Claiming His Christmas Wife

by Dani Collins

  He might not survive the disaster in the distance, so he had forced the issue today, while he was still able to carry on. He wasn’t proud of it. Looking back, he saw he’d done the same thing the first time. His only regret was that he’d left Imogen feeling blamed back then. At least this time they both knew it was his fault.

  Which was no comfort at all.

  Rather than fly directly to his empty penthouse in New York, he stopped in Charleston to see his father. During Gwyn’s escapade, Henry had moved into a gated neighborhood for privacy. Attention had long died down, but his father enjoyed the social community he’d formed there.

  “How is it over when it only just started?” his father said after inquiring about Imogen. “I thought she was only going to Greece sporadically, not staying there.”

  Travis sighed, wishing his father would accept things at face value. This grotto behind his father’s house was usually one of the most relaxing places to sit and visit with him, but Travis rose to his feet, restless.

  “We knew very quickly the first time that we wouldn’t last. We couldn’t sustain it this time, either.” He pushed his hand into his pocket and found her rings. He was going to ruin them, rubbing them together the way he constantly did, but he pressed them onto his finger and thumb tips, working them against each other. It had become a habit.

  “I’ve been seeing your mother, you know.”

  “What?” Travis snapped his head around.

  His father shrugged sheepishly. “We had coffee a few days after my party. There were things we had never talked through before. I hadn’t given her a chance to tell me her side of it, too busy calling her names and impugning her. I worry I distorted your view of women with things I said back then.”

  “Dad—”

  “Do you know I was drinking before she cheated? I never wanted to tell you that, but I thought you might have guessed. No? It wasn’t nearly as bad as after, but I was feeling pressure from work. Untold pressure from those committees asking me to run in state elections. Maybe I wasn’t sleeping with other women, but I was spending more time lunching with a bottle and other people than with your mother. I wasn’t there for you the way I should have been, before or after.” He made a face.

  “I’m not here to play blame games, Dad. I’ve never felt that Mother really needed me, not the way you did. That’s the only reason I’m closer to you. We don’t need family therapy or anything.” He rubbed the back of his neck, thinking that felt like a lie. Maybe he had come here looking for commiseration of some sort. Women. Right?

  “Has Imogen cheated?”

  “Not even close,” he muttered, freshly ashamed that he’d questioned her about another man. She’d had every right to be angry about that. “We’re different people, that’s all.”

  “Good.”

  “How is that good? I want something I can count on, Dad. Someone who’s predictable, not...” Whimsical and kind and sensitive. Someone so sensual and engaging he forgot himself.

  “Then get a dog.”

  He shot his father a dirty look. “I don’t want to believe we have a future, start a family, then discover we’re not going to work. Better to nip that in the bud.”

  “If you actually aren’t compatible, then yes. But what kind of lifetime warranty do you expect, Travis? Do you know what Gwyn said the last time she was here? That she was glad her mom had those years with me. We had plans, you know. We were going to travel. I was counting on that. It didn’t work out, but I have no regrets. I didn’t divorce her because she got sick and canceled our future. You can’t count on anything, especially time.

  “If you don’t love Imogen, fine. Move on. But if you do love her, what the hell are you doing acting like she’ll still be there when you wake up and realize you want her? You’re wasting time you could be spending making my future grandchildren.”

  Travis returned to New York the next day. His father’s words were turning over in his mind, wearing holes in his skull. Now his empty penthouse was filled with her memory, making it a difficult place to be. He called a Realtor and made an appointment, then stood in the office he had rarely used. He had intended to tell Imogen she could use this room as a home office, to write the biography. He stared at where she had lounged that first day, when he had fantasized about making love to her again.

  If only he had got her pregnant that night on the yacht.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, wondering if that was what he was reduced to, needing the excuse of an unplanned pregnancy to try again with her. Really try. Oddly, he was convinced that he would somehow make that work. He was at his best when he was needed.

  He looked back on his father’s breakdown, a time when Travis had been frustrated and angry but had understood his role. The few times he’d helped his mother, it had been when her lover was away and the sink had backed up, or she needed furniture moved. Gwyn had thought Travis hated her until her life had burned down around her. He’d been furious that it took her so long to involve him, thinking she ought to have known he would come the minute she asked, but she’d been too proud to fall back on him.

  Was he waiting for Imogen to pass out in the street again so he could race in and save her? Had he felt threatened when she had ceased to lean on him? Had that been the real issue?

  She had told him she loved him, but he’d only seen that she was leaving him despite saying it. She had said that he was hurting her, which had been a blow, one that had made him think letting her go was a kindness.

  He hadn’t considered that her upbringing predisposed her to have a specific need for love. He’d made no effort to meet that need. He had covered her basic survival with food and shelter—exactly as her piece-of-dirt father had done.

  Travis didn’t want to love anyone, though. He never had. Love was obligation and loyalty at best. At worst, it was an emotional wringer when the people you loved were in pain. Romantic love was a glittering facet of passion, not something true and deep and sustainable.

