The Contaxis Baby

‘Tom’s warning Jen that if she stays friendly with Lizzie, she’s likely to find herself out on her own with only Lizzie!’

‘How could she have treated Connor that way? He was so much fun, so kind…’

Lizzie fled with hot, prickling tears standing out in her shaken eyes. Returning to her table, she drained her glass without even tasting the contents. Those female voices had belonged to her friends. One of them had even gone to school with her. Ex-friends. All of a sudden everybody hated her, yet only weeks ago she had had so many invitations out she would have needed a clone of herself to attend every event. Now she wanted to bolt for the exit and go home. But she wasn’t welcome at home any more and Jen would be furious if she tried to end the evening early.

Yes, Connor had seemed kind. At least, she had thought so too until she went down to the Denton country cottage and found Connor in bed with Felicity. Her skin turned cold and clammy at that tormenting memory.

She had been thinking about inviting a bunch of friends to the cottage for the weekend. Believing that the property had been little used in recent times, she had decided to check out that there would be sufficient bedding. Connor must have come down from London in her stepmother’s car and it had been parked out of sight behind the garage, so Lizzie had had no warning that the cottage was occupied. She had been in a lovely, bubbly mood, picturing how amazed Connor would be when she told him that he would be spending his twenty-fifth birthday in Bali.

Lizzie had been on the stairs when she heard the funny noises: a sort of rustling and moaning that had sent a momentary chill down her spine. But even at that stage she had not, in her ignorance, suspected that what she was hearing was a man and a woman making love. Blithely assuming that it was only the wind getting in through a window that had been left open, she had gone right on up. From the landing, she had got a full Technicolor view of her boyfriend and her stepmother rolling about the pine four-poster bed in the main bedroom.

Felicity had been in the throes of what had looked more like agony than ecstasy. Connor had been gasping for breath in between telling Felicity how much he loved her and how he couldn’t bear to think that it would be another week before he could see her again. Throughout that exchange, Lizzie had been frozen to the spot like a paralysed peeping Tom. When Felicity had seen her, her aghast baby-blue eyes had flooded with tears, making her look more than ever like a victim in the guise of a fairytale princess.

But then crying was an art form and a way of life for her stepmother, Lizzie reflected, striving valiantly to suppress the wounding images she had allowed to surge up from her subconscious. Felicity wept if dinner was less than perfect… ‘It’s my fault…it’s my fault,’ she would fuss until Maurice Denton was on his knees and promising her a week in Paris to recover from the trauma of it. In much the same way and with just as much sincere feeling she had wept when Lizzie found her in bed with Connor Morgan. Tears had dripped from her like rain but her nose hadn’t turned red and her eyes hadn’t swelled up pink.

When Lizzie cried, it was noisy and messy and her skin turned blotchy. That afternoon, Connor and Felicity had enjoyed a full performance to that effect, before Lizzie’s pride came to the rescue and she told them to get out of the cottage. After they had departed, she had made a bonfire of their bedding in the back garden. Recalling that rather pointless exercise, she forced herself upright with an equally forced smile when Jen urged her up to dance.

Up on the overhanging wrought-iron gallery above, Sebasten was scanning the crowds below while the club manager gushed by his side, ‘I recognised the Denton girl when she arrived. She looks a right little goer…’

Derisive distaste lit Sebasten’s brooding gaze. The very fact that Lisa Denton was out clubbing only forty-eight hours after the funeral told him all he needed to know about the woman who had trashed Connor’s life.

‘Although little wouldn’t be the operative word,’ the older man chuckled. ‘She’s a big girl…not even that pretty; wouldn’t be my style anyway.’

His companion’s inappropriate tone of prurience gritted Sebasten’s even white teeth. Beyond the fact that he had a very definite need to put a face to the name, he had no other immediate motive for seeking out Lisa Denton. She would pay for what she had done to Connor but Sebasten never acted in reckless haste and invariably employed the most subtle means of retribution against those who injured him.

