Kitabı oku: «Mother's Day Treats», sayfa 8

‘And this is Lizzie,’ he murmured with a skimming glance in her general direction, drawing her to the attention of his other guests in a very impersonal manner.

‘Do you work for Sebasten?’ a woman in her thirties asked Lizzie some minutes later, evidently having no suspicion that Lizzie might be present in any other capacity.

‘Yes.’ The way Sebasten was behaving, Lizzie was happy to make that confirmation but an angry, discomfited spark flared in her clear green eyes.

Another four people arrived and soon afterwards they crossed the hall to the dining room. Pride helped Lizzie to keep up her end of the general conversation but she did not look at Sebasten unless she was forced to do so. What she ate or even whether she did eat during that meal she was never later to recall. She started out angry but sank deeper into shock as the evening progressed. Had she really expected to act as his hostess? Certainly, she had not expected to be treated like someone merely invited to keep the numbers at the table even.

‘So…which luscious lady are you romancing right now?’ the older brunette, who had entertained them all with her sharp sense of humour, asked Sebasten in a coy tone over the coffee-cups.

Lizzie froze and watched Sebasten screen his dark eyes with his spiky black lashes before he murmured lazily. ‘I’m still looking.’

With a trembling hand, Lizzie reached for her glass of water. Feeling sick, betrayed and outraged, she backed out of her chair without any perceptible awareness of what she was about to do, walked down the length of the table and slung the contents of her glass in Sebasten’s face. ‘When I find a real man, I’ll let you know!’ she spelt out.

Sebasten vaulted upright and thrust driven fingers through his dripping hair.

The silence that had fallen had a depth that was claustrophobic.

And then, as Lizzie went into retreat at the shimmering incredulity in Sebasten’s stunned golden eyes, one of the guests laughed out loud and she spun to see who it was that could find humour in such a scene.

‘Bravo, Lizzie!’ Patsy Hewitt told her with an amused appreciation that bewildered Lizzie. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a more entertaining evening.’

‘I’m glad someone had a good time,’ Lizzie quipped before she walked out of the room and sped upstairs with tears of furious, shaken reaction blinding her.

Had that guy talking been the guy she thought she loved? The male whose baby she carried? Denying her very existence? He was ashamed of her. What else was she to believe but that he was ashamed to own up to being involved with Connor Morgan’s ex-girlfriend? He needn’t think she had not eventually read the significance of his having neglected to speak her surname even once or his determination not to distinguish her with one atom of personal attention. So why the heck had he invited her? And how did she ditch him when she was expecting his baby?

But such concerns for a future that seemed distant were beyond Lizzie at a moment when all that was on her mind was leaving Sebasten’s house just as fast as she could manage it. So it was unfortunate that while she had been downstairs dining her case had been unpacked.

She was in shock after the evening she had endured and the shattering discovery that Sebasten could turn into a male she really didn’t want to know. Why? Why had he suddenly changed towards her?

In a flash, she recalled his cool parting from her that morning at Contaxis International and stilled, comprehension finding a path through her bewilderment. Nothing had been right since then. He had been in a distant mood when he came to pick her up and then in the car she had asked that stupid question about whether or not he liked children and the atmosphere had gone from strained to freezing point. He wanted out. Why had she not seen that sooner?

With nerveless hands, she dragged out her case and plonked it down on the bed. She remembered the way he had made love to her earlier in the day and she shivered, almost torn in two by the agony that threatened to take hold of her.

When Sebasten strode in, she was gathering up the items she had left out on the dressing-table earlier and in the act of slinging them willy-nilly into her case.

‘What do you want?’ Lizzie asked, refusing to look higher than his snazzy dark blue silk tie.

‘Perhaps I don’t like having water thrown in my face in front of an audience,’ Sebasten heard himself bite out, although that had not been the tack he had planned to take. ‘And the audience didn’t much enjoy the fall-out either…it’s barely midnight and they’ve all gone home.’

‘If I had had anything bigger and heavier within reach, the damage would have been a lot worse!’ Lizzie’s soft mouth was sealed so tight it showed white round the edges.

‘Do you even realise who the woman who last spoke to you was?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care. There is just no excuse for the way you treated me tonight!’ Lizzie was fighting to retain a grip on her disturbed emotions and walk out on him with dignity. Deep down inside she knew that if she allowed herself to think about what she was doing or what was happening between then she might come apart at the seams in front of him.

‘Patsy Hewitt is the Sunday Globe’s gossip columnist. No prizes for guessing which couple will star in her next lead story!’

The journalist’s name had a vague familiarity for Lizzie but so intense was her emotional conflict that she could not grasp why he should waste his breath on something that struck her as an irrelevant detail.

‘I didn’t flaunt our relationship tonight because I wanted to protect you from that kind of unpleasant media exposure,’ Sebasten completed angrily.

