Читать книгу Mother's Day Treats - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 17

IT WAS very unfortunate for Sebasten that Lizzie had watched his arrival from the safe, shadowy depths of the dining room.

Even at a distance, the slashing brilliance of his smile rocked Lizzie where she stood. He was so gorgeous but that he should dare to smile, sure of his welcome, it seemed, before he even saw her, lacerated her pride, fired her resentment and drove home the suspicion that he lacked any sense of remorse. He was tough, ruthless and hard and no relationship with Sebasten would ever go any place where she wanted it to go, she acknowledged with agonised regret. He had already spelt that out in terms no sane woman could ignore.

Hadn’t she already got through the first week of being without him? She would get over him eventually, wouldn’t she? It dawned on her that on some strange inner level she had not the slightest doubt that Sebasten was about to suggest a reconciliation and that shook her. But once she announced that she had already conceived his child and in addition had every intention of raising that child, Sebasten would surrender any such notion fast. So really, what was she worrying about?

Sebasten had killed his smile by the time Lizzie opened the door. ‘Come in…’

‘I suggest we go out, so that we can talk,’ Sebasten murmured levelly. ‘I imagine your family aren’t in the mood for visitors today.’

‘Only my father is here and he’s having a nap in the library.’ A quiver assailing her at his proximity, Lizzie pushed wide the door into the drawing room.

‘Where’s the…’ Sebasten bit back the blunt five-letter word brimming on his lips in the very nick of time and substituted, ‘your stepmother?’

‘Already gone,’ Lizzie admitted, tight-mouthed with tension. ‘They’ll be getting a divorce.’

‘Your father’s got his head screwed on,’ Sebasten asserted with an outstanding absence of sensitivity. ‘Booting her straight out the door was the right thing to do.’

‘Actually Felicity left under her own steam,’ Lizzie declared, making the humiliating connection that she had once been booted out of Sebasten’s life with the same efficiency that he was so keen to commend.

‘Even better…she won’t collect half so much in the divorce settlement,’ Sebasten imparted with authority.

‘Right at this moment, my father has more to think about than his bank balance!’ Lizzie hissed in outrage. ‘He’s devastated.’

‘I was thinking of you, not your father. Not very pleasant for you, having to put up with a woman like that in the family,’ Sebasten contended, allowing himself to study her taut, pale face, the strain in her unhappy eyes, and then removing his attention again before he was tempted into making the cardinal error of a premature assumption that forgiveness was on the table and dragging her into his arms. ‘Why the blazes didn’t you spill the beans on your stepmother weeks ago?’

‘I believed she was pregnant with my little brother or sister…only it turns out now that she was lying about that to protect herself and keep me quiet.’ A tight little laugh fell from Lizzie’s lips as she thought of the baby that she carried. It seemed so ironic that the conception which Felicity must initially have been desperate to achieve should have come Lizzie’s way instead.

‘It sounds like she was off the wall. If it’s any consolation, Ingrid Morgan is shattered too and feeling very guilty about the way she treated you,’ Sebasten revealed. ‘She called me this morning.’

‘I don’t hold any spite against Connor’s mother.’ Taut as a bowstring, Lizzie hovered by the window.

‘I don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me the whole truth. If you had named your father’s wife, I would never have disbelieved your explanation and I could have been trusted with that information.’

Lizzie noted without great surprise that Sebasten was playing hardball and landing her with a share of the blame for his refusal to have the smallest faith in her. ‘I’m not so sure of that. You and your old friend Ingrid wanted your pound of flesh, regardless of who got hurt in the process!’

Sebasten did not like the morbid tone of that response at all. ‘I misjudged you and I’ll make it up to you.’

‘Was that an apology?’

‘Theo mou…give me time to get there on my own!’ Sebasten urged in a sudden volatile surge that disconcerted her and let her appreciate that he was not quite as cool, calm and collected as he appeared. ‘I am sorry, truly, deeply sorry.’

