Nik hunkered down athletically again at her feet and reached for both her hands in an unusual demonstration for a male who was normally very reserved. ‘Be pleased. I want to come home, glikia mou. I suppose I’m asking you for a second chance...’
It was so humble, so unlike the proud, fiercely independent male she knew that tears stung the backs of Betsy’s clear eyes. She stared at him, her gaze locked to the sleek, dark, fallen-angel beauty of his lean, taut face and she could literally sense how keyed up he was waiting for her to agree. It meant a great deal to him; she could feel that. And she thought that only a male of Nik Christakis’s complexity could think it was normal to move back in with the wife he was divorcing without even talking the idea over with her in advance. There had always been something about his sheer lack of emotional intelligence that pierced her heart deep as an arrow. He was so clever but so out of touch with ordinary things that she took for granted and she had always recognised that eccentric quality in him, right from the night of his equally startling wedding proposal, which had also come out of nowhere at her.
‘I’m not sure I could trust you again,’ she told him honestly. ‘So much has happened...and the other women—’
‘I haven’t slept with anyone but you.’
Betsy was astonished until she recalled him falling on her like a hungry wolf and it was that recollection that convinced her that he was telling the truth. ‘Even so, you’ve been photographed out and about with a lot of other women—’
‘But I’ve only been with you,’ Nik declared afresh. ‘I only want to be with you.’
Betsy lifted uncertain fingers and traced his darkly shadowed jawline, fingertips brushing the stubble already formed there. She wondered what she was doing. But she was realising that her supposed hatred of Nik had only provided a useful bolster to her pride and her survival, and that when she went looking for its strength to stiffen her spine with resistance, it was mysteriously absent. She didn’t hate him; she wanted him back. Did that make her the biggest female fool in the Western world? Was she crazy to even consider reconciling with a guy who arrived with a removals van as if eight months of separation and all the bitter turns and twists of the divorce proceedings had never happened?
‘But you never wanted a baby,’ she heard herself remind him hoarsely.
‘A child is a big responsibility,’ Nik said seriously, evidently indifferent to the reality that he already had responsibility for a vast business empire and thousands and thousands of employees round the world. ‘And children are very vulnerable. That was why I never wanted the responsibility of protecting one.’
Betsy didn’t follow his reasoning. He seemed to be thinking of some kind of doomsday scenario in which a child could get hurt, but she could see that he was deadly serious and for that reason she nodded as if she totally understood what he was saying. ‘And that’s why you had the vasectomy?’ she prompted.
Nik nodded in silence, having given the explanation that he had already worked out beforehand. He wished he could have come up with those words eight months earlier when it might have saved them both a lot of grief. But at the time, in shock at her discovery that he had had a vasectomy, he had thought he could only tell her the truth and that was an option he could not even contemplate, would never contemplate.
Betsy searched his lean dark face, noticed the shadows below his eyes, the indented lines of extreme tension bracketing his mouth, and tried to think straight. But with no warning whatsoever, emotional overload and exhaustion were together hitting her like a freight train hurtling downhill. ‘I can’t give you an answer right now,’ she told him shakily. ‘I need to think about it and I think I need to lie down for a while...’