The limousine drew up outside the hall and for a split second Betsy simply sat there, fixedly staring at Nik. You had restrictions as well was still ringing in her ears with the last two words ringing the loudest. ‘When you said you were seriously flawed, what did you mean...?’
The passenger door whipped open and crisp, cool night air flooded in. Nik retained her hand and tugged her out of the car to guide her up the steps. ‘I owe you the truth,’ he intoned with a bitterness he couldn’t hide. ‘But it’s a truth I would never have chosen to share with you.’
A chill of foreboding was sliding down Betsy’s taut spinal cord and rousing goosebumps on her exposed skin. She searched his bold bronzed profile, only to be taken aback by the harsh lines of tension underscoring his spectacularly strong bone structure. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she whispered apologetically.
Nik thrust open the drawing room door and went to pour them both a drink. In silence he extended a pure orange to her and she grasped the moisture-beaded glass of juice tightly, unable to take her attention off him.
‘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.
‘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 becaus
e 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?’