The Contaxis Baby

He swept her back down the stairs, past a welter of curious eyes and on towards the exit. Her nerves were jumping like electrified beans. She relived the bold caress of his sure hands over her breasts and her cheeks flooded with hot self-conscious colour. Not the sort of familiarity she normally allowed. What was she doing with him? Where on earth was he taking her? He thought she was beautiful. He wanted to be with her, she reminded herself with feverish determination. Nobody else did, not her father, who had cut her out of his life, not a single one of her friends.

On the wet pavement outside, a uniformed chauffeur extended an umbrella for their protection and hurried to open the door of a long, opulent silver limousine. Lizzie was impressed and she got in, refused to think about what she was doing and turned to look at Sebasten again. The dizzy sense of rightness that had engulfed her only minutes earlier returned. ‘Where were you born?’ she heard herself ask.

In the act of tugging her close, Sebasten grinned at what struck him as an essentially feminine and pointless question. ‘On an island the size of a postage stamp in the Aegean Sea…and you?’

‘In Devon,’ she confided, heart skipping a beat over that incredible smile of his. ‘My parents moved to London when I was a baby.’

‘How fascinating,’ Sebasten teased, lacing his fingers into her hair and kissing her. She drowned in the scent and the taste of him, head falling back on her shoulders as his tongue darted in an erotic sweep between her lips and made her gasp with helpless pleasure.

At some point, they left the limo, climbed steps, traversed a low-lit echoing hall, but true awareness only returned to Lizzie when she swayed giddily on the sweeping staircase she found herself on. His hands shot out to steady her. ‘Are you OK?’

‘These stupid shoes…’ Lizzie condemned in mortification and she kicked off her spike-heeled sandals where she stood as though her unsteady gait had been caused by them.

‘How much have you had to drink?’ Sebasten enquired with lethal timing, a dark frown-line forming between his ebony brows.

‘Hardly anything,’ Lizzie told him breathlessly while making a conscious effort not to slur her words. She was taut as a bowstring, suddenly terrified of receiving yet another rejection to add to the many she had already withstood.

As he received that assurance Sebasten’s tension evaporated and he swept her on into a massive, opulent room rejoicing in a very large and imposing bed. She was jolted by the sight of the bed and a rather belated stab of dismay made her question her own behaviour. She barely knew Sebasten and she was still a virgin. But then she had never been tempted until she met Connor and she had expected him to become her first lover. As the degrading memory of finding her boyfriend and her stepmother in bed together engulfed Lizzie afresh, she rebelled against her own moral conditioning. After all, hadn’t her old-fashioned principles let her down badly when it came to men? A more experienced woman would have been suspicious of Connor’s lack of lusty intent.

Eyes flaring like emerald-green stars on that bitter acknowledgement, Lizzie spun round and feasted her attention on Sebasten. He was gorgeous and tonight he was hers, all hers, absolutely nobody else’s. She had never met anyone like him before. He was so focused, so sure of himself that he drew her like a magnet and the heat of his appreciative appraisal warmed her like the sun after weeks of endless rain.

Lizzie tilted her head back, glossy marmalade hair tumbling back from her slanted cheekbones. ‘You can kiss me again,’ she informed him.

With an appreciative laugh, Sebasten claimed her parted lips in a long, drugging kiss that rocked her on her feet. Lifting her up into his arms with easy strength, he brought her down onto his bed. What was it about her that made her seem so different to other women? One minute she was quiet and mysterious, the next tossing an open challenge, glorious green eyes telegraphing pure invitation.

Lizzie surfaced from the mindless spell of her own response and stared up at him. ‘Are you as good at everything else as you are at kissing?’

Sebasten tossed his jacket on a chair, enjoying the wide, wondering look in her face as she watched him. ‘What do you think?’

That she could barely breathe when those shimmering dark golden eyes rested on her and her mouth ran dry as a bone when he unbuttoned his shirt. From his broad shoulders to his powerful, hair-roughened pectorals and flat, taut abdomen, he was all sleek, bronzed skin and rippling muscles.

‘That you’re very sexy,’ Lizzie confided helplessly.

‘We match…’ Sebasten strolled lithe as a hunting animal and barefoot towards the bed.

