Mother's Day Treats

Over an hour later, Lizzie arrived at her family home to find it besieged by the Press. A half-dozen cameras flashed in her direction and she had to fight her way past to get indoors. Her father was sitting behind closed curtains in a state of severe shock.

CHAPTER NINE

‘FELICITY walked out late last night. A friend in the media phoned to warn her about the story appearing in the Sunday Globe,’ Maurice Denton shared in a shattered tone as Lizzie paced the room, too restive to stay still. ‘Felicity isn’t coming back. She made it clear that she wants a divorce.’

‘But…but what about the baby?’ Lizzie pressed, disconcerted by the speed and dexterity of her stepmother’s departure from the marital home.

The older man regarded her with hollow eyes. In the space of days, he seemed to have aged. ‘There is no baby…’

Lizzie’s mouth fell wide. ‘You mean, Felicity’s lost it…oh, no!’

‘There never was a baby. She wasn’t pregnant. It was a crazy lie aimed at persuading you not to tell me about her affair with Connor.’ Her parent shook his greying head with a dulled wonderment that he could not conceal. ‘Felicity thought that if she tried, she could get pregnant easily and then pretend she’d mixed up her dates. But it didn’t happen: she didn’t conceive. As time went on and she was forced to pretend to go to pre-natal appointments she decided that she would have to fake a miscarriage…thank heaven, I was spared that melodrama!’

‘Do you think…er…Felicity’s having a breakdown?’ Lizzie suggested worriedly. ‘I mean, maybe it was one of those false pregnancies that come from genuine longing for a baby—’

‘No.’ Maurice Denton’s rebuttal was flat, bitter. ‘Last night, she informed me that she didn’t even like children and that she was fed up not only with the whole insane pretence that she had foisted on us all but also sick and tired of living with a man old enough to be her father! She wasn’t even sorry for the damage she did to you, never mind me!’

Lizzie flinched. ‘I’m so sorry…’

‘Perhaps when a man of fifty-five marries a woman more than thirty years younger he deserves what he gets. Why didn’t you come to me about her and the Morgan boy?’

‘I…I told myself I couldn’t tell you for the baby’s sake…but possibly, I just couldn’t face the responsibility.’ Listening to the mayhem of raised voices outside the front door, Lizzie said gently, ‘Look, maybe the reporters will go away if I make a statement to them…what do you think?’

‘Do as you think best,’ Maurice Denton advised heavily. ‘Felicity is gone and it can only be Felicity or you that those vultures are interested in. I’ve never had much of a public profile.’

Lizzie went outside to address the assembled journalist and parry some horrendous questions of the lowest possible taste. ‘Was Morgan sleeping with both you and your stepmother?’

‘Connor and I were only ever friends,’ Lizzie declared with complete calm.

‘What about you and Sebasten Contaxis?’ she was asked.

‘Oh, I’m not friends with him!’ Lizzie asserted without hesitation and there was a burst of appreciative laughter at that response.

It was only later while she was making a snack for her father that she truly appreciated that her own name had been cleared. Would Sebasten find out? Sooner or later, he would discover that he had targeted the wrong woman. How would he react? But why should she care? What he had confessed to doing was beyond all forgiveness. She looked into the fridge, where a jar of sun-dried tomatoes sat, and her tastebuds watered. Sun-dried tomatoes followed by ice-cream. She shut the fridge again in haste, unnerved by recent food cravings that struck her as bizarre.

An hour later, Sebasten sprang out of his Lamborghini outside the Morgan household in the leafy suburbs. A lingering solitary cameraman took a picture of him. Waving back the bodyguards ready to leap into action and prevent that photo being taken, Sebasten smiled. Sebasten had been smiling ever since he read Patsy Hewitt’s hatchet job on Lizzie’s stepmother. The wicked stepmother, a typecast figure and a perfect match to Sebasten’s own prejudices. He could not imagine how he had contrived not to register that Lizzie’s father had a very much younger wife who bore more than a passing resemblance to the evil queen in Snow White. He could not imagine how it had not once crossed his mind that Lizzie might be engaged in protecting a member of her own family.

‘Lizzie’s not friends with you, mate,’ the cameraman warned Sebasten.

