‘I didn’t want you to see me as being damaged and I don’t want your sympathy or your pity now,’ Nik told her curtly, pale beneath his bronzed skin as he stared back at her in challenge. ‘You thought I was perfect and I wanted so badly to be perfect for you. I wanted you to look up to me, to respect me—’
‘I still do, for goodness’ sake!’ Betsy swore in passionate rebuttal of his obvious concern. ‘You’re ten times cleverer than I am and a brilliant, highly successful businessman. Of course I respect you and I could never think less of you. In fact I probably think more of you because you’ve chosen to struggle very bravely in silence... Why is that? I appreciate the macho aspect of hiding what you deem to be a weakness, but why couldn’t you tell me years ago? I mean, for goodness’ sake, we were married!’
‘I was taught always to hide it from people, the bruises, the scars. I became an expert at redirecting people away from my pain and suffering. My own mother saw me as a freak because I would never react to the abuse she put me through. I learnt quickly that if I did react, or cry, or beg her to stop, it would only be worse for me. So I stopped crying, stopped feeling and closed off from her and everyone else completely,’ Nik volunteered in the most shockingly calm voice as though his mother’s attitude to him had been perfectly understandable. ‘She had me in behavioural conditioning sessions by the time I was four years old.’
Betsy studied him in horror but clamped her lips shut on an exclamation that would have revealed her true feelings. He didn’t want to hear that her heart was breaking on his behalf. Evidently his childhood had been an endurance test of unkindness and pain. His mother hadn’t nurtured or loved him; she had called him a freak. From an early age he had been forced into self-reliance, a fact that could only have increased his innate distrust of others and his isolation.
Emboldened by her lack of embarrassing reaction to his admission, Nik continued doggedly, determined to tell her everything now that he had started. ‘Helena despised me. It was bad enough that she had a baby she didn’t want but she was ashamed of me too.’
Tears stung Betsy’s eyes but she kept her eyes wide, determined not to let him see them. She couldn’t bear to think of what his childhood must have been like. By all accounts, his mother had been a less than loving parent and he must have felt that was his fault because he wasn’t good enough for her, wasn’t perfect. How confused and lost he must often have felt when he didn’t understand, she reflected in positive anguish at the thought of the unhappiness he must have suffered.
‘My mother was physically abusive,’ Nik admitted curtly. ‘But the nightmares only began shortly after I met you. I had suppressed all the memories of her cruelty—it was my way of coping. I hadn’t forgotten what she did to me. I just didn’t want to dwell on the memories. But when I met you I opened myself up to feeling things for the first time and then without any warning I started suffering flashbacks and nightmares about the violence.’
Betsy sucked in oxygen like a drowning swimmer and then she simply couldn’t contain her feelings any longer. She crossed the distance between them and wrapped her arms round his lean, powerful body as though she would never let him go. ‘You should never have allowed your mother to come to our wedding,’ she condemned for want of anything better to say, fearful of revealing her sympathy and damaging his pride, for she was painfully aware that such honesty, such soul-baring, had to be very tough for so reserved and secretive a male. ‘Why didn’t your grandfather protect you?’
‘We lived in an entirely separate wing of his home. He never saw or heard anything suspicious and he assumed I picked up the bruises being bullied at school because I wasn’t very good at playing with the other children,’ he explained wryly.
Betsy rested her brow against his shirtfront, the solid, reassuring thump of his heartbeat thrumming against her and his warmth sinking into her chilled bones like an addictive drug. ‘Why didn’t you tell him what your mother was doing to you?’