Kitabı oku: «Mother's Day Treats», sayfa 3

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.

And she guessed he was, she conceded, snatching up a comb from the counter of a built-in unit to begin disentangling her hair. He could have thrown her back out on the street. He could have taken advantage of her…well, not really, she decided, reckoning that Sebasten would prefer a live, moving woman to one showing all the animation of a corpse. And he had prevented her from making a very big mistake! Why didn’t she just admit that to herself? Her life was in a terrible mess and she shouldn’t even have been looking at Sebasten, never mind behaving like a tramp and coming home with him. She ought to be really grateful that nothing much had happened between them…

Only she wasn’t. Tears stung the back of Lizzie’s eyes and she blinked them back with stubborn determination. The ghastly truth was that she still found Sebasten incredibly attractive and she had blown it. Really blown her chances with him. There was nothing fanciable or appealing about a woman who had to be dumped in a shower to be brought out of a drunken collapse, naturally he was disgusted with her. But she was much angrier with herself than he could possibly have been. She had never been so attracted to any guy and she was convinced that alcohol had had very little to do with her extraordinary reaction to him. Why had she had to meet the most gorgeous guy of her life on the one night that she made a total, inexcusable ass of herself?

Wishing that she had thought to reclaim her clothing before she entered the bathroom and embarrassed to death as stray memories of her wanton behaviour broke free of her subconscious to torment her, Lizzie crept back into the bedroom.

Dawn was beginning to finger light through the heavy curtains. She had hoped that Sebasten would have fallen asleep or taken himself tactfully off somewhere else to allow her a fast and silent exit but no such luck was hers.

Sebasten was watching the television business news but the instant the door opened he vaulted upright and studied her. Still wrapped in the towel, hair brushed back from her scrubbed-clean face, she looked even more beautiful to Sebasten than she had looked earlier. Even pale, she had a fresh, natural appeal that pulled him against his own volition.

‘You might as well sleep in one of my guest rooms for what’s left of the night,’ Sebasten surprised himself by suggesting.

‘Thanks…but I’d better be going.’ Strained eyes centred on him in a look so brief he would have missed it had he not been watching her like a hawk. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your time.’

His mouth quirked. She sounded like a little girl who had attended a very bad party but was determined to leave saying all that was polite. He watched her stoop in harried movements to snatch up her clothes and shoes, mortification merging her freckles with a hot pink overlay of colour. Her inability to conceal her embarrassment was oddly touching.

‘How sober are you?’ Sebasten prompted lazily, eyes flaring to smouldering gold as her lush mouth opened and the tip of her tongue snaked out in a nervous flicker to moisten her full lower lip. Hunger, fierce and primitive as a knife at his groin, burned through him.

‘Totally wised up…’ Lizzie tried hard to smile, acknowledging her own foolishness.

‘Then stay with me…’ Sebasten murmured thickly.

Thrown by that renewed invitation, Lizzie gazed across the room, green eyes full of surprise and confusion. ‘But—’

‘Of course there are conditions,’ Sebasten warned, smooth as silk. ‘With your eyes closed, you have to be able to touch the tip of your nose with one finger and you only get one chance.’

An involuntary laugh escaped Lizzie as she looked back at him. Still clad only in the jeans, he was drop-dead gorgeous: all sleek, bronzed, hair-roughened skin, lean muscle and masculinity. Even the five o’clock shadow now roughening his strong jawline only added to his sheer impact. Feeling just then that it would be more sensible to close her eyes and deny herself the pleasure of staring at him as though he had just dropped down from heaven for a visit, Lizzie strove to play the game and performed the exercise even though at that point she had every intention of leaving.

‘Then you have to open your eyes again and walk in a straight line to the door,’ Sebasten instructed.

Growing amusement gripping her, Lizzie set out for the door.

‘Full marks,’ Sebasten quipped.

Lizzie spun round. ‘You’ve got to do it too.’

Disconcerted, Sebasten raised a brow in scornful dismissal of that challenge.

‘You take yourself very seriously.’ Lizzie watched him with keen intensity because it was one of the most important things she had learnt about him. ‘You don’t even like me to suggest that you might be anything less than totally in control.’

‘I’m a man. That’s normal,’ Sebasten drawled.

Not to Lizzie, it wasn’t. She was used to younger men who were more relaxed about their image and the differences between the sexes but she could see that Sebasten inhabited another category altogether. The strong, brooding, macho type unlikely to spill his guts no matter how tough the going got. Not her type at all, she told herself in urgent consolation.

Sebasten strode in a direct line to the door but only because where she was was where he wanted to be at that instant. ‘Satisfied?’

‘Yes…we are two sober people…and I need to go and get dressed.’ Breathless at finding herself that close to him again, Lizzie coloured, heartbeat thumping at what felt like the base of her throat.

‘I’ll only take it all off again,’ Sebasten threatened in a dark, deep undertone of warning that sent a tingle of delicious threat down her taut spine.

‘Walking in a straight line to the door when you asked was just my effort to lighten the atmosphere,’ Lizzie shared awkwardly.

‘While every lingering look you give me tells me how much you still want me,’ Sebasten delivered without an instant of hesitation.

‘You’ve got some ego!’ Lizzie condemned in disconcertion.

