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Revenge. It was not a pretty or feminine word but it was also the very last thing a manipulative and cunning business shark like Nik Christakis would expect from his once submissive and soon-to-be ex-wife. He hadn’t cared about her but he did care about his precious money. There was no greater goal in Nik’s life than the ruthless pursuit of profit and the clever conservation of that vast store of personal wealth. Betsy knew that if she could significantly dent Nik in the wallet department, if in no other way, she would finally draw blood. After all, it had taken her outrageous claim of half of everything he possessed to persuade Nik into an actual face-to-face meeting with her again. Self-evidently money mattered to Nik more than she or their marriage had ever mattered.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside and Betsy stiffened. The door handle made a slight noise but the door stayed shut and she froze, her heart leaping into her mouth.
‘Let us do the talking,’ her legal representative, Stewart Annersley, reminded her afresh.
He might as easily have said that Betsy was out of her league in such company but she already knew that, could barely credit that she had spent three entire years in Nik’s world of rarefied wealth and yet contrived to remain easily shocked and gullible. What did that say about her? Was she stupid? A poor reader of people and their motivations? She had been distraught when Nik had taken Gizmo from her. The little dog had been her only comfort and even though Nik was by no means a doggy-orientated male, he had still insisted on taking the animal back. Why?
Betsy believed it was because Nik was the ultimate control freak. Evidently, what was his stayed his, unless it was a discarded wife. His most recent attack had been to go after the house that he had never liked but that she loved. Why? Certainly he owned it and he had paid for the restoration, yet he had only bought the property to please her. Or had he? Had he simply seen Lavender Hall as a promising investment? More and more Betsy doubted the assumptions she had once made about what motivated Nik.
Without warning, the door sprang open and framed Nik’s very tall, well-built body. Her heart hammered madly for a split second and then felt as though it had stopped beating altogether because for a long timeless moment she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink. He radiated raw sexual charisma.
His extraordinarily light eyes glittered like gleaming emeralds in his lean, darkly beautiful face, startlingly noticeable eyes and shockingly astute. A thousand memories threatened to consume her—from the recollection of their disastrous first date to their idyllic honeymoon and the lonely challenge of her life once reality had set in—and she fought them off fiercely. He wasn’t going to do this to her again, she swore with inner vehemence. He wasn’t going to break her nerve again.
She lifted her chin, squared her stiff shoulders and stared back at him while carefully blanking him out because she could not face direct eye contact. Yet in the back of her mind she was still plunged into sudden agony by his presence, wondering how this had happened to them, how the man she had once adored could have become her worst enemy. Where had she gone wrong? What had she done to make him treat her with such hostility and unkindness?
And even while paranoia and self-pity threatened to overwhelm Betsy for a dangerous instant, it was Nik’s voice she heard inside her head. ‘Stop with the persecution complex and the blame game,’ he had once told her. ‘Not everything’s your fault. You’re not being punished for some sin in this world or the next. The bad stuff is simply what life throws at you...’
Nik scanned Betsy with compulsive intensity. Had she shrunk? She had never been very big in either height or size—indeed she barely weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. Surrounded by her legal posse she was utterly overshadowed. She had definitely lost weight. He wondered if she was eating properly, an old protective instinct kicking in, instantly stamped down on hard and consigned to the back of his mind as inappropriate. It was none of his business any more, equally none of his business that her lawyer, Annersley, was leaning far too close to her, appreciative eyes pinned to Betsy’s delicate profile as if she were a prize up for grabs. And of course, endowed with even a tithe of what Nik was worth, Betsy would be very much a trophy for some scheming male to snatch up in the future.
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.’
‘Wasteful,’ he had pronounced with a sardonic curve to his handsome mouth. ‘But you look like you could use the calories.’
‘I’m just skinny. I’ve always been skinny,’ Betsy had parried, dimly conscious of his companion’s frowning, silent scrutiny.
