by Dani Collins
“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 yo
ur 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.”
“Are you kidding?” Travis closed his eyes and Imogen was pretty sure steam came out his ears.
“I didn’t say a word,” she swore.
“You didn’t have to, did you?”
“My passport lapsed! My student card was long gone. Sometimes you need more than one piece of ID. Why would anyone give a care who I was married to? I’m nobody and you’re just one more businessman in a city of—” She cut herself off as she saw a look pass between the men.
Gwyn, she remembered. Travis’s sister was notorious clickbait.
“It’s not her fault,” Travis said to Vito.
“I will assure her of that, but you know what she’s like.” Vito’s smile was pained as he rubbed the back of his neck and excused himself to go upstairs.
“For what it’s worth, that’s one of the reasons I never told a soul you and I were married,” Imogen said. “Once I saw what the online trolls were doing to her, I not only didn’t want to be part of it, but I had enough people willing to pile on me. It would have only made things worse for her to be associated in this direction.”
He stared at her. “You really want me to believe you were thinking of her?”
And him, but what was the use in trying to convince him? “You either believe me or you don’t, Travis. I can’t make you do anything.”
It hurt to acknowledge his mistrust. All of this was even more excruciating than being one more anonymous hard-luck story in a building full of society’s rejects.
“It’s actually your fault that our marriage has been exposed, you know,” she pointed out. “Some orderly probably saw you acting like a big shot, transferring your wife to Celebrity Central. You in your tailored suit, flashing your gold-plated phone. You should have left me at the first hospital and none of this would be happening.”
He picked up his phone and said, “It’s last year’s model. Off the shelf.”
“Whatever. You made me look important. I wasn’t trying to be.”
“Let’s skip the blame shifting and get to mitigating the damage. You really owe me now.” He tapped and rolled the phone along its edge on the arm of his chair, thoughts hidden behind an expression gone granite hard. “This is going to be all over the gossip sites. Maybe the financial pages and television news outlets. I imagine they’ll dig up the date of our marriage and the divorce settlement.”
As much as she had rationalized taking that settlement, she had always felt ashamed of herself for demanding it.
He had been contemptuous in fulfilling it, making clear that whatever physical infatuation he’d felt toward her had firmly run its course. She repulsed him on every level.
She had dreamed ever since of paying him back, just to soften his harsh opinion of her, but she knew from her childhood what a lost cause that sort of aspiration was.
“It won’t be long before my father is calling me, asking whether this report of my marriage is true.”
“What do you want me to do?” She held up her powerless hands.
“I’ll tell you what I want you to do. Don’t humiliate me again.”
Was that what she had done? Because when she had been standing there, wanting to make explanations about her father’s business and how painful her relationship was with him, she’d felt pretty damned humiliated to realize Travis didn’t care one iota that she had reasons and responsibilities and that she suffered. He had decided she was a faithless spendthrift well before she’d returned from her father’s office that day.
“This is what you’re going to do,” he said in a voice so hard it couldn’t be scratched. “You’re going to say our marriage was youthful impulse and we parted ways when we realized our mistake. After your father passed, you began doing charity work, which is how you happened to be on skid row when you needed medical attention. I’ll make suitable donations to back that up. Then we’re going to show the world that we might have parted over artistic differences, but I had the taste and sense to marry very well. You’re going to stay with me, pretend we’re reconciling and act like the kind of wife you should have been.”
Bad girl. I didn’t say you could come out of your room. Get back up there.
She swallowed back the bitter pill in the back of her throat. “Is that what I’m going to do?”
“Unless you’re ready to start making a living the way your neighbor appeared to earn hers, you are going to do exactly what I tell you to do.”
“You don’t see the irony of introducing me to your friends and family now, when I’m not actually married to you, when you were ashamed to call me your wife before?”
“It galls me,” he assured her, leaning back and catching at his pant leg as he crossed one over the other, flinty expression belying his relaxed pose. “But the cat is out of the bag. We’re going to groom it and put a pretty collar on it and keep it from scratching up the furniture.”
“And somehow this pays off my debt to you.”
“It keeps it from getting worse.”
Oh, she doubted that.
The walls were closing in another inch. They’d been compressing on her for months. Years, even. No options. It was a trapped, helpless feeling and she could only sit there with her hands knotted into fists and breathe.
“You don’t have anywhere to go,” he pointed out, as if she wasn’t sickening
ly aware. “How do I look if I put you on the street? No, we’re rediscovering each other. At Christmas. It’s very romantic,” he said with thick sarcasm. “The press will be very positive.”
He said the last in a way that was more of a threat.
Mind yourself, Imogen, or you’ll stay in your room.
“How long will this last?”
“Until I feel the attention has died down enough we can part without it being noteworthy.”
“But I’ll still owe you for the hospital bills.” She flicked nonexistent lint from her pajama pants. “Too bad you won’t have sex with me. Otherwise, I could pay that down exactly the way my neighbor does.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t sleep with you. I said you need to work harder to make it interesting.”
For a moment, all she heard was a rush in her ears. Her face grew hot. She wanted to believe it was anger, but it was embarrassment. Acute insecurity. No matter what she did or how hard she tried, she was never enough. It was a hot coal of humiliation that burned a hole in her belly every single day.
“Well.” She clung fiercely to what shredded dignity she had left, but she was dying inside. “I’ve only had one lover and he taught me all I know, so blame yourself. But after that remark, I’d rather give it away to strangers on the street than sleep with you again.” She stood.
He shot to his feet, arm jerking as though he would stop her in her tracks.
She wasn’t walking out, though. As he had pointed out so ruthlessly, she had nowhere to go.
She tucked her elbows into her sides, avoiding his touch. “Powder room?”
He gave a brief nod toward the far end of the kitchen.