Authors: Lynne Graham
In instinctive concern, Sebasten crouched down beside her. Tears were running down her face in rivulets and he assumed she had really hurt herself. ‘I’d better get an ambulance—’
‘Don’t be stupid…I only bumped it…I’m just being a baby!’ Lizzie wailed in mortification. ‘I’m tired and it’s been a tough week, that’s all.’
And when she cried, she really cried, Sebasten noted. There were no delicate, ladylike sniffs, no limpid, brimming looks calculated to induce male guilt. She just put her head down and sobbed like a child. She was miserable. He should be happy about that. Lean, powerful face taut, he snatched her up off the floor and into his arms. Reasoning that sticking her in a guest room alone with her distress would not only seem odd but also suspicious behaviour for a male supposed to be interested in her, he carried her into his room, where he deposited her on the bed and backed off.
With a tremendous effort of will, Lizzie gulped into silence and squeezed open her swollen eyes. It was true that she was very tired but it was her over-taxed emotions which had brought on the crying jag. In the frame she was in, she didn’t think that she was capable of having a relationship with anybody. She missed her home, she missed her father.
‘I’m sorry you met me last week,’ Lizzie confided abruptly. ‘You’re never going to believe that I’m not normally like this.’
From the shadows outside the pool of light shed by the bedside lamps, Sebasten strolled forward. ‘Have a bath. Get some sleep. You’re exhausted.’
‘Not very sexy…Exhaustion, I mean,’ she muttered, plucking at the sheet with a nervous hand, peering out from under her extravagant torrent of hair, which shone with copper and gold lights.
‘I’ll be up later…I’ve got a couple of calls to make.’
‘Kiss me goodnight,’ Lizzie whispered on a breathless impulse before he reached the door.
Sebasten stopped dead and swung round, emanating tension. ‘Surely, feeling so tired, you’re not up for anything tonight?’
‘So if there’s no—er sex, you don’t kiss either,’ Lizzie gathered and nodded, although she was cut to the bone at his rejection.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘You don’t fancy me any more?’ Lizzie was determined to get an answer.
Sebasten strode across the room, closed firm hands over her arms and hauled her up onto her knees on the mattress. She could have drowned in the pagan glitter of his splintering golden eyes. He brought his mouth plunging down on hers and it was like being pitched into a stormy sea without warning. Excitement shivered and pulsed through her in answer, heat and craving uniting at the thrumming heart of her body until she went limp in his hold, all woman, all invitation.
‘I hope that answers that question,’ Sebasten breathed thickly, dark colour accentuating his fabulous cheekbones as he let her sink back from him in sensual disarray.
Lizzie had a soak in his sunken bath, let the water go cold while she waited for him to join her. Then, ashamed of her own wanton longing, she took advantage of another one of his couple of hundred shirts and climbed into bed. That fiery, demanding kiss had soothed her though and she drifted off to sleep with a dreamy smile on her face…
CHAPTER FIVE
LIZZIE opened her eyes just when morning light was spilling through the bedroom and found Sebasten wide awake and staring down at her.
She didn’t feel shy or awkward; she just felt happy that he was there. Indeed, so right and natural did it feel that she might have been waking up beside him for absolute years. But then had she been, she might have been just a little more cool at the effect of that all lean, bronzed, hair-roughened masculinity of his poised within inches of her. With a languorous stretch, she gazed up into the dark golden eyes subjecting her to an intense scrutiny and her heart fluttered like a frantic trapped bird inside her.
‘Good morning,’ she whispered with her irrepressible smile. ‘You shouldn’t stare. It wakes people up.’
Three brandies and a cold shower had failed to cool Sebasten’s ravenous arousal and he had never been into celibacy. It was just sex, he reasoned, thought and integrity had nothing to do with it and denying himself was a pointless sacrifice when he had already enjoyed her.
He threaded caressing fingers through a shining strand of her amber hair and then knotted it round his fist to hold her fast, his stunning eyes semi-screened by his lush black lashes to feverish gold. ‘Lust is keeping me awake, pethi mou.’
‘Oh…’ Breathing had already become a challenge for Lizzie.
‘And you’ve been nicking my shirts again…there’s a price to pay.’ Long brown fingers flicked loose the topmost button and she quivered, melting like honey on a hot plate and mesmerised by his dark male beauty.
‘Will I want to pay it?’
‘I know you will,’ Sebasten husked, releasing another button with tantalising slowness, watching her spine arch and push her pert little breasts up tight against the silk, delineating the straining pink buds already eager for his attention.
‘How do you know?’ Lizzie prompted unevenly, mortified by his absolute certainty of his welcome.
‘Your exquisite body is screaming the message at me…’ Sebasten parted the edges of the shirt with the care of a connoisseur and bent his arrogant dark head to graze his teeth over a pale pink swollen nipple.
