‘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.