  And yet, what he felt toward Imogen was all of those things. He knew that as clearly as he knew she had left him and it was nobody’s fault but his own.

  * * *

  When Imogen had been a child, inventing stories had been her salvation. Later, when grief had engulfed her, she had filled up notebooks with poetry and song lyrics. Essays and ad copy and current events had all played their part in keeping her sane while her heart throbbed and ached.

  Two weeks after her breakup with Travis, she had a new medium to help mend her broken heart, one she found infinitely fascinating because she identified with her subject. Cassandra O’Brien had been rejected by her family the moment her teenage aspirations turned to acting. She had had a rough life making ends meet, riding the feast or famine trials of acting, falling for men who didn’t love her the way she longed to be loved—deeply and forever.

  By some miracle, she had eventually met her soul mate and wound up here, on this Greek island, living in a house that looked like it belonged in the English countryside. It was a fairy tale and fed Imogen’s starved, scorned heart with hope.

  She couldn’t help sighing over that.

  “You sound like you’ve sprung a leak.”

  Travis’s voice startled her so badly that she gasped and leaped to her feet, knocking her chair back into the wall.

  He looked amazing. Rumpled and travel-weary in a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled back, but a feast for her eyes as he gazed around the small front room of the guest cottage.

  “Looks like you’ve called in Joli’s decorator.”

  “I know. Rafe said this isn’t how he works—” Damn. She bit her lip.

  “Rafe,” Travis repeated gravely.

  “He peeked in the other day when he came by for some boxes. I don’t see him. I shouldn’t have brought him up.”

  Just like that, her eyes were hot and her self-worth was in the toi
let. Tears were in her eyes.

  This was why it was good they were over, she reminded herself. Not because he had accused her of cheating, but because he made her feel so very imperfect without even trying.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked huskily.

  “I want to talk to you. Can you take a break?”

  “Travis—” She was barely hanging on over here, only getting through her days because the children checked on her and she refused to let them find her with her head in the oven. But there was no way she could withstand another interaction with this man. It could very well be the one that killed her.

  She shook her head.

  He closed his eyes, flinched. “I deserve that,” he said in a serious tone that might have held an edge of agony. “But I came all this way. Give me five minutes. Please.”

  She looked around. The cottage was not only messy, but too small to contain him and how she felt about him. She couldn’t risk permeating it with his memory. It would leave her incapable of living or working here.

  “Outside.” She cleared her throat and rose, picked her way across the piles littering the floor, each step a dreadful inch closer to more heartbreak. “We’ll go to the beach.”

  He stepped back as she came through the door. She closed the screen and put on her sandals.

  “Why didn’t you call?” she asked as they made their way through the orange grove.

  “Because you would have hung up.”

  Maybe. “Is something wrong?”

  “Very.”

  She looked up, concerned. “Your dad?”

  “You’re here and I’m not.”

  “Travis—”

  “I love you, Imogen.” A flash of pain sliced across his expression as he said the words. “God,” he muttered, rubbing the center of his chest. “I didn’t know that would feel so good. I think I loved you when we were married. I think that’s why I married you.”

  She halted, jaw going lax. “But you...”

  “Let you go. Slept with other women. I know. I hate myself, Imogen. I hate myself for all of that. For hurting you. For calling you my only mistake. Letting you go was the mistake.”

  She tried to move her lips, but her hand was over her mouth and she didn’t know what to say anyway.

  “I don’t want to be in love. I hate myself most for the tears that are coming into your eyes as I say that. But I need you to understand why it scares the hell out of me. I doubt you’ve slept with Rafe—in fact, I’m sure you haven’t. But if you have, hell, I deserve that. I should have been true to you the way you were true to me. But it wouldn’t change how I feel about you if you’ve been with a dozen other men. I don’t think anything could. That’s why I don’t know how to handle it, Imogen. You could cheat and I wouldn’t stop loving you. I would probably stay married to you. How the hell am I supposed to live with giving you that kind of power over me?”

  He faced her and drew her hand down, holding both of hers in his. He was very solemn as he looked into her eyes. His were filled with turmoil and remorse and something so tender that the flimsy shields she’d spent the last two weeks trying to recover toppled like a house of cards inside her.

  “How do I ask your forgiveness? How do I convince you, after driving you away twice, that you should give me another chance?”

  Her heart was quavering so hard it turned her voice fluttery and weak. “Tell me again that you love me.” Had she imagined it?

  “I need bigger words, better ones, for what I feel for you. ‘I love you’ isn’t enough. I’ve never been the one in a relationship who needs, but I need you, Imogen. I need you like air. I need the love you’ve offered me. I won’t take it for granted again, I swear.” His hands were tight over hers.

  “Oh, Travis.” She started to step forward, to throw her arms around his neck, but he disappeared.

  He dropped to his knee and there in his palm were her rings.

  She stacked her hands over her mouth again, this time to still the trembling of her lips. She was crumpling on all sides, wetness falling from her lashes as she clenched her eyes shut, terrified this was a dream and she was going to wake up alone.

