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That idea didn’t bother Nik, no, it didn’t bother him at all, he told himself fiercely, sliding with a degree of unnecessary force into the chair spun out for him by his own team. Naturally there would be other men in Betsy’s future; she was a beauty. His attention skimmed over her pale profile. She had always reminded him of a spun-glass figurine, fragile in every proportion, the sort of woman a man wanted to protect and cherish. And where had that chivalrous attitude, shown only to her, taken him? he asked himself cynically. On the road to the divorce court and a poorer future like a thousand other foolish men. ‘I want a baby,’ she had said, all tearful blue eyes and trembling lips, breaking their premarital agreement, trying to selfishly, wilfully rewrite history... And she hadn’t even noticed that the bottom had fallen out of his world the moment she spoke.
Obviously, Betsy would have that much-desired baby with another man now. Without warning, Nik’s stomach lurched. He gulped down the cup of hot black coffee offered to him and burnt his mouth. Betsy was trying to rob him blind just as his gigolo father, Gaetano, had once tried to rob Nik’s mother, Helena. Helena Christakis, however, had been too clever to be conned by Gaetano Ravelli, and Nik’s IQ left his mother’s at the starting stakes.
More to the point, he didn’t give a damn about Betsy now. Like an alcoholic he was taking the cure and the cure was seeing her again and feeling nothing. And there she was: tiny, exquisitely provocative in every detail from her cloak of silky pale blonde hair and porcelain skin to the luscious pout of her naturally pink lips. Hard jawline squaring, he searched out her flaws and underlined them in his head: the bump in her nose, the faint scattering of freckles, the ridiculous lack of height and the very modest curves. On a physical level she was very far from being perfect... What the hell had he ever seen in her?
Without warning Betsy glanced up, soft feathery lashes lifting to reveal eyes the colour of the deepest ocean, and instantaneous lust gripped Nik in an iron fist, punching through him so fast that his big, powerful body tensed, his muscles pulling defensively taut while the hungry swelling at his groin tightened the sleek fit of his tailored trousers. His response shocked him and it took a great deal to shock Nik. Indeed, the consternation that followed made sweat break out on his upper lip before he turned colder than snow, utilising every fibre of his single-minded character to crush his unwelcome response to her. Obviously, he reasoned grimly, his momentary arousal was nothing more complex than the knee-jerk reaction of an old habit around a sexually familiar woman.
Betsy stared fixedly at the table while the legal formalities got under way. Nik was at the far end, distant enough to be visually ignored, but every strand of her being was working against her will to turn her neck in that direction to snatch a glance at him. It had been so long, so agonisingly long since she had had the simple luxury of looking at him. Some instinct she could not suppress lifted her head up and for one explosive split second of time she collided with Nik’s stunning green eyes, eyes that were positively startling in that lean, dark, devastatingly handsome face of his.
Suddenly she couldn’t breathe or move again and the most primitive responses controlled her. Molten heat surged at the core of her and she literally felt her breasts stir inside her bra, her nipples prickling and straining into swollen buds. A welter of erotic images assailed her and burning colour drove off her pallor. Later it would hurt that Nik had the power to look away first but in the instant that disconnection occurred she was merely grateful to be set free of that terrible awareness and craving again. How could he still do that to her? How could she still feel the power of his scorching sexual attraction?
After all, Nik had put her through hell. He had stayed silent when he should have spoken up. He had even allowed her to go through the horrendous humiliation of discovering the truth that had made a mockery of their marriage from the lips of one of his brothers.
‘You will regret this...’ Nik had warned her forbiddingly the day she had thrown him out, but her sole regret then had been that she had not found out what he had been hiding from her sooner.
In retrospect she knew she had behaved like a madwoman that day. Temporary insanity had gripped her from the minute her whole world came crashing down around her. She had screamed, she had shouted, she had cursed and he had stood there like a granite rock battered by stormy seas—essentially untouched by her anger, her tears and her pleas for an explanation. In fact he had said nothing beyond the quiet, unemotional admission that what she had learned about him from his younger brother Zarif was indeed the truth: Nik had had a vasectomy at the age of twenty-two and there was absolutely no possibility of him ever having a child with her. But Nik had excluded Betsy from that secret and, unforgivably, he had allowed her to break her heart trying and failing to get pregnant for months on end. Why hadn’t he just told her the truth? ‘Why?’ she had demanded again and again, and he had stared back at her in resolute brooding silence, refusing to explain his behaviour.
Marisa Glover, the celebrated divorce lawyer by Nik’s side, studied Betsy with cool blue eyes and quite casually asked her why she believed that a woman who had been a penniless, dyslexic waitress before her marriage and had not worked since should have a legal claim on half her husband’s estate.
‘Let’s face it...you have no children to support,’ the icy blonde beauty reminded the table at large.
All of a sudden, Betsy was bone-white and reeling from the stream of virtual body blows landing on her with the devastating efficiency of bombs, her skin squeezing tight over her bones in horror. Nik had told them; he had told them she was dyslexic and mortification drenched her like icy water thrown in her face. As for the reminder that she had no children, that was an even more cruel strike considering that Nik had comprehensively and deviously denied her what she had so desperately wanted.