‘I can’t be,’ Lizzie confided shakily.

‘I’m not asking you to be sorry,’ Sebasten pointed out in some bewilderment, wondering whether the shine of tears in her eyes was a promising sign that the very first humble apology he had made to a woman in his entire life had had the right effect.

‘You see, I can’t be sorry that you misjudged me because if I hadn’t found that out, I would never have discovered what a ruthless, conscience-free louse you are,’ Lizzie completed in a wobbly but driven voice.

Sebasten spread lean brown hands in a natural expression of appeal. ‘But I’ll never be like that with you again,’ he protested. ‘I want you back in my life.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll find another dumb woman to take my place,’ Lizzie snapped out brittly and turned her back on him altogether while she fought to rein back the tears threatening her.

‘Yes, I could if I wanted to but there’s one small problem…I only want you.’

In his bed, that was all, Lizzie reflected painfully, her throat thick with tears. She forced herself back round to face him again and tilted her chin. ‘I think you’ll give up on that ambition when I tell you what I have to tell you.’

‘Nothing could make me give up on you,’ Sebasten swore, moving forward and reaching for her without warning to tug her forward into his arms.

Lizzie only meant to stay there a second but Sebasten had come to the conclusion that action was likely to be much more effective than words that appeared to be getting him precisely nowhere. He framed her flushed face with two lean hands and gazed down into her distraught green eyes. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he was moved to demand in reproach. ‘I will never hurt you again.’

Trembling all over, Lizzie parted dry lips and muttered, ‘I’m pregnant…’

Pregnant? That announcement fell on a male quite unprepared for that kind of news. Sebasten tensed, not even sure he had heard her say what she had just said. ‘Pregnant?’ he echoed, his hands dropping from her.

‘Yes,’ Lizzie confirmed chokily.

‘Pregnant…’ Sebasten said again as though it was a word that had never come his way before and innate caution was already telling him to shut up and not say another single sentence. But he was so shattered by the concept of Lizzie being pregnant that not all the caution in the world could keep him quiet. ‘Is it Connor’s?’ he shot at her rawly, savage jealousy gripping him in an instant vice.

Watching the flare of volatile gold in his stunning eyes, the fierce cast of his superb bone-structure, Lizzie was backing away from him and she only stilled when her shoulders met the china cabinet behind her. ‘No, it is not your half-brother’s child. Even Connor was not low enough to try to get me into bed while he was making mad, passionate love to my stepmother behind my back. I never slept with Connor,’ Lizzie spelt out shakily.

Sebasten recalled his own belief in her inexperience the first night he had shared with her but Sebasten was always stubborn and not quite ready in the state of numb shock he was in to move straight in and embrace the possibility of a child he had never expected to have. ‘How do I know that for sure?’

Temper leapt with startling abruptness from the sheer height of Lizzie’s tension. ‘You’re the only lover I’ve ever had…is it my fault you were too busy taking advantage of me to even notice that I was a virgin?’

‘I didn’t take advantage of you and if you’re telling me the truth you’re the only virgin I’ve ever slept with,’ Sebasten launched back, playing for time while he mulled over what she had said but all his anger ebbing at miraculous speed. Even so, that did not prevent him from finding another issue. ‘You said you were protected.’

‘I was sick the next morning…it might have been that or it might just be that I fall into the tiny failure-rate percentage…but the point is,’ Lizzie framed afresh, ‘I am pregnant and it’s yours.’

‘Mine…’ Sebasten was now unusually pale at the very thought of what he saw as the enormous responsibility of a baby. All he had to do was think about his own nightmare childhood, the misery inflicted on him by self-preoccupied adults who left him to the care of unsupervised staff when it suited them and isolated him in boarding schools, where he had also been forgotten with ease. Nobody knew better than he that even great wealth was no protection when it came to a child’s needs.

