Claiming His Christmas Wife

by Dani Collins

  “Is that true?” Travis’s fists were so tight she could see the bulge of veins in his forearms all the way from over here.

  “That was his reaction,” she said, voice scraped raw by the past. “I couldn’t even process that I had lost my mother and sister, but all he said was ‘Go to your room.’ Then he locked himself in his study until the funeral.”

  She had needed Juliana so badly then, but all she’d had was one hug from a housekeeper who had helped her find something to wear.

  “I was eleven, just young enough to believe if I tried hard enough, he would change and learn to care about me, since I was all he had left. I worked really hard at school, hung around with all the spoiled preppy kids who came from families he admired. I didn’t find one person I had a single thing in common with, but I tried. I took a degree in journalism, even though I was more of a fiction person. All the profs said my work was too purple. I wrote for Dad’s dying rags, even though he only assigned me fluff pieces and only published my work if he absolutely had to. You thought I interviewed you as bait, trying to con you into our marriage, but I saw what an up-and-comer you were. My article was actually really good, but he cut it at the last minute. I tried to sell it to his competitor for you, because it was good press. We had a huge fight about it. We fought a lot and I always stormed out, saying awful things, but I always crawled back. They say the definition of crazy is to keep doing the same thing expecting a different result. I’m certifiable.”

  She ate her crusts out of habit. She cut them off because she didn’t like them, but knew better than to waste food, so she always got rid of them first.

  “I was feeling pretty full of myself when we married. I almost quit and walked out of his house for good. I didn’t need him if I had you, right? Then I realized you didn’t actually care for me, that you only married me for my virginity. Seemed better to go back to the devil I knew, then. At least I had something he wanted. Maybe I could save his company and finally earn his respect.”

  She didn’t know if he was even breathing. He stood so still, he could have been carved from marble. It made it easier to talk around the drill bit hollowing out her chest, leaving curled shards of her soul on the floor. She was confessing her sins to a statue, not a real person. It was a relief to finally get it all out.

  “In the end, he hated me even more than you do, because I saw him at his weakest. I spent a solid year looking after him until I just couldn’t do it anymore. Physically. He was too heavy for me to get into the bath. I had to put him into care. He hated me for that, too. I shouldn’t have been born, I wasn’t his favorite, I didn’t save his business and I abandoned him to strangers—even though I spent hours every day with him at the home, fetching anything his nonexistent heart desired. I don’t know why he was such a twisted, awful person. I’m sorry I was born to him, too. And embarrassed. That’s why I never told you. I mean, who wants to admit her own father didn’t love her?”

  She picked up the sandwich, knowing she needed to eat it but feeling quite sick now, not sure she could swallow a single bite.

  “Whenever I go to bed hungry and feeling sorry for myself, I dream I’m locked in my bedroom again. If she can, Juliana sneaks in to make me feel better. You’re the only person it’s ever bothered because you’re the only person I’ve ever slept next to. But I don’t expect you to believe any of this. I’m a bad apple who never should have been born.”

  She bit into her sandwich and forced her jaw to chew.

  * * *

  The crying in her sleep was real. That much he knew. She sounded like a child when she was in the throes of her dream and came awake so shaken and confused, there was no way she was faking it.

  He remembered the first time her tears had woken him, just a few days after he’d moved her into his old apartment. They’d had a fight earlier that evening about whether to tell anyone they were married. Rather than take her out for dinner, they’d had makeup sex until they fell asleep, utterly exhausted. He had thought she was crying about their fight when he woke to hear her sobbing. It had been eerie to realize she was asleep. He’d felt guilty, then worse, when touching her had scared the hell out of her.

  “It was just a bad dream,” she had dismissed after his soothing turned to lovemaking and her soft weight lay pliant against him. Embarrassed, she had risen to make bacon and eggs in the middle of the night.

  “You should have told me after the first time,” he said now, trying to fit this new information into his vision of her as a lying schemer. His father had tortured Travis in his own way, but it had been by pushing him into a state of passive helplessness. His father had never, ever, deliberately hurt him. Neither of them were the type to be effusive, but he didn’t question his father’s love or pride in him.

  “Why?” she asked between bites. “What would telling you have changed?”

  He didn’t know. Would he have tried to keep her away from the man? He had known things weren’t all roses there. The other time she’d had the dream had been a couple of weeks later, mere days before she’d walked out for good. She’d seen her father and had arrived home late, clearly upset.

  He had assumed she didn’t want to talk. He hadn’t asked why she was so withdrawn.

  You didn’t want to know about my life any more than you wanted to share details about yours.

  He hadn’t wanted to open up, so he hadn’t asked her to. He had preferred to kiss her out of her mood, keeping their sharing to the physical pleasure they offered each other. The times when he had sensed she was looking for more from him, some sort of emotional intimacy, he had withdrawn.

  Why? Because his mother had cheated on his father and left. Their divorce had been brutal, the fallout nasty, but he would deny carrying a lifetime of scars. Perhaps he was wary of becoming as besotted with a woman as his dad had been, having seen the damage it could do. Mostly he didn’t like to talk about it because it was water under the bridge. And none of what he’d experienced was so bad he had nightmares about it.