Her lawyer stepped in to steer the topic in a more practical direction.
Nik scrutinised Betsy’s pale, taut profile, the anxious flicker of her lashes, the tightness of her lips, and knew she was hurt, humiliated and still recoiling from Marisa’s opening salvo. Marisa was the best divorce lawyer in London and an unashamed barracuda and Nik always employed the best. But now his perfect white teeth were gritted, brown fingers clenching into a fist against a long, powerful thigh. Had Betsy expected him to play nice? Had she thought anything could still be sacred, that anything could remain a secret in their divorce? Could she still be that innocent?
He was still waiting for her legal team to attack, for they certainly had the ammunition. It went without saying that he did not want the curious facts of his hush-hush vasectomy aired in an open court. That was private, considerably more so in his opinion than the dyslexia she was so ashamed of suffering from. Even so the shaken look of pain and betrayal etched in her tightly controlled but oh, so expressive face got to him whether he liked it or not and distaste and impatience rose in Nik for degrading Betsy in front of witnesses.
Annersley was currently engaged in reminding Marisa that Nik had refused to allow Betsy to work during their marriage, implying that Nik was a dinosaur and a bully of no mean order but doing so in the politest of terms. Marisa was pointing out that Betsy lacked the education required to gain anything other than the most menial of jobs and that a man of Nik’s social status could hardly be expected to tolerate a wife taking an unskilled, humble position.
Something suddenly snapped Nik’s hold on his volatile temper. Without even thinking about what he was doing, he ground his hands down on the edge of the conference table and sprang upright with an abruptness that startled everybody present. Lean, strong face hawklike, he growled, ‘Diavelos...enough! This ends here. Marisa, you are well aware that Betsy single-handedly runs her own business at Lavender Hall—’
‘Well, yes, but—’
‘We are finished here for now,’ he ground out with harsh finality. ‘I will discuss this no further—’
‘But nothing’s been agreed,’ Annersley complained.
Betsy stole a grudging glance at Nik, scarcely able to credit that he had brought the humiliating session to so swift a halt. Surely he could not have done that for her benefit? She refused to believe that; he had to have some clever ulterior motive. She felt wounded and degraded after having her dyslexia thrown in her face, not to mention the reminder that she had never completed her education to an acceptable level. It infuriated her that she could blame Nik for that last reality, for Nik had complained so bitterly when she was attending evening classes to study for her A levels that she had eventually given them up. Nik might have travelled the globe constantly during their marriage, but when he was at home he had made it very, very clear to her that he always expected her to be there. And she had finally given way to his selfish protests, naively believing that he was admitting to needing her and secretly gratified that the male who did not tell her he loved her could not bear to find her missing or unavailable.
‘There will be another meeting,’ Nik decreed, striding to the door without another glance in Betsy’s direction.
* * *
Betsy got off the train and walked to her car.
She was angry with herself, as angry as she was ashamed that she had reacted to Nik on so basic a level, responding to his lethal sexual attraction like a silly young girl without self-knowledge or defences. She wanted to feel nothing, absolutely nothing around Nik. After all, nothing was what he deserved. Cristo’s wife, Belle, had told Betsy that she should be dating again and that she would not get past her experience with Nik until she did. Unfortunately the last thing Betsy needed after the heart-rending grief of her marriage breakdown was another man to worry about. Men were very high maintenance; Nik had taught her that.
Her troubled thoughts were already whisking her back in time. When she had first met Nik Christakis she had been working as a waitress at a little bistro across the road from his office.
She had enjoyed her job. ‘If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,’ her late grandmother had told her when she was a child, and the truth of that homely maxim had never let Betsy down. She refused to let the fact that a job was humble or low paid colour her attitude, but she had always known that had her grandmother survived she would have been very disappointed by Betsy’s lack of educational achievement. Her loving gran had taught her that with extra time and specialised tutoring she could overcome her dyslexia and that it was not an excuse for low expectations in life. That awareness in mind, she had chosen her job to fit the fact that she was studying several nights a week at evening class to get her A levels. Oh, she’d had big plans back then for a more promising future.
In those days it had never occurred to her that a man could come between her and her wits. She was twenty-one and boys had come and gone, but nobody special, nobody capable of engaging her heart or tempting her body. When she had first seen Nik, he had been sitting at one of her tables in the spring sunshine: a stunningly beautiful male sheathed in a black cashmere overcoat, light green eyes framed by impossibly long, lush black lashes, zapping her with instant tingling awareness as he ordered coffee. She hadn’t noticed that Cristo was with him that first time, hadn’t even registered the presence of plain-suited men by the wall, hovering with the protectiveness of bodyguards. As always Nik had commanded full centre stage. Her heart had beat so fast it had felt as if it were in her throat and she had feared its crazy acceleration would choke her.
When he had ordered a second coffee, she had left a complimentary biscuit on the table but he had handed it back to her. ‘I don’t touch sugar...ever,’ he had told her softly, his foreign accent purring along the syllables with disturbing sexiness.
‘Wish I could say the same,’ Betsy had breezed back, popping the biscuit in her pocket for later. She had always been hungry, free meals or snacks not having been part of her employment terms. ‘But I still have to bring you the biscuit with your coffee. It’s management policy.’
