Authors: Lynne Graham
Lizzie stiffened. ‘Then you must’ve known some very unreliable women but that’s still not an excuse for throwing a word like ‘‘slut’’ at me!’
‘What I saw looked bad,’ Sebasten growled, evading the issue.
‘Did you have a really nasty experience with someone?’ Lizzie was dismayed by his stubborn refusal to apologise but far more disturbed by that initial statement of distrust in her sex.
‘Oh, just a mother and three stepmothers,’ Sebasten imparted with acid derision, dark eyes burning back to gold in warning.
‘Three?’ Her lush mouth rounded into a soundless circle and slowly closed again, for she was so disconcerted she could think of nothing to say.
‘One gold-digger, two sluts and one pill-popper,’ Sebasten specified with raw scorn, for he loathed any reference to his family background. ‘I suppose you now think you understand me.’
No, what she understood was how deep ran his distrust and his cynicism and she was shaken by what he had kept hidden behind the sophisticated façade. Well, you admired the complexity and now you’ve got it in spades, a dry little voice said inside her head. This is the guy you love: running in the opposite direction is not a realistic option. What was in her own heart and the reality that she already ached at the thought of the damage done to him would pull her back.
‘No, I think you’ll do just about anything, even spill the beans about the family from hell…anything rather than apologise,’ Lizzie quipped, making her tense mouth curve into a rueful grin.
Thrown by that unexpected sally, Sebasten stared down into her dancing green eyes, the worst of his aggressive tension evaporating. ‘The flowers were the apology—’
‘What flowers?’
‘You should’ve got them this morning—’
‘I leave for work at the crack of dawn.’ Lizzie tossed her head back. ‘Was there a card with a written apology included?’
‘Just a signature,’ Sebasten admitted, sudden raw amusement sending a slashing smile across his lean dark face. ‘You’re very persistent, aren’t you?’
The megawatt charm of that smile made Lizzie’s knees wobble. Her body was held fast by a delicious tension that made her skin prickle, her breasts swell and her nipples tighten with sudden urgent and embarrassing sensitivity. ‘Don’t try to change the subject,’ she warned him shakily.
‘Or persuade you into silence?’ Sebasten questioned, closing his hands to her narrow waist and lifting her up to bring her down on the table at which she had been sitting sorting documents just minutes earlier.
‘Sebasten…’ she gasped, disconcerted by that sudden shift into lover mode but secretly thrilled by it too. ‘Suppose someone comes in?’
‘The door’s locked—’
‘That was sneaky—’
‘Sensible…’ Sebasten contradicted, bracing long fingers either side of her and leaning forward to claim a teasing kiss. But the instant his mouth touched the lush softness of hers, he remembered how he had felt the night before when he had seen her in another man’s arms and a sudden primitive need that was overwhelming swept him in stormy reaction. Instead of teasing, he forced her willing lips apart with the hungry driving pressure of his own.
Her heart banging in both surprise and excitement at his passion, Lizzie only worked up the will-power to tear free when her lungs were near to bursting. ‘We have serious stuff to talk about—’
‘This is very serious, pethi mou,’ Sebasten broke in with fierce intensity, brilliant eyes locked to her as he let his lean hands travel with possessive appreciation up over her slender thighs. ‘It was two weeks since we’d made love…two weeks of indescribable frustration…I think that must be why I lost my head last night.’
With a mighty effort of will Lizzie planted her hands in a staying motion over his, even though every weak, sinful skin-cell she possessed was thrumming like a car engine being revved. ‘We haven’t even discussed you fixing up this job for me—’
‘But I’m so bloody grateful I did…it keeps you within reach,’ Sebasten groaned, escaping her attempt at restraint with single-minded purpose and sinking his hands beneath her hips instead to tug her to the edge of the table and lock her into contact with him.
Brought into tantalising connection with the virile thrust of his potent masculine arousal, Lizzie uttered a sudden moan and plunged both hands into his luxuriant black hair and kissed him with all the wild hunger she had suppressed during his absence unleashed. Sebasten sounded a raw, appreciative groan low in his throat. Throwing back his broad shoulders to remove his jacket, he jerked loose his silk tie with a distinct air of purpose and cast both away.
Her mouth ran dry even as shock gripped her that he intended to take their lovemaking further.
‘I’m so hot for you, I ache,’ Sebasten spelt out hoarsely, golden eyes smouldering over her with burning intent, any hope of restraint wrested from him by the sheer charge of shaken anticipation he could see in her feverishly flushed face.
‘Yes…me too,’ Lizzie muttered, instinctively ashamed of the intensity of her own hunger for him but unable to deny it.