‘Watch this space,’ Sebasten advised with all the sizzling, lethal confidence that lay at the heart of his forceful character. He just felt happy, crazy happy, and all he could think about was reclaiming Lizzie.

‘She’s a gutsy girl…I wouldn’t count my chickens.’

Sebasten just laughed and leant on the doorbell and rattled the door knocker for good measure.

CHAPTER TEN

IT WAS very unfortunate for Sebasten that Lizzie had watched his arrival from the safe, shadowy depths of the dining room.

Even at a distance, the slashing brilliance of his smile rocked Lizzie where she stood. He was so gorgeous but that he should dare to smile, sure of his welcome, it seemed, before he even saw her, lacerated her pride, fired her resentment and drove home the suspicion that he lacked any sense of remorse. He was tough, ruthless and hard and no relationship with Sebasten would ever go any place where she wanted it to go, she acknowledged with agonised regret. He had already spelt that out in terms no sane woman could ignore.

Hadn’t she already got through the first week of being without him? She would get over him eventually, wouldn’t she? It dawned on her that on some strange inner level she had not the slightest doubt that Sebasten was about to suggest a reconciliation and that shook her. But once she announced that she had already conceived his child and in addition had every intention of raising that child, Sebasten would surrender any such notion fast. So really, what was she worrying about?

Sebasten had killed his smile by the time Lizzie opened the door. ‘Come in…’

‘I suggest we go out, so that we can talk,’ Sebasten murmured levelly. ‘I imagine your family aren’t in the mood for visitors today.’

‘Only my father is here and he’s having a nap in the library.’ A quiver assailing her at his proximity, Lizzie pushed wide the door into the drawing room.

‘Where’s the…’ Sebasten bit back the blunt five-letter word brimming on his lips in the very nick of time and substituted, ‘your stepmother?’

‘Already gone,’ Lizzie admitted, tight-mouthed with tension. ‘They’ll be getting a divorce.’

‘Your father’s got his head screwed on,’ Sebasten asserted with an outstanding absence of sensitivity. ‘Booting her straight out the door was the right thing to do.’

‘Actually Felicity left under her own steam,’ Lizzie declared, making the humiliating connection that she had once been booted out of Sebasten’s life with the same efficiency that he was so keen to commend.

‘Even better…she won’t collect half so much in the divorce settlement,’ Sebasten imparted with authority.

‘Right at this moment, my father has more to think about than his bank balance!’ Lizzie hissed in outrage. ‘He’s devastated.’

‘I was thinking of you, not your father. Not very pleasant for you, having to put up with a woman like that in the family,’ Sebasten contended, allowing himself to study her taut, pale face, the strain in her unhappy eyes, and then removing his attention again before he was tempted into making the cardinal error of a premature assumption that forgiveness was on the table and dragging her into his arms. ‘Why the blazes didn’t you spill the beans on your stepmother weeks ago?’

‘I believed she was pregnant with my little brother or sister…only it turns out now that she was lying about that to protect herself and keep me quiet.’ A tight little laugh fell from Lizzie’s lips as she thought of the baby that she carried. It seemed so ironic that the conception which Felicity must initially have been desperate to achieve should have come Lizzie’s way instead.

‘It sounds like she was off the wall. If it’s any consolation, Ingrid Morgan is shattered too and feeling very guilty about the way she treated you,’ Sebasten revealed. ‘She called me this morning.’

‘I don’t hold any spite against Connor’s mother.’ Taut as a bowstring, Lizzie hovered by the window.

‘I don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me the whole truth. If you had named your father’s wife, I would never have disbelieved your explanation and I could have been trusted with that information.’

Lizzie noted without great surprise that Sebasten was playing hardball and landing her with a share of the blame for his refusal to have the smallest faith in her. ‘I’m not so sure of that. You and your old friend Ingrid wanted your pound of flesh, regardless of who got hurt in the process!’

Sebasten did not like the morbid tone of that response at all. ‘I misjudged you and I’ll make it up to you.’

‘Was that an apology?’

‘Theo mou…give me time to get there on my own!’ Sebasten urged in a sudden volatile surge that disconcerted her and let her appreciate that he was not quite as cool, calm and collected as he appeared. ‘I am sorry, truly, deeply sorry.’

‘I can’t be,’ Lizzie confided shakily.