That he should dare to be angry with her after the way he had behaved added salt to the wounds he had already inflicted. In the back of her mind, she discovered, had lurked a very different expectation: that he might grovel for embarrassing her in such a way, for denying her like a Judas before witnesses. And nothing short of grovelling apologies would have eased the colossal pain of angry, bewildered loss growing inside her.

‘Why the heck should a guy with your reputation care about media exposure?’ Lizzie demanded and looked at him for the first time since he had entered the room.

And it hurt, it hurt so much to study those lean, devastatingly attractive features, note the fierce tension etched in his fabulous bone-structure and recognise the hard condemnation in his scorching golden eyes.

‘And why the heck would I care anyway?’ she added in sudden haste, determined to get in first with what she knew was coming her way. ‘We’re finished and I want to go home. You can call a taxi for me!’

‘You can stay the night here. It would be crazy for you to leave this late at night.’ Instead of being relieved that the deed he had been in no hurry to do had been done for him, a jagged shot of instant igniting fury leapt through Sebasten.

‘The very idea of staying under the same roof as you is offensive to me. You’re an absolute toad and I hope Patsy whatever-her-name-is shows you up in print for what you are!’ Lizzie slung back not quite levelly, for a tiny secret part of her, a part that she despised, had hoped that he might argue with her announcement, might even this late in the day magically contrive to excuse his own behaviour and redress the damage he had done.

‘Perhaps had you considered telling me the truth about Connor this might not be happening,’ Sebasten heard himself declare, his jawline clenching hard. ‘Instead you lied your head off to me!’

‘I beg your pardon…?’ Settling perplexed green eyes on him, Lizzie stared back at him, her heart beginning to beat so fast at that startling reference to Connor that it felt as if it was thumping inside her very throat. Why was he dragging Connor in?

‘Connor’s mother, Ingrid, is a close family friend.’

Her gaze widened in astonishment at that unexpected revelation, pallor driving away the feverish flush in her cheeks, an eerie chill tingling down her spine. ‘You didn’t tell me that before…you said you hardly knew him—’

‘I knew Connor better as a child than as an adult.’ On surer ground now, Sebasten let true anger rise and never had he needed anger more than when he saw the shattered look of incomprehension stamped to Lizzie’s oval face. She was so pale that all seven freckles on her nose stood out in sharp relief. ‘You also said you didn’t know him well and then told repeated lies about your relationship with him.’

‘I didn’t lie,’ Lizzie countered in angry bewilderment, her tall, slender body rigid as she attempted to challenge the accusation that she was a liar while at the same time come to terms with the shocking reality that Sebasten had close ties that he cherished with the Morgan family but that he had not been prepared to reveal that fact to her. ‘I actually told you a truth that nobody other than myself, Connor and the woman involved knew!’

‘Theos mou…the truth?’ Sebasten slammed back with raw derision, infuriated that he had noticed her freckles in the middle of such a confrontation and outraged by the unfamiliar stress of having to fight to maintain his concentration. ‘Your most ingenious story of Connor’s secret affair with a married woman that would be impossible to disprove when you declined to name the lady involved. That nonsense was a base and inexcusable betrayal of Connor’s memory!’

‘You didn’t believe me,’ Lizzie registered in a belated surge of realisation and she shook her bright head in a numbed movement. ‘And yet you never said so, never even mentioned that Ingrid Morgan was a friend of yours. Why did you conceal those facts? If you believed I was lying, why didn’t you just confront me?’

‘Maybe I thought it was time that someone taught you a lesson.’ No sooner had Sebasten made that admission than he regretted it. ‘That was before I understood that what I was doing to you was as reprehensible as what you did to Connor.’

Lizzie only heard that first statement and her blood ran cold in her veins. Maybe I thought it was time that someone taught you a lesson. That confession rocked her already shaken world and threatened to blow it away altogether. He had gone after her, singled her out, and it had all been part of some desire to punish her for what she had supposedly done to Connor? She was shattered by that final revelation.

‘What sort of a man are you?’ Lizzie demanded in palpable disbelief.

Anger nowhere within reach, Sebasten lost colour beneath his bronzed skin and fought an insane urge to pull her into his arms and hold her tight. ‘The night I met you, the first night, I didn’t know who you were. I didn’t find out until the following morning when I saw your driving licence.’

Lizzie dismissed that plea without hesitation. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences like that…you went on the hunt for me.’

‘Had I known who you were I would never have gone to bed with you,’ Sebasten swore half under his breath.

A wave of dizziness assailed Lizzie. She could not bear to think of what he had just said. Blocking him from her mind and her view, she sank down on the foot of the bed and reached for her mobile phone. Desperate to leave his house, she punched out the number of a national cab firm to request a taxi.