With deft fingers Sebasten undid the tie on her aqua top, spread it wide and then tipped her back over one strong arm to claim a plundering kiss of raw, sensual urgency while he unclipped the front fastening on her white bra. ‘I’m not used to frustration…I’ve never felt this desperate,’ he grated truthfully.
That same seething desperation had Lizzie in an iron hold. She was trembling, already breathing in short, shallow little spurts. The bra cups fell from her tender breasts and a lean brown hand captured an erect pink nipple to toy with first one throbbing peak and then the other. The pleasure was hot, heady and so immediate that all the breath was forced from her in a long, driven gasp. The maddening twist of craving low in her belly was a growing torment.
Sebasten sat her up, sank impatient hands beneath her and peeled off her panties. She was helpless in the grip of her own abandonment. An earthy sound of approbation was wrenched from him when he discovered the slick satin heat already awaiting him, and from that point control no longer existed for him either.
‘Please…’ Lizzie heard herself plead in helpless thrall to the pleasure and to him.
Sebasten straightened, hauled her back to him at the point where she had all the resistance of a rag doll and sank into her silken sheath in one forceful thrust. She clung to him on a wave of such powerful excitement, she thought she might pass out with the sheer overload of sensation. It was wild, wilder than she had ever dreamt it could be even with him. When she finally convulsed in almost agonised ecstasy, he silenced her cry of release with the hot demand of his mouth, stilled the writhing of her hips and ground deep into her one last time.
In the wake of the most explosive climax of his life, Sebasten was stunned. He took in his surroundings, his attention lodging in disbelief on the bland office walls, and he was even more stunned. Feeling as though he had just come out of a blackout, he raised Lizzie, smoothed her silky, tumbled hair back from her brow with a hand he couldn’t keep steady and began to restore her clothing to order at speed.
The loud staccato burst of knocking on the door froze him into stillness.
Dragged from the dazed aftermath of their intimacy, Lizzie opened shattered eyes wide on the aghast awareness of how impossible it would be to hide a male of six feet four inches in a room full of wall-to-wall filing cabinets. ‘Oh, no…there’s someone wanting t-to get in here—’
‘Ignore it.’
‘We can’t!’ she whispered frantically.
‘We can—’
‘I’m calling Security if this door is not unlocked immediately!’ a furious female voice threatened from the corridor.
CHAPTER SIX
S EBASTEN swore under his breath, swept up his jacket and dug his arms into it while Lizzie leapt off the table, smoothed down her mussed skirt and retrieved the one item of her clothing which Sebasten had removed with a face that burned hotter than any fire.
‘This is Sebasten Contaxis…the lock’s jammed and I’m stuck in here! Call Maintenance!’’ Sebasten called back, all ice-cool authority.
Five seconds later, high-heeled shoes were to be heard scurrying down the corridor. As soon as the racket of the woman’s retreat receded, Sebasten stepped back and aimed a powerful kick at the lock. The door sprang open all on its own but the lock now looked damaged enough to support his story. Lizzie was still paralysed to the spot, transfixed by his speed and inventiveness in reacting to what had threatened to be the most humiliating encounter of her entire life.
‘After you…’ Sebasten invited with the shimmering golden eyes of a male who enjoyed a healthy challenge and enjoyed even more turning in a gold-medal performance for the benefit of an impressed-to-death woman. ‘Grab a few files and lose yourself at the other end of the floor. I’ll pick you up at half-six. We’re entertaining tonight at Pomeroy Place, my country house, so pack a bag.’
‘Sounds great,’ she mumbled, revelling in the coupley togetherness of that ‘we’ he had employed.
‘I forgot about the blasted party,’ Sebasten admitted with a frown over that same slip of the tongue as he swung away.
‘Sebasten…?’ In a sudden surge of emotion that Lizzie could no more have restrained than she could have held back floodwater, she flung herself at him as he turned back with an enquiring ebony brow raised. Green eyes shining, she linked her arms round his neck and gave him a hug. ‘That’s for just b-being you,’ she told him, her voice faltering as he tensed in surprise.
‘Thanks.’ Sebasten set her back from him, his keen dark gaze veiling as he read the soft, vulnerable look in her expectant face. ‘I should get going,’ he pointed out.
Lizzie gathered up some loose papers and found another room in which to work. From there she could hear the rise and fall of speculative voices as maintenance staff attended to the damage door further down the corridor but she was incapable of listening. She pressed clammy hands to her pale, stricken face, unable to combat the deep inner chill spreading through her. Even after the incredible passion they had shared, even while her wretched body still ached from the penetration of his, her affectionate hug and declaration had been received like a step too far. He might have attempted to conceal that reality but his lack of any true response had spoken for him.
