Mother's Day Treats

CHAPTER SEVEN

LIZZIE didn’t cry that night: she was reeling with so much shock and reaction she was exhausted and she lay down on her bed still clothed and fell asleep.

After only a few hours, she wakened to a bleak sense of emptiness and terrible pain. She had fallen in love with a sadist. Sebasten had got under her skin when she was weak and vulnerable and hurt her beyond relief. Yet he was also the father of her baby. Her mind shied away from that daunting fact and her thoughts refused to stay in one place.

If Sebasten was Connor’s half-brother that meant that the still attractive Ingrid must have had an affair with Sebasten’s father. A very secret affair it must have been, for Connor himself when she asked had told Lizzie a different story about the circumstances of his birth.

‘Ingrid met up with an old flame and the relationship had fizzled out again before she even knew I was on the way,’ he had confided casually. ‘He was an army officer. She did plan to tell him when he came back from his posting abroad but he was killed in a military helicopter crash shortly before I was born.’

Had that tale been a lie? Her brow indented as she dragged herself out of bed to look into her empty fridge. What was the point of thinking about Connor and the blood tie that Sebasten had claimed? She needed to keep busy, she told herself dully. She also had to eat to stay healthy, which meant that she had to shop even when the very thought of food made her feel queasy. In addition, she reminded herself, she had to make an appointment with the doctor.

Without ever acknowledging that she was still so deep in shock from the events of the previous twenty-four hours that she could barely function, Lizzie drove herself through that day. She got a cancellation appointment at the doctor’s surgery. She learned that she was indeed pregnant and when she asked how that might have happened when she had been taking contraceptive pills was asked if she missed taking any or had been sick. Instantly she recalled that first night with Sebasten when she had been ill, stilling a shiver at the wounding memories threatening her self-discipline, she fell silent. Concentration was impossible. Behind every thought lurked the spectre of her own grief.

From the medical centre she trekked to the supermarket, where she wandered in an aimless fashion, selecting odd items that had more appeal than others, but she returned to her bedsit and discovered that she had chosen nothing that would make a proper meal. She grilled some toast, forced herself to nibble two corners of it before having to flee for the bathroom and be ill.

Sebasten rose on Sunday with a hangover unlike any he had ever suffered. He had virtually no memory of Saturday. Any thought of Lizzie was the equivalent of receiving a punch to the solar plexus but he couldn’t get her haunting image out of his mind. Was it guilt? What else could it be? When had any Contaxis ever sunk low enough to contemplate taking revenge on a woman? What the hell had got into him that he had even considered such a course of action? And now, when he was genuinely worried about Lizzie’s state of mind, how could he check up on her?

Over breakfast, he flipped open the gossip page of the Sunday Globe and any desire to eat receded as he read the startling headline: ‘CONTAXIS 0, DENTON 10.’

For all of his adult life, Sebasten had been adored and fêted and flattered by the gossip-column fraternity but Patsy Hewitt’s gleeful account of events at his dinner party was very much of the poison-pen variety and directed at him. She made him sound like a total arrogant bastard and recommended that Lizzie keep looking until she found a man worthy of her, a piece of advice which sent Sebasten straight into an irrational rage.

Of course Lizzie wasn’t about to race off on the hunt for another man! She was in love with him, wasn’t she? But since their affair was over, ought he not to be keen for her to find a replacement for him? Just thinking about Lizzie in another man’s bed drove Sebasten, who ate a healthy breakfast every morning without fail, from the breakfast table before he had had anything more than a single cup of black coffee.

He went out for a ride, returned filthy and soaked after a sudden downpour and got into the shower. After that, he tried to work but he could not concentrate. Why shouldn’t he be concerned about Lizzie? He asked himself defensively then. Wasn’t he human? And why shouldn’t he give her the Mercedes and the diamonds back? After all, what was he to do with them? She was having a hard time and possibly getting back the possessions which she had been forced to sell would cheer her up a little.

