The Contaxis Baby (18 page)

Yet throughout those two glorious weeks they shared, Sebasten continually surprised and delighted her with the unexpected. The night that he found her eating sun-dried tomatoes with a fork direct from the jar she had brought out to Greece with her, he had laughed at her embarrassment over her secret craving and carried both jar and her back to bed. But within twenty-four hours a ready supply of Greek sun-dried tomatoes had been flown in.

‘It’s a Greek baby,’ he had pointed out cheerfully.

She would never have dreamt of telling Sebasten but she truly believed he was a perfect husband. He was romantic, although without ever seeming to realise that he was being romantic. He was also incredibly passionate and tender as well as being the most entertaining male she had ever been with. In short, he was just wonderful. She could not credit that she had been so worried that he might not be ready for the commitment of marriage. She was convinced that at any moment he would open the subject of their living in separate houses when they returned to London and talk her out of what she had already decided had been a very stupid idea.

It was the last night of their honeymoon. Sebasten had selected it as the night they would cast off their newly married seclusion and host a party at the big white villa over the hill. He wanted to entertain all the Greek friends and business acquaintances who had not been able to make it to a wedding staged at such short notice.

‘You look fantastic in that dress,’ Sebasten informed her as he entered the bedroom.

Lizzie encountered the appreciative gleam in his gaze and just grinned. ‘You picked it. The emeralds look spectacular with it too. Thank you.’

‘Gratitude not required. Those emeralds accentuate your eyes and I had to have them, pethi mou.’

She looked so happy, Sebasten thought with a powerful sense of achievement and satisfaction. He could not believe that she would insist on living apart from him when they got back home again. If she had begun to care for him even a little again, she would surely change her mind.

‘How did you get so friendly with Ingrid Morgan?’ Lizzie asked as she kicked off her shoes to walk barefoot across the sand. The path that led up through the pine wood to the main house was on the other side of the beach. ‘You never did explain that.’

‘Between the ages of eight and eleven, I spent every vacation here with Ingrid and Connor. My father would just fly in for a few days here and there,’ Sebasten explained wryly.

‘Every vacation?’ Lizzie queried in surprise.

‘It suited Andros. He was between wives. Ingrid treated me the same way she treated Connor and I began to think of them as my family.’ Sebasten grimaced as if to invite her scorn of such a weakness on his part. ‘It ended the day I asked my father when he and Ingrid were getting married.’

‘Was marriage so out of the question?’

‘By that stage they had already had a stormy on-and-off relationship that spanned quite a few years. He never thought of her as anything other than a mistress and he’d convinced himself that I was too young to ask awkward questions. But he took me back to our home in Athens that same evening and I was an adult before I met Ingrid again.’

‘That was so cruel!’ Lizzie groaned.

No longer did she wonder why he had once admitted to not trusting her sex, for he had been let down by the only two women he had learned to love when he was a child. His mother had walked away through her own personal choice but Ingrid Morgan had had no choice, for she had had no rights over her lover’s son.

Why the hell had he told her all that? Sebasten asked himself in strong exasperation. Lizzie’s eyes were glistening with tears and, even as he was warmed by her emotional response on his behalf, he was embarrassed by it too.

Ahead of them lay the big, opulent white villa built by Andros Contaxis for his second wife. Lizzie had had a lengthy tour of the house the week before. While a hugely impressive dwelling with as many rooms as a hotel, it lacked character and appeal. Considering that problem and keen to change the subject to one less sensitive, she murmured in a bright upbeat tone, ‘I’ve got so many plans for the house. I can hardly wait to get home to make a start. I really will need the advice of a good interior designer, maybe even an architect.’

Sebasten absorbed that admission in angry, startled bewilderment. He assumed she was referring to the house he had offered her for her own sole occupation in London. How the hell could she exude such enthusiasm for literally throwing him back out of her life again? Had nothing that they had shared in recent days made her reappraise that ambition? What was he? A negotiable part of the old sun, sea and sex vacation aboard? Or just a rebound affair after Connor that was now leading to its natural conclusion? Obviously not much more, for all that he was the father of the baby she carried!

Surprised by his silence, Lizzie coloured, for she had assumed that he would be pleased. But then possibly he believed that when they were only just married she had some nerve announcing that she planned to redesign one of his homes. After all, it should have been his suggestion, rather than hers, she thought in sudden mortification. Just because her own father had always preferred to let the women in his life take care of such matters did not mean that Sebasten had a similar outlook.

