Page 33 of Husband for the Holidays

Locking her throat against the bubble of pressure trying to burst free, she moved into the bedroom and searched for her long coat, double-checking that her passport was still in its zipped inner pocket. It was, along with her well-worn and mostly empty wallet. She took off the jacket she was wearing, throwing it onto the bed.

“Think this through, Eloise,” Konstantin said crisply. “Negotiating the prenup forces Antoine to open your mother’s financial books to me. If there’s malfeasance, I’ll find it and put a stop to it. You want that.”

She did, but—

“He can’t marry you to anyone else if you’re married to me, can he?”

No, but...“I don’t have to marry anyone if I don’t want to,” she blurted, still hurt by his drive-by proposal. “Especially when it’s only a ridiculous stunt. You really want to go through all of this trouble and expense, buy me clothes and a ring, stage aweddingand negotiate a prenup just so you can get a peek inside a few ledgers? Fake a business deal with him,” she cried, waving her hand in the air. “There are thousands of ways you could sic accountants on him.”

“How are you missing that marriage accomplishes so much more than that?” He clasped the top of the door where he stood. “Think of the power and influence you’ll have. He thought you’d make a good society wife? Hell, yes, you will. If you are my wife, no one will dare cross you, least of all him. And if he were to somehow steal all of your mother’s money—which I won’t allow to happen, but if he did—you’d have the means to support her.”

“How?” she cried. “Youjustsaid we’d divorce.”

“Ifnecessary,” he repeated.

“How could it not be necessary? You don’twantto marry me.”

“Of course, I want to. I don’t do things I don’t want to do,” he said pithily.

“Yes, I know that,” she said heatedly. “You’ve pushed me away enough times to make that very obvious.” She hated to bring that up. It made her stomach hurt, the rejections were so sharp, but it was the truth.

“Really?” He dropped his arm to his side. “You’re upset that I didn’t kiss you when you were seventeen?You were seventeen.”

“What about the funeral?”

“It was afuneral. And last night you were crying.”

“I wasn’t crying this morning, was I? But you still couldn’t get out of bed fast enough!”

His brows shot up. After a pause that caused her heart to batter the inside of her chest like a trapped bird, he said in a low rasp, “If I’d stayed in that bed, we would be marrying anyway because I didn’t have a condom. I do now, by the way.”

Gulp. She tried to look away, but the man was the king of staring contests, able to put erotic visions in her head with eye contact alone and forcing her to hold that vision between them until her scalp tightened. So did her nipples.

“We don’t have to marry to have sex,” she mumbled, hugging herself. Then she put up a hand, even though he hadn’t moved. “That wasn’t an invitation. I’m just saying that insisting on marriage is an overreaction.”

“No, Eloise.” His voice hardened. “What I’ve done until now has been anunder-reaction.” He pushed off the door so he filled the whole space with his powerful presence. “I cannot believe I left you and your mother to your own devices for this long. Marrying you is a correction. A necessary one. I intend to provide for your needs for the rest of your life. I intend to look out for your mother to the best of my ability. Marriage is the most expedient way to do those things.”

“And what do you get out of it? A clean conscience? Sex?”

“Yes.”

“You know that’s not any more romantic than marrying me out of spite, right?”

He muttered a tired curse toward the ceiling.

“Look.” She hugged the coat she still held. “I’m tempted to let you take over and look after us. That’s a really nice offer, but as far as making corrections goes, I want to be strong enough to help my mother myself. Using you to do it makes me feel like I’m not enough. Like I’m still a—” She cut herself off and looked at her coat, wondering what she thought she was doing. Where would she go if she walked out? To her mother and Antoine?

“Still a what?” he prompted gruffly.

She threw the coat on the bed and took a few restless paces between the bed and the open wardrobe.

“Mom nevercalledme a burden. She never said she didn’t want me, but she didn’t intend to have me. She met my father while she was on vacation. They had a brief affair and she didn’t realize she was pregnant until it was too late to make other choices. And it was all on her to raise me. Dad was never there to change a diaper or anything.”

“Didshechange a diaper?” His brow went up with skepticism.

“No. I had nannies, obviously. But paying for them came out of the fortune that Ilias’s father left her. My father didn’t give her anything but a responsibility she hadn’t asked for.”

“Has she ever said anything to make you think she regrets having you?” he asked with gentle challenge.

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