At that point, his attention was ensnared by the slender woman spinning below the lights on the dance floor below, long hair the colour of marmalade splaying in a sea of amber luxuriance around her bare shoulders. She flung her head back with the kind of suggestive abandonment that fired a leap of pure adrenalin in Sebasten. Every muscle in his big, powerful length snapped taut when he saw her face: the exotic slant of her cheekbones below big, faraway eyes and a lush, full-lipped pink mouth. Her beauty was distinctive, unusual. Her white halter-neck top glittered above a sleek, smooth midriff and she sported a skirt the tantalising width of a belt above lithe, shapely legs that were at least three feet long. Bloody gorgeous, Sebasten decided, sticking out an expectant hand for the drink he had ordered and receiving it while contemplating that face and those legs and every visible inch that lay between with unashamed lust and wholly dishonourable intentions. Tonight, he would not be sleeping alone…

‘That’s her…the blonde…’

Recalled to the thorny question of Lisa Denton by his companion’s pointing hand, Sebasten looked to one side of his racy lady with the marmalade hair and, seeing a small blonde with the apparent cleavage of the Grand Canyon, understood why the manager had referred to his quarry as a big girl. So that was the nasty little piece of work whom Connor had lost his head over. Sebasten was not impressed but then he hadn’t wanted or expected to be.

On the dance floor below, Jen touched Lizzie’s shoulder to attract her attention. Only then did Sebasten appreciate that the two women knew each other and he frowned, for such a close connection could prove to be a complication. It was predictable that within the space of ten seconds Sebasten had worked out how that acquaintance might even benefit his purpose.

Jen reached the table she had been seated at with Lizzie first and then turned with compressed lips. ‘I’ve been thinking that…well, perhaps it’s not such a good idea for you to stay with me…’

Remembering the dialogue that she had overheard in the cloakroom, Lizzie felt her heart sink. ‘Has someone been getting at you?’

‘Let’s be cool about this,’ Jen urged with a brittle smile. ‘I have every sympathy for the situation you’re in right now but I have to think of myself too and I don’t want to—’

‘Get the same treatment?’ Lizzie slotted in.

Jen nodded, grateful that Lizzie had grasped the point so fast. ‘You should just go to a hotel and keep your head down for a while. You can pick up your things tomorrow. By this time next week, everybody will have found something other than Connor to get wound up about.’

And with that unlikely forecast, Jen walked without hesitation into the enemy camp two tables away and sat down with the crowd, who had been ignoring Lizzie all evening. For an awful instant, Lizzie was terrified that she was going to break down and sob like a little baby in front of them all. Whirling round, she pushed her way back onto the crowded dance floor, where at least she was out of view.

It was an effort to think straight and then she stopped trying, just sank into the music and gave herself up to the pounding beat. Her troubled, tearful gaze strayed to the male poised on the wrought-iron stairs that led down from the upper gallery and for no reason that she could fathom she fell still again. He was tall, black-haired and possessed of so striking a degree of sleek, dark good looks that the unattached women near by were focusing their every provocative move on him and even the attached ones were stealing cunning glances past their partners and weighing their chances.

He looked like a child in a toy shop: spoilt for choice while he accepted all those admiring female stares as his due. He was also the kind of guy who never looked twice at Lizzie except to lech over her legs and then wince at her flat chest and her freckles when he finally dragged his Neanderthal, over-sexed gaze up that high. Story of my life, Lizzie conceded. An over-emotional sob tugged at her throat as self-pity demolished a momentarily entrancing fantasy of said guy making a beeline for her and thoroughly sickening Jen and her cohort of non-wellwishers.

Ashamed of her own emotional weakness, Lizzie headed for the bar, for want of anything better to do.

A hand suddenly closed over hers, startling her. ‘Let me…’ a dark, deep, sinfully rich drawl murmured in her ear.

Let him…what? Flipping round, Lizzie had the rare experience of having to tilt her head back to look up at a man. She encountered stunning dark golden eyes and stopped breathing, frozen in her tracks by shock. It was the guy from the stairs and close to he was even more spectacular than he had looked at a distance, not to mention being very much taller than she had imagined. Male too, very, very male, was the only other description she could come up with as she simply stared up at him.

Beneath her astonished scrutiny, he snapped long brown fingers, tilted his arrogant dark head back to address someone out of view and then began to walk her away from the crush at the bar again.

‘I’ve got freckles…’ Lizzie mumbled in case he hadn’t noticed.

‘I shall look forward to counting them.’ He flashed her the kind of smile that carried a thousand megawatts of sheer masculine charisma and her heart, her dead and battered heart, leapt in her chest as though she had been kicked by an electrical charge.

