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‘What are you doing?’ Betsy whipped defensive hands over her bared breasts as they spilled free of the supportive bodice.
‘Tucking you in.’ Nik slid a hand below her hips to ease her free of the bedding, flipped it back and settled her down on the cool sheet. ‘Drop the modesty. Let me enjoy the view.’
Her heart beating very fast, Betsy lowered her hands, feeling a little foolish for that belated cover-up. After all, they were married. And he had already told her that they could have sex without him assuming that it meant they were reconciled. Could she take that cool, sensible stance too? Her every emotion battled against such a concept. But at the same time there was no way she was ready yet to give him a final answer on whether or not she believed they could rebuild their marriage.
‘There’s more of you now to appreciate and you were already beautiful, yineka mou,’ Nik husked, appraising the fuller contours of her small breasts before lowering his dark head to lick the lush, prominent peak of a swollen pink nipple while his fingers delicately shaped the new ripeness of her flesh. ‘This, however, is for your pleasure, not mine. I want you to relax.’
Her breath hitched in her dry throat and she slumped back against the pillows, weak with longing and more than willing to let him play with her treacherous body but very far from being in a relaxed state. He dallied with the straining buds, utilising every ounce of skill
in his armoury to tease her sensitised flesh. Heat thrummed to another level between her slender, trembling thighs, while her hips shifted back and forth in a movement she couldn’t control. He tugged off her panties and leant back to slowly run his hands up the full length of her extended legs and ease them apart. Eyes hot on hers, he vented an appreciative masculine growl when his fingertips came into contact with the honeyed moisture coating her hidden core.
He drew her back into the hard heat of his taut, muscular body, covering her mouth with his. His tongue delved and explored and desire burned higher in Betsy than a firework shooting into the sky. Her hands clutched at his shoulders before lacing into his luxuriant black hair to hold him fast. He was a very sexy kisser. While he engaged her lips his hands roved until, freeing her mouth, he pulled her back against him and gently, softly, touched her between her trembling thighs.
Between one heartbeat and the next, her whole body became a mass of screaming nerve endings and she quivered and shook in response against him, her breath releasing in muffled sobs and gasps. Against her hip she could feel him hard and ready even through the barrier of his trousers. ‘Make love to me,’ she urged helplessly.
‘Later,’ Nik husked, burying his mouth against her exposed throat and licking and nipping at the sensitive cords of muscle pulling taut there to send another wave of painfully erotic stimulation through her already tormented body. ‘Come for me...’
His stubbled jawline rasped against her cheek as he touched her with aching expertise and suddenly there was nothing she could do about it, her body was racing for the finish line all on its own. A liquid flame ran through her as unstoppable as a tide and the tightness in her pelvis suddenly clenched and convulsed in an explosion of almost intolerable pleasure as spasm after spasm of ecstatic release gripped her.
Nik settled her limp length back against the pillows. ‘Now you sleep,’ he rasped.
Betsy’s face felt hot enough to fry eggs on and she didn’t open her eyes as he tugged the cool linen sheet over her hot, damp body. She was limp with shame at having succumbed to temptation and taken the pleasure he offered. Once again she had stomped all over her own most deeply held principles. But then hadn’t she always done that to keep Nik in her life? She had married a man who did not love her and from that moment on everything had become a compromise. In the same way, if they reconciled to raise their unborn children, she would never have the security of knowing herself loved and would have to live with the truth that only her fertility had brought him back to her.
And that was a toxic truth, she acknowledged painfully, one that would twist and grow inside her like Jack’s beanstalk and eventually smother her self-esteem. But if the only alternative was to stay separated and continue the divorce, would that be any easier? After all, with her being pregnant they could not have a clean break now. Could she live with Nik always on the periphery of her life as the father of her children? Look on with detachment when he eventually chose another woman to share his life?
Pain slammed through her in answer to that question. Her lashes lifted as she stole an anguished glance at his bold bronzed profile, insecurity clawing at her. For a split second she wanted his arms round her so badly it hurt. Later, she recalled, a little bubble of heat warming her chilled limbs at the promise of that word. And in the back of her mind, she cringed at what loving Nik had done to her pride. Would she only feel secure now when he demonstrated desire for her body?
CHAPTER EIGHT
OVER BREAKFAST ON the sunlit terrace the following morning, Betsy studied Nik’s lean bronzed face with its sleek yet hard-edged charisma, feminine appreciation sending prickles of awareness slivering through her pelvis. At the same time she was wondering why he hadn’t joined her in bed the previous night. She assumed it was because her long and very sound sleep had convinced him that her need for rest was more important.
‘So, what would you like to do today?’ Nik enquired lazily.
‘Obviously I want to see where you grew up...in fact every place on this island that’s associated with your childhood!’ Betsy confessed with helpless enthusiasm.
Seriously taken aback by that chirpy admission, Nik briefly froze. A split second later he concealed his reaction by forcing a transient smile to his lips while he scanned Betsy’s happy and relaxed expression. No, she had not the slightest suspicion that she had dropped a brick. And Vesos was, after all, where he had grown up. Her expectation that, having brought her here, he would want to share childhood experiences was simply normal. Acknowledging that truth, Nik cursed his decision to come to the island in the first place. Why hadn’t he just hired a villa somewhere? Vesos and this house had seemed the most sensible choice when they were already in Greece. But it had also been the very last place he had wanted to revisit, he reflected grudgingly.
Rising with something less than his usual grace from his seat, Nik stood gazing out through the trees towards the sea, mastering the powerful emotions threatening to roar through him like a hurricane, his broad back and wide shoulders rigid with tension. My mistake, he conceded heavily, and what could he do but play along to satisfy her natural curiosity? And why not when he was an adult now and no longer a weak and frightened child? Betsy wanted pretty, cosy pictures and he would give her pretty, cosy pictures, not the awful, pity-inducing truth.
‘You started school here?’ Betsy prompted over an hour later as she studied the small brick-built building beside the harbour and the young children playing outside with fascination.
Nik nodded and barely repressed a shudder. He thought of the bruising a teacher had once questioned and the lies he had been forced to tell to hide the reality of what went on within his own home. School had been difficult, not, of course, in academic terms but in the pain of the gradual dawning realisation that other children did not appear to suffer the treatment that he did. It had been a challenge for him to make friends, set apart as he was by his family’s wealth, even more of a challenge to play when he didn’t know how to play.
‘I really wish we could go and see your grandfather’s house—’ Betsy admitted.
No, no, no, no, Nik reflected sickly, nausea stirring at such a disturbing prospect.
‘But I know it’s your mother’s house now,’ Betsy allowed ruefully. ‘Couldn’t we drive past it?’
Nik was willing to settle for that less menacing suggestion. He drove along the coast road towards the cliffs.
‘Did you play on this beach?’
‘I was never allowed to leave the grounds of my grandfather’s home unless I had an adult with me,’ Nik fielded wryly, struggling to think of some single sunny recollection of his earliest years that would satisfy her desire to know more, but coming up with nothing.
Betsy peered at the house through the tall wrought-iron electric gates while Nik stared out through the windscreen without turning his dark head, lean brown hands flexing round the steering wheel of the sports car. ‘It’s an enormous place,’ she commented, glancing at him, wondering why he was so quiet and so... She struggled and failed to come up with an adequate label for his attitude. ‘Which bit of it did you live in?’
‘The wing furthest away from the gate,’ Nik related flatly. ‘It was entirely self-contained—my mother insisted on having her privacy.’
