settled her down on the wide, low bed and undressed her with cool efficiency, tugging off the sweater, unzipping her skirt and slipping off her shoes before pulling the duvet over her.
‘I need a shower,’ he admitted. ‘Is there still one in the bathroom? Or have you got rid of that as well?’
Betsy almost laughed. ‘Of course the shower’s still in there.’
She lay watching him strip, a sight she had never thought to see again, and the experience felt utterly unreal. He strode naked into the bathroom, yet she had recognised his unease with his surroundings. He didn’t like change; he never had. The new colour scheme and furniture had made him tense and uncomfortable. Well, what had he expected? That she would continue to live with the bed they had once shared, allowing her home to inflict constant wounding with memories of what they had once shared together and lost? No, at least Belle had helped Betsy to make that much of a fresh start.
Nik emerged from the bathroom still towelling dry his black hair. She was startled to notice that he was still fully aroused. Nik had assumed that Betsy would fall asleep, but she was awake, wide, evocative azure eyes pinned to him. She was snuggled down under the duvet, hair as pale as a young child’s trailing across the pillow in tousled disarray. Would he simply have got dressed and left had she been conveniently asleep? He honestly didn’t know the answer to that question. What he did know as he looked at her was that he wasn’t yet ready to leave, and without hesitation he tossed back the duvet and climbed in beside her.
‘It’s the middle of the day,’ she reminded him, colour heating her face.
‘Are you only remembering that now?’ Nik traded sardonically, and she might have snapped back had he not closed his arms round her and tugged her reassuringly close. ‘What does it matter what time it is?’
‘It doesn’t,’ she conceded and then said in a different tone altogether, ‘Nik?’
‘Shush,’ he breathed, fearful of what she might say, curving her up against his still taut and aroused length with an exhilarating sense of extraordinarily intense satisfaction.
‘You’re still—’ she began.
‘I am,’ Nik agreed, draping her tiny body over top of him with care. ‘Do you think you could do anything about that?’
‘You’re not joking, are you?’ Betsy knew he wasn’t joking because she could feel him hard as an iron bar beneath her.
‘Evidently you make me insatiable, hara mou.’
Her palms curved to his broad shoulders. Nik had enormous reserves of charm when he chose to utilise them but it was a very long time since he had bothered to show her that side of him. As a result, the slashing charismatic smile that lit up his lean dark features literally mesmerised her, leaving her defenceless. He lifted his head and tasted her parted lips with an intensity that set up a chain reaction of response that slivered through her bloodstream and sprang a sneak attack on her. He tasted so good and his lean hands were stroking up and down her slender spine, finding spots that felt erogenous even though she knew they were not. Even sealed to the heat and hard muscularity of him, she shivered, her heart hammering again, astounded by events and yet covertly flattered by his unquenchable hunger for her.
‘One more time and then you can sleep,’ Nik husked, rolling her back against the pillows and leaning over her, his devastatingly dark and masculine attraction enhanced by the shadow of stubble beginning to roughen his lower cheekbones and jawline.
‘Time off for good behaviour?’ she teased.
Claiming her mouth hungrily again in answer, he caught a swollen nipple between finger and thumb and rubbed the tender tip. A flame darted anew through her slender length and centred at her core, renewing the throb of awareness she had believed quenched. ‘You could always make me want you,’ she breathed in a helpless admission.
‘Once you only wanted me when it was the right day on your temperature chart,’ Nik reminded her with more than a hint of ice in his dark deep voice.
Something shrivelled and died inside Betsy and she would have done anything not to have roused that memory, which tore an ugly hole in the cocoon of togetherness she had spun for them in her mind. She pressed up against him, flattening her breasts to his broad, hair-roughened chest, and nipped at his full lower lip in reproof. ‘I don’t have a chart any more—’
‘Siopi...quiet,’ he urged and kissed her until she couldn’t remember what they had been talking about and, furthermore, no longer cared.
He tasted wonderful. He even smelled wonderful, the evocative scent that was uniquely him flaring her nostrils, firing her senses with a tormenting familiarity that made her feel ridiculously safe. Expert fingers traced her breasts and skimmed up the inside of her thigh, teasing, taunting until the torment made her squirm and twist and whimper in frustration, wanting, by then needing so much more. Only when the hunger he had skilfully awakened rose to an unbearable intensity did he shift over her, sliding into the honeyed welcome of her body with an ease and dexterity that made her cry out and arch her spine. And from that point on, once an answering passion had fully seized her, the tenor of his approach changed and his shallow thrusts became deep and strong and she could feel what control she retained slipping away as the excitement built and built until finally she came, screaming his name, and almost instantly fell into the deep sleep of complete exhaustion.
Darkness had fallen beyond the windows when a slight sound awakened Betsy. She lifted her head from the pillow and everything came flooding back with much the same effect as having a bucket of cold water thrown over her and she sat up with an abrupt start of energy. Nik was engaged in tying his tie in front of the cheval mirror in the corner and hot, mortified colour enveloped her from top to toe. She hugged the sheet, afraid to think, shrinking from the prospect of passing judgement on herself.
‘You’re leaving?’ she whispered as she switched on the bedside lamp.
Nik swung round, eyes light and glittering in the shadows, reticence etched in every angle of his lean, strong face. ‘I should’ve gone hours ago—’
‘Were you planning to walk out without speaking to me first?’ Betsy pressed tightly because her throat was closing over. She edged the sheet as high as she could, so tense that her muscles ached from the strain.
‘That might have been easier for both of us,’ Nik quipped, striding to the foot of the bed to gaze down at her from his considerable height.
‘How so?’
‘I’ve heard that this...’ he shifted a fluid brown hand in a gesture that encompassed both her and the bed ‘...is quite common for couples going through a divorce.’
Betsy felt as if he had punched her in the stomach and she lost colour, her skin pulling taut across her fragile bone structure. ‘Really?’ she queried with no expression at all.
‘Yes, really,’ Nik fielded drily. ‘It happens but it doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t change anything.’
For the very first time in her life, Betsy wanted another human being lying stone dead at her feet. But even then she wouldn’t forgive Nik, she reckoned wildly, plunged as she was into an abyss of mortification and pain and, worst of all, the dreadful conviction that it was her mistake that had unleashed such a humiliation on her.
‘Obviously, we’re still getting a divorce,’ Nik assured her, underlining the point quite unnecessarily as though