‘Hell…I’ll take you back to London!’ Sebasten broke in.

Having made the call, Lizzie ignored him and breathed in slow and deep to ward off the swimming sensation in her head. The guy she had fallen in love with had embarked on their relationship with the sole and deliberate intent of hurting and humiliating her. She could not believe that he could have been so cruel, and why? Over the head of Connor, who had already cost her so much!

Sick to the heart, she stood up like an automaton and headed for the dressing room, where she assumed her clothes had been stowed away. She dragged garments from hangers and drawers, dimly amazed at the amount of stuff she had contrived to pack for a single night. But then she had been in love, hadn’t she been? Unable to make up her mind what she might need, what would look best, what he might admire most on her. A laugh that was no laugh at all bubbled and died again inside her. Her throat was raw and aching but, in the midst of what she believed to be the worst torture she would ever have to get through, her eyes were dry.

Sebasten hovered, lean, powerful hands clenching and unclenching. ‘I should never have slept with you,’ he admitted with suppressed savagery. ‘If I could go back and change that I would—’

‘Try staying out of basements too.’ Her tone one of ringing disgust, Lizzie quivered with a combustible mix of self-loathing and shame that he could have been so ruthless and wicked as to take advantage of her weakness. ‘There could never have been an excuse for what you’ve done. That you should have set out to cause me harm is unforgivable.’

‘Yes,’ Sebasten conceded in Greek, snatching in a deep-driven breath and switching back to English to state. ‘I do accept that two wrongs do not make a right, but in the heat of the moment when I was confronted with the depth of Ingrid’s despair my mind was not so clear. I was appalled that first morning when I discovered your true identity and what took place today was indefensible. But from the outset I was very much attracted to you.’

Heaping clothes into the case, Lizzie made herself look at him, hatred in her heart, hatred built on a hurt that went so deep it felt like a physical pain. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better? I met you when my whole life had crashed around me. I was very unhappy and you must have seen that…yet you waded in and made it worse,’ she condemned. ‘How could you be such a bastard?’

‘I lost the plot…isn’t that obvious?’ Sebasten threw back at her with a savage edge to his accented drawl as he swept up the couple of garments she had dropped on her passage from the dressing room but held on to them because he did not want to hasten her departure. ‘I got in deeper than I ever dreamt and I’m paying a price for that now too.’

Lizzie thought in a daze of the child she carried and a spasm of bitter regret tightened her facial muscles. She was no longer listening to him. ‘Connor cheated on me and he didn’t spare my feelings a single thought. I lost my friends and my father’s respect. I paid way over the odds for being the fall guy in that affair. But this is something else again…I loved you…’ Her voice faltered to a halt and she blinked, shocked that she had admitted that and then, beyond caring, she snapped her case closed with trembling hands and swung it down off the bed.

‘I don’t want you to leave in this frame of mind…’ Sebasten declared as much to her as to himself.

‘I hate you. I will never forgive you…so stop saying really stupid things!’ Lizzie slung at him with a wildness that mushroomed up from within her without any warning and made her feel almost violent. ‘What did you expect from me? That I was going to shake hands and thank you for wrecking my life again!’

Sebasten had no answer, but then he had never thought that far ahead and just then cool, rational thought evaded him. ‘If you want to go back to London tonight, let me drive you,’ he urged, taking refuge in male practicality.

‘You’re wired to the moon,’ Lizzie accused shakily, hauling her case past him.

His hand came down over hers and forced her fingers into retreat from the handle. She just let him have the case. She walked to the door, threw it wide and started down the stairs while she willed the taxi to come faster than the speed of light.

Sebasten reached the hall only seconds in her wake. As a manservant hurried from the rear of the hall to relieve him of the case, only to be sent into retreat by the ferocious look of warning he received from his employer, Lizzie wrenched open the front door on her own.’

‘Give me my case!’ she demanded, fired up like an Amazon warrior.

With pronounced reluctance, Sebasten set the case down. ‘Lizzie…Connor was my half-brother…’

Lizzie spun back to him in astonishment and an image of Connor surged up in her mind’s eye: the very dark brown eyes that had been so unexpected with her ex-boyfriend’s blond hair, the classic bone-structure, his height and build. She did not question Sebasten’s ultimate revelation. Indeed, for her it was as though the whole appalling picture was finally complete.

‘Two of you…’ she muttered sickly as she turned away again to focus with relief on the car headlights approaching the front of the house. ‘And both of you arrogant, selfish, lying rats who use and abuse women! Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?’

Sebasten froze at that response. The cab driver got out to take her case. Within the space of a minute, Lizzie was gone. Sebasten looked down at the flimsy white bra and red silk shirt he was still grasping in one hand and he knew that he was about to get so drunk that he didn’t know what day it was.

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.