‘I’m not asking you to be sorry,’ Sebasten pointed out in some bewilderment, wondering whether the shine of tears in her eyes was a promising sign that the very first humble apology he had made to a woman in his entire life had had the right effect.

‘You see, I can’t be sorry that you misjudged me because if I hadn’t found that out, I would never have discovered what a ruthless, conscience-free louse you are,’ Lizzie completed in a wobbly but driven voice.

Sebasten spread lean brown hands in a natural expression of appeal. ‘But I’ll never be like that with you again,’ he protested. ‘I want you back in my life.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll find another dumb woman to take my place,’ Lizzie snapped out brittly and turned her back on him altogether while she fought to rein back the tears threatening her.

‘Yes, I could if I wanted to but there’s one small problem…I only want you.’

In his bed, that was all, Lizzie reflected painfully, her throat thick with tears. She forced herself back round to face him again and tilted her chin. ‘I think you’ll give up on that ambition when I tell you what I have to tell you.’

‘Nothing could make me give up on you,’ Sebasten swore, moving forward and reaching for her without warning to tug her forward into his arms.

Lizzie only meant to stay there a second but Sebasten had come to the conclusion that action was likely to be much more effective than words that appeared to be getting him precisely nowhere. He framed her flushed face with two lean hands and gazed down into her distraught green eyes. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he was moved to demand in reproach. ‘I will never hurt you again.’

Trembling all over, Lizzie parted dry lips and muttered, ‘I’m pregnant…’

Pregnant? That announcement fell on a male quite unprepared for that kind of news. Sebasten tensed, not even sure he had heard her say what she had just said. ‘Pregnant?’ he echoed, his hands dropping from her.

‘Yes,’ Lizzie confirmed chokily.

‘Pregnant…’ Sebasten said again as though it was a word that had never come his way before and innate caution was already telling him to shut up and not say another single sentence. But he was so shattered by the concept of Lizzie being pregnant that not all the caution in the world could keep him quiet. ‘Is it Connor’s?’ he shot at her rawly, savage jealousy gripping him in an instant vice.

Watching the flare of volatile gold in his stunning eyes, the fierce cast of his superb bone-structure, Lizzie was backing away from him and she only stilled when her shoulders met the china cabinet behind her. ‘No, it is not your half-brother’s child. Even Connor was not low enough to try to get me into bed while he was making mad, passionate love to my stepmother behind my back. I never slept with Connor,’ Lizzie spelt out shakily.

Sebasten recalled his own belief in her inexperience the first night he had shared with her but Sebasten was always stubborn and not quite ready in the state of numb shock he was in to move straight in and embrace the possibility of a child he had never expected to have. ‘How do I know that for sure?’

Temper leapt with startling abruptness from the sheer height of Lizzie’s tension. ‘You’re the only lover I’ve ever had…is it my fault you were too busy taking advantage of me to even notice that I was a virgin?’

‘I didn’t take advantage of you and if you’re telling me the truth you’re the only virgin I’ve ever slept with,’ Sebasten launched back, playing for time while he mulled over what she had said but all his anger ebbing at miraculous speed. Even so, that did not prevent him from finding another issue. ‘You said you were protected.’

‘I was sick the next morning…it might have been that or it might just be that I fall into the tiny failure-rate percentage…but the point is,’ Lizzie framed afresh, ‘I am pregnant and it’s yours.’

‘Mine…’ Sebasten was now unusually pale at the very thought of what he saw as the enormous responsibility of a baby. All he had to do was think about his own nightmare childhood, the misery inflicted on him by self-preoccupied adults who left him to the care of unsupervised staff when it suited them and isolated him in boarding schools, where he had also been forgotten with ease. Nobody knew better than he that even great wealth was no protection when it came to a child’s needs.

‘I appreciate that this is a shock for you,’ Lizzie conceded when she could hear that ghastly silence no longer. ‘But I should also add that I’m going to have this baby—’

Emerging from his unpleasant recollections. Sebasten frowned at her in complete innocence of her meaning. ‘What else would you do?’

Silenced by that demand, Lizzie blinked.

‘I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it,’ Sebasten breathed, squaring his broad shoulders in the face of his inner conviction that life as he knew it had just been slaughtered. But much of his gloom lifted on the sudden realisation that, of course, Lizzie would come in tow with the baby. With Lizzie back in his life and him ensuring in a discreet way that the baby was never, ever neglected for even a moment, he could surely rise to the challenge?