  He had forgotten all about her nightmares. If he had known that hunger brought them on, he would have woken her to come down for dinner earlier. When he’d seen her asleep in his bed, however, something in him had eased. He’d told himself it was the relief from conflict. He wouldn’t have to manage her interactions with his family. Who knew what she would say next? What damage she would cause?

  I’m a bad apple who never should have been born.

  He had made himself catch up on work after his houseguests went to bed, but he hadn’t been tired enough to fall asleep once he’d crawled into bed beside her. He had been lying there, fighting memories of the other times they’d shared a bed, when he’d heard her breathing change.

  Moments later, she had rolled onto her stomach and sobbed into her pillow as though she couldn’t take whatever was being done to her. It was horrible. Of course he’d woken her to bring her out of it.

  She’d known it was him right away, snuggling into place against him as if no time had lapsed at all, arousing him to the breaking point between one heartbeat and the next, with only the graze of her soft skin against his own. Her hand had moved with delicious familiarity and he’d nearly slipped into the erotic world where only the two of them existed.

  He couldn’t let her manipulate him like that, though. He had put a stop to her seeking touch and she’d reacted with such a jolt, it had only hit him as she pulled away that she’d still been half-asleep.

  The fact her reaction hadn’t been a deliberate act of manipulation, but her subconscious still reacting to him, was strangely gratifying. There was a part of him that had wondered if all her responses back then had been manufactured to wring a dollar value out of him, but the sensuality that had so ensnared him had, at least, been real.

  “See?” she murmured, brushing her fingers over her plate. “Telling you has just made both of us uncomfortable and it changes nothing.” Her cheeks looke
d hollow, her pleated brow fraught with embarrassment and despair. She rinsed the plate and put it into the dishwasher. “It shouldn’t happen again, but I’ll sleep down here, just in case.”

  “Go back to bed.”

  She gripped her elbows. Her narrow shoulders hunched up. “I don’t want to sleep with you.”

  No? He would dearly love to test that, but only said, “I’ll stay down here.”

  “I don’t want to put you out.”

  He snorted.

  The flash of injury in her expression was a bolt of lightning, jagged and searing, lasting only milliseconds but smacking him in the chest, leaving him breathless and seeing nothing while she walked away without even wishing him a good night.

  It wasn’t.

  * * *

  After tossing and turning, Imogen had slept late, waking to hear Travis in the shower. She went downstairs to find his sister and her family gone.

  “Toni took her gifts?” she guessed when he came downstairs.

  “Saved me packing them, so I said yes to her taking them.”

  That was when she learned they were going south to his father’s birthday and having Christmas with the bunch of them.

  “You can’t ask me to participate in that. I can’t afford gifts.” She hadn’t celebrated since her mother and sister had been alive.

  “It’s very low-key,” he said dismissively. “Until the kids came along, we didn’t do gifts at all. We still don’t exchange between adults. Gwyn bakes cookies and makes a nice dinner.”

  It would still be awkward and painful, making her feel like an outsider yet again.

  She had silently prayed the doctor would caution her against flying, getting her out of it, but an hour later the jerk had peered in her ear and pronounced, “Settling down nicely.” He had approved her for travel provided she kept up with her antibiotics.

  Since then, Travis had been expediently making decisions on her behalf, seeming to grow more impatient with her by the minute. “Stop asking how much everything costs,” he muttered as he herded her along Fifth Avenue. “You need clothes.”

  “Normal clothes. Not...”

  Not designer jeans at two grand a pair and cocktail dresses straight from the cover of Vogue. Imogen was currently changing out of a new dress to replace Gwyn’s. This one was also a cable-knit, but it clung to her flyweight frame. It was so cute it had her reliving her three-year sentence on the fashion desk.

  The cheeky lace-up sides on this forest green sheath add panache to a seasonal standard. Pair with a knee-high dress boot and an open-front trench for a day of shopping, then loosen the skirt laces for cocktails and clubbing.

  The snug knit and low neckline flatters the most modest curves. Ramp up the fun factor with a bright red scarf and a bold lip, or drop in some drama with patterned black tights and a boho bracelet.

  Now he was badgering her into ever-more-elegant eveningwear. And badgering the boutique’s owner while he was at it.

  “I don’t care if frosted colors are made of titanium and on sale for ninety-nine cents. They’re too ashen for her. Bring something vibrant. Jewel tones.” He had an artist’s eye in a businessman’s head. The foundation of his fortune was real estate, built on his father’s success in that arena, but Travis’s vocation was architecture. He had shot into the stratosphere based on his ability to bring contemporary form and function to classic building design. “Yes, more like that.”

  An assistant was allowed past his gatekeeper surliness and came into Imogen’s spacious changeroom with a sapphire-blue gown draped over her arms.

  “Sorry,” Imogen murmured on his behalf.

  The woman brushed it off with a warm smile. “A day of spoiling is always a treat, isn’t it?” She helped Imogen into the dress.