‘You like freckles?’

‘Ask me tomorrow,’ Sebasten purred with husky amusement.

CHAPTER TWO

AS SEBASTEN approached the table where Lizzie had been seated, his bodyguards, who Lizzie assumed were bouncers, shifted the people about to take it over with scant ceremony. Two waiters then appeared at speed to clear the empty glasses.

Watching that ruthless little display of power being played out before her, Lizzie blinked in surprise. Was he the manager or the owner of the club? Who else could he be? The bar was heaving with a crush of bodies but the bouncer types only had to signal to receive a tray of drinks while others less influential fumed.

Looking across the table as her companion folded down with athletic grace into a seat, Lizzie still found herself staring: he was just so breathtaking. His lean, bronzed features were framed with high cheekbones, a narrow-bridged classic nose and a stubborn jawline. He had the kind of striking bone structure that would impress even when he was old. Luxuriant black hair curled back from his forehead above strong, well-marked brows, his brilliant, deep-set dark eyes framed by thick black lashes. Her heart hammered when he smiled at her again but she could not shake the lowering sensation that his choice of her with her less obvious attractions was a startling and inexplicable event.

‘I’m Sebasten,’ Sebasten drawled, cool as glass. ‘Sebasten Contaxis.’

His name meant nothing to Lizzie but, as what she had already seen suggested that she ought to recognise the name, she nodded as if she had already recognised him and, having finally picked up on the sexy, rasping timbre of his accent, said, ‘I’m Lizzie…you’re not from London—er—originally, are you?’

Taking that as a case of stating the obvious with irony, Sebasten laughed. ‘Hardly, but I’m very fond of this city, Lizzie? Short for? The obvious?’

‘Yes, after my mother…it’s what my family and closest friends call me.’ As Lizzie met the concentrated effect of those spectacular dark golden eyes, a frisson of feverish tension not unlaced with alarm seized her: he was not the sort of straightforward, safe male she was usually drawn to. There was danger in the aura of arrogant expectation he emanated, in the tough strength of purpose etched in that lean, dark, handsome face. But perhaps the greatest threat of all lay in the undeniable sizzle of the sexual signals in that smouldering gaze of his.

‘I take it that you saw at one glance that we were likely to be close,’ he said in a teasing undertone that sent a potent little shiver down her taut spine.

Her breath snarled up in her throat. Caution urged her to slap him down but she didn’t want him to walk away, could not, at that instant, think of clever enough words with which to gracefully spell out the reality that she was not into casual intimacy on short acquaintance. But for the first time in her life, Lizzie realised that she was seriously tempted and that shook her.

In surprise, Sebasten watched the hot colour climb in her cheeks so that the freckles all merged, the sudden downward dip of her eyes as she tilted her head to one side in an evasive move that was more awkward than elegant. For a moment, in spite of her sophisticated, provocative appearance, she looked young, very young and vulnerable.

‘Smile…’ he commanded, suddenly wondering what age she was.

And her generous mouth curved up as if she couldn’t help herself in an entirely natural but rather embarrassed grin that had so much genuine appeal that Sebasten was entrapped by the surprise of it. ‘I’m not the best company tonight,’ she told him in a tone of earnest apology.

Sebasten rose in one fluid movement to his full height and extended a hand. ‘Let’s dance…’

As Lizzie got up she caught a glimpse of the staring faces at that table of ex-friends that she had been avoiding all evening and she threw her head back, squaring her taut bare shoulders. It felt good to be seen with a presentable male, rather than being alone and an object of scornful pity.

Just as it had once felt good to be with Connor? Lizzie snatched in a sharp gasp of air, painfully aware that Connor had smashed her confidence to pieces. She had thought that he was as straight and honest as she was herself. When he had made no attempt to go beyond the occasional kiss, she had believed his plea that he respected her and wanted to get to know her better. In retrospect that made her feel such an utter and naïve fool, for his restraint had encouraged her to make all sorts of foolish assumptions, not least the belief that he was really serious about her. When she was forced to face the awful truth that Connor had instead been sleeping with her much more beautiful stepmother, she had been devastated by her own trusting stupidity.

A strong arm curved round Lizzie and tugged her close in a smooth move that brought her into glancing collision with Sebasten’s lean, muscular length. A shockwave of heated response slivered through her quivering body.