‘And what would making the best of it…entail?’ Lizzie prompted thinly.

‘Sebasten expelled his pent-up breath in an impatient hiss. ‘Obviously, I’ll have to marry you. It’s my own fault. I should’ve taken precautions too that night but we’re stuck with the consequences and I’m a Contaxis…not the sort of bastard who tries to shirk his responsibilities!’

During that telling speech, Lizzie almost burst into a rage as big as a bonfire. She went lurching from total shock at the speed with which he mentioned marriage when she had never dreamt he might even whisper that fatal word. Then she truly listened and what she heard inflamed her beyond belief.

‘I don’t want to marry you—’

‘You’ve got no choice—’

‘Watch my lips—I do not want to marry you!’

Sebasten dealt her a grim appraisal in which his powerful personality loomed large. ‘Of course you do. Right now, we’ve got a bigger problem than me being a ruthless, conscience-free louse!’ he countered with sardonic bite. ‘Can we please focus on the baby issue?’

‘You don’t want to marry me…you don’t want the baby either!’ Lizzie flung at him in condemnation, feeling as though her heart was breaking inside her and hating him for not being able to feel what she felt.

‘I want you and I’ll get used to the idea of the baby,’ Sebasten declared.

Intending to show him out the front door, Lizzie yanked the drawing-room door wide and then froze. Her father was standing in the hall, his face a stiff mask of disbelief. It was obvious that he had heard enough to appreciate that she was carrying Sebasten’s child. He looked at her with all his disappointment written in his eyes and it was too much to her after the day she had already endured. With a stifled sob, Lizzie fled for the sanctuary of her old apartment in the stable block.

Sebasten could see ‘potential ally’ writ large in his future father-in-law’s horror at the revelation that his unmarried daughter was expecting a baby. ‘I’m sorry you had to hear the news like that. Naturally, Lizzie’s upset by the circumstances but I’m just keen to get the wedding organised.’

Maurice Denton was relieved by that forthright declaration. Unfreezing, almost grateful for a distraction from his own personal crisis, he offered Sebasten a drink. Sebasten accepted the offer.

He had never been more on edge: he felt as if Lizzie was playing games with him and that was not what he expected from her. It took time to concede that he might have been a little too frank about his reactions and that perhaps lying in his teeth would have gone down better. After a third drink to Sebasten’s one, Maurice informed Sebasten that should be himself live until he was ninety-nine he had no hope of ever hearing a marriage proposal couched in less attractive terms. He then asked his son-in-law-to-be if he was shy about being romantic.

Sebasten tried not to cringe at the question but he was honest in his response: he had never made a romantic gesture in his entire life.

‘I think you’d better get on that learning curve fast,’ Lizzie’s father advised before going on to entertain Sebasten with stories of how devoted a mother Lizzie had been to her dolls and how much she had always adored fussing round babies.

While the older man began to find some solace not only in those happier memories of the past but also in the prospect of a grandchild after the humiliation of his own disappointed hopes of another child, Sebasten began to imagine the baby as a miniature version of Lizzie tending to her dolls and relax and even warm to the prospect.

A copy of Lizzie’s birth certificate having been supplied helpfully by her parent, Sebasten drove off to apply for a special licence that would enable him to marry Lizzie within the week. Mindful of that galling advice about romance, he went on to pay a visit to a world-famous jewellery store. He chose the most beautiful rare diamond on offer and a matching wedding ring.

Late that evening, Sebasten returned to the Denton household as confident as he had been of his reception earlier in the day, only on this second occasion convinced he was infinitely better prepared to deliver exactly what was expected of him. Lizzie could hardly doubt the strength of his commitment to marrying her when he had already made all the arrangements for the wedding on his own.

That afternoon, Lizzie had had a good cry about Sebasten’s crass and wounding insensitivity. She had tried hard to respect his honesty but in point of fact it had hurt too much for her to do that. She might love him but there were times when furious frustration and pain totally swallowed up that love. With the best will in the world, how could she marry a guy who didn’t want a wife and could only stick children at a distance or inanimate on a painted canvas? No crystal ball was required to foresee the disaster that would result from Sebasten making himself do what he had always sworn he would not do.

