The Contaxis Baby

On the wet pavement outside, a uniformed chauffeur extended an umbrella for their protection and hurried to open the door of a long, opulent silver limousine. Lizzie was impressed and she got in, refused to think about what she was doing and turned to look at Sebasten again. The dizzy sense of rightness that had engulfed her only minutes earlier returned. ‘Where were you born?’ she heard herself ask.

In the act of tugging her close, Sebasten grinned at what struck him as an essentially feminine and pointless question. ‘On an island the size of a postage stamp in the Aegean Sea…and you?’

‘In Devon,’ she confided, heart skipping a beat over that incredible smile of his. ‘My parents moved to London when I was a baby.’

‘How fascinating,’ Sebasten teased, lacing his fingers into her hair and kissing her. She drowned in the scent and the taste of him, head falling back on her shoulders as his tongue darted in an erotic sweep between her lips and made her gasp with helpless pleasure.

At some point, they left the limo, climbed steps, traversed a low-lit echoing hall, but true awareness only returned to Lizzie when she swayed giddily on the sweeping staircase she found herself on. His hands shot out to steady her. ‘Are you OK?’

‘These stupid shoes…’ Lizzie condemned in mortification and she kicked off her spike-heeled sandals where she stood as though her unsteady gait had been caused by them.

‘How much have you had to drink?’ Sebasten enquired with lethal timing, a dark frown-line forming between his ebony brows.

‘Hardly anything,’ Lizzie told him breathlessly while making a conscious effort not to slur her words. She was taut as a bowstring, suddenly terrified of receiving yet another rejection to add to the many she had already withstood.

As he received that assurance Sebasten’s tension evaporated and he swept her on into a massive, opulent room rejoicing in a very large and imposing bed. She was jolted by the sight of the bed and a rather belated stab of dismay made her question her own behaviour. She barely knew Sebasten and she was still a virgin. But then she had never been tempted until she met Connor and she had expected him to become her first lover. As the degrading memory of finding her boyfriend and her stepmother in bed together engulfed Lizzie afresh, she rebelled against her own moral conditioning. After all, hadn’t her old-fashioned principles let her down badly when it came to men? A more experienced woman would have been suspicious of Connor’s lack of lusty intent.

Eyes flaring like emerald-green stars on that bitter acknowledgement, Lizzie spun round and feasted her attention on Sebasten. He was gorgeous and tonight he was hers, all hers, absolutely nobody else’s. She had never met anyone like him before. He was so focused, so sure of himself that he drew her like a magnet and the heat of his appreciative appraisal warmed her like the sun after weeks of endless rain.

Lizzie tilted her head back, glossy marmalade hair tumbling back from her slanted cheekbones. ‘You can kiss me again,’ she informed him.

With an appreciative laugh, Sebasten claimed her parted lips in a long, drugging kiss that rocked her on her feet. Lifting her up into his arms with easy strength, he brought her down onto his bed. What was it about her that made her seem so different to other women? One minute she was quiet and mysterious, the next tossing an open challenge, glorious green eyes telegraphing pure invitation.

Lizzie surfaced from the mindless spell of her own response and stared up at him. ‘Are you as good at everything else as you are at kissing?’

Sebasten tossed his jacket on a chair, enjoying the wide, wondering look in her face as she watched him. ‘What do you think?’

That she could barely breathe when those shimmering dark golden eyes rested on her and her mouth ran dry as a bone when he unbuttoned his shirt. From his broad shoulders to his powerful, hair-roughened pectorals and flat, taut abdomen, he was all sleek, bronzed skin and rippling muscles.

‘That you’re very sexy,’ Lizzie confided helplessly.

‘We match…’ Sebasten strolled lithe as a hunting animal and barefoot towards the bed.

‘Do we?’ Her heart hammered behind her ribs. She felt like an infatuated teenager confronted without warning by her idol: butterflies in her tummy, brain empty, teeth almost chattering with nerves. Every lingering strand of caution was urging her to acknowledge her mistake and take flight but those prudent promptings fell into abeyance at the same instant as Sebasten rested shimmering dark golden eyes of appreciation on her.

‘Ne…’

‘No?’ Lizzie was confused.

