The Contaxis Baby. LYNNE GRAHAM
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‘You need food to soak up the booze in your system,’ Sebasten delivered with cutting emphasis.
Squirming with shame and embarrassment, Lizzie reached for a sandwich. ‘I don’t get drunk…I’m not like that…I just had a hideous day—’
‘So you decided to give me a hideous evening,’ Sebasten slotted in with ungenerous bite. ‘Count your blessings—’
‘What blessings?’ Lizzie was fighting hard to hold back the surge of weak tears that that crack had spawned.
‘You’re safe and you’re still all in one piece. If you’d picked the wrong guy to spring this stunt on, you might not have been,’ Sebasten pointed out.
Chilled by what she recgonised as a fair assessment, Lizzie swallowed shakily and made herself bite into the sandwich. It was delicious. Indeed, she had not realised just how hungry she was until that moment. In silence, she sipped at the black coffee, wincing with every mouthful, for she liked milk in her coffee, and worked her way through the sandwiches.
Sebasten watched the sandwiches melt away and noted that for all her slenderness she had a very healthy appetite. ‘When did you last eat?’ he finally asked drily.
‘Breakfast,’ Lizzie worked out with a slight frown and that had just been a slice of toast. Lunch she hadn’t touched because just beforehand her father had phoned to say that he was coming home specially to talk to her and her appetite had vanished. As for supper, well, Jen hadn’t offered her anything but her first alcoholic drink of the evening.
‘No wonder you ended up flat on your face on my carpet,’ Sebasten delivered as he topped up the cup she had emptied.
Lizzie paled. ‘Not the world’s most forgiving person, are you?’
‘No.’ Sebasten made no bones about the fact. ‘What did your “hideous” day encompass?’
Lizzie looped unsteady fingers through her fast-drying hair to push it back from her brow and muttered tightly. ‘My father told me to move out and get a job. I was very upset—’
‘At twenty-two years of age, you were still living at home and dependent on your family?’ Sebasten demanded in surprise. ‘Are you a student?’
Lizzie reddened. ‘No. I left school at eighteen. My father didn’t want me to work. He said he wanted me to have a good time!’
Sebasten scanned the delicate diamond pendant and bracelet she wore, conceding that they might well be real rather than the imitations he had assumed. Yet she didn’t speak with those strangulated vowel sounds that he associated with the true English upper classes, which meant that she was most probably from a family with money but no social pedigree. He was wryly amused that Ingrid, who was obsessed by a need to pigeon-hole people by their birth and their bank balance, had taught him to distinguish the old moneyed élite from the nouveau riche in London society.
‘And, no…having a good time did not cover my behaviour tonight!’ Lizzie advanced in defensive completion. ‘That was a one-off!’
‘So you were very upset at the prospect of having to keep yourself,’ Sebasten recapped with soft derision and innate suspicion that her apparent ignorance of who he was had been an act calculated to bring his guard down. ‘Is that why you came home with me?’
Startled by that offensive question, Lizzie sucked in a sudden sharp breath. As the fog of alcohol released her brain, she had already absorbed enough of her surroundings to recognise that she was in the home of a male who inhabited a very much wealthier and more rarefied world than her own. She lifted her chin. ‘No, to tell you the truth, now that I’m recovering my wits, I haven’t the foggiest idea why I came home with you because I don’t like you one little bit.’
A disconcerting smile flashed across Sebasten’s dark, brooding features. Angry green eyes the colour of precious emeralds were hurling defiance at him and her spine was as rigid as that of a queen in a medieval portrait. Unfortunately for her, though, her tangled hair and the bath towel supplied a ridiculous frame for that attempt to put him in his place.
The instant that incredible smile lit up his lean, strong features, Lizzie’s heartbeat went haywire and her mouth ran dry and she knew exactly why she had come home with him. If he kept his smart mouth closed, he was just about irresistible.
‘You’re angry that you made a fool of yourself,’ Sebasten retaliated without hesitation. ‘But I may have done you a big favour—’
Hot colour burned in Lizzie’s cheeks. ‘You call throwing the windows wide and torturing me in a cold shower doing me a favour?’
‘Yes…if the memory of that treatment stops you drinking that much again in the wrong company.’
Unused to a woman fighting with him, Sebasten savoured the sheer frustrated rage in her expressive face and his body hardened again in sudden urgent response. He wanted to flatten her back onto his bed and remind her of how irrelevant liking or anything else was when he touched her. His own reawakened desire startled him. Then her tangled torrent of hair was drying to gleam with rich gold and copper lights and that exotic and passionate face of hers still kept drawing him back. The intimate recollection of her lush little breasts and that lithe, slender body of hers shaking with hunger beneath his own was all the additional stimuli required to increase Sebasten’s level of arousal to one of supreme discomfort.
In the midst of swallowing the sting of that further comment destined to humble her, Lizzie felt the burn of Sebasten’s stunning dark golden eyes on her and what she had been about to say in an effort to save face died on her tongue. Stiffening, she shifted forward onto the edge of the bed. Suddenly aware of the high-voltage tension that had entered the atmosphere, she felt too jittery to handle her discomfiture and she settled her feet down onto the carpet.
‘It’s time I went home,’ she announced but she hesitated, afraid that the awful dizziness might return the instant she tried to stand up.
‘Where is home?’
‘No place right now,’ Lizzie admitted after a dismayed pause to appreciate the threatening reality. ‘I still have to find somewhere to live. Right now my luggage is parked at a friend’s place but I can’t stay there.’
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 presentability 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