‘Do we?’ Her heart hammered behind her ribs. She felt like an infatuated teenager confronted without warning by her idol: butterflies in her tummy, brain empty, teeth almost chattering with nerves. Every lingering strand of caution was urging her to acknowledge her mistake and take flight but those prudent promptings fell into abeyance at the same instant as Sebasten rested shimmering dark golden eyes of appreciation on her.

‘Ne…’

‘No?’ Lizzie was confused.

‘Ne…is Greek for yes.’ Sebasten came down on the side of the bed with a smile that lit up his lean, strong face and melted her.

‘You’re Greek?’

‘Ten out of ten,’ Sebasten gathered her close and threaded lazy hands through her tumbling mane. ‘I love the colour of your hair…but I still don’t know your surname.’

In the expectant silence, Lizzie tensed. Fearful of his reaction were he to recognise the name of Denton, she heard herself quote her late mother’s maiden name. ‘Bewford.’

‘Now I can’t lose you again,’ Sebasten asserted.

‘Would it matter if you did?’ Heart racing so fast now that she could barely speak and keep her voice level, Lizzie curved an uncertain hand round his arm.

‘Absolutely, pethi mou.’ Sebasten reflected that he might even make it to the three-month mark with her, a milestone he had yet to share with any woman. Unsettled by that uninvited and odd thought, he kissed her again.

He made love to her mouth with devastating virtuosity, plundering the tender interior she opened to him. Lizzie pressed forward, unsteady hands linking round his neck, fingers uncoiling to rise and sink into the depths of his luxuriant black hair. It was sweeter and wilder and more intense than anything she had ever known. He bent her back over his arm so that her bright hair trailed across the pillows and let his lips seek out the tiny pulse going crazy beneath her collarbone.

Lizzie quivered in surprise and what little grip she had left on reality vanished. When he then located the tender pulse spot below her ear, her body thrummed into a burst of life so that not one part of her was capable of staying still. She was not even conscious of the deft unsnapping of the clasps on her halter top, only of the air grazing her distended nipples and cooling the swollen sensitivity of her flesh. He eased off her stretchy skirt to leave her clad in only a pair of white lace panties.

‘You’re perfect,’ Sebasten groaned, cupping the ivory-pale rose-tipped mounds he had unveiled with possessive hands, easing her back against the pillows to direct his attention to the tender tips straining for his attention.

Capturing a throbbing peak between his lips, he flicked it with his tongue and she moaned out loud at the surge of tormenting sensation that made her tense and tremble and jerk beneath his ministrations. Nothing before had ever felt so good that it almost hurt and she was lost in the shocking intensity of her own response. She was breathing in fast little pants, aware of her body as she had never been before, feeling the charged readiness of wild anticipation, the crazed race of her own pounding heartbeat, the damp heat pulsing between her thighs.

‘Talk to me…’ Sebasten urged.

‘I…can’t find…my voice,’ Lizzie tried to say after a bemused hesitation in which she had to struggle just to force her brain to think again. Even to her own ears, the words emerged sounding indistinguishable and slurred.

Sebasten stilled and, scanning her dismayed face, he removed his hands from her. ‘You’re drunk…’

As that harsh judgement came out of nowhere at her, Lizzie flinched. Bracing herself on one awkward hand, she sat up. His lean, powerful face was taut, stunning golden eyes betraying angry distaste.

‘I’m—’

‘Out of your skull on booze…not my style!’ Sebasten incised, springing upright to his full intimidating height.

Dragged with little warning from the breathtaking hold of unbelievable passion, Lizzie found herself in need of a ready tongue. But there was nothing ready about her tongue when her brain was in a haze of confusion. ‘Not your style?’ she echoed.

It was a terrible strain for her to try to enunciate each word with clarity. She reeled off the bed in an abrupt movement, suddenly feeling horribly naked and under attack.

As he watched her stagger as she attempted to stay vertical Sebasten’s wide, sensual mouth clenched even harder, his whole body in the fierce grip of painful frustration while he questioned how he could possibly have failed to register the state she was in. ‘The consent issue,’ he breathed with icy restraint. ‘No way would I even consider bedding a woman too inebriated to know what she is doing!’

Her toes catching in her discarded skirt where it lay, Lizzie tipped forward and only just managed to throw out her hands to break her own fall. As she went down with a crash, punctuated by a startled expletive from Sebasten, she just slumped on the soft, deep carpet.

