because it was screamingly inappropriate. For the sake of the future and her unborn child she had to stick to cold, hard facts. ‘So you accept that you’re to blame for this pregnancy and that this will be your child?’
Lush spiky black lashes narrowed over suddenly astute green eyes, bright chips of colour in his lean, strong face. ‘Have you any doubt on that score?’ he questioned drily.
Betsy lifted her chin, azure eyes full of scornful dismissal. ‘None at all.’
‘Are you pleased?’ Nik asked her without warning because he literally couldn’t think of anything else to say and was wary of saying the wrong thing. A baby. Betsy was having a baby, his baby. Her announcement had plunged him deep into shock. He couldn’t compute a concept so foreign to him for he had never once actively considered becoming a father. Reversing the vasectomy had been much more of an intellectual and philosophical exercise than an actual wish to see a child of his own blood born. Indeed that was a development that even at his most optimistic he had never once dared to envisage. After all, children were so vulnerable and no matter how hard one might endeavour to protect a child bad things still happened to them. At the thought, Nik paled.
Betsy breathed in so deep and long that she felt giddy. ‘Am I pleased?’ she repeated in charged disbelief, her small body turning rigid with the force of her feelings. ‘Are you kidding? I wanted a baby when we were married. I wanted a family. This...’ she spread her arms wide in emphasis, as if encompassing the distance now between them ‘...is not what I wanted!’
‘So you don’t want the baby,’ Nik assumed, wondering how he felt about that but still too shaken by her news to know. A baby. Betsy was going to have a baby, the first Christakis infant to be born since his own birth.
‘It’s my baby...of course I want it!’ Betsy slung back at him with an aggression she had never shown him before, no, not even on the day their marriage had tumbled down like a pack of cards and she had virtually thrown him out of their home. ‘You need to know now upfront that there’s no way I’m having a termination—’
‘I am not that stupid,’ Nik fielded flatly. ‘Nor would I ask you to do such a thing.’
‘No?’ Betsy’s voice was steadily rising in volume even though she was struggling to stay calm, well aware that a loss of temper was a handicap she didn’t need. ‘Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t a termination suit you much better than the birth of a child you don’t want?’
‘Don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say I didn’t want the child,’ Nik countered darkly. ‘Obviously, you do—’
Betsy was in no mood to allow him to make assumptions and she was frustrated by his failure to give her a single hint of his true feelings. ‘Why? What’s obvious about it? Because you’re wrong—everything’s changed. I never wanted to be a single parent raising a child alone!’
Nik clenched his teeth together on an ill-considered retort. She was pregnant. Betsy was pregnant, he reflected abstractedly, marvelling at the development that had come too late to save them. Whether she would admit it or otherwise, he had finally contrived to give her the one thing she truly wanted and he was violently disconcerted by the flare of satisfaction that infiltrated him at that acknowledgement. He didn’t want to think about the baby; he wanted to think about what the baby would mean to her, and he was convinced that that child would mean the world to Betsy.
He remembered the secret stash of baby clothes he had stumbled on in the back of the closet and the sickening sensation of futility and powerlessness that had engulfed him that evening. He couldn’t tell her the truth about his past; he could never tell her the truth, for how would she regard him afterwards? He had only had his pride left to sustain him. He had known from the outset that silence was his only possible defence, but her announcement had engulfed him like a hurricane, throwing into chaos everything he had believed he felt and thought.
‘You made it that way for me!’ Betsy continued in angry condemnation. ‘You didn’t give me a choice. You didn’t warn me I could get pregnant—’
Nik released his breath in an impatient sound and replied with innate practicality, ‘I don’t think contraception was uppermost in either of our minds that day. I didn’t think about anything that prosaic—’
‘Oh, I can believe that all right!’ Betsy flamed back at him, eyes hurling furious derision, ripe mouth curved with unfamiliar scorn. ‘All you were thinking about was sex!’
‘Be practical...what else would I be thinking about?’ Nik traded evenly, not one whit perturbed by that indictment. ‘You didn’t hold back either.’
Betsy wanted to slap him for that insolent reminder. Had she behaved like a sensible, self-respecting woman, nothing would’ve happened. She would have looked at him in shock and said no straight away when he came on to her. But she had never found it possible to look at Nik and say no and that went right to the heart of their relationship. The balance of power in the sex department had always been his until she had thrown a spanner into the works by craving a child and a whole new schedule during which Nik’s desire for her had noticeably declined. Colour infusing her cheeks, she studied his desk. ‘I totally hate and despise you—’
‘We must be practical,’ Nik murmured softly, much as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘Drama and accusations of blame will get us nowhere—’
‘That’s very easy to say from where you’re standing,’ Betsy riposted bitterly. ‘Your whole life isn’t going to be disrupted by single parenthood!’
‘Both our lives will be disrupted,’ Nik countered drily. ‘But as lack of resources is not a problem I believe we will survive the challenge. I will naturally ensure that you have all the support you require from this point on—’
People he would pay to take the physical work and round-the-clock responsibility out of parenting, Betsy interpreted in even greater disgust. He wasn’t volunteering himself; he wasn’t willing to make a single sacrifice. And why would he be when he didn’t want to be a father in the first place? she asked herself painfully.
‘Stuff your blasted resources!’ Betsy slung at him, vitriolic in the grip of her resentment, her heart-shaped face flushed with fury, eyes hurling don’t-give-a-damn defiance. ‘All I ever wanted was a father for my baby, not access to your wallet!’
Nik settled lacerating sea-green eyes on her, derision shimmering in every angle of his lean dark features. ‘Am I supposed to be impressed by that statement? Until very recently you were claiming half of everything I own,’ he reminded her with razor-edged cool.
Betsy squared her slim shoulders and hitched her bag, determined not to show weakness. ‘And instead I’ve done even better,’ she quipped. ‘A baby has to be a virtual lifelong meal ticket!’
Nik surveyed her with chilling detachment. ‘Go home, Betsy, before I lose my temper,’ he urged.
And Betsy couldn’t get out of his office fast enough and didn’t breathe again until she was safe in the lift, whirring back down to the ground floor. Playing up to his view of her as a gold-digger might momentarily have seemed a way to save face, but in the long term it was a very bad idea, she reflected shamefacedly, particularly if it soured relations between them even more. What happened to her brain around Nik? She had just called her baby a lifelong meal ticket and she cringed at the awareness, knowing that even screaming abuse at Nik would have been preferable to the not so subtle weapon she had employed to fight her own corner.
And why had she behaved that