‘Ne…is Greek for yes.’ Sebasten came down on the side of the bed with a smile that lit up his lean, strong face and melted her.

‘You’re Greek?’

‘Ten out of ten,’ Sebasten gathered her close and threaded lazy hands through her tumbling mane. ‘I love the colour of your hair…but I still don’t know your surname.’

In the expectant silence, Lizzie tensed. Fearful of his reaction were he to recognise the name of Denton, she heard herself quote her late mother’s maiden name. ‘Bewford.’

‘Now I can’t lose you again,’ Sebasten asserted.

‘Would it matter if you did?’ Heart racing so fast now that she could barely speak and keep her voice level, Lizzie curved an uncertain hand round his arm.

‘Absolutely, pethi mou.’ Sebasten reflected that he might even make it to the three-month mark with her, a milestone he had yet to share with any woman. Unsettled by that uninvited and odd thought, he kissed her again.

He made love to her mouth with devastating virtuosity, plundering the tender interior she opened to him. Lizzie pressed forward, unsteady hands linking round his neck, fingers uncoiling to rise and sink into the depths of his luxuriant black hair. It was sweeter and wilder and more intense than anything she had ever known. He bent her back over his arm so that her bright hair trailed across the pillows and let his lips seek out the tiny pulse going crazy beneath her collarbone.

Lizzie quivered in surprise and what little grip she had left on reality vanished. When he then located the tender pulse spot below her ear, her body thrummed into a burst of life so that not one part of her was capable of staying still. She was not even conscious of the deft unsnapping of the clasps on her halter top, only of the air grazing her distended nipples and cooling the swollen sensitivity of her flesh. He eased off her stretchy skirt to leave her clad in only a pair of white lace panties.

‘You’re perfect,’ Sebasten groaned, cupping the ivory-pale rose-tipped mounds he had unveiled with possessive hands, easing her back against the pillows to direct his attention to the tender tips straining for his attention.

Capturing a throbbing peak between his lips, he flicked it with his tongue and she moaned out loud at the surge of tormenting sensation that made her tense and tremble and jerk beneath his ministrations. Nothing before had ever felt so good that it almost hurt and she was lost in the shocking intensity of her own response. She was breathing in fast little pants, aware of her body as she had never been before, feeling the charged readiness of wild anticipation, the crazed race of her own pounding heartbeat, the damp heat pulsing between her thighs.

‘Talk to me…’ Sebasten urged.

‘I…can’t find…my voice,’ Lizzie tried to say after a bemused hesitation in which she had to struggle just to force her brain to think again. Even to her own ears, the words emerged sounding indistinguishable and slurred.

Sebasten stilled and, scanning her dismayed face, he removed his hands from her. ‘You’re drunk…’

As that harsh judgement came out of nowhere at her, Lizzie flinched. Bracing herself on one awkward hand, she sat up. His lean, powerful face was taut, stunning golden eyes betraying angry distaste.

‘I’m—’

‘Out of your skull on booze…not my style!’ Sebasten incised, springing upright to his full intimidating height.

Dragged with little warning from the breathtaking hold of unbelievable passion, Lizzie found herself in need of a ready tongue. But there was nothing ready about her tongue when her brain was in a haze of confusion. ‘Not your style?’ she echoed.

It was a terrible strain for her to try to enunciate each word with clarity. She reeled off the bed in an abrupt movement, suddenly feeling horribly naked and under attack.

As he watched her stagger as she attempted to stay vertical Sebasten’s wide, sensual mouth clenched even harder, his whole body in the fierce grip of painful frustration while he questioned how he could possibly have failed to register the state she was in. ‘The consent issue,’ he breathed with icy restraint. ‘No way would I even consider bedding a woman too inebriated to know what she is doing!’

Her toes catching in her discarded skirt where it lay, Lizzie tipped forward and only just managed to throw out her hands to break her own fall. As she went down with a crash, punctuated by a startled expletive from Sebasten, she just slumped on the soft, deep carpet.

With a mighty effort of will, Lizzie lifted her swimming head again and focused on Sebasten’s bare brown feet. Even his toes were beautiful, she thought dimly as she tried to come up with something to say in a situation that had already gone far beyond embarrassment. ‘Do you think…do you think you could sober me up before we continue?’ she muttered hopefully.

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.