‘Cute skinny,’ Nik had countered, whipping his keen gaze over her slender proportions, sending colour flying like a banner into her cheeks. ‘Very, very cute.’
And she had rushed away to get that second coffee, wondering what on earth was wrong with her. He hadn’t been the first customer to try to flirt with her and she had usually taken it in her stride as simple banter, infinitely preferring that approach to that of the occasional creeps who had let their hands stray if she’d got too close. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might have actually meant anything by his remarks. After all, she had noticed his fancy coat and the sleek dark suit he had worn beneath it and already categorised him as some high-flying city-executive type and, as such, completely out of her league.
The next time she had served him he had offered her the biscuit first and she had flushed and said hurriedly, ‘No, thanks. My boss told me we’re not allowed to eat the biscuits because it looks bad.’
‘Really?’ Nik had quirked a black brow. ‘Maybe I should have a word with him—’
‘No, please don’t say anything,’ Betsy had urged in harried retreat with her tray.
‘If it worries you that much I won’t. My name’s Nik, by the way,’ he had responded casually.
A tin of incredibly expensive fancy biscuits had been delivered to her at work that afternoon, the gift card signed with a slashed ‘Nik’. Betsy had been more embarrassed than pleased, particularly when her boss, Mark, had noted the delivery, asked her if the gift was from a customer and frowned in disapproval when she had confirmed it. When she had thanked Nik for the gift he had shrugged it off as if it was too unimportant to mention.
Nik had come in every Tuesday after that, settling down to chat in a foreign language to Cristo while constantly fielding calls on his mobile phone. Just seeing him had thrilled her and meeting his eyes had electrified her all over, sending heat laced with weird chills racing through her body in an uncontrollable surge. It had not escaped her notice that he watched her as well and that he left her ridiculously large tips that swelled the staff collection box as never before.
‘Be careful around that guy,’ Mark had warned her one morning. ‘I’ve only just realised who he is. He’s Nik Christakis and he owns the office block opposite—NCI, Nik Christakis Industries. And guess what? In his no-doubt vast portfolio of businesses he already has a large chain of coffee shops and I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of him.’
‘He owns the building over there?’ Betsy had gasped.
‘Haven’t you ever noticed his bodyguards?’ Mark had rolled his eyes at her lack of observation. ‘He has to be an extraordinarily wealthy man to need security and you do have to wonder why he’s slumming here with us.’
Betsy had felt foolish for not appreciating that Nik was as much a fish out of water in the bistro as snow in July. She had looked him up online and learned that he was Greek and that Cristo was his half-brother. She’d also discovered that Nik had grown up in a very different world from her own. Embarrassed by the adolescent daydreams she had been weaving round him until that point, she had become more circumspect in her behaviour when he was around.
‘No smile for me?’ Nik had queried on his next visit, catching her fingers in his to halt her and sharply disconcerting her with that move. ‘Is something wrong?’
Azure eyes wide, she had reddened. ‘No, nothing’s wrong. We’re just very busy and I’m a bit distracted.’
‘Have dinner with me tomorrow night,’ Nik had drawled without warning.
Jolted by the invitation, and scarcely believing that he was serious, Betsy had jerkily retrieved her fingers and clutched at her tray. ‘Sorry, I can’t. I’ve got a class—’
‘The next night you’re free,’ Nik had interposed smoothly.
‘We’ve got nothing in common,’ she had protested.
‘But I want you because you’re different,’ Nik had informed her huskily, making her drop her eyes in shock at that blunt admission and shiver as though her insides were being subjected to a force-ten gale.
‘It wouldn’t work,’ she had argued in a low voice.
‘If I say it will work, it will work. When?’ Nik had pressed mercilessly.
‘Er...Friday,’ she had admitted in the suffocating silence, horrendously aware of his brother’s incredulous scrutiny. ‘I’m free Friday night.’
‘I’ll pick you up at half eight,’ Nik had responded calmly and asked for her address.