‘I appreciate that this is a shock for you,’ Lizzie conceded when she could hear that ghastly silence no longer. ‘But I should also add that I’m going to have this baby—’

Emerging from his unpleasant recollections. Sebasten frowned at her in complete innocence of her meaning. ‘What else would you do?’

Silenced by that demand, Lizzie blinked.

‘I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it,’ Sebasten breathed, squaring his broad shoulders in the face of his inner conviction that life as he knew it had just been slaughtered. But much of his gloom lifted on the sudden realisation that, of course, Lizzie would come in tow with the baby. With Lizzie back in his life and him ensuring in a discreet way that the baby was never, ever neglected for even a moment, he could surely rise to the challenge?

‘And what would making the best of it…entail?’ Lizzie prompted thinly.

‘Sebasten expelled his pent-up breath in an impatient hiss. ‘Obviously, I’ll have to marry you. It’s my own fault. I should’ve taken precautions too that night but we’re stuck with the consequences and I’m a Contaxis…not the sort of bastard who tries to shirk his responsibilities!’

During that telling speech, Lizzie almost burst into a rage as big as a bonfire. She went lurching from total shock at the speed with which he mentioned marriage when she had never dreamt he might even whisper that fatal word. Then she truly listened and what she heard inflamed her beyond belief.

‘I don’t want to marry you—’

‘You’ve got no choice—’

‘Watch my lips—I do not want to marry you!’

Sebasten dealt her a grim appraisal in which his powerful personality loomed large. ‘Of course you do. Right now, we’ve got a bigger problem than me being a ruthless, conscience-free louse!’ he countered with sardonic bite. ‘Can we please focus on the baby issue?’

‘You don’t want to marry me…you don’t want the baby either!’ Lizzie flung at him in condemnation, feeling as though her heart was breaking inside her and hating him for not being able to feel what she felt.

‘I want you and I’ll get used to the idea of the baby,’ Sebasten declared.

Intending to show him out the front door, Lizzie yanked the drawing-room door wide and then froze. Her father was standing in the hall, his face a stiff mask of disbelief. It was obvious that he had heard enough to appreciate that she was carrying Sebasten’s child. He looked at her with all his disappointment written in his eyes and it was too much to her after the day she had already endured. With a stifled sob, Lizzie fled for the sanctuary of her old apartment in the stable block.

Sebasten could see ‘potential ally’ writ large in his future father-in-law’s horror at the revelation that his unmarried daughter was expecting a baby. ‘I’m sorry you had to hear the news like that. Naturally, Lizzie’s upset by the circumstances but I’m just keen to get the wedding organised.’

Maurice Denton was relieved by that forthright declaration. Unfreezing, almost grateful for a distraction from his own personal crisis, he offered Sebasten a drink. Sebasten accepted the offer.

He had never been more on edge: he felt as if Lizzie was playing games with him and that was not what he expected from her. It took time to concede that he might have been a little too frank about his reactions and that perhaps lying in his teeth would have gone down better. After a third drink to Sebasten’s one, Maurice informed Sebasten that should be himself live until he was ninety-nine he had no hope of ever hearing a marriage proposal couched in less attractive terms. He then asked his son-in-law-to-be if he was shy about being romantic.

Sebasten tried not to cringe at the question but he was honest in his response: he had never made a romantic gesture in his entire life.

‘I think you’d better get on that learning curve fast,’ Lizzie’s father advised before going on to entertain Sebasten with stories of how devoted a mother Lizzie had been to her dolls and how much she had always adored fussing round babies.

While the older man began to find some solace not only in those happier memories of the past but also in the prospect of a grandchild after the humiliation of his own disappointed hopes of another child, Sebasten began to imagine the baby as a miniature version of Lizzie tending to her dolls and relax and even warm to the prospect.

A copy of Lizzie’s birth certificate having been supplied helpfully by her parent, Sebasten drove off to apply for a special licence that would enable him to marry Lizzie within the week. Mindful of that galling advice about romance, he went on to pay a visit to a world-famous jewellery store. He chose the most beautiful rare diamond on offer and a matching wedding ring.