‘Of course,’ she added hurriedly, striving to backtrack from her stated intention without losing face, ‘change doesn’t always mean improvement and it could be a mistake to rush into a project that would be so expensive—’

‘Spend what you like when you like,’ Sebasten delivered in a derisive undertone. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

Shock sliced through Lizzie. As they entered the villa she stole a shaken glance at his lean, hard profile, wondering what on earth she had said to deserve such a response. Whatever, it was obvious that Sebasten was angry. Furthermore, once their guests began arriving in a flood, Sebasten roved far and wide from her side, leaving her more than once to assume the guise of a faithful follower. He also talked almost exclusively in Greek, which she supposed was understandable when he was mixing with other Greeks, but on several occasions when she was already aware that their companions spoke English he left her feeling superfluous to their conversations.

‘You have all my sympathy,’ Candice, a beautiful and elegant brunette, remarked to Lizzie out of the blue.

Having already been informed by Candice that she had once dated Sebasten, Lizzie tensed. ‘Why?’

‘Sebasten doesn’t quite have the look of a male who has taken to marriage like a duck to water.’ Exotic dark eyes mocked Lizzie’s flush of dismay at that crack. ‘But then some men are just born to prefer freedom and it is early days yet, isn’t it?’

That one stinging comment was sufficient to persuade Lizzie that Sebasten was making a public spectacle of her. Seeing him momentarily alone, she studied him. He looked grim without his social smile, pale beneath his usually vibrant olive skin tone, and concern overcame her annoyance. She hurried over to him and said ruefully, ‘Are you going to tell me what’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing’s the matter.’ Hard golden eyes clashed with hers in apparent astonishment.

‘But I’ve hardly seen you this evening—’

‘Do we need to stick together like superglue?’ Sebasten elevated a sardonic ebony brow. ‘I have to confess that after two weeks of round-the-clock togetherness, I’m in need of a breather and looking forward to leading more separate lives when we get home.’

The silence enclosed her like silent thunder.

‘Believe me, you’re not the only one,’ Lizzie breathed, fighting to keep her voice level.

She walked away but inside herself she was tottering in shock and devastation. How could he turn on her like that when she had believed them so close? She loved him to distraction but how could she allow herself to love someone that ruthless in stating his own dissatisfaction with their marriage? What had gone wrong, how it had gone wrong without her noticing seemed unimportant. All that mattered was that once again she herself had been guilty of making a fatal misjudgement about how a man felt about her.

Oh, she knew he didn’t love her but she had believed that they were incredibly close for all that. Hadn’t he said so himself? But then, what did she believe? What Sebasten said in bed or what he said out of it? She knew which version her intelligence warned her to place most credence in. She gazed round the crowded room but all the faces were just a blur and the clink of glasses, the chatter and the music seemed distant and subdued. Then, without her even appreciating the fact, the most awful dizziness had taken hold of her. As she lurched in the direction of the nearest seat she was too late to prevent what was already happening, and she folded down on the carpet with a stifled moan of dismay.

Already striding towards her, alerted by her striking pallor and wavering stance, Sebasten was right on the spot to take charge but cool did not distinguish the moments that immediately followed Lizzie’s fainting fit. Never an optimist at the best of times, in the guilt-stricken mood he was in, Sebasten was convinced he’d killed her stone-dead and the reality that there were at least three doctors present was of no consolation whatsoever.

Lizzie recovered consciousness to find herself lying on a sofa in another room. Three men were hovering but Sebasten was down on his knees, clutching one of her hands, much as if she were on her deathbed. She blinked, almost smiled as her bemused gaze closed in on his lean, strong face, and then she remembered his words of rejection and what colour she had regained receded again and she turned her head away, sucking in a deep, convulsive breath.

‘Only a faint, nothing to really worry about,’ Sebasten’s best friend from university asserted in bracing Greek. ‘A mother-to-be shouldn’t be standing for hours on end on such a warm and humid evening—’

‘And not without having eaten any supper,’ chimed in another friend.

‘She has a fragile look about her,’ the third doctor remarked, his more pessimistic and cautious nature a perfect match for Sebasten’s. ‘Entertaining two hundred people tonight may well have been too much for her. This is a warning to you. She needs rest and tender care, and try to keep the stress to a minimum.’

Sebasten was feeling bad enough without the news that his lack of care on almost every possible count had contributed to Lizzie’s condition. He scooped her up into his arms. ‘I’m taking you up to bed.’