As she had moved away to serve another customer she had heard Cristo arguing with his brother and she had just known it was about her and that Nik’s sibling could not credit that his brother had invited a waitress out on a date.
Nik had steamrollered over her objections and she should have seen the writing on the wall then. Nik didn’t quit until he got what he wanted. He was relentless, unstoppable and stubborn as a mule.
CHAPTER TWO (#ue92f2f69-b189-5ea0-a0d7-8cd06b5e655e)
NIK WAS ENSCONCED in his limo with a very beautiful blonde. Jenna had seemed the perfect antidote to his difficult morning. She was light-hearted and fun and she wasn’t looking for anything serious. She had invited him back to her apartment and neither of them had any illusion about what was to happen there. Now she snuggled up against him, her hand fastening possessively to a long, powerful thigh. He stiffened, resisting a strong urge to shake her off. He was getting a divorce, he reminded himself obstinately. He was a free man. It was past time he acted on that change of status.
Jenna shifted almost onto his lap to kiss him. In a defensive move, he threw his head back and her lips caught his jawline instead. The scent of her washed over him and she smelled wrong to him. Not bad, just somehow and inexplicably...wrong. He lifted a hand to her shoulder, long fingers accidentally brushing her hair. It felt coarse instead of silky and he didn’t want to touch it. In a fury he willed himself to stop making crazy comparisons. Maybe that was why the normal, healthy male response to an approach from a willing, attractive woman wasn’t happening for him.
Thee mou...his body was demonstrating all the reaction of a solid block of wood, he acknowledged in mounting frustration. Something was messing with his head and his libido and he didn’t know what but neither was he prepared to discuss the problem with his therapist. He had been forced to explore quite enough unpleasant issues with the good doctor and, while he had every respect for the lady’s common sense and discretion, there were still some things he refused to share. He might have unburdened himself of the dark weight of his dysfunctional past and felt stronger for it, but the freedom to return to his former taciturn habits was equally a relief. Sharing anything did not come naturally to a male with his reserved nature. And such acknowledgements were only one more unnecessary reminder that being involved in any way with Betsy was still ruining his life, cutting off his choices and reminding him of his boundaries while stifling the raw energy, the voracious sex drive and the sheer ruthlessness that had always healthily compelled Nik forward in life.
His mobile phone buzzed and he dug it out with an apology, but he already knew he wasn’t going back to Jenna’s apartment. Clearly she didn’t attract him enough, he reflected grimly. When he added in the unthinkable, that for the first time in his life he might fail between the sheets, it was sufficient to crush his need to test himself and prove that he had left his marriage behind him.
No, to achieve that goal he required a rather more civilised approach, he conceded broodingly, momentarily forgetting his companion. Taking some of the aggro out of the situation between him and Betsy would be a good strategic move. That didn’t mean he was going to give her a cartload of money or grant any of her ridiculous requests or, worse still, talk to her as Cristo had so ludicrously suggested. He didn’t want to talk to Betsy. He wouldn’t keep his temper if he talked to her and any gain from his breaking of the ice between them would be swiftly destroyed by a fresh flood of hostility and mutual resentment. No, talking of any kind was off the table. Diavelos, the lawyers could do the talking.
* * *
The day after the legal meeting, Betsy set out the items for sale on the new shelves in the shop and stepped back to assess the display.
She might have gone through hell since her marriage had broken down but, when it came to work, her overwhelming need to keep busy and mentally challenged had ironically ensured that the same months were astonishingly productive and creative in business terms. The little farm shop selling fresh veg, fruit and eggs, which Nik had grudgingly allowed her to open in one of the redundant farm buildings behind the hall, had tripled in size to house the baked goods and home-cooked ready meals she had sourced. Since then she had added the card and gift section, where she stocked everything from potpourri to local crafts. Across the yard, work was noisily progressing as a former ruined cottage was transformed into a small coffee shop.