Her entire body jackknifed up towards his, a low, moaning cry breaking from her lips.
With a groan, Sebasten lifted his head again. ‘Different rules this time. You lie still…if you move or cry out, I stop.’
‘S-sorry?’ she stammered.
‘You get too excited too fast.’
‘That’s wrong?’ Lizzie had turned scarlet.
A shimmering smile flashed across Sebasten’s lean, bronzed features. ‘I want an excuse to torture you with sensual pleasure…give me it.’
A quiver of wild, wanton anticipation sizzled through Lizzie. ‘I’ll just lie back and—er—think of painting then—’
‘It’s going to be a lot more exciting than watching paint dry,’ Sebasten promised with a husky laugh of amusement, scanning her expressive face.
And she found out that it was within minutes. The tension of struggling to stay still and silent no matter what he did electrified her with heat and desperate craving. He shaped her tender breasts, toyed with the throbbing peaks until every muscle in her shivering length was whip-taut and then switched his attentions to other places that she had never dreamt had even the tiniest erotic capability. But she soon found out otherwise. Sebasten ran his mouth down her spine and she was reduced to a jelly. He sucked her fingers and she was ready to flare up in flames, wild, helpless, terrified he might stop as he had threatened, turn off that wholly seductive, enslaving flow of endless exciting pleasure.
‘You’re doing really good,’ Sebasten groaned and it was an effort to find the words in English as a telling shudder racked his big, powerful frame. The challenge he had set her from the pinnacle of his own bedroom supremacy was gnawing with increasing savagery and ego-zapping speed at his own self-control.
Lizzie gave him a smile old as Eve, leant up and ran the tip of her tongue in provocation and encouragement along his sensual lower lip and he growled and pushed her back against the pillows and drove his mouth down on hers with raw, hungry demand. Literal fireworks went off inside her. She was with him every step of the way, ecstatic at the change of pace that matched her own fevered longing and impatience.
‘I want you…now!’ Sebasten ground out hoarsely, hauling her under him with an incredible lack of cool when she had not the smallest intention of arguing.
And then he was there where she had so needed him to be, coursing into her and burying himself deep. Her climax was instant, shattering. Shorn of all control, she was thrown to a fierce peak and then she splintered into a million shellshocked pieces in an experience so intense she was left in a daze.
‘You’re a lost cause,’ Sebasten bit out with a sudden laugh and then he kissed her, slow and tender, and her heart gave a wild spin as though it were a globe on a hanger.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered but that was the exact moment that she realised that she was in love, head over heels, fathoms-deep in love as she had never been before.
‘Don’t be…you’re incredible in bed,’ Sebasten assured her, reminding himself that tomorrow was another day to reinstate restraint before he took her to heaven and back again.
Exactly a fortnight later, Lizzie experienced her first day at work.
Her concentration was not all that might have been: Sebasten was due back that afternoon from his second trip abroad since she had met him. In the intervening weeks, he had only managed to see her twice, once meeting her for dinner when he was actually en route to the airport, and on the second occasion taking her to the races to help him entertain a group of foreign businessmen in his private box. As neither event had entailed anything in the way of privacy, Lizzie was counting the hours until she could see him again and could indeed think of nothing else but Sebasten.
True love, she recognised ruefully, had taken a long time to hit her. What she had felt for Connor had just been a practice run for the main event. Connor had damaged her pride, her self-confidence and her blind faith in others more than her heart. With Sebasten, she had discovered an entire new layer of more tender feelings. She worried about the incredible hours he seemed to work. She cherished every tiny thing she found out about him but Sebasten could be stingier than Scrooge when it came to talking about himself. His different moods fascinated her, for the cool front he wore concealed a volatile temperament controlled by rigid self-discipline. He was full of contradictions and complexities and every minute she spent with him, even on the phone, plunged her deeper into her obsession with him.
Even so, the poor start she contrived to make at CI on her first day annoyed and frustrated her.
‘A couple of little points,’ Milly Sharpe, the office manager on the sixth floor, a whip-thin redhead in a navy business suit, advanced with compressed lips. ‘Getting off at the wrong tube station is not an acceptable excuse for being late. Please ensure that you arrive at the correct time tomorrow. Did you receive a copy of the CI dress code?’
Lizzie almost winced. ‘Yes.’
‘The code favours the darker colours, suits—longer skirts or trousers—and sensible shoes. The key word is formal, not casual.’
There was a pause while a speaking appraisal was angled over Lizzie’s fashionable green skirt worn with a matching fitted top that sported faux fur at cuff and neckline and the very high sandals on her slender feet. Lizzie reddened and wondered if the woman honestly believed that she had the wherewithal to rush out and buy a complete new wardrobe. She had never bought dark colours, had never owned sensible shoes that were not of the walking-boot variety and her trouser collection consisted of jeans, chinos and pure silk beach wear.
