Читать книгу Mother's Day Treats - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 18

LIZZIE discovered the hard way that embarking on her first career job the same week she planned to get married was a very great challenge.

On the balance side, she thrived in a more informal working environment where a designer-clad appearance was a decided advantage and she was earning almost twice the salary she had earned at CI. She got on great with her new colleagues, was immediately given sole responsibility for organising a celebrity party for the opening of a new nightclub and spent the entire week wishing there were more hours in the day.

Having to slot in choosing her entire bridal trousseau in the space of one extended lunch hour, however, annoyed her. Spending two evenings drumming up interest in the new club by frantic socialising with acquaintances now all too keen to be seen in the company of the future wife of Sebasten Contaxis was even worse. Being pregnant also seemed to mean that she tired much more easily and she just paled when she thought of how difficult it would be to fit ante-natal appointments into such action-packed extended work hours.

She thought about Sebasten with a constant nagging anxiety that kept her awake at night when she most needed to sleep. He spent the first half of the week away on a business trip, and although he called her he seemed rather distant. She asked herself what more she had expected from him. What had seemed in the heat of the moment to be the perfect solution to her concerns about marrying him now seemed more and more like a mistake.

What real chance was she giving their marriage or Sebasten by insisting on separate accommodation? What true closeness could they hope to achieve if they lived apart? It was also much more likely that, shorn of any perceptible change in his life, Sebasten would continue to think of himself as single. That was hardly a conviction she wanted to encourage. And, in telling him upfront that she didn’t trust him and yammering about space and freedom, wasn’t she giving him the impression that he would be wasting his time even trying to adapt to the concept of a normal marriage?

In the light of those unsettling second thoughts on the issue, Lizzie’s heart just sank when Sebasten phoned her forty-eight hours before their wedding to announce that he had found the perfect house for her requirements.

‘Gosh, that was quick!’ was all she could think to say in an effort to conceal her dismay at the news.

Lizzie had not seen Sebasten since the night they agreed to marry. Yet when he picked her up that evening to take her to view the house, he proved resistant to her every subtle indication that she was just dying to be grabbed and held and kissed senseless. After a week in which she had missed him every hour of every day, one glimpse of his lean, devastatingly handsome features and lithe, powerful frame and she was reduced to a positive pushover of melting appreciation.

‘I really love my ring,’ she told him encouragingly. ‘And the wedding planners you hired are just fantastic.’

‘I didn’t want you overdoing things when you were pregnant. How’s the PR world shaping up?’

‘It’s demanding but a lot of fun,’ she said with rather forced cheer, not adding that after only four days she had reached the conclusion that it was the perfect career for a single woman without either a husband or children.

‘You’ll be able to rest round the clock on our honeymoon,’ Sebasten informed her drily.

‘What honeymoon?’ Lizzie gasped. ‘A week into the job, I can’t ask for time off!’

‘Then it’s just as well I asked for you. Your boss was very accommodating—’

‘He was…?’

‘Naturally. You’re an enormous asset to the firm. As my wife, you will have unparalleled access to the cream of society and the kind of contacts most PR companies can only dream about. You could dictate your own working hours, even go part-time.’ Sebasten dropped that bait in the water and waited in hope of hearing it hooked.

‘Quite a turnaround from my working conditions at Contaxis International,’ Lizzie could not resist remarking while cringing with shame at the reality that she had almost leapt on that reference to part-time work. Wouldn’t he be impressed if she took that easy way out at such speed?

His strong profile tensed. ‘Blame me for that. I wanted the spoilt little rich girl to learn what it was like to have to work for a living. Yet I would never have been attracted to you had you been what I believed you were.’

The Georgian town house he took her to see was only round the corner from his own London home and Lizzie did not comment on that reality when he did not, but her heart swelled with hope at the proximity he seemed keen to embrace. It was a lovely house, modernised with style and in wonderful decorative order. His lawyers, he explained, had negotiated a compensation agreement with the current tenants, who were prepared to vacate the house immediately. In a similar way, the owner had made a very substantial profit from agreeing to sell quickly.