With a mighty effort of will, Lizzie lifted her swimming head again and focused on Sebasten’s bare brown feet. Even his toes were beautiful, she thought dimly as she tried to come up with something to say in a situation that had already gone far beyond embarrassment. ‘Do you think…do you think you could sober me up before we continue?’ she muttered hopefully.

CHAPTER THREE

SEBASTEN surveyed Lizzie with thunderous incredulity and then he wondered what he was going to do with her.

After all, he was responsible for her, wasn’t he? He had pressed more alcohol on her when she must already have had enough and he had brought her into his home. In the condition she was in, he could hardly stuff her into a taxi or ask his chauffeur to cope with her and, since he too had had several drinks, he could not drive her anywhere.

In the tense silence which would have agonised Lizzie had she been sober, she surveyed his carpet fibres and then looked up. Sebasten was down on one knee, contemplating her with an expression of fierce frustration.

‘I could just sleep here on the floor,’ Lizzie proffered, striving to be helpful.

Sebasten collided with huge green eyes.

The beginnings of an irreverent grin pulled at her full, reddened mouth because she was suffering from a dreadful urge to succumb to uncontrollable giggles. ‘You see…I don’t think I can get up…can’t feel my legs.’

Sebasten experienced a sudden near-overwhelming desire to shake her until he could force some sense back into her head. Had she no idea how much at risk she could be in a stranger’s house? Or of how dangerous it was for a woman to drink so much that she could neither exercise caution nor defend herself? The very idea of her behaving in such a way with another man filled him with dark, deep anger.

‘Do you make a habit of this kind of behaviour?’ he demanded rawly.

As she was assailed by that gritty tone, all desire to giggle was squashed at the source. ‘No…you’re the first…sorry,’ Lizzie slurred, sinking back to the carpet again.

Vaulting to his feet, Sebasten strode over to the phone by the bed and lifted it to order a large pot of black coffee and sandwiches to be brought upstairs. Then he contemplated his victim with brooding intensity and his long, powerful legs carried him over to the windows. Depressing the locks, he thrust the French windows back to let in the cold night air.

As that chilly breeze touched her slender bare back, Lizzie gave a convulsive shiver. Sebasten surveyed her without remorse. He would sober her up and then have her conveyed home. Wrenching the top sheet from the bed, he flung it over her prone body and gathered her up with determination to carry her into the adjoining bathroom.

‘Sleepy…’ Lizzie mumbled.

‘You need to wake up,’ Sebasten informed her, settling her with some difficulty onto the seat in the spacious shower cubicle and hitting the buttons to switch on the water. Only as the water cascaded down did he appreciate that he hadn’t removed the sheet. Then he no longer felt quite so comfortable with her semi-clad state.

As the water hit her, Lizzie opened bewildered and shaken eyes. ‘No…don’t want to be wet,’ she framed weakly.

‘Tough,’ Sebasten told her, barring the exit in case she made a sudden leap for freedom.

Far from making a dive for it, in slow motion and wearing an only vaguely surprised expression, Lizzie slithered off the seat like a boneless doll into a heap on the floor of the cubicle.

‘Up!’ Sebasten urged in exasperation.

Lizzie curled up and closed her eyes, soothed now by the warm flooding flow of water. ‘Sleepy,’ she mumbled again. ‘Night…night.’

Teeth gritted, Sebasten stepped into the shower to hit the controls and turn the water cold. She uttered a satisfying yelp of surprise as the water went from warm and soothing to icy and tingling. However, Sebasten got so wet in his efforts to haul Lizzie’s uncooperative body back up onto the seat, he ended up squatting down to hold her up and suffering beneath the same cold gush.

‘C-cold!’ Lizzie stammered.

‘I’m freezing too!’ Sebasten launched, shirt and trousers plastered to his big, powerful body as the same chill invaded him. He withstood the onslaught with masochistic acceptance. Served him bloody well right, he thought grimly. She was way too young and immature for him. What had got into him? Bringing her home had been a mistake and he had never sunk low enough to take advantage of a stupid woman.

‘Very…cold,’ Lizzie moaned.

‘And you said you weren’t an airhead,’ Sebasten recalled out loud with a deep sense of injustice, watching her wet hair trail in the water, looking down at her miserable face which was now—aside of the odd streak of mascara—innocent of all cosmetic enhancement. She still had perfect skin and amazing eyes, he noted. But he could not credit that he was trapped in his own shower with a drunk woman. He didn’t get into awkward situations like that.