But why? For a split-second, Sebasten had looked down into her eyes and what had he seen there? Love? She felt humiliated, foolish and scared all at once. Whatever he had seen, he had not wanted to see. It was as though she had crossed some invisible boundary line and, instead of moving to meet her, he had turned his back. But then what had she been thinking of when she threw herself at him like that? The wildness of their lovemaking had shattered her and perhaps she had wanted reassurance…emotional reassurance.
At that awful moment of truth, Lizzie regretted her first night in Sebasten’s bed with an angry self-loathing of her own weakness that nothing could have quenched. She had been reckless and now she was paying the price for not resisting temptation until she knew him better. Even more did she suffer at the recollection of her own wanton response to him only thirty minutes earlier. What Sebasten wanted it seemed Sebasten got. He touched her and she demonstrated all the self-will of a clockwork toy. For the first time, she understood with painful clarity just how cruelly deceptive sexual intimacy could be. Was she at heart the slut he had called her? She winced, her throat aching, because she was just so much in love with him. But did Sebasten see her as anything more than a casual sexual affair?
In the mood Lizzie was in, the prospect of devoting her lunch hour to buying a pregnancy test had scant appeal. Where had the insane fear that she might have conceived come from in the first place? It wasn’t as though she had felt sick or even dizzy since she had come into work. She was just being silly, working herself up into a panic because she was involved in her very first intimate relationship. All the same, oughtn’t she to check just to be on the safe side?
She bought the test kit, buried it in her bag, tried to forget it was there and discovered she could not. Then that afternoon, when she sprang up in a sudden movement after leafing through a bottom file drawer, her head swam and she swayed. As soon as she got home she knew she would use the test because a creeping sense of apprehension was growing at a steady rate at the back of her mind.
On the top floor of the CI building, Sebasten stared out at the city skyline with a brooding distance etched in his grim gaze. He was in a state of angry conflict that was foreign to him. What was he playing at with Lizzie Denton? When had his own motivations become as indistinct to him as a fog? Since the morning he learned her true identity, he had not once stopped to think through what he was doing in getting involved with her. That reality shook him at an instant when he was still striving without success to come up with an adequate explanation for what he had already labelled the ‘basement episode’. He felt out of control and he didn’t like it.
How could he keep on somehow neglecting to recall how cruelly Lizzie had treated his half-brother, Connor? Or the number of sweet studied lies that had tripped off her ready tongue on that same subject? What was he suffering from? Selective-memory syndrome? Did that glorious body of hers mean more to him than his own honour? Or even basic decency? From start to finish, his intimacy with her had defied every tenet he lived by.
He could no more easily explain why he had bought her diamonds and her car back for her. Did Lizzie deserve a reward for demonstrating that buckets of winsome pseudo-innocent charm could conceal a shallow nature? After all, most women made a special effort to impress and hide their worst side around a male of his wealth. Furthermore, he was very fond of Ingrid Morgan but he was bitterly aware that on the day of Connor’s funeral he had made the rare mistake of letting emotions cloud his judgement. It was past time he ended what should never have begun…
While Sebasten was coming to terms with what he saw as an inevitable event, Lizzie was seated on her bed in shock, just staring at the little wand that had turned a certain colour ten minutes earlier. She picked up the test kit instructions and read the section on false results for the third time. Maybe the kit had been old stock. She checked the sell-by date on the packaging but there was no comfort to be found there.
Although it seemed incredible to her, she was going to have a baby…Sebasten’s baby. If he reacted to a hug as if it were a marriage proposal, how would he react to a baby? She paled and shivered and wrapped her arms round herself. That first night she had told him that she was protected, had fully, confidently believed that she was, but hadn’t she also known that no form of contraception yet existed that was a hundred per-cent effective?
The concept of having a child in her life transfixed Lizzie. As yet none of her former friends had children and discussing babies had always been considered deeply un-cool. Lizzie had always kept quiet about the fact that she adored babies, had had to restrain herself from commenting in public about how seriously attractive some of them were and how insidious was the appeal of the shops that sold tiny garments. She stood up and studied her stomach in the mirror, sucked what little of it there was in…was there just the very faintest hint of it not going in quite as far as it once had? Registering what she was doing, she frowned in dismay at her inability to think sensible thoughts.
She wasn’t married, she wasn’t solvent, she didn’t even have a proper job, and on being told the father of her baby would most probably demonstrate why he had such a bad reputation. He might try to deny that he was the father or he might assume that she would agree to a termination that would free him from the responsibility for her child. In fact, it would be extremely na?ve of her to expect anything but a shocked and angry reaction from Sebasten. This was a guy who had told her that he never gave women the benefit of the doubt. In her situation that was not good news.
