‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that I was a little off the wall sometimes?’ he framed with sardonic bite.
Without responding, Betsy watched him toss back a brandy and registered the strain he was striving to control.
‘Well?’ he prompted grimly.
‘You’re a little different...occasionally,’ she acknowledged reluctantly, thinking of the wedding proposal that had come out of nowhere and the reconciliation he had chosen not to discuss before moving back in. ‘But nothing I can’t handle or live with—’
‘Let’s see if you can work it out for yourself,’ Nik framed with dark, driven derision, a muscle jerking taut at the corner of his unsmiling mouth. ‘I’m no good at empathy. I find it hard to know what someone is thinking. I instinctively distrust most people. On the plus side, I don’t play games in relationships. Even so, my flaws have caused me endless problems in the field of personal relationships.’
Betsy was in a daze. Her head started to thump with the onset of a tension headache because what he was trying to tell her was so much more important than anything she could have foreseen.
‘As a child, I was brutalised by a severe level of abuse,’ Nik admitted gruffly, watching her with his beautiful green eyes as if he was suddenly expecting her to start screaming or shouting at him. ‘My mother was the perpetrator—’
‘Your...mother?’ Betsy exclaimed in horror.
‘My mother...yes—women can be violent too,’ Nik extended grittily. ‘I’ve always suspected she had some kind of personality disorder. Whatever, she was very violent. She never wanted a child in the first instance and, worst of all, I reminded her of Gaetano, whom she hated. She believed my father had made a fool of her by getting Cristo’s mother pregnant as well and she focused her hatred and resentment on me because I resembled him.’
Betsy was dizzy with shock. ‘I had no idea, Nik. Why didn’t you ever tell me about this? Those nightmares you used to suffer—?’
‘Childhood memories... I also began suffering from flashbacks of the abuse,’ Nik confessed in a raw, reluctant undertone. ‘It takes me longer to understand emotional stuff...like tonight with Cristo. I went into meltdown because I was very angry and upset. I felt betrayed. I was afraid that you might have developed feelings you shouldn’t have where he was concerned, feelings you couldn’t acknowledge because you knew you shouldn’t have them. I wondered how the hell I would ever get to the real truth and believe it in such a situation...because difficult as it would be for anyone in that position, it’s even worse for me.’
‘Oh, Nik...’ Betsy breathed painfully, her heart going out to him because so much that she had never understood about him was finally falling into place for her.
This was why he struggled when she hurled angry accusations at him, fell silent and brooded when she began to talk about feelings, and ultimately it was why he had misunderstood how she felt about him and walked out on their marriage. He had genuinely thought she didn’t love him any more, that she had told him the literal truth. He couldn’t comfortably assess such a confrontation and sometimes, regrettably, people threw wild, wounding insults and made threatening announcements purely to shock when they were hurt and angry. After all, that was exactly what she had done with him.
‘And this is what I would have done anything to avoid,’ Nik admitted angrily, throwing his proud dark head high. ‘I never wanted you to know and to think less of me—’
‘I don’t think less—’ she argued in dismay.