Claiming His Christmas Wife

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

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.