‘I would suggest that you also do something with your hair. It’s a little too long to be left safely loose when you’re working with office equipment.’
It was worse than being back at school, Lizzie thought in horror, waiting to be told to take off her earrings and removed her nail polish as well.
By the time Lizzie was shown to the switchboard and taken through a bewildering number of operations while various messages flashed up lightning-fast on the screen in front of her, sheer nervous tension had killed her ability to concentrate on the directions she was being given or remember them.
The hours that followed were a nightmare for her. She learnt that if she pressed the wrong button, she created havoc. She put calls through to lines that were engaged, cut people off in the middle of conversations, connected calls to the wrong extensions, lost others in an endless loop which saw them routed round the building and back to her again. The amount of abuse she got was a colossal shock to her system. Furious callers raged down the line at her and several staff appeared in person to remonstrate with her.
‘A switchboard operator must remain calm,’ Milly Sharpe reproved when Lizzie was as wrung out as a rag, jumping and flinching at the mere sight of an incoming call and ducking behind the screen if anybody walked past in case they were about to direct a volley of complaints at her.
She was weak with relief when she was switched to photocopying duties after lunch. Although the machine’s sensors gave her a real fright by buzzing into sudden life the instant she approached, she felt better able to cope. In addition, something more than mere nerves was afflicting her: the longer she stood, the more light-headed she felt and her queasy tummy had put her off eating any lunch. She prayed that she was not developing summer flu.
Having access to a computer that was linked to the colour photocopier, while she waited for the copier to finish printing she succumbed to the temptation of doing an online search for information on Sebasten. But the very site she found brought up a to-die-for portrait photo of Sebasten and she never got any further. Her heartrate quickening at first glimpse of that lean, strong face, she drank in his image with intense appreciation. The stress of her difficult day seemed to evaporate as she hit the print button to get a copy of that photo to take home.
When more than one photo began to pile up in the copier, she did not initially panic. In fact she just thought she would have a photo for every handbag, would indeed not need to go an hour without a frequent fix of studying Sebasten. However, as the pile began to mount beyond the number of bags that even she possessed she tried to cancel the print run. But nothing she did would persuade the wretched machine to cease the operation. As luck would have it, Milly Sharpe arrived at that point.
Scooping up the first picture of Sebasten, she held it up like an exhibit at a murder trial, icy condemnation in her challenging gaze. ‘Where did you get this from?’
‘I only meant to print one—’
‘You mean…there’s more than one?’ the redhead demanded and swooped on the fat pile in disbelief, checking the print run with brows that vanished below her fringe. ‘You have printed four hundred copies of this photo?’
Lizzie reddened to her hairline, feeling like a kid caught languishing over a secret pin-up. ‘I’m really very sorry—’
‘Have you any idea how much this special photographic paper costs per single sheet?’
Lizzie was shattered to be informed that she had wasted a couple of hundred pounds of very expensive stationery.
‘And on company time!’ The other woman’s voice shook with outrage. ‘I would also add that I consider it the height of impertinence to print photos of Mr Contaxis. I think it would be best if you spent the rest of the afternoon tidying up the stationery store room across the corridor.’
Just when Lizzie was wondering why it should be ‘impertinent’ to print images of Sebasten, a wave of such overpowering nausea assailed her that she was forced to bolt for the cloakroom. After a nasty bout of sickness she felt so dizzy that she had to hang on to the vanity counter before she felt steady enough on her feet to freshen up. While she was doing that, a slight, youthful blonde came in.
‘I’m Rosemary. I’m to check up on you and show you to the sick room,’ she explained with a friendlier smile than Lizzie had so far received from any of the female staff.
‘I’m fine now,’ Lizzie asserted in haste, thinking that if she ended up in the sick room on top of such a disastrous work performance, her first day would definitely be her last day of employment in the building.
‘You’re still very pale. Don’t let Milly Sharpe get to you,’ the chatty blonde advised. ‘If you ask me, she’s just got a chip on her shoulder about how you got your job.’
Lizzie frowned. ‘How…I got my job?’
Rosemary shrugged a carefully noncommittal shoulder. ‘There’s this mad rumour flying round that you didn’t come in by the usual selection process but got strings pulled for you by someone influential on the executive floor—’
Lizzie coloured in dismay. ‘That’s not true—’
‘The average temp doesn’t wear delectable designer suits either and we’re all killing ourselves over what you did with the photocopier,’ Rosemary confided with an appreciative giggle as they left the cloakroom. ‘Four hundred copies of our hunky pin-up boss, Sebasten. I bet Milly takes them home and papers her bedroom walls with them! Glad you’re feeling better.’
‘Boss?’ Lizzie queried that astonishing label several seconds too late, for the blonde had already disappeared into one of the offices and Lizzie was left alone, fizzing with alarm and confusion.