek ticked and he looked away, not offering an explanation, which scored another fresh line down her heart.
“You wouldn’t let me change my status online and said it was because you wanted me to yourself. Then you went to work every day, leaving me alone in that big apartment where I wasn’t allowed to touch anything.”
“You claimed to be writing for your father, if I recall. Why did I never see any of those articles?” So scathing.
Her face stung, but she wasn’t about to get into her father’s lack of love for her. One spurn was all she could relive at a time, thanks.
“You were planning our divorce before you said, ‘I do.’ That’s why you drew up the prenup. All you cared about was keeping the damage to your reputation at a minimum. You invested nothing in our relationship except what I took when I left, certainly not your heart. Our marriage was as much a transaction on your side as mine. I bruised your ego by walking out before you told me to leave, not your feelings. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Please. She silently begged him to give her a rosier view of their flash-in-the-pan romance. Her whole body tingled, ions reaching out for a positive against this negative charge consuming her.
“Fine,” he bit out. “You’re right. I knew it was a mistake even as I was saying the words.”
His words skewered into her. She swallowed, wishing she had died in the gutter, rather than survive to face this.
“You’re welcome for remaining your dirty little secret, then,” she snapped. “For what it’s worth, you’re one of thousands of mistakes I’ve made. Not unique or special at all.”
“You don’t know when to quit, do you?” he said in a dangerous voice. “Aside from the day you walked out, of course.”
“Oh, you started that. You know you did.”
“A husband is allowed to ask his wife why he needs to top up her credit card before it’s a month old,” he said through his teeth.
“Your exact words were, ‘I don’t care where it went.’ You didn’t want to know about my life any more than you wanted to share details about yours. I quit kidding myself at that point. It wasn’t a marriage if you were suffering buyer’s remorse. I did you a favor by walking out.”
“That’s one way to frame it.”
“Yeah, well, I keep trying to do you the favor of walking away again, but you keep forcing me to sit my butt back down. Why is that?”
“Because you owe me, Imogen.” He leaned forward, hand gripping the arm of his chair as though trying to keep himself in it.
“I owe a lot of people. Get in line.”
The sound of the elevator had them both holding their stare but clamming up while the animosity cracked and bounced between them.
A superbly handsome man appeared in a bespoke suit. Little sparkles came off him where snowflakes had melted across his shoulders and in his dark hair. He was clean-shaven, calm and confident, not taken aback in the least by the sight of an orphan in hospital pajamas huddling on Travis’s designer sofa.
“You must be Imogen,” he said with a heart-melting Italian accent, coming forward to take her hand in a gentlemanly shake. “No, don’t get up. Vittorio Donatelli. Vito, per favore.”
“Gwyn texted you?” Travis surmised.
“And the photographers downstairs inform me that Imogen is your wife. Congratulazioni,” he said to Travis with a blithe smile. “They asked for a comment. I told them I’m very happy for you, of course.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
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Dani Collins
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: It′s a convenient Christmas arrangement…Until he wants her for ever!After their secret marriage ends in heartbreak, billionaire Travis Sanders never wants to see Imogen again. Yet when Imogen faints in the cold New York snow Travis is called to her very public rescue! To avoid a media scandal they must agree to a temporary reconciliation—at least until Christmas. But with their intense heat still burning Travis is tempted to reclaim his wife—for good!