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That idea didn’t bother Nik, no, it didn’t bother hiree of unnecessary force into the chair spun out for him by his own team Naturally there would be other men in Betsy’s future; she was a beauty His attention skimmed over her pale profile She had always reile in every proportion, the sort of woman a man wanted to protect and cherish And where had that chivalrous attitude, shown only to her, taken him? he asked himself cynically On the road to the divorce court and a poorer future like a thousand other foolish men ‘I want a baby,’ she had said, all tearful blue eyes and tre to selfishly, wilfully rewrite history And she hadn’t even noticed that the bottom had fallen out of his world the moment she spoke

Obviously, Betsy would have that , Nik’s stoulped down the cup of hot black coffee offered to hi to rob hiolo father, Gaetano, had once tried to rob Nik’s mother, Helena Helena Christakis, however, had been too clever to be conned by Gaetano Ravelli, and Nik’s IQ left hisstakes

More to the point, he didn’t give a da the cure and the cure was seeing her again and feeling nothing And there she was: tiny, exquisitely provocative in every detail from her cloak of silky pale blonde hair and porcelain skin to the luscious pout of her naturally pink lips Hard jawline squaring, he searched out her flaws and underlined the of freckles, the ridiculous lack of height and the veryperfect What the hell had he ever seen in her?

Without warning Betsy glanced up, soft feathery lashes lifting to reveal eyes the colour of the deepest ocean, and instantaneous lust gripped Nik in an iron fist, punching through hi, powerful body tensed, hisat his groin tightened the sleek fit of his tailored trousers His response shocked hireat deal to shock Nik Indeed, the consternation that followed made sweat break out on his upper lip before he turned colder than snow, utilising every fibre of his single-minded character to crush his unwelcori more complex than the knee-jerk reaction of an old habit around a sexually familiar woman

Betsy stared fixedly at the table while the legal forh to be visually ignored, but every strand of her being orking against her will to turn her neck in that direction to snatch a glance at hi since she had had the si at him Some instinct she could not suppress lifted her head up and for one explosive split second of tireen eyes, eyes that were positively startling in that lean, dark, devastatingly handsome face of his

Suddenly she couldn’t breathe or ain and the ed at the core of her and she literally felt her breasts stir inside her bra, her nipples prickling and straining into swollen buds A welter of erotic i colour drove off her pallor Later it would hurt that Nik had the power to look away first but in the instant that disconnection occurred she was rateful to be set free of that terrible awareness and craving again How could he still do that to her? How could she still feel the power of his scorching sexual attraction?

After all, Nik had put her through hell He had stayed silent when he should have spoken up He had even allowed her to go through the horrendous hu the truth that had e from the lips of one of his brothers

‘You will regret this’ Nik had warned her forbiddingly the day she had thrown hiret then had been that she had not found out what he had been hiding from her sooner

In retrospect she knew she had behaved like a ripped her fro down around her She had screamed, she had shouted, she had cursed and he had stood there like a granite rock battered by storer, her tears and her pleas for an explanation In fact he had said nothing beyond the quiet, unemotional ader brother Zarif was indeed the truth: Nik had had a vasectoe of twenty-two and there was absolutely no possibility of hi a child with her But Nik had excluded Betsy froivably, he had allowed her to break her heart trying and failing to get pregnant for months on end Why hadn’t he just told her the truth? ‘Why?’ she had deain, and he had stared back at her in resolute brooding silence, refusing to explain his behaviour

Marisa Glover, the celebrated divorce lawyer by Nik’s side, studied Betsy with cool blue eyes and quite casually asked her why she believed that a woman who had been a penniless, dyslexic waitress before her al claim on half her husband’s estate

‘Let’s face ityou have no children to support,’ the icy blonde beauty ree

All of a sudden, Betsy was bone-white and reeling fro on her with the devastating efficiency of boht over her bones in horror Nik had told them; he had told them she was dyslexic and mortification drenched her like icy water thrown in her face As for the reminder that she had no children, that was an eventhat Nik had comprehensively and deviously denied her what she had so desperately wanted

Her lawyer stepped in to steer the topic in a more practical direction

Nik scrutinised Betsy’s pale, taut profile, the anxious flicker of her lashes, the tightness of her lips, and knew she was hurt, hu salvo Marisa was the best divorce lawyer in London and an unashamed barracuda and Nik always eritted, brown fingers clenching into a fist against a long, powerful thigh Had Betsy expected hi could still be sacred, that anything could remain a secret in their divorce? Could she still be that innocent?

He was still waiting for her legal team to attack, for they certainly had the a that he did not want the curious facts of his hush-hush vasectomy aired in an open court That was private, considerably more so in his opinion than the dyslexia she was so asha from Even so the shaken look of pain and betrayal etched in her tightly controlled but oh, so expressive face got to him whether he liked it or not and distaste and i Betsy in front of witnesses