As for her father, Maurice Denton, well, Sebasten was starting to cherish a very low opinion of a man he had never met. Family were supposed to stick together through thick and thin and forgive mistakes. Instead the wretched man had deprived his daughter of all means of support when it was entirely his fault that she was quite unequal to the task of supporting herself in the style to which her shortsighted parent had encouraged her to become accustomed.

Inflamed on Lizzie’s behalf by that reflection, Sebasten snatched up his car keys and arranged for the Mercedes to be driven back to London to be delivered. He could not wait long enough for his own car to be driven round to the front of the house and he startled his staff by striding through the rear entrance to the garages and extracting his Lamborghini for himself.

After attending church, guiltily aware that it was her first visit since she had left home, Lizzie wondered why her father and Felicity were absent from their usual pew and realised that they must be spending the weekend at the cottage. Buying a newspaper before she went back to the bedsit, Lizzie read what Patsy Hewitt had written about that evening at Pomeroy Place and assumed that the journalist had decided to take a feminist stance for a change. She frowned when she perused the final cliff-hanging comment that advised readers to watch that space for a bigger story soon to break and then assumed that it could be nothing to do with either her or Sebasten.

Studying Sebasten’s lean, dark, devastating face in the photo beside the article, her eyes stung like mad. Angry with herself, she crushed the newspaper up in a convulsive gesture and rammed it in the bin. Then she opened the post that she had ignored the day before and paled at the sight of a payment request from an exclusive boutique where she had a monthly account. She had barely had enough cash left in her bank account to cover travel expenses and eat until the end of the month, when she would receive her first pay cheque. She would have to ask for a little more time to clear the bill. Furthermore, she would have to exert bone and sinew to try and find part-time evening or weekend employment so that she could keep up her financial commitments.

The first Lizzie knew of the mysterious reappearance of the Mercedes she had sold was the arrival of a chauffeur at her door. ‘Miss Denton…your car keys,’ he said, handing them to her.

‘Sorry?’ Lizzie stared at him in bewilderment. ‘I don’t own a car.’

‘Compliments of Mr Contaxis. The Merc is parked outside.’

Before Lizzie even got her breath back, the man had clattered back down the stairs again.

Compliments of Mr Contaxis? What on earth was going on? In a daze, Lizzie left her room and went outside. There sat the same black glossy Mercedes four-wheel-drive which her father had bought her for her twenty-second birthday. She couldn’t credit the evidence of her own eyes and she walked round it in slow motion, her mind in a feverish whirl of incomprehension.

Where had Sebasten got her car from and why would he give it back to her? Why would a guy who had dumped her only thirty-six hours earlier suddenly present her with a car worth thousands of pounds? Oh, yes, she knew that—technically speaking—she had dumped him first but in her heart she accepted that she had only got the courage to do that because she had known that he intended to do it to her if she did not.

Having reclaimed the diamonds from the safe in his town house, Sebasten arrived on Lizzie’s doorstep, feeling much better than he had felt earlier in the day, indeed, feeling very much that he was doing the right thing.

Lizzie opened the door. The sheer vibrant, gorgeous appeal of Sebasten in sleek designer garments that exuded class and expense exploded on her with predictable effect. Just seeing him hurt. Seeing him dare to almost smile was also the cruel equivalent of a knife plunging beneath her tender skin. Even an almost smile was an insult, a symptom of his ruthless, cruel, nasty character and his essential detachment from the rest of humanity.

Lizzie dealt him a seething glance. ‘You get that car taken away right now!’ she told him. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re playing at but I don’t want it.’

Engaged in looking Lizzie over in a head-to-toe careful appraisal that left not an inch of her tall, shapely figure unchecked and thinking that he might like the way turquoise set off her beautiful hair but that she did something remarkable for the colour red as well, Sebasten froze like a fox cornered in a chicken coop and attempted to regroup.

‘I don’t want your car either…it’s no use to me,’ he pointed out in fast recovery, closing the door and, without even thinking about what he was doing, leaning his big, powerful length back against that door so that she couldn’t open it again.

‘Exactly what are you doing with a car that I sold?’ Lizzie demanded shakily, temper flashing through her in direct proportion to her disturbed emotions.