Lizzie made no protest. The more she thought about his rejection, the more anguished she felt, and what self-discipline she had was directed towards thanking the doctors for their assistance and striving to behave normally.

By the time Sebasten had carried Lizzie up to the master-bedroom suite and settled her down on the vast circular bed that had sent her into a fit of giggles when she first saw it, even he was a little out of breath. But so shattered had he been by her collapse and by the gut-wrenching punishment of having been forced to think of what life might be like without her that Sebasten was desperate to dig himself back out of the very deep hole that fierce pride had put him in.

‘I was lying in my teeth when I said I was tired of us being together,’ Sebasten confessed in a raw, driven undertone.

Thinking that now he felt sorry for her and blamed his own blunt honesty for causing her stupid faint, Lizzie flipped over and presented him with her back. ‘I’d like to be on my own.’

‘I’m sorry I was such a bastard,’ Sebasten framed half under his breath, his dark, deep drawl thick with strain. ‘I don’t want to score points any more. I do want you to be happy—’

‘Then go away,’ she muttered tightly.

‘But I need you in my life.’ Sebasten forced that admission out with much the same gritty force as a male making a confession while facing a loaded gun.

A solitary tear rolled down Lizzie’s taut cheek. Obviously he had recognised just how devastated she was at the concept of having to let go of her dream of a happy, normal marriage. ‘I don’t need you,’ she mumbled flatly.

CHAPTER TWELVE

S EBASTEN had had a hell of a night.

Most of their guests had travelled home. Some who had had to stay overnight at the villa at least retired early, but those who did not kept him up until almost dawn. For what remained of the night he paced the room next to Lizzie’s and fought the temptation to disturb her so that they could talk again. While Lizzie breakfasted in bed at his express instruction, he had to assume a cheerful-host act until the merciful moment that the last of their visitors had departed. However, by that stage it was time to embark on their return trip to London.

Lizzie came downstairs dressed in a dark green shift dress, her hair pulled back in a sophisticated style, all but her lush pink lips and the tip of her nose hidden behind a giant pair of sunglasses.

‘How do you feel?’ Sebasten asked, striving to suppress the recollection of finding her bedroom door locked when he had tried to make the same enquiry earlier in the day.

‘Marvellous…can’t wait to get home!’ Lizzie declared, heading for the helicopter outside at speed.

Behind the sunglasses her reddened eyes were dull with misery but Lizzie had her pride to sustain her. When they boarded the Contaxis jet at Athens, she struck up an animated conversation with the stewardesses, went into several determined fits of laughter at the movie she chose to watch and enjoyed a second dessert after eating a hearty late lunch. And she called him insensitive, Sebasten reflected in receipt of that concerted display of indifference.

‘I have to call into the office,’ Sebasten announced after she had climbed into the limousine waiting to collect them in London. ‘I’ll see you back at the house…we have to talk.’

But what was there to talk about? Lizzie asked herself wretchedly. He had already spelt out how he felt. She had no option but to go to his London home, for the town house he had purchased had yet to be furnished. So, couldn’t she buy some furniture? Surely camping out in bare rooms would be better than staying with Sebasten when her presence was no longer welcome?

How could he get bored with her between one moment and the next? Her throat ached and her rebellious memory served up a dozen images of intimacy that cut her like a knife when she could least bear it. Sebasten dragging her out of bed to breakfast at dawn and enjoy what he called ‘the best part of the day’ and her struggling to match his vibrant energy and conceal her yawns. Sebasten watching her try on clothes, a smouldering gleam of appreciation in his gaze letting her know exactly what to buy. Sebasten curving her into his arms last thing at night and making her feel so incredibly happy and secure.

No, camping out in bare rooms, she decided with a helpless shiver, would be more comfortable than the chilling prospect of sharing the same household even on a temporary basis, ever conscious of what they had had and then lost. Painful as it was, she knew that some men lost all interest in a woman once the excitement of the chase was over and that those same men could go from desire to uninterest almost overnight. Was that Sebasten’s true nature? And had he not already achieved what he had said was most important? Their child would be born a Contaxis. The sad fact was that his parents did not have to live together nor even remain married to meet that requirement.

Infuriated at the crisis that had demanded his presence at Contaxis International, Sebasten got back home just before seven that evening. By then, Lizzie had already cleared out. The dressing room off the master bedroom looked as though a whirlwind by the name of Lizzie had gone through it and his staff had tactfully left the evidence for him to find. She had left a note on the bed. Seeing it, he froze, not wanting to read it.

