Semua Bab The husband i imagined : Bab 1 - Bab 10

# The husband i imagined *A steamy contemporary romance novel*---## PREMISEElena Marchetti, a rising film star, wakes up in a hospital after a car accident with no memory of the last two years. The last face she saw — the last photo she remembers looking at before the accident — belongs to Daniel Ashford, a powerful, guarded tech billionaire she'd only just met once at an event. Convinced he's her husband, she says so out loud in front of the press, his family, and half the hospital staff before he can stop her.Daniel corrects her immediately, privately, the moment they're alone. But by then, the story is already out — and it's solved a very real problem he has: a hostile board vote, a family trust that requires him to be "settled" to retain control of his company, and a tabloid narrative he desperately needed to change. He proposes they let the world keep believing it, just for a few months, while her memory (hopefully) returns and his company crisis resolves.She agrees — she

It took eleven minutes to clear the room.Elena counted them, because counting was easier than thinking, and because Daniel — still holding her hand, she noticed, though his jaw had gone tight enough to crack — counted them too, out loud, in a low voice to the woman with the clipboard, like he was giving her a deadline instead of a request."Everyone out. Now. That includes you, Patricia, whatever the studio told you to get on camera."The woman with the recording phone — Patricia, apparently, though Elena had no memory of ever knowing that name, no memory of anything at all that might explain how a stranger with a phone had ended up standing in her hospital room within hours of a car accident — lowered her phone with visible reluctance and murmured something about "just documenting the recovery, for the fans, they're worried" before a security guard, appearing from nowhere with the practiced efficiency of a man who did this often, walked her out with a firm hand at her elbow.The old

Her room — "your room," Daniel had said, with a small, careful pause before the word that Elena chose not to examine, though she noticed it, filed it away with the growing collection of small things she was noticing and not yet examining — had a view of the water and a bed she was certain, with total confidence and zero evidence, she had never actually slept in.The room itself was beautiful in an understated way, all soft linens and pale wood, a shelf of books along one wall that looked well-used rather than decorative, a window seat overlooking the bluff where the light was already starting to go gold with late afternoon. It didn't feel staged. It felt, oddly, like a room someone had actually lived in once, briefly, and then left waiting."We'll say the accident's left you needing space to recover," Daniel said, standing in the doorway like he was reluctant to fully commit to entering, one hand braced against the frame. "Separate rooms won't raise questions. Recovering wives get sep

The first flash of real memory came three nights later, and it arrived like a struck match — sudden, bright, gone almost before she understood what she'd seen, leaving only the acrid afterimage behind. She was standing at the window of her room, unable to sleep, the house quiet around her, watching moonlight lay itself flat and silver across the water, when it hit her: not a scene, exactly, more a fragment — headlights, rain hammering on a windshield, her own hands white-knuckled on a steering wheel, and underneath it all, a feeling of urgency so sharp it was almost physical, of needing to reach someone before something happened that she couldn't stop, before it was too late for a reason she couldn't name. She was on the floor before she registered sitting down, back against the cold wall beneath the window, breathing hard, her heart hammering the way it must have hammered that night, whenever that night had been, wherever the rain had been falling. The

The gala was Grace's idea — "the fastest way to kill a rumor," she said, over breakfast, buttering toast with the brisk efficiency of a woman who'd navigated exactly this kind of crisis before, decades ago, in circumstances she didn't elaborate on, "is to be seen being boring together in public. Nothing quiets speculation faster than a couple who look thoroughly unremarkable standing next to a shrimp tower" — and Elena spent the better part of an afternoon standing in front of a mirror while a stylist named Whitfield fussed over a dress the deep green of bottle glass, muttering about camera-ready silhouettes like Elena's body was a technical problem to be solved with enough pins and the right lighting."You look like you're bracing for impact," Daniel said from the doorway, dressed in a dark suit that did something unfair to his shoulders, watching her study her own reflection with an expression she couldn't quite read on her own face."I don't remember how to do this," Elen