‘I bought it back for you weeks ago…as well as these.’ Sebasten set down the little pile of jewellery boxes on the table. ‘I had you watched the first week by one of my bodyguards and I knew everything that you did.’

‘You had me watched?’ Lizzie echoed in even deeper shock and recoil as she flipped open a couple of lids to confirm the contents and the sparkle of diamonds greeted her. ‘You bought my jewellery as well? Why?’

Sebasten had been hoping to evade that question. ‘At the time I planned to win your trust and impress you with my generosity.’

‘You utter bastard,’ Lizzie framed with an agony of reproach in her clear green gaze. ‘So that’s why you offered me the use of an apartment! You thought you could tempt me with your rotten money. Well, you were way off beam then and you’re even more out of line now—’

‘I just want you to take back what’s yours,’ Sebasten slotted in with fierce determination.

‘Why? So that you can feel better? So that you can buy your way out of having a conscience about what you did to me?’ Lizzie condemned in a shaking undertone. ‘Don’t you even have the sensitivity to see that you’re insulting me?’

‘How…am I insulting you?’ Sebasten queried between gritted teeth, for he was in no way receiving the response he had expected and he wondered why women always had to make simple matters complicated. He was trying to make her life easier. What was wrong with that?

‘By making the assumption that I’m the kind of woman who would accept expensive gifts from a guy like you! How dare you do that? Do you think I was your mistress or something that you have to pay me off?’ Lizzie was so worked up with hurt and anger that her voice rose to a shrill crescendo.

‘No, but I never bought you a single thing during the whole time we were together,’ Sebasten pointed out, one half of his brain urging him to take her in his arms and soothe her, the other half fully engaged in stamping out that dangerous temptation to touch her again.

‘I suppose that’s how you get so many women…you pay them with gifts for putting up with you!’ Lizzie slung fiercely, fighting back the tears prickling at the backs of her eyes.

Determined not to react to that base accusation, Sebasten was staring down at the bill from the boutique that lay on the table and then studying the little column of figures added up on the sheet of paper beside it. Was she that broke?

‘I could give you a loan. You would repay it when you could,’ he heard himself say.

Lizzie wrenched open the door and said unsteadily. ‘Go away…’

‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’ Sebasten hovered, full of angry conflict and growing frustration. ‘I came here with good motivations and no intention of upsetting you.’

Lizzie scooped up the jewel boxes and planted them in his hands along with the car keys. ‘And don’t you dare leave that car outside. I can’t feed a parking meter for it on my income.’

‘Lizzie—?’

‘You stay away from me!’

‘All I wanted to know was that you were OK!’ Sebasten growled.

‘Of course I’m OK. A visit from you is as good as a cure!’ Lizzie hurled, her quivering voice breaking on that last assurance.

Sebasten departed. He should have thought about her not being able to afford to run a car, he reflected, choosing to focus on that rather than anything else she had said. However, the disturbing image of her distraught face and the shadows that lay like bruises beneath her eyes travelled with him. She didn’t look well. Was he responsible for that? For the first time since childhood Sebasten felt helpless, and it was terrifying. He could not believe how stubborn and proud she was. He saw Lizzie in terms of warmth and sunlight, softness and affection, and then he tried to equate that belated acknowledgement with the character that Ingrid had endowed her with.

Lizzie threw herself face down on the bed and sobbed into the pillow until she was empty of tears. What must her distress be doing to her baby? Guilt cut deep into her. She rested a hand against her tummy and offered the tiny being inside her a silent apology for her lack of control and told herself that she would do better in the future.

As for Sebasten, did she seem so pitiful that he even had to take her pride away from her by offering her a loan as well as the car and the diamonds? Why had she ever told him that she loved him? And why was he acting the way he was when all that she had ever known about him suggested that a declaration of love ought to drive him fast in the opposite direction? How dared he come and see her and make her feel all over again what she had lost when he wasn’t worth having in the first place?

When was she planning to tell him about the baby? She drifted off to weary sleep on the admission that she was not yet strong enough to face another confrontational scene.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ON MONDAY morning, Sebasten thought his personal staff were all very quiet in his radius and he assumed that the Sunday Globe gossip column had done the rounds of the office.