Late that evening, Sebasten returned to the Denton household as confident as he had been of his reception earlier in the day, only on this second occasion convinced he was infinitely better prepared to deliver exactly what was expected of him. Lizzie could hardly doubt the strength of his commitment to marrying her when he had already made all the arrangements for the wedding on his own.

That afternoon, Lizzie had had a good cry about Sebasten’s crass and wounding insensitivity. She had tried hard to respect his honesty but in point of fact it had hurt too much for her to do that. She might love him but there were times when furious frustration and pain totally swallowed up that love. With the best will in the world, how could she marry a guy who didn’t want a wife and could only stick children at a distance or inanimate on a painted canvas? No crystal ball was required to foresee the disaster that would result from Sebasten making himself do what he had always sworn he would not do.

Sebasten took the steps up to Lizzie’s apartment three at a time. The door wasn’t shut and he frowned. It was dangerous to be so careless of personal safety in a big city. She really did need him around. He let himself in. Lizzie was curled up on a big, squashy sofa, fast asleep. She was wearing a pale pink silk wrap, another colour to add to the already wide spectrum of shades which Sebasten considered framed Lizzie to perfection. He crouched down by her side.

Lifting up her limp hand, he threaded the engagement ring onto her finger. Now she was labelled his for every other man to see. As that awareness dawned on him, Sebasten finally saw the point of engagements. She got the little ring, he got to post the much more important hands-off-she’s-mine giant ring of steel. He liked that. This romantic stuff? Easy as falling off a log, Sebasten decided.

With a sleepy sigh, Lizzie opened her eyes and focused on Sebasten and thought she was back in bed with him again, which she very often was in her most secret dreams. Enchanted by the pagan gold glitter of his intense gaze, she let appreciative fingers drift up to trace a high, angular cheekbone. He caught her hand in his and captured her lips in a sensual, searching exploration that was an erotic wake-up call to every sense she possessed. She leant up the better to taste him, breathe in the achingly familiar scent that was uniquely his, close her arms round his neck so that she could sink greedy fingers into the depths of his luxuriant black hair.

Sebasten made a low, sexy sound of encouragement deep in his throat. Scooping her up, he sank back with her cradled in his arms and let his tongue dip in a provocative slide between her lips. Lizzie jerked and strained up to him, wanting, needing, possessed by helpless excitement and hunger for more.

‘You still want me, pethi mou,’ Sebasten husked, pausing to trail his mouth in a tantalising caress down the line of her long, elegant neck. ‘But I can’t stay long. Your father has been very understanding and tolerant but I won’t risk causing offence.’

Emerging for the first time since she had wakened to proper awareness, Lizzie snatched in a quivering gasp of shame and embarrassment: she had fallen like an overripe plum into Sebasten’s ready hands. ‘This shouldn’t be happening,’ she bit out shakily and flew upright to smooth down her wrap.

Only then did she register the weight of the ring now adorning her hand. In disbelief, she raised her fingers to stare at the fabulous solitaire diamond sparkling in the lamplight.

‘Like it?’ Sebasten lounged back on the sofa with the indolent, expectant air of a male bracing himself to withstand fawning feminine approbation.

‘What is it?’

‘You really need to be told?’

Lizzie jerked her chin in an affirmative nod, for she could not credit that the male she had flatly refused to marry could have bought her an engagement ring and what was more put in on her finger without her knowledge or agreement.

‘It matches the wedding ring. I got it too.’ Well-aware of her shaken silence and proud of that seeming achievement, Sebasten rose to his full height so that she could fling herself at him and hug him.

‘You…did!’ Lizzie parroted, a swelling forming in her tight chest that she did not immediately recognise as rage.