‘Earned…like my reputation,’ Sebasten slotted in, closing his lean, sure hands to her slender waist to tilt her forward. ‘We’ll conduct an experiment—’

‘No…no experiments,’ Lizzie cut in on a higher pitch of nervous stress. ‘I don’t do stuff like this, Sebasten. I don’t have one-night stands. I don’t sleep with guys I’ve only just met…in fact, I haven’t got much experience at all and you’d probably find the business news more riveting—’

Sebasten recognised one of the qualities that had drawn him to her but which he had failed to identify: a certain degree of innocence. Fired by the rare event of being challenged to persuade a woman into his bed, he focused his legendary negotiating skills on Lizzie. ‘I’m riveted by you,’ Sebasten incised with decisive conviction. ‘Right from the first moment I saw you at the club.’

‘Stop kidding me…’ Skin warming, Lizzie connected with his stunning golden eyes and trembled, wanting to believe, her battered self-esteem hungry for that reassurance. That close to him, it was difficult to breathe and the warm, clean male scent of his skin flared her nostrils with a familiarity that tugged at her every sense. She wanted to lean into him, crush the tender tips of her swollen breasts into the hard wall of his chest, feel that wide, sexy mouth ravish her own again.

‘I’m not kidding. One look and I was hooked.’ Sebasten gazed down at her from below the dense fringe of his black lashes and just smiled and that was the moment she was lost, that was the moment when any pretence of self-control ran aground on the sheer strength of her response to him. Her pulses racing, Lizzie felt the megawatt burn of that smile blaze through her and she angled into him in a helpless movement. When his mouth came down on hers again, the heat of that sensual assault was pure, addictive temptation.

In the midst of that kiss, Sebasten carried her back to the bed and peeled away the towel. He cupped her breasts, bent his arrogant dark head over the pale pink distended peaks and used his knowing mouth and his even more knowing hands to give her pleasure.

‘Are you protected?’ he asked.

‘Yes…’ She had started taking contraceptive pills a month after she had begun dating Connor but she crushed that unwelcome association back out of her mind again, the bitterness that had haunted her in recent weeks set behind her. A fresh start, a new and more productive life, Sebasten. She was more than ready for those challenges when Sebasten was giving her the impression that he felt much the same way that she did.

As he slid off the bed in one fluid movement to dispense with his jeans, her cheeks reddened and she turned her head away while wicked but self-conscious anticipation licked along her every nerve-ending.

He came down beside her again and she let her hands rise up over his powerful torso. She had never really wanted to explore a man before but she could not resist her need to touch him. Her fingers roved from the satin-smooth hardness of his shoulders to graze through the short black whorls of hair hazing his pectorals to the warm tautness of his stomach, feeling his muscles flex in response.

‘Don’t stop there, pethi mou,’ Sebasten husked.

Lizzie got more daring, let her fingers follow the intriguing furrow of silky black hair over his stomach and discovered the male power of him with a jolt of mingled dismay and curiosity. He was smooth and hard but there was definitely too much of him.

‘This way,’ Sebasten murmured with concealed amusement, initially startled by her clumsiness and then adapting to teach her what he liked. It was a lesson he had never had cause to give before but it sent his desire for her surging even higher.

That intimate exploration made Lizzie feel all hot and quivery and she pressed her thighs together on the disturbing ache stirring at the very heart of her. When he teased at her swollen lower lip before letting his tongue delve into the tender interior of her mouth in a darting foray that imitated a far more elemental possession she trembled against his lean, strong body, feverish hot craving gripping her.

His breathing fractured, Sebasten dragged his mouth from hers to gaze down at her with fiery golden eyes. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so hot for a woman as I am for you.’

He pulled her to him and his expert hands traced the beaded sensitivity of her breasts. She couldn’t stay still any more. Tiny little tremors were racking her. Her breath was rasping into her dry throat, pulses thrumming, heart pounding. At the apex of her legs he traced the moist, needy secret of her femininity and she moaned out loud, couldn’t help herself. The pleasure was dark and deep and terrifyingly intense. He controlled her and she didn’t care; she just didn’t want him to stop. The bitter-sweet torment of sensation sizzled through every fibre of her writhing body with increasing intensity until she was on the edge of a desperation as new to her as intimacy.

‘I need you…now,’ Sebasten growled.

Rising over her, he tipped her up with strong hands and came down over her. She barely had time to learn the feeling of his urgent demand for entrance before he plunged his throbbing shaft into her slick heat and groaned with an earthy pleasure at the tightness of his welcome.

The momentary stab of unexpected pain made Lizzie jerk and cry out but the passionate urgency controlling her allowed no competition. Too much in the grip of the feverish need he had induced, she gave him a blank look when he stilled in questioning acknowledgement of that cry. Her whole body craved him with a force of hungry excitement that nothing could have haltered and she arched up to him in frantic encouragement until he succumbed to that invitation and ground his body into hers again, sheathing himself fully and sending another shockwave of incredible desire through her. His pagan rhythm drove her to the edge of ecstasy and then flung her over the wild, breathtaking peak before the glorious, peaceful aftermath of fulfilment claimed her. As he reached his own shuddering release, she wrapped her arms round him tight.

‘Sublime,’ Sebasten muttered hoarsely in Greek and then he rolled back and hauled her over him to study her flushed and shaken face, the unguarded softness and warmth in her green eyes as she looked back at him. He pushed his fingers into her tumbling hair and tugged her back down to him so that he could kiss her again. ‘I think we’re going to do this again and again…and again.’

‘Hmm…’ Lizzie was more mesmerised by him than ever now. She scanned his lean, strong face and let her fingertips roam from his shoulder to curl into his tousled black hair instead. His features were so masculine: all taut angles from the clean slant of his high cheekbones to the proud jut of his nose and the blue-shadowed roughness of his hard jawline. His stunning gaze gleamed lazy gold beneath the semi-screening sweep of his spiky lashes. She just wanted to smile and smile and smile like an idiot.