‘Not,’ Lizzie pronounced with unexpected aggression, her chin tilting up.

A loud knock sounded on the door in the bedroom beyond. With a groan, Sebasten put her down but she slumped without his support. A vision of having to explain a drowned woman in his shower overtaking him, he switched off the water.

‘Don’t move…’ he instructed Lizzie as he strode back to the bedroom, dripping every step of the way.

A faint flush over his hard cheekbones as the member of staff presenting the laden tray of coffee and sandwiches stared in open stupefaction at his drenched appearance, Sebasten kicked the door shut again and set down the tray beside the bed.

When he returned to the bathroom, Lizzie was striving to crawl out of the shower on her hands and knees and being severely hampered by the trailing sopping sheet.

‘Feeling a little livelier?’ Sebasten quipped with dark satire.

‘Feel…a-awful!’ Lizzie stuttered through teeth chattering like castanets and she laid her head down and just sobbed in weakened rage. ‘Hate you!’

She looked pathetic. Sebasten snatched up a big bath towel, crouched down to disentangle her from the sheet and wrapped her with care into the towel. Hauled up into a standing position, she fell against him like a skater on ice for the first time and he lifted her up and carried her through to the bedroom to settle her back on the bed. Keeping a cautious eye on her in case she fell off the bed too, he backed away to strip off his own wet clothing and pitch the sodden garments onto the bathroom floor.

It was like babysitting, he decided, his even white teeth gritting. Not that he had ever done any babysitting, for Sebasten was not in the habit of putting himself out for other people. But the comparison between his own erotic expectations earlier in the evening and reality was galling to a male who was accustomed to a life than ran with the smooth, controlled efficiency of an oiled machine.

‘Close the windows…’ Lizzie begged, deciding there and then as cold dragged her mind from its former fog that she had fallen live into the hands of a complete sadist.

‘Yes, you’re definitely waking up now.’ Sheathed only in a pair of black designer jeans, Sebasten crossed the room to pull the French windows shut.

Lizzie blinked and then contrived to stare. The jeans fitted him as well as his own bronzed skin, accentuating his flat, muscular stomach, his narrow hips and long, hard thighs. Colouring, she looked away, sobered up enough already by the shock of that cold shower to cringe with mortification. Sebasten tugged her forward, tossed pillows behind her to prop her up and proceeded to pour the coffee.

‘Don’t feel like coffee—’

‘You’re drinking it,’ Sebasten told her and he laid the tray of sandwiches down beside her. ‘Eat.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ she dared in an undertone.

‘You need food to soak up the booze in your system,’ Sebasten delivered with cutting emphasis.

Squirming with shame and embarrassment, Lizzie reached for a sandwich. ‘I don’t get drunk…I’m not like that…I just had a hideous day—’

‘So you decided to give me a hideous evening,’ Sebasten slotted in with ungenerous bite. ‘Count your blessings—’

‘What blessings?’ Lizzie was fighting hard to hold back the surge of weak tears that that crack had spawned.

‘You’re safe and you’re still all in one piece. If you’d picked the wrong guy to spring this stunt on, you might not have been,’ Sebasten pointed out.

Chilled by what she recgonised as a fair assessment, Lizzie swallowed shakily and made herself bite into the sandwich. It was delicious. Indeed, she had not realised just how hungry she was until that moment. In silence, she sipped at the black coffee, wincing with every mouthful, for she liked milk in her coffee, and worked her way through the sandwiches.

Sebasten watched the sandwiches melt away and noted that for all her slenderness she had a very healthy appetite. ‘When did you last eat?’ he finally asked drily.

‘Breakfast,’ Lizzie worked out with a slight frown and that had just been a slice of toast. Lunch she hadn’t touched because just beforehand her father had phoned to say that he was coming home specially to talk to her and her appetite had vanished. As for supper, well, Jen hadn’t offered her anything but her first alcoholic drink of the evening.

‘No wonder you ended up flat on your face on my carpet,’ Sebasten delivered as he topped up the cup she had emptied.

Lizzie paled. ‘Not the world’s most forgiving person, are you?’