‘In fact, I’ve been extremely busy,’ Sebasten extended in his rich dark drawl. ‘I’ve got a special licence. I’ve got the church booked and a top-flight wedding-planners outfit burning the midnight oil on the finer details even as we speak. You have nothing to do but show up looking gorgeous on Saturday—’

‘You mean…I get to pick my own dress?’

‘I contacted an Italian designer…they’re flying over a team on Wednesday with a selection for you.’

‘Oh…this Saturday?’ Momentarily Lizzie’s rage took a back seat to shock at the sheer level of organisation that had taken place behind her back and the news that her own wedding was to be staged in just six days’ time.

‘Your father agreed that we shouldn’t hang around.’

‘Did he really?’ Lizzie queried in a rather high-pitched tone. ‘Sebasten…cast your mind back to my answer to your declaration that we should marry.’

‘You said no but I knew you didn’t mean it,’ Sebasten informed her.

‘D-did you?’ Lizzie’s response shook with the force of her feelings but she looked again at the ring on her engagement finger. Her eyes stung and she spun away, remembering the guy who had hired decorators to leave her free to dine with him. He did what he thought best and if that meant refusing to credit her refusal, using her own father as back-up and going ahead and arranging a wedding all on his own, he was more than equal to the challenge.

And more than anything else in the world she would have loved to have faith in that blazing confidence he wore like an aura and rise to that same challenge. But he didn’t love her, was only offering to marry her because she was pregnant and he had never wanted a child. Where would they be in a few months’ time when she was more in love and more dependent on him than she was even now and he discovered that good intentions were not enough? He wouldn’t find her so attractive once her slender figure vanished. He might even be downright repulsed by her fecund shape. He might get bored, he might even stray and she would be destroyed…absolutely, utterly destroyed by such a rejection.

‘I can’t do it,’ Lizzie whispered.

Sebasten linked strong arms round her and slowly turned her round. ‘Bridal nerves,’ he told her with a determined smile.

‘I can’t do it,’ Lizzie whispered again, white as milk. ‘I can’t marry you.’

Sebasten freed her and took a step back. He was making a real effort to control the stark anger threatening his control but he could not understand what was the matter with her. He had done every single thing he could think of to please her and she had not voiced one word of appreciation. She had not even appeared to register his enthusiasm for something he had never, ever thought he would do.

‘The baby must have the Contaxis name and my protection,’ he spelt out. Eyes dark as the night sky pinned to her taut, trouble face. ‘That’s not negotiable.’

‘Commands don’t cut it with me,’ Lizzie snapped, feeling the full onslaught of his powerful personality focused on her and rebelling.

‘Then tell me what does because I sure as hell have no idea!’ Sebasten raked back at her in sudden dark fury.

Trembling, Lizzie whirled away again. Although she loved him, she had a deep instinctive need to keep herself safe from further hurt and disillusionment. He had too much power over her, and how could she trust him when only his sense of responsibility had persuaded him to offer marriage? She saw the sense in his insistence that they marry to give their baby his name, for the law as it stood did not recognise less formal relationships. Yet to marry him and live with him as a wife felt like a giant step too far for her at that moment.

If only there was something in between, a halfway house that could answer her needs and the baby’s without trapping Sebasten into immediate domesticity and commitment before he could judge whether or not he could meet those demands in the long term. A halfway house, she thought in desperation, and then the solution came to her in a positive brainstorm.

‘I want an answer,’ Sebasten told her fiercely.

A flush on her cheeks, excitement in her eyes, for Lizzie was eager to come up with a blueprint that would allow her to marry him. ‘I have it. We don’t live together…you buy me a house of my own!’

‘Say that again…no, don’t.’ Sebasten warned, studying her with laser-like intensity, shimmering golden eyes locked to her in disbelief.

‘But don’t you see it? It would be perfect!’ Lizzie told him with an enthusiasm that could only inflame. ‘You could visit whenever you liked.’

‘Really?’ Sebasten’s bitten-out response was not quite level while he wondered if she was feeling all right, but he was reluctant to risk asking that question in case she took it as an insult.