‘I borrowed some of your furniture but I’ll return it soon. It’s easier this way,’ she wrote in her note. ‘Stay in touch.’

Stay in touch? Sebasten crunched the note between his fingers. Easier for whom? He was in total shock. Nothing he had said the night before had made any impression on her. He had said ‘ I need you’ to a woman who could break down in floods of tears over a sad film, but she had still walked out. Let her go, his stubborn pride urged.

When Sebasten hit the bell on the front door, Lizzie mustered her courage and went to answer it.

Lean, bronzed features taut, he was sheathed in a formal dark business suit. She allowed her gaze to flick over him very fast. He looked sensational, but then he always did, she acknowledged painfully. Heart pounding like a road drill, she crossed the echoing hall and showed him into the only furnished room available.

‘Look at me…’ Sebasten urged in a roughened undertone.

She was shocked by the haunted strain in his dark gold gaze and the fierce tension stamped into every sculpted line of his hard bone-structure.

‘Come home…please,’ he breathed with fierce emphasis. ‘We have to talk.’

‘I think that all that needs to be said was said last night,’ Lizzie said unevenly.

‘No…I tried to give you space while we were in Greece. I went against my own nature.’ Sebasten shifted a lean, forceful hand to emphasise that point. ‘If I had that two weeks a second time, believe me, I wouldn’t make the same mistake again.’

‘But you went out of your way to hurt me last night.’ Lizzie’s mind was in angry, defensive turmoil, for she could no longer understand what he wanted from her.

Sebasten released a ragged laugh. ‘What did you expect from me after I had to listen to you telling me that you couldn’t wait to start renovating this house? How was I supposed to react? You were letting me know that nothing had changed, that you weren’t prepared to live with me or even give our marriage a fighting chance!’

Lizzie stared back at him with wide, bewildered eyes. ‘But I wasn’t talking about this house…I was talking about your father’s villa on the island!’

Sebasten stilled in his pacing track across the room and frowned in equal bemusement. ‘You didn’t make that clear. The villa on Isvos?’

‘Yes.’ Lizzie took in a slow, steadying breath as she grasped that they had been talking at cross purposes the previous night. His aggression had been fired by a simple misconception: his belief that she was still hell-bent on setting up a separate household. ‘You picked me up wrong and leapt to the wrong conclusion.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Sebasten had a different viewpoint. ‘You’ve moved in here.’

‘Only because I thought that was what you wanted!’

‘Why would I want to live apart from my wife?’ The fierce glitter in his intent golden eyes challenged her, his jawline clenching hard. ‘I thought that I could accept that for a while if it meant that you married me but this feels more like the end of our marriage than the beginning. But I know that I can’t force you to feel what I feel.’

‘And what do you feel?’ Lizzie almost whispered, so great was her tension, for what he was telling her was exactly what she had needed to hear from him.

‘That maybe you haven’t quite got over Connor yet. That maybe this situation is what I asked for when I screwed up our relationship from start to finish…but I still love you and I’ll wait for as long as it takes,’ Sebasten breathed with fierce conviction.

Lizzie was still as a statue. Shock had made her pale. ‘You love me?’

Sebasten fixed level, strained golden eyes on her and nodded much as if he had just confessed to a terminal illness.

‘Since when?’ Lizzie could barely frame the question.

‘Probably the first night we met. I did things that night that I would never have done in a normal state of mind,’ Sebasten confessed with grim dark eyes, not appearing to register that she was fumbling her way down onto the edge of the sofa she had borrowed. ‘I did take huge advantage of you. You were very vulnerable that night but I just couldn’t let go of you. Love is supposed to make people kinder but at that stage it only made me more selfish and ruthless.’

‘Sebasten…’ Lizzie was wondering if she could dare to credit what she was hearing when what he was saying was her every dream come true.

‘No, I’m determined to tell it like it was, no stone left unturned,’ Sebasten asserted with a derision angled at himself. ‘After I sobered you up that night, I should’ve put you in a guest room. On the other hand, if I had done that you wouldn’t have got pregnant and I could never have persuaded you to marry me. So, I’m afraid I can’t even regret that we made love.’

Lizzie could not drag her mesmerised stare from his lean, strong face. ‘Yes, he was still very much the focused guy she had fallen in love with. But that he should be grateful that she had conceived because that development had ultimately made her let him back into her life again touched her to the heart.