Here she was, living in a crummy bedsit, having come down in the world the exact same day she met a very rich man, and lo and behold…a few weeks later she would be telling him that she had fallen pregnant by him. Even to her that scenario did not look good. The least suspicious of men might have doubts about conception having been accidental in such circumstances, so the odds were that Sebasten would immediately think that he had been deliberately entrapped. An anguished groan escaped Lizzie.
She might really love Sebasten but she was getting acquainted with his flaws and her pride baulked at the prospect of putting herself in such a demeaning position. There was no good reason why she should make an immediate announcement though, was there? Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait until she had at least seen a doctor? Furthermore, that would give her more time to work out how best to broach the subject with Sebasten…
As Sebasten drove over to collect Lizzie, he cursed the necessity of their having to spend the night under the same roof at Pomeroy.
He was about to break off their relationship, so where had his wits been when he had made an inconvenient arrangement like that? But then he had since worked out exactly where his wits had been over the past three weeks: Lost in lust. Indeed, recalling his own extraordinary behaviour that same morning, his strong jawline took on an aggressive cast. Unbelievably, he had staged a clandestine sexual encounter at Contaxis International in the middle of his working day. All decent restraint had vanished the same instant he laid eyes on Lizzie’s lithe, leggy perfection: he had had that door shut and locked within seconds.
So, in common with most single males with a healthy sex drive, Sebasten reasoned, he had proved to be a push-over when it came to the lure of a forbidden thrill. But that angle was cold consolation to a Greek who prided himself on the strength of his own self-discipline. Yet in that file room he had behaved like a sex-starved teenager who took advantage of every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate it might be. That demeaning image rankled even more.
It just went to show that a guy should never, ever relax his guard round a woman, Sebasten conceded in grim conclusion. Lizzie was an absolute powder-keg of sexual dynamite. Why else could he not keep his hands off her? Why else had he dragged her home with him only hours after meeting her?
After all, he had never been into casual encounters. Had anyone ever told him that he would some day sink to the level of sobering up a drunk woman and then falling victim to her supposed charms afresh, he would have laughed out loud in derision. Only now he wasn’t laughing. After all, he had only got through the previous couple of weeks of self-denial by virtually staying out of the country and seeing her only in public places, he acknowledged with seething self-contempt.
When he picked up Lizzie he would be really cool with her and she would register that the end was nigh for herself. Exactly why, he asked himself then, was he agonising about something that had cost him only the most fleeting pang with other women?
Relationships broke up every day. She had ditched Connor without an ounce of concern, he reminded himself. But then how did he judge her for that when he had done pretty much the same thing himself? The rejected lover was hurt and what could anybody do about that? He recalled Lizzie’s shining, trusting green eyes clinging to him and something in his gut twisted. He didn’t want to hurt her.
Lizzie was still getting ready when Sebasten arrived.
‘Are you always this punctual?’ she groaned, hot, self-conscious colour burning her cheekbones as she evaded his gaze, for all she could think about at that instant was the pregnancy test that had come up positive.
‘Always,’ Sebasten confirmed, shrugging back a cuff to check his Rolex for good measure, determined to be difficult.
He looked grim, Lizzie registered, her heart skipping a beat as she noted the tautness of his fabulous bone-structure.
‘I’ll wait in the car,’ Sebasten said drily, striving not to notice the way her yellow silk wrap defined her slender, shapely figure. For a dangerous split-second he thought of her as a gaily-wrapped present he couldn’t wait to unwrap and the damage was done: his body reminded him with ferocious and infuriating immediacy that their stolen encounter earlier had only blunted the edge of his frustration.
‘Don’t be daft…I’ll only be a minute.’ Lizzie watched the faintest hint of dark colour score his chiselled cheekbones and wondered in dismay what on earth was the matter with him.
Desperate for any form of distraction that might lessen his awareness of the ache in his groin, Sebasten studied the open suitcase festooned with an enormous heap of garments as yet unpacked. He frowned. She was very disorganised and he was quite the opposite, so why was there something vaguely endearing about the harried, covert way she was now trying to squash everything into the case without regard for any form of folding whatsoever? He hated untidiness, he hated unpunctuality. Tell her it’s over now, his intelligence urged him just as Lizzie looked up at him.
‘You’ve had a lousy day, haven’t you?’ she guessed in a warm and sympathetic tone that snaked out and wrapped round Sebasten like a silken man-trap. ‘Why don’t you just sit down and chill out and I’ll make you a cup of coffee?’