‘We would each hold on to more of our own separate lives than married couples usually do. You’d have your business and I’d have my new PR job—’

‘What new PR job?’ Sebasten interrupted faster than the speed of light.

‘I’m starting tomorrow—’

‘But you’re pregnant—’

‘Pregnant women work in PR too—’

‘You were working for me, Sebasten remind her, taking a new tack as his raging frustration rose to almost ungovernable heights. He didn’t want her working any place and certainly not in some freewheeling PR firm where she would be engaged in constant interaction with other men and a frantic social life.

‘Not any more and it wasn’t a good idea, was it? Other people don’t feel comfortable working around a woman who may be involved with the boss. So, as I was saying…if we lived in separate houses we wouldn’t crowd each other.’

Dark colour now scored Sebasten’s rigid cheekbones. ‘Maybe I fancied being crowded.’

Lizzie breathed in deep. ‘And I think…the first couple of months anyway…you shouldn’t stay overnight.’

‘I can tell you right now upfront that I won’t buy a separate house and either you take me overnight or you take me not at all!’ Sebasten launched at her with savage incredulity.

Lizzie swallowed the thickness of tears clogging her throat. ‘You can’t blame me for trying to protect myself. I don’t want to be hurt again and it’s going to take time for me to be able to trust you.’

Sebasten spread rigid hands and clenched them into tight, angry fists in silence. So it was payback time. Oh, yes, he understood that. She wanted to put him through hell to punish him and it would be a cold day in hell before he accepted humiliation from any woman!

‘You’re taking this the wrong way,’ Lizzie said anxiously.

‘I don’t like being taken for a ride—’

‘I just want us both to have the space and the freedom to see whether or not we want to live together—’

‘I know that now…what is the matter with you?’ Sebasten demanded rawly.

‘I won’t agree to any other arrangement before Saturday,’ Lizzie countered shakily, crossing two sets of fingers superstitiously behind her back and offering up a silent prayer.

A sexless, endless probation period during which she made him jump through hoops like a wild animal being trained? Sebasten could barely repress a shudder.

‘Forget it…’ he advised between clenched teeth, outraged, stormy dark eyes unyielding.

The silence lay thick and heavy and full of rampant undertones of aggression.

‘Is it…well, is it the lack of sex that makes this idea of mine so unacceptable?’ Lizzie finally prompted awkwardly.

‘Where would you get a weird idea like that?’

‘OK…sex is included,’ Lizzie conceded, reddening to her hairline at her own dreadful weakness in failing to stand firm.

So he would buy her a house which she would never, never live in, Sebasten reflected, sudden amusement racing through him at the speed with which she had removed the ban on intimacy.

‘I suppose it might be rather like keeping a mistress,’ Sebasten mused, watching her squirm at that lowering concept with immense satisfaction. ‘OK…it’s a deal. I’ll go for it.’

But when Sebasten climbed into his car minutes later, neither satisfaction nor amusement coloured his brooding thoughts. She didn’t love him. If she had ever loved him, he had killed that love. She would accept the security of marriage but she was set on having a separate life. Yet he had always been separated from other people, initially by wealth and being an only child, later by personal choice, when keeping his relationships at an undemanding superficial level had become a habit.

Yet somewhere deep down inside him Sebasten registered that he had had a dream of living a very different life with Lizzie, Lizzie and the baby. A life where everything was shared. He did not know when that had started or even how it had developed and that such a dream even existed shook and embarrassed him. Especially after his bride-to-be had spelt out her dream of two separate households, talked about space and freedom and only included her body as a last-resort sop to his apparent weak masculine inability to get by without sex.

Intellect told him that he would be insane to accept such terms.

Only a guy who was plain stupid would accept such terms.

Or a guy who was…desperate?

At supersonic speed, Sebasten reminded himself that their main objective was taking care of their future child’s needs and that it was better not to dwell on inconsequentials.