‘And when I suspected that you were a virgin, did I feel guilty?’ Sebasten spread rueful hands in emphasis. ‘No, I didn’t feel guilty even then. That made you feel more like mine, and you’re right—where you’re concerned I’m very possessive and jealous and I was delighted that I was your first lover.’

‘You’re being so honest,’ Lizzie managed in a shaky voice. ‘I really like that.’

‘Then I saw your driver’s licence and realised you were Lisa Denton and it all just blew up in my face. From there on in, it only got worse,’ Sebasten continued heavily.

‘The night we met…you honestly didn’t know who I was?’ Lizzie gasped.

‘I told you I didn’t! I saw you on the dance floor and I couldn’t take my eyes off you. I had not the smallest suspicion that you were Connor’s ex.’

And she hadn’t believed him, Lizzie thought in dismay.

‘In fact I thought the little blonde I saw speaking to you was Lisa Denton and I had no intention whatsoever of approaching her.’

‘That was Jen,’ Lizzie whispered, fully convinced that he was telling her the truth.

‘Once I knew your true identity, I couldn’t acknowledge how I felt about you. I wrecked everything trying to stay loyal as I believed to Connor’s memory.’

‘Why, though? You admitted you hardly knew him as an adult.’

Sebasten grimaced. ‘The day of the funeral was also the day Ingrid told me that he was my half-brother.’

Lizzie absorbed that fact with a flash of anger in her expressive eyes. ‘Oh, that was wicked…to finally tell you that when Connor was dead!’

‘I wouldn’t say it was wicked, but with hindsight I can see that it was very manipulative timing,’ Sebasten conceded with wry regret. ‘But Ingrid was out of her head with grief. It sent me haywire though. I felt a great sense of loss. I felt guilty that I had not made more effort to maintain contact with Connor.’

Lizzie did not believe he would have found very much common ground with his half-brother but she was too kind to say so. Her memory of the younger man had softened but she knew that he had been arrogant and self-centred right to the last in allowing his friends to go on believing that she had broken his heart and driven him to the heavy drinking sessions that finally contributed to his death.

‘I’ve learnt more about Connor through what he did to you than I probably ever wanted to know,’ Sebasten confided with a grimace, as if he could read her mind. ‘What I hate most is that I came along and I hurt you even more.’

‘That’s behind us now,’ Lizzie assured him.

‘Time and time again, I told myself that the secret of your incredible attraction was just sex,’ Sebasten groaned. ‘The minute I realised that you were Lisa Denton, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t ever sleep with you again…but I did and more than once.’

‘I know.’ Lizzie was trying hard not to smile.

‘That episode in the basement just…’ Sebasten threw up both hands in a speaking gesture of rare discomfiture. ‘It was crass, crazy. I’m really sorry about that. Afterwards, I couldn’t believe I’d lost control to that extent…I mean, I was fighting what I felt for you with everything I had! But I was a pushover every time.’

‘That’s when you realised how keen I was on you, wasn’t it?’ Lizzie prompted gently.

Dark colour scored his superb cheekbones. ‘I felt like a total bastard and I didn’t want to hurt you. So, I decided that I had to dump you because the entire situation had become more than I could handle.’

‘You poor love…’ Lizzie swallowed hard on the unexpected giggle that bubbled in her throat. ‘You’ve had a really tough time.’

‘You dumped me,’ Sebasten reminded her. ‘I couldn’t even do that right!’

Lizzie got up and wrapped her arms round him.

‘I thought you were angry with me. Why are you hugging me?’ Sebasten asked, his Greek accent very thick.

‘For making me feel as irresistible as Cleopatra…for letting me see that loving me has made you suffer a lot too…so now I can forgive you for having made me suffer,’ Lizzie confided, locking both arms round his neck.

‘You can forgive me?’ Some of the raw tension in his big, powerful frame eased and he closed his own arms tightly round her. ‘Give me a chance to make everything right from now on?’

‘Loads of chances,’ she promised, conscious of the anxiety still visible in his dark golden eyes. ‘When did you realise you’d fallen in love with me?’

Sebasten tensed. ‘I sort of suspected it in Greece but I didn’t take those thoughts out and examine them because I didn’t know what was going to happen when we came back to London. But when you collapsed last night I panicked and faced how much you meant to me. I had this nightmare vision of my life without you in it—’