  “This time we do it right,” he said. “A public engagement. A proper wedding with witnesses who will hold us accountable to our vows. I want to tell the world that you’re mine, that I love you. I want you to let me take care of you because I want you in sickness and in health, Imogen. Richer or poorer. We’ve seen each other’s worst. Let’s do better this time. Let me have your hand. Please.”

  It was too perfect. He was saying all the right things and it wasn’t possible. “I can’t believe...” But she offered her hand because even if it was a dream, she wanted to take it as far as it could go.

  “Believe it. You do deserve my love, Imogen. I’ll do everything in my power to deserve yours.” He reached for her hand and reverently slid both rings on her finger, holding her knuckles against his lips a long moment. “I’ve been wanting to see them on you... Never take them off again. Promise me.”

  He waited, looking as if he wouldn’t rise until she gave him that vow.

  “I do. I promise.”

  He rose and she shook even harder.

  “Is this real?”

  “It’s very real. Feel.” He pressed her ringed hand to his chest where his heart pounded inside his rib cage. When he kissed her, his lips were hot and worshipful. Then, because they could never resist turning a chaste kiss to a passionate one, they sank into a deeper kiss, one that tasted of hot blood and excitement, but something more exalted.

  As they twined their arms around each other, desire rose, a desire that needed physical expression, but sought the joining of souls as much as bodies.

  “We should go back to the cottage,” she breathed, pulling back. Then she frowned, eyes widening in apprehension. “What about my contract—?”

  “Sometimes we’ll have to be apart.” He said it with stoic dismay. “I’ll come to you as often as you come to me. I don’t want you to feel anything less than what you are, Imogen. My equal. My love. My heart. The woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. The woman I want in my life every single day. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Travis. I always have.”

  “I know. You humble me with that. I want to give you everything your heart needs.”

  “You already have...”

  EPILOGUE

  Two years later

  SOMEONE WAS IN the bedroom, moving toward the bed. It wasn’t Imogen. She was pressed against him, fast asleep. He was fast asleep, but even so, he was aware of this other presence and there she was. A girl who might have been Imogen at twelve with hair in two braids, the bridge of her nose freckled, her smile a little too big for her face and her teeth set with a hint of overbite. She was pretty, wearing a dress that might have been white or navy or the same red-gold as her brows and lashes.

  One day, he found himself thinking foggily, he and Imogen would have a daughter who looked just like her. Maybe a few months from now.

  She giggled. He heard it in his head along with her high, sweet voice. “He’s a boy. I’m here to tell her not to worry about him. He’ll be fine.”

  Imogen wasn’t eating much these days and was worried her empty stomach was hurting the baby. Was she crying? Through his heavy sleep, he thought she might be starting to sob. He started to turn toward her and gather her in.

  “Wait,” the girl said. “I want to talk to her. I want to tell her I won’t be coming anymore. She doesn’t need me. She has you now. And Julian.”

  Who was Julian?

  She giggled again. “If she’s sad, tell her she’ll see me when Lilith comes.”

  Who was Lilith?

  “Go make breakfast. Be quiet. Don’t wake her.”

  Travis snapped his eyes open to the walls of the penthouse. The blink of colore
d Christmas lights off the downstairs terrace reflected faintly on the ceiling. It was midmorning, Christmas Eve. He was fully dressed on the bed with Imogen. They’d been starting their day when she had been unable to stomach breakfast and started crying, fearful that if she didn’t eat, she would miscarry. She was incredibly emotional these days, not feeling well at all, which was why they’d opted not to join everyone in Italy and were having Christmas here, just the two of them. Two and a half.

  With his protective buttons pushed to max levels, he had cuddled her on the bed, promising to call the doctor, but they’d both fallen asleep.

  Now she was whimpering beside him, face turned into the pillow, but it wasn’t the sorrowful, lonely cry he’d heard before. It was a subdued sob, like she was trying to hold back her cries so she could listen.

  His scalp tightened. It had been a dream, he assured himself. A bizarre, fanciful dream that had no place in a rational man’s mind as anything but.

  Still, he was very careful as he rose, letting her continue to sob. It went against everything in him, but he did it, heart battering his chest as he made his way down the stairs.

  Such a weird day. It had started out so well, with the doorman sending up Imogen’s author copies while she’d been trying to choke down breakfast. He’d teasingly put it under the tree with the rest of the wrapped boxes, earning a cry of protest from her.

  She was not waiting until Christmas to open that one. For a woman who didn’t celebrate Christmas, she was giddier than Toni about the prospect of opening gifts tomorrow. Today had been one of the happiest days of her life until she had become sick.

  He picked up the book she had signed to him, the first out of the box. Flipping it over, he saw Imogen’s smiling face—so like the girl in his dream, if older and more heart-catchingly beautiful. She had her elbow propped, her hand along her cheek so her rings showed. She wore three now, the original two with a third they’d had custom-made to match. They had decided three was the charm and so far, so great.