Sebasten took the steps up to Lizzie’s apartment three at a time. The door wasn’t shut and he frowned. It was dangerous to be so careless of personal safety in a big city. She really did need him around. He let himself in. Lizzie was curled up on a big, squashy sofa, fast asleep. She was wearing a pale pink silk wrap, another colour to add to the already wide spectrum of shades which Sebasten considered framed Lizzie to perfection. He crouched down by her side.

Lifting up her limp hand, he threaded the engagement ring onto her finger. Now she was labelled his for every other man to see. As that awareness dawned on him, Sebasten finally saw the point of engagements. She got the little ring, he got to post the much more important hands-off-she’s-mine giant ring of steel. He liked that. This romantic stuff? Easy as falling off a log, Sebasten decided.

With a sleepy sigh, Lizzie opened her eyes and focused on Sebasten and thought she was back in bed with him again, which she very often was in her most secret dreams. Enchanted by the pagan gold glitter of his intense gaze, she let appreciative fingers drift up to trace a high, angular cheekbone. He caught her hand in his and captured her lips in a sensual, searching exploration that was an erotic wake-up call to every sense she possessed. She leant up the better to taste him, breathe in the achingly familiar scent that was uniquely his, close her arms round his neck so that she could sink greedy fingers into the depths of his luxuriant black hair.

Sebasten made a low, sexy sound of encouragement deep in his throat. Scooping her up, he sank back with her cradled in his arms and let his tongue dip in a provocative slide between her lips. Lizzie jerked and strained up to him, wanting, needing, possessed by helpless excitement and hunger for more.

‘You still want me, pethi mou,’ Sebasten husked, pausing to trail his mouth in a tantalising caress down the line of her long, elegant neck. ‘But I can’t stay long. Your father has been very understanding and tolerant but I won’t risk causing offence.’

Emerging for the first time since she had wakened to proper awareness, Lizzie snatched in a quivering gasp of shame and embarrassment: she had fallen like an overripe plum into Sebasten’s ready hands. ‘This shouldn’t be happening,’ she bit out shakily and flew upright to smooth down her wrap.

Only then did she register the weight of the ring now adorning her hand. In disbelief, she raised her fingers to stare at the fabulous solitaire diamond sparkling in the lamplight.

‘Like it?’ Sebasten lounged back on the sofa with the indolent, expectant air of a male bracing himself to withstand fawning feminine approbation.

‘What is it?’

‘You really need to be told?’

Lizzie jerked her chin in an affirmative nod, for she could not credit that the male she had flatly refused to marry could have bought her an engagement ring and what was more put in on her finger without her knowledge or agreement.

‘It matches the wedding ring. I got it too.’ Well-aware of her shaken silence and proud of that seeming achievement, Sebasten rose to his full height so that she could fling herself at him and hug him.

‘You…did!’ Lizzie parroted, a swelling forming in her tight chest that she did not immediately recognise as rage.

‘In fact, I’ve been extremely busy,’ Sebasten extended in his rich dark drawl. ‘I’ve got a special licence. I’ve got the church booked and a top-flight wedding-planners outfit burning the midnight oil on the finer details even as we speak. You have nothing to do but show up looking gorgeous on Saturday—’

‘You mean…I get to pick my own dress?’

‘I contacted an Italian designer…they’re flying over a team on Wednesday with a selection for you.’

‘Oh…this Saturday?’ Momentarily Lizzie’s rage took a back seat to shock at the sheer level of organisation that had taken place behind her back and the news that her own wedding was to be staged in just six days’ time.

‘Your father agreed that we shouldn’t hang around.’

‘Did he really?’ Lizzie queried in a rather high-pitched tone. ‘Sebasten…cast your mind back to my answer to your declaration that we should marry.’

‘You said no but I knew you didn’t mean it,’ Sebasten informed her.

‘D-did you?’ Lizzie’s response shook with the force of her feelings but she looked again at the ring on her engagement finger. Her eyes stung and she spun away, remembering the guy who had hired decorators to leave her free to dine with him. He did what he thought best and if that meant refusing to credit her refusal, using her own father as back-up and going ahead and arranging a wedding all on his own, he was more than equal to the challenge.