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‘I didn’t know you’d found those clothes... Why didn’t you tell me?’ she pressed weakly.
‘I knew I was in way over my head, so it was easier and safer to avoid the subject,’ Nik admitted grimly. ‘There was no way out for me that I could see. As far as I knew then the vasectomy was irreversible and no matter what I did you were going to break your heart for what I could never hope to give you...’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Betsy whispered feelingly, finally recognising what that troubled phase of their lives had cost him as well. Her desire for a child had become an obsession that had ruled her existence and his and he had been trapped by a truth that he could not bear to share with her.
But now everything had changed, she reminded herself impatiently. Against all the odds, she had conceived that much-wanted baby and what she was fighting for now was the need for them to create a viable blueprint for their marriage to thrive in the future.
‘These terms you mentioned...’ Nik prompted softly but she wasn’t fooled by his tone. He stood straight and tall, lean, darkly beautiful face taut as if he was daring her to suggest conditions that he would find unacceptable.
‘You were always travelling and I was home alone. That would have to change,’ Betsy told him ruefully.
Nik viewed her in astonishment. ‘But I wasn’t away on pleasure trips. I was travelling for business reasons—’
‘I know, but you were never at home and I got very lonely,’ Betsy forced herself to admit with bald honesty. ‘I was lucky to see you one week a month. It wasn’t enough.’
Nik was sharply disconcerted. ‘As a husband my most basic function is surely to be a good provider for you?’
‘That would sound very impressive and I could forgive your absences if your business was in trouble or you weren’t already richer than Croesus. But you don’t have either excuse. Ideally, I want a husband who thinks that his most basic function should be to make me happy,’ Betsy confided valiantly. ‘And it would make me much happier if you were at home more, particularly once the children are born. You need to be on the spot to be a good father.’
Nik was broodingly silent. It had never occurred to him that she could be lonely when he wasn’t around. After all, in the first years of their marriage she had never once complained about the amount of time they spent apart. It was true that she had once said that loneliness had initially led to her desire for a child, but he had assumed that that was a momentary source of unhappy frustration, more of an excuse on her part than an actual fault that could be laid at his door.
‘A long time ago, my grandfather taught me that the only person you can really trust in business is yourself and you’re asking me to delegate important functions to subordinates,’ he informed her heavily. ‘I don’t know if I can do that...’
He was so serious, so very serious. She had asked him to travel less, stay home more, but the way he was reacting she might as well have asked him to give her a daily pint of his blood or sacrifice a limb. Her hands knotted by her sides to prevent her from reaching out to him because until that moment she had never appreciated just how deep his distrust of others went or that that distrust had been fostered in him at an early age by a close relative.
‘But you could try,’ she pointed out gently. ‘Try and see how it goes because if you don’t try another way of living I can’t see how I’ll ever be happy with you.’
Nik was taken aback by that underwritten threat. He knew men who would be grateful to learn that their wives wanted to see more of them. He knew even more how grateful he had always been to come home to Betsy, even during the baby-obsessed phase of their marriage. Then, quick as a flash, another acknowledgement gripped him. In a few months’ time they would have two young children in their lives and that fast and that easily Nik understood where his first priority should lie. He could not protect children whom he rarely saw. He could not be a good father or a good husband without making compromises. But, as always, when sudden change threatened, Nik froze, filled with sudden dread and disquiet at the prospect of his careful routine being disrupted.
‘What’s wrong?’ Betsy queried.
‘Nothing,’ Nik declared instantly, veiling his gaze and breathing in slow and deep in a control exercise he had been taught to utilise at the tender age of ten. No child of his would ever be similarly afflicted. The knowledge that he would do everything possible to protect his children soothed him.
Betsy moved forward, painfully aware that Nik was locked in an intense introspection that took hold of him occasionally and shut her out. She ran her palms up over his shirtfront, exulting in the heat and hard strength of him, wishing he would share what was troubling him. ‘You and I...it can work,’ she told him steadily. ‘We can make it work.’
His lean, powerful length tensing for a different reason as his body’s natural instincts took over from his brain, Nik stared down into anxious azure eyes and a hundred memories threatened to entrap him: Betsy struggling to hide her difficulty in reading the menu at their first dinner date; Betsy laughing in the rain when her umbrella broke and she got soaked; Betsy teaching Gizmo to return a ball rather than chewing it to pieces; Betsy telling him he had got her pregnant. She was both fearless and frank with that take-it-or-leave-it honesty that he had always cherished. It was a shame he couldn’t match that honesty, couldn’t tell her what had happened to him, but he believed that the truth would only weaken him in her eyes and ultimately frighten her and she depended on him to protect her. He was caught between a rock and a hard place.
‘Betsy...’ he husked not quite evenly, fingers lacing into her silky blonde hair to brush it back from her cheekbone.
‘We can make each other happy. We can make it work,’ she repeated with dogged conviction.
‘Shut up,’ he told her in Greek and he kissed her with urgent claiming force.
It was a kiss filled with lust and frustration and it was hotter than the fires of hell, burning through Betsy like a flaming arrow that ignited a wanton ache between her slender thighs. She fell into that kiss like a falling star and burned up. When he gathered her up in his arms and carried her through to the sleeping compartment, she looked up at him with her heart in her eyes, warmth and fear and longing all tangled up together, but she still didn’t give him the words of love she had once given so trustingly. Once she said those words, she couldn’t take them back again, couldn’t impose any distance between them and couldn’t make the same demands. Once she said them he would know her for a fake; he would know she wouldn’t turn her back or walk away. Not because she didn’t want to but because she simply couldn’t...
CHAPTER TEN
BETSY GRIMACED AT her reflection in the mirror. She was getting ready for Belle’s party but her thoughts were far removed from frivolity.
If Nik had loved her, she was convinced she could have buried every atom of her insecurity for ever. As it was, unhappily, she was convinced that her husband had only returned to her because she was pregnant and that knowledge was a humiliation that would only fester with every passing year. Her troubled blue eyes dampened. Blinking ferociously fast, she quickly grabbed up
a tissue to soak up the tears before she could smudge her mascara.
But it was a fact that Nik didn’t love her and never had loved her. He lusted after her like crazy, a chemical connection that had evidently kept him true even while they were separated. Be grateful for what you have rather than yearning for what you can’t have, Betsy urged herself in frustration. After all, some people would kill for the power to ignite such high-voltage passion in a partner. It should be enough. It had to be enough.
It was barely twenty-four hours since they had returned to Lavender Hall and a good deal of that time they had spent in bed. Her face burned at the recollection. She couldn’t stop wanting Nik, couldn’t put the brakes on the wild, greedy hunger he invoked every time she looked at him. But if she continued to be so easily available, how long would it be before Nik recognised that he had her exactly where he wanted her? In the palm of his hand to treat as he saw fit. A position of such weakness and vulnerability could never be a good starting point, particularly for a shiny new reconciliation.
Pale blonde hair, freshly washed and dried, swung in a silken bell round her shoulders as she walked back into the bedroom. Almost simultaneously, Nik strode out of the dressing room, fully dressed and immaculate. In a designer jacket teamed with close-fitting black trousers that enhanced his height, narrow hips and long, muscular legs, he looked absolutely gorgeous, all dark and sleek and the very ultimate in raw sexual power.