Behind the counter, her manager, Alice, was chatting cheerfully to a regular customer stocking up for her weekly shop. Betsy had initially hired Alice to ensure that she was always available when Nik was at home, but even though she was now able to work much longer hours the arrangement still worked well. After all, the business had expanded and Alice was good at dealing with the financial side of things, while Betsy was happiest handling suppliers and sourcing new goods.
Furthermore, Alice had the wisdom to understand when not to ask awkward questions. Divorced from a cheating ex and raising three children, she knew all about sleepless nights and heartache. Alice had not said a word when she came into work some mornings and found all their produce rearranged, the fruit so shiny it looked polished and the tiled floor so clean you could see your face in it. Time after time Betsy had taken refuge in work when she couldn’t sleep. But there was a far more practical reason behind her industry and the long hours she put in.
Betsy’s ultimate goal was to make Lavender Hall self-sufficient because she was mortified by the prospect of hanging on Nik’s sleeve for the rest of her days. If she built up the business enough it could support her and cover the wages bill for the staff required not only to run the business but also to maintain the house and garden. In truth, claiming a very large slice of Nik’s fortune had not solely been an act of aggression or revenge but more of a counter-attack to his unreasonable demand that Lavender Hall be sold. The house offered Betsy an unparalleled resource as a business base from which she could earn her own living and she had lots of even more ambitious ideas on the back burner for the future.
The phone on the counter buzzed and Alice answered it. ‘It’s for you,’ she told Betsy.
Edna, the hall housekeeper, was on the line. ‘You have a visitor, Mrs Christakis. Is it still all right for me to take the afternoon off?’ the older woman asked anxiously.
Edna and her husband, Stan, who kept the garden, had provided sterling ongoing support on the home front after Betsy had had to cut back on staff after Nik’s departure. With Nik and his high expectations of instant service removed from the equation, there had been no need for a fancy private chef, a driver or a flock of maids.
‘Of course it is,’ Betsy assured her while abstractedly wondering why she had not named the visitor. Obviously someone familiar, possibly Cristo or even his wife, Belle, she thought hopefully, because she was in the mood for some uplifting company.
Betsy liked Belle, a leggy Irish redhead with boundless vitality and a great sense of fun. Belle had slowly become a trusted friend in spite of the fact that what Belle had to say about Nik was pretty much unrepeatable. Betsy, in turn, admired the way Belle and Cristo had taken on responsibility for the five kids Belle’s mother had had during her long-running affair with Cristo and Nik’s late father, Gaetano. Nik would never have sacrificed his personal freedom on such a score, she conceded painfully, wondering how she had contrived to be so blind to the reality that the man she wanted to father her child didn’t even like children.
Smoothing her stretchy black skirt down over her hips and twitching down the pushed-up sleeves of her pink honeycomb-knit sweater, Betsy left the shop and cut through the walled garden to the door in the ten-foot wall that led straight into the hall’s vast rear courtyard. When Nik had protested her desire for a commercial outlet at their home, she had reminded him of the size of that wall and had added that the opening up of the former farm lane would preserve their privacy from both customers and traffic. He had remained stalwartly unimpressed, giving way solely because he had known she needed something to occupy her while he travelled abroad so much.
And yet now here she was, running not the hobby shop he had envisaged but her own thriving business, she reflected ruefully, striving to raise her flagging spirits with that comforting reminder. Who would ever have thought she had that capability? Certainly not her parents, who had never expected much from her. It had been her grandmother, a retired teacher, who had ensured that Betsy got the help she needed with her dyslexia. In truth, Betsy’s parents had never really had much time for Betsy and had been ashamed of her reading and writing difficulties. In fact she was convinced that she had been an accidental conception because even as a child she had been aware that her parents resented the incessant demands of parenthood, no matter how much her grandmother tried to help them out. Her parents had died in a train crash when Betsy was eleven. By then her grandmother had already passed away and Betsy had had to go into foster care, the first seed of her conviction that she would never ever want children already sown by her own distinctly chilly upbringing.
