Claiming His Christmas Wife. Dani Collins

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.”