He swore that he would not think about Lizzie. At eleven he found himself accessing her personnel file. When he discovered that she had been reprimanded for the printing of four hundred copies of a photo of himself, all hope of concentration was vanquished. He was annoyed that he liked the idea of those photos.

Sebasten did not believe in love. He was crazy about Lizzie’s body…and her smile…and her hair. He had enjoyed the way she chattered too. She talked a lot, which in the past was a trait which had irritated him in other women, but Lizzie’s chatter was unusually interesting. He had also liked the easy way she would reach out and touch him; nothing wrong with that either, was there? It didn’t mean he was infatuated or anything of that nature, merely that he could still appreciate her good points.

On the other side of the equation, she was a rampant liar and she must have slept with his half-brother and he could not work out how he had managed to block that awareness out for so long. At the same time, he could no longer credit the dramatic contention that Lizzie had driven Connor to his death. Ingrid had needed someone to blame. But Connor had got behind the wheel of his car, drunk. That car crash had been the tragic result of his half-brother’s recklessness and love of high speed.

At that point, without any prior thought on the subject that he was aware of, Sebasten decided to settle that outstanding bill he had seen in Lizzie’s bedsit. She couldn’t prevent him from doing that, could she?

That same day, Lizzie went into work and found herself the target of covert stares and embarrassing whispers. Only then did she recall the article that had been in the newspaper the previous day. In a saccharine-sweet enquiry, Milly Sharpe asked her where she would like to work and Lizzie reddened to her hairline.

‘Any place,’ Lizzie answered tautly and ended up at a desk in a corner where she was given nothing like enough to keep her occupied.

She saw then that continuing employment in Sebasten’s company could well be less than comfortable for her. During her lunch break, she called into the employment agency across the road from the CI building and enjoyed a far more productive chat with one of the recruitment consultants there than she had received at the establishment which Sebasten had recommended a month earlier.

‘You have a great deal of insider knowledge and experience in the PR field,’ the consultant commented. ‘I’m sure we can place you in a PR firm. It would be a junior position to begin with, and of course you’re entitled to basic maternity leave, but if you prove yourself you could gain quite rapid advancement.’

On Tuesday, Sebasten took sudden note of how very long it had been since he had staged a meeting with the accounts team on the sixth floor and he instructed his secretary to make good that oversight. That Lizzie worked on that floor was not a fact he allowed to enter his mind once. On Wednesday, he was infuriated by the announcement that the accounts meeting could not be staged until Friday, as key personnel were away on a training course.

On Thursday, Ingrid phoned Sebasten and demanded to know if it was true that he had been seeing Liza Denton. Sebasten said it was but that it was a private matter not open to discussion, and if Ingrid’s shock at that snub was perceptible Sebasten was equally disconcerted by the very real anger that leapt through him when the older woman then made an adverse comment about Lizzie. On Friday, Sebasten arrived at the office even earlier than was his norm, cleared his desk by nine, strode about the top floor unsettling his entire staff and checked his watch on average of once every ten minutes.

On the sixth floor, Lizzie’s week had felt endless to her. She was craving Sebasten as though he were a life-saving drug and hating herself for being so weak. She knew she had to tell him that she was pregnant, but while she still felt so vulnerable she was reluctant to deal with that issue. Mid-week, during the extended lunch break she hastily arranged, she had an interview for a position with a PR firm but had no idea whether or not she was in with a chance. On Friday morning, Milly Sharpe greeted her arrival at work with a strange little smile and put her on the reception desk.

When Sebasten strode out of the lift, the first person he saw was Lizzie. Lizzie, clad in a yellow dress as bright as sunshine. He collided with her startled green eyes and walked right past the senior accounts executive waiting to greet him without even noticing the man.

‘Lizzie…’ Sebasten said.

Taken aback by his sudden appearance, Lizzie nodded in slow motion as though to confirm her identity while her gaze welded to him with electrified intensity. His sheer physical impact on her drove out all else. She drank him in, heart racing at the sudden buzz in the atmosphere and there was not a thought in her head that was worthy of an angry, bitter woman. His luxuriant black hair gleamed below the lights and her fingers tingled with longing. His brilliant golden eyes, semi-screened by his spiky lashes, set up a chain reaction deep down inside her, awakening the wicked hunger that melted her in secret places and made her tremble.

