The Contaxis Baby (5 page)

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 present-ability 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 finger-tips 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.

She had been a virgin, he was sure of it, Sebasten thought, but he wasn’t quite sure enough to broach the issue. He recalled her clueless approach to making love to him and amusement filled him. A split-second later the renewed ache of desire prompted him to kiss her again and it was the last even semi-serious thought he had for some hours.