‘Good idea.’ Nik crossed the room with a flash of his long, powerful legs.
‘And when you get there, you should explain some things to Betsy,’ Cristo urged ruefully.
‘That kind of interference is not within our remit,’ Zarif chimed in, his tone one of reproach at that offering of advice.
As he listened to his brothers a line of colour flared along Nik’s high cheekbones and then receded, leaving him curiously pale and extremely tense. Lush black lashes dipped down over his bright eyes as he dropped a protective arm round Betsy’s slim shoulders. ‘Home,’ he agreed with unconcealed relief.
‘Did you apologise to Cristo?’ Betsy prompted as the limousine drew away from the town house.
Nik flashed her a stunned glance. ‘No, I did not. Why would I apologise?’
Betsy breathed in slow and deep. ‘You attacked him—’
‘He got what he deserved,’ Nik countered with caustic bite. ‘It may be a little late in the day that he’s getting it but he did deserve it. You’re my wife and I trusted him with you—’
‘And he never once betrayed that trust,’ Betsy declared, choosing to be tactful rather than point out that during that period of their lives Nik had turned his back on their marriage and left her alone to sink or swim. ‘If it’s true that he did develop some sort of silly crush on me, I had no suspicion of it because he never said or did anything around me that even suggested that.’
‘Never?’ Nik pressed, shooting her a troubled and still-unconvinced appraisal. ‘And how did you feel about Cristo at the time? I had gone, the divorce had started and you were alone but for my brother’s supportive visits.’ He spoke the word ‘supportive’ with deeply derisive emphasis.
‘I was grateful for his support and the fact that he was willing to listen to me rambling on,’ Betsy admitted honestly. ‘I had nobody else to talk to. He was your brother. Talking about you to Cristo didn’t feel disloyal and I knew that anything I said wouldn’t go any further.’
‘I encouraged him to connect with you,’ Nik confided grittily, his jawline clenching hard at the recollection. ‘I had total trust in him. I should have known better—’
‘You encouraged him to be my friend?’ Betsy repeated in surprise. ‘But why?’
Nik shifted uneasily in his corner of the back seat. ‘I wanted to know that you were all right, that you had everything you needed—’
‘But I wasn’t all right,’ Betsy responded in a small, tight voice of commendable restraint. ‘How could I have been? You had refused to even discuss your vasectomy and why you’d had it done and then you simply walked out on our marriage.’
Nik frowned, clearly thinking that evaluation unjust. ‘Because you told me to leave. You said you could never forgive me, never look at me again and that I had killed your love. You said our marriage was over,’ he replied.
Betsy studied his lean, darkly handsome face, taken aback to have her words of many months earlier thrown back at her when she’d least expected to hear them. ‘But that’s just the sort of thing people say when they’re angry and hurt and crazily confused—’
‘Only you can’t afford to say stuff like that to me because I took it all literally and I believed that you meant every word that you said,’ Nik admitted in a raw undertone.