‘So…’ His mind a wasteland, his hormones reacting with a dangerous enthusiasm that made lingering an impossibility, Sebasten snatched in a deep, sharp breath. ‘How are you?’

‘OK…’ Lizzie managed to frame after considerable effort to come up with that single word.

‘I have a meeting…’ Sebasten swung away, her image refreshed to vibrance in his memory.

As he strode down the corridor, Lizzie blinked and emerged from the spell he had cast. A slow, deep, painful tide of colour washed over her fair complexion. A burst of stifled giggles sounded from the direction of Milly Sharpe’s office, which overlooked Reception, and her heart sank. Had she somehow shown herself up? Well, what else could she have done when she had just sat staring at Sebasten like a lovesick schoolgirl? Squirming in an agony of self-loathing and shame, Lizzie decided she would not be around when Sebasten emerged from his meeting again.

That afternoon the recruitment agency called and informed her that Robbins, the PR firm, were keen for her to start work with them the following week. Deep relief filled Lizzie to overflowing and she accepted the offer. Away from Contaxis International, she would be better able to put her life together again and possibly it would be easier to face telling Sebasten what he would eventually have to be told.

On Friday evening, for the sixth night in a row, Sebasten stayed home and brooded. He didn’t want to go out and he didn’t want company.

Lizzie called her father for a chat. He seemed very preoccupied and apologised several times for losing the thread of the conversation. She asked what he had decided to do about Mrs Baines, the housekeeper, whom Felicity had wanted dismissed.

Maurice Denton released a heavy sigh. ‘I offered Mrs Baines a generous settlement in recognition of the number of years she’d worked for us. She accepted it but she was very bitter and walked out the same day. Felicity was delighted but I must confess that the whole business left a nasty taste in my mouth.’

‘How is Felicity?’

‘Very edgy…’ the older man admitted with palpable concern. ‘She bursts into tears if I even mention the baby and when I suggested that I ought to have a word with the gynaecologist she’s been attending, she became hysterical!’

Lizzie raised her brows and winced in dismay. Was her stepmother heading for a nervous breakdown? All over again, she felt the guilty burden of the secret knowledge she was withholding from her father. Then she wondered how Maurice Denton, never the most liberal of men and very set in his traditional values, would react to a daughter giving birth to an illegitimate child and paled. Such an event might well sever her relationship with her father forever…

On Sunday morning, Sebasten again lifted the Sunday Globe, which he had always regarded as a rubbish newspaper aimed at intellectually-challenged readers. However, he only wanted to check out that Patsy Hewitt had not picked up any other information relating either to himself or Lizzie. The front page was adorned with the usual lurid headline offering the unsavoury details of some sleazy affair, he noted, and only at that point did he recognise that the article was adorned with a photo of Connor.

And Sebasten was gripped to that double-page spread inside the paper with a spellbound intensity that would have delighted Patsy Hewitt, who had found ample opportunity to employ her trademark venom after doing her homework on Lizzie’s stepmother, Felicity Denton. Mrs Baines, the Denton housekeeper, had sold her insider story of Felicity’s affair for a handsome price and Connor, even departed, still had sufficient news value to make the front page with his once tangled lovelife.

Lizzie was still in bed asleep when her mobile phone began ringing. Getting out of bed to answer it, she was bemused to realise that it was a former friend calling to express profuse apologies for misjudging her over Connor.

‘What are you talking about?’ she mumbled.

‘Haven’t you seen this morning’s Sunday Globe yet?’

Learning that Mrs Baines had sold her story of Felicity’s affair with Connor shook Lizzie rigid. No longer did she need to wonder why her stepmother had been so eager to get rid of the family housekeeper: Felicity had been justifiably afraid that Mrs Baines knew too much. Had Connor visited the Denton home as well? Lizzie wrinkled her nose with distaste. The housekeeper had probably known about that affair long before she herself did.