‘You’re leaving?’ she whispered as she switched on the bedside lamp.
Nik swung round, eyes light and glittering in the shadows, reticence etched in every angle of his lean, strong face. ‘I should’ve gone hours ago—’
‘Were you planning to walk out without speaking to me first?’ Betsy pressed tightly because her throat was closing over. She edged the sheet as high as she could, so tense that her muscles ached from the strain.
‘That might have been easier for both of us,’ Nik quipped, striding to the foot of the bed to gaze down at her from his considerable height.
‘How so?’
‘I’ve heard that this...’ he shifted a fluid brown hand in a gesture that encompassed both her and the bed ‘...is quite common for couples going through a divorce.’
Betsy felt as if he had punched her in the stomach and she lost colour, her skin pulling taut across her fragile bone structure. ‘Really?’ she queried with no expression at all.
‘Yes, really,’ Nik fielded drily. ‘It happens but it doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t change anything.’
For the very first time in her life, Betsy wanted another human being lying stone dead at her feet. But even then she wouldn’t forgive Nik, she reckoned wildly, plunged as she was into an abyss of mortification and pain and, worst of all, the dreadful conviction that it was her mistake that had unleashed such a humiliation on her.
‘Obviously, we’re still getting a divorce,’ Nik assured her, underlining the point quite unnecessarily as though he feared that she might be too stupid to get that message.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, knowing that even the sight of him falling down dead at her feet wouldn’t satisfy her sufficiently. Hatred now leapt through her as fierily as the passion that had betrayed her. In spite of everything he had done to her, she had missed him, missed sex, and she was paying the price for her wretchedly poor judgement now.
‘We both need to move on,’ Nik breathed curtly.
‘Until now I never appreciated what a taste you have for platitudes,’ Betsy responded grittily. ‘You have patronised me, insulted me and used me. Now I know what it feels like to be a booty call.’
Nik ground his teeth together. He had said what he had to say. He was exceptionally intelligent and he knew the score, even if calling it was insensitive. They had both made a mistake and it was his place to spell that out. He wasn’t built to closely connect with another human being. After the abusive childhood he had endured, how could he possibly be? There was a lack in him, not in her, and he could never give her what she wanted and deserved.
‘I’ll let you keep the house as well,’ he told her flatly.
‘It’s good to know I profited from prostituting myself,’ Betsy hurled back at him shakily, tears burning the backs of her eyes like acid. ‘For goodness’ sake, go!’
And without fanfare that was exactly what Nik did. The door snapped shut in his wake but not before Gizmo had inserted himself through the gap and hurtled towards his only recently rediscovered mistress.
‘Oh, Gizmo...’ she gasped, her voice catching on a sob as she hugged the shaggy little dog to her chest.
Nik had just walked out on her again. His driver would have sat outside waiting for him all these hours. That wouldn’t bother Nik and he wouldn’t apologise for his thoughtlessness either. The only child of a fabulously wealthy Greek heiress, Nik was accustomed to staff who never questioned or complained and he paid highly for a very high standard of service. A wife with a similar attitude would have suited him so much better than Betsy ever had. She had wanted too much from him and had fought her own corner too hard while demanding an independence of thought and action that had frequently infuriated him. But then bearing in mind his behaviour on their first catastrophic date, she really couldn’t say that she hadn’t been warned that nothing would be plain sailing with Nik Christakis at the helm...