Cutting through the spacious empty kitchen, Betsy hurried through to the big hall and came to a startled halt when she saw the tall, broad-shouldered male with blacker than black hair, standing poised with his back turned to her by the still-open front door.
Nik had already surveyed his surroundings with keen interest, instantly noting the changes since his exit six months earlier. The furniture was a little dusty. There were no fresh flowers adorning the central table, not even a welcoming fire burning in the massive grate. But superimposed over that picture was a misty image of Betsy twirling round the same hall before restoration had made the building habitable.
‘Isn’t it just amazing?’ she had exclaimed in excited appeal on their very first visit to Lavender Hall, her face lit up like a Christmas tree.
‘It needs to be demolished,’ Nik had countered, unimpressed.
‘It’s not past saving,’ Betsy had argued. ‘Can’t you feel the atmosphere? The character of the place? Can’t you imagine what it would look like with a little work?’
A little work with a wrecking ball, Nik had thought grimly, uninspired by the chipped and broken bricks and the floor puddled by drips from gaping windows and a leaking roof. She had dragged him off on a tour, chattering with bubbling enthusiasm about how the Elizabethan property was a treasure chest of history and on the endangered historic buildings list. Right from the start he had thought it was a horrible house and about as far removed from his idea of a comfortable and suitable country home as it was possible to imagine. But he had recognised that Betsy had fallen madly in love with the dump and, even though it wasn’t what he wanted, he had agreed to buy it for her, a generous act that had rebounded on him many times in the following months when the costs of restoration had risen to outrageous levels.
Ne...yes, he had been a decent, caring husband, Nik reflected with brooding hostility. He had tried to make his wife happy, had given her everything she had ever wanted with the single exception of that last impossible demand of hers, and he still could barely credit that their marriage had been destroyed by her desire for, of all things, a baby. Her careless dismissal of the idea of having a child had been so convincing before their marriage.
Lean, strong face tensed by the forbidding tenor of his thoughts, Nik swung round with a frown just as Betsy surged through the kitchen door. She looked harassed, her pale blonde hair tumbling round her delicate, flushed features, making her eyes look more mauve in hue than ever and emphasising the pink, pillowy, luscious shape of her unpainted lips.
Instantaneous desire lit Nik up inside in a firework burst of startling heat that took his breath away. Without the smallest warning everything he had failed to feel in the limo with Jenna the day before surged through him, tightening every muscle in his body and setting off a fast-beating pulse at his groin that made him want to smash something in sheer frustration.
‘Betsy,’ he breathed in growling acknowledgement.
One glimpse of her visitor and Betsy had frozen in place like someone who had run head first into a solid brick wall. Why on earth hadn’t Edna warned her? His sexy-as-sin voice washed over her like rich vanilla ice cream coated in melted dark chocolate, vibrating down her taut spinal cord... Nik’s voice, the first weapon in his considerable arsenal of attraction. Nik here at the hall where she had never expected to see him again! His sudden appearance was a huge shock and she blinked rapidly and snatched in a stark breath, striving to brace herself for what could only be bad news of some kind.
‘What are you doing here?’ she gasped strickenly before she could think better of openly revealing her dismay.
‘I needed to see you.’
Unconvinced, Betsy simply stared back at him. His dark grey pinstripe designer suit was faultlessly fitted to every muscular angle of his lean, powerful body. Big and strong, he was a brutal force of nature beneath that sleek, sophisticated façade he wore to the world. In all the months they had lived apart he had made not one single attempt to see her, so why now? Her brain, however, was stuttering to a halt when confronted with Nik in the flesh. Those lean, darkly beautiful features of his drew her in like a fire on a freezing day. She didn’t want to look but she couldn’t help herself. He had the gorgeous face and classic body of a mythical god, eyes shimmering bright as emeralds, awakening a primal attraction that was rooted so deep inside her she didn’t know where it began or how she would ever be free of its sway. Her skin prickled, tiny hairs rising at the nape of her neck as she subdued a responsive shiver. Her heart was racing.