‘No.’ Sebasten made no bones about the fact. ‘What did your “hideous” day encompass?’

Lizzie looped unsteady fingers through her fast-drying hair to push it back from her brow and muttered tightly. ‘My father told me to move out and get a job. I was very upset—’

‘At twenty-two years of age, you were still living at home and dependent on your family?’ Sebasten demanded in surprise. ‘Are you a student?’

Lizzie reddened. ‘No. I left school at eighteen. My father didn’t want me to work. He said he wanted me to have a good time!’

Sebasten scanned the delicate diamond pendant and bracelet she wore, conceding that they might well be real rather than the imitations he had assumed. Yet she didn’t speak with those strangulated vowel sounds that he associated with the true English upper classes, which meant that she was most probably from a family with money but no social pedigree. He was wryly amused that Ingrid, who was obsessed by a need to pigeon-hole people by their birth and their bank balance, had taught him to distinguish the old moneyed élite from the nouveau riche in London society.

‘And, no…having a good time did not cover my behaviour tonight!’ Lizzie advanced in defensive completion. ‘That was a one-off!’

‘So you were very upset at the prospect of having to keep yourself,’ Sebasten recapped with soft derision and innate suspicion that her apparent ignorance of who he was had been an act calculated to bring his guard down. ‘Is that why you came home with me?’

Startled by that offensive question, Lizzie sucked in a sudden sharp breath. As the fog of alcohol released her brain, she had already absorbed enough of her surroundings to recognise that she was in the home of a male who inhabited a very much wealthier and more rarefied world than her own. She lifted her chin. ‘No, to tell you the truth, now that I’m recovering my wits, I haven’t the foggiest idea why I came home with you because I don’t like you one little bit.’

A disconcerting smile flashed across Sebasten’s dark, brooding features. Angry green eyes the colour of precious emeralds were hurling defiance at him and her spine was as rigid as that of a queen in a medieval portrait. Unfortunately for her, though, her tangled hair and the bath towel supplied a ridiculous frame for that attempt to put him in his place.

The instant that incredible smile lit up his lean, strong features, Lizzie’s heartbeat went haywire and her mouth ran dry and she knew exactly why she had come home with him. If he kept his smart mouth closed, he was just about irresistible.

‘You’re angry that you made a fool of yourself,’ Sebasten retaliated without hesitation. ‘But I may have done you a big favour—’

Hot colour burned in Lizzie’s cheeks. ‘You call throwing the windows wide and torturing me in a cold shower doing me a favour?’

‘Yes…if the memory of that treatment stops you drinking that much again in the wrong company.’

Unused to a woman fighting with him, Sebasten savoured the sheer frustrated rage in her expressive face and his body hardened again in sudden urgent response. He wanted to flatten her back onto his bed and remind her of how irrelevant liking or anything else was when he touched her. His own reawakened desire startled him. Then her tangled torrent of hair was drying to gleam with rich gold and copper lights and that exotic and passionate face of hers still kept drawing him back. The intimate recollection of her lush little breasts and that lithe, slender body of hers shaking with hunger beneath his own was all the additional stimuli required to increase Sebasten’s level of arousal to one of supreme discomfort.

In the midst of swallowing the sting of that further comment destined to humble her, Lizzie felt the burn of Sebasten’s stunning dark golden eyes on her and what she had been about to say in an effort to save face died on her tongue. Stiffening, she shifted forward onto the edge of the bed. Suddenly aware of the high-voltage tension that had entered the atmosphere, she felt too jittery to handle her discomfiture and she settled her feet down onto the carpet.

‘It’s time I went home,’ she announced but she hesitated, afraid that the awful dizziness might return the instant she tried to stand up.

‘Where is home?’

‘No place right now,’ Lizzie admitted after a dismayed pause to appreciate the threatening reality. ‘I still have to find somewhere to live. Right now my luggage is parked at a friend’s place but I can’t stay there.’

Sebasten watched her stand up like a newborn baby animal afraid to test her long slim legs and then breathe in slow and deep. She plotted a passage to the bathroom and vanished from view. Closing the door, she caught her own reflection in a mirror and groaned out loud, lifting a trembling hand to her messy hair. Any pretence towards presentability was long gone, she reflected painfully. It was little wonder Sebasten had been sprawled in an armchair at a distance, talking down to her as if he were a very superior being.