  Spoiling? Was that what this was? Imogen was already in French lace underwear the last attendant had forced on her at his command. This didn’t feel like indulgence. It felt like an assertion of his wealth and power over her, while putting further obligations upon her.

  “Shoes,” the young woman decided after zipping her. She hurried away.

  “Can’t you tell your father I have the plague and leave me here while you go to Charleston?” Imogen asked, poking her head out to where he lounged on a sofa, sipping champagne and scrolling through his phone. “You don’t want me to meet him,” she reminded him.

  “He wants to meet you.”

  “But I don’t know what you’re expecting of me. What are the rules?” What was the punishment if she broke them?

  “Rule one is to quit fighting me on every little thing.” He lifted his gaze. “Let me see.”

  “It’s too long. She’s bringing me shoes.”

  “Get out here.”

  In all her years of trailing behind her father to galas and award ceremonies, she had never once worn a gown, only cocktail length. Deep down, she was loving this. She felt like a princess with silk whispering against her legs and tickling the tops of her feet. The cut lifted her modest bust and the shade turned her eyes to the color of the Caribbean Sea.

  But she wasn’t wearing makeup. Her hair was in a ponytail and she was so, so sensitive to his criticism. He had made a face at Gwyn’s too-big dress, insisting they find something else immediately, as if he couldn’t stand to be seen with her looking less than 110 percent. He had then nodded curtly to accept the green knit, barely looked at the jeans and showed zero interest in her shiny new boots. He wasn’t enjoying this. It was something he had to do because she had ruined his life. Again.

  She devolved into that most primitive of female desires for approval by hoping she looked pretty enough to please him. She picked up the skirt and hesitantly walked out to present herself.

  He didn’t move except to scan his critical eye up and down her with slow, thorough study. Finally, he took a sip of his champagne and said, “That will do.” His gaze went back to his phone.

  Her heart sank through the floor. She shifted her weight, standing on that stupid, pulsing organ that wanted and wanted and wanted.

  The attendant hurried over with a pair of strappy black heels dangling from her fingers.

  “Don’t bother.” Imogen picked up her skirt and turned to go back into the changeroom, blinking the sting from her eyes.

  “Imogen.” Bad girl. “Try on the shoes.”

  “Why?” she tossed over her shoulder. “You’ve made your decision.”

  The distracted attention he’d been giving her focused in so tightly, she felt the heat of his gaze like a laser that burned patterns into her skin. Like an electric lasso that looped out and held her in place while jolting her with a thousand volts.

  “And now I’ve decided I want to see it with shoes.”

  The attendant heard the silky danger in his tone and crouched before Imogen. “We’ll see if it needs hemming.” She eased each of Imogen’s feet into the shoes.

  Imogen held Travis’s gaze the whole time, staring him down even though she had no power here. Even though she was scared spitless of his anger.

  Show no fear.

  The young woman stood back and said, “Oh, yes, that’s lovely. Don’t you think, sir?”

  Imogen waited, holding his gaze, waiting and waiting, while he said nothing.

  “Would it kill you to be nice for five minutes?” she blurted.

  His scathing gaze went down the gown to the French label shoes, coming back with a pithy disdain. He was being more than nice, his askance brow said, spending this kind of money on her.

  She tightened her hands into fists. “Just buy me a leash and parade me around naked, then, since all you really want is the ability to yank me to heel.”

  His expression didn’t change except for a bolt of something in his eyes at her temerity. He set aside his glass and stood, dropping his phone onto the cushion as he walked toward her, still holding her gaze.
He jerked his head to signal the attendant to make herself scarce.

  Imogen’s heart pounded, but she held her ground.

  “Now you’ve gone and made it look like we’re fighting.” He traced his fingertip up the throbbing artery in her throat, ending under her chin to tilt her gaze up to his.

  His expression was mild, his eyes glittering with fury.

  “And how things look is all you care about, isn’t it?” She kept her voice low. “Was I not pretty enough to be your wife? Is that why you were so ashamed of me? Is that why I have to wear all these fancy labels and be seen, not heard?”

  His touch shifted to hold her jaw in a gentle but implacable hand. “If I want to stop you talking, I know how to do it.”

  “Yes, you know all the best ways to hurt me and you can’t resist standing on each of those bruises, can you?”

  “Does it hurt, Imogen?” He lowered his head so his mouth hovered near her own. “Last night when you reached for me, were you thinking about how good I made you feel? Four years seems a long time to go without sex. I don’t believe you have.”

  The bastard. She ought to shove him away, but when she lifted her hands, it was only to splay them on his sides. She did think about the way he’d made her feel. Had every single day for the four years since she’d last touched him. Of the very few dates she’d been on, none had roused so much as a desire to kiss another man.

  “You’ve been throwing it around like hard candy at a parade, I suppose?”

  “Want some?” He slanted his head to take one microscopic nibble of her bottom lip.

  The tiny contact strummed through her in a tremor of acute need.

  This did hurt, but she was losing track of whether this was the pain of his derision or the pain of not having what she craved more than anything.