‘You always get what you want, don’t you?’ Lizzie muttered helplessly, struggling to admire the elegant, spacious rooms but increasingly chilled at the prospect of living there alone. She must have been crazy to demand such an eccentric lifestyle, she decided, close to panic. Feeling horribly guilty and confused by her own contrariness, she talked with gushing enthusiasm about how much she was looking forward to moving in.

Sebasten had been on keen watch for withdrawal pangs from the separate-house commitment. After all, the house would be a bit large perhaps but perfect in every other way for his future father-in-law, who had already mentioned a desire to sell the home he had shared with his estranged wife. As Lizzie complimented all that she saw, his hopes that she might never move into the house suffered a severe setback.

On her wedding day, Lizzie donned a gown fit for a fairy tale. The exquisite beaded, embroidered bodice bared her smooth shoulders and the flowing full skirt made the utmost of her tall, slender figure.

Surprise after wonderful surprise filled her day. A gorgeous sapphire and diamond necklace and earrings arrived from Sebasten as well as a blue velvet garter for good luck. Although she had never indicated any preference for certain flowers, her bouquet was a classic arrangement of her favourites. The equivalent of Cinderella’s coach drawn by white horses came to ferry her the short distance to the church. Seeing everywhere the evidence of Sebasten’s desire to make their wedding match her every possible fantasy, she was a radiant bride.

Her heart swelled when she walked down the aisle and Sebasten turned to watch her with a breathtaking smile on his lean dark features. Surely no guy marrying against his own will could manage a smile that brilliant? Hugging that belief to herself, she cherished every moment of the ceremony and sparkled with quicksilver energy in the photos taken afterwards.

‘You look stunning,’ Sebasten groaned in the limo that whisked them away from the church and, tugging her close, he ravished her soft raspberry-tinted mouth under his, awakening such a blaze of instant hunger in Lizzie that she clung to him.

‘I’m wrecking your lipstick…your hair,’ Sebasten sighed, setting her back from him with hands that he couldn’t keep quite steady.

Loving his passion, Lizzie awarded him a provocative look of appreciation. ‘It was worth it.’

There was an enormous number of guests at the reception. Introductions and polite conversations continually divided her and Sebasten and it was a relief for Lizzie to glide round the dance floor in the circle of his arms, safe from such interruptions.

‘I feel awful…I just can’t feel the same about friends who dropped me after Connor’s death because of those stupid rumours,’ Lizzie confided ruefully.

Sebasten stiffened, realising he disliked even the sound of his half-brother’s name on her lips and discomfited by the discovery. ‘Are there guests here who did that to you?’

‘Loads of them. A good half of them I’ve known since I was a kid, and Dad’s acquainted with their families too, so I didn’t feel I had the option of leaving them off the guest list.’

‘I wouldn’t have given one of them an invite!’ Shimmering dark golden eyes pinned to her in clear reproof. ‘You’re too soft. If someone crosses me once, they don’t get a second chance.’

Lizzie tensed. ‘Didn’t I cross you too?’

Sebasten wrapped her even closer to his big, powerful frame, infuriated by the knowledge that she had been snubbed and ignored by people she had considered to be her friends and then been so forgiving. ‘Continually…but then you inhabit a very special category, pethi mou.’

Lizzie looked up at him with her irreverent grin. ‘Remind yourself of that the next time I cross you…you know,’ she added impulsively, ‘if I look very hard I can see that you do bear a slight resemblance to Connor.’

Taken aback by that sudden assurance, Sebasten’s superb bone-structure tensed. ‘Why are you even looking for a resemblance?’

At the coolness of that demand, Lizzie coloured in surprise. ‘Only because you told me that you were half-brothers…and there is only a vague similarity. In your height and build, around the eyes, that’s all.’

Without the smallest warning, Sebasten found himself wondering whether she had been drawn to him in the first instance because he reminded her of his younger brother. Until that same moment, he had not actually thought through what he had finally learned about his half-brother’s relationship with Lizzie. Connor had cheated on her with another woman, Connor had essentially done the rejecting and wasn’t it possible that Lizzie had been left carrying a torch?

‘What’s wrong?’ Lizzie asked because Sebasten had fallen still in the middle of the dance.

‘I should’ve warned you that Connor’s true parentage is a secret. Ingrid had her own good reasons for successfully fooling my father into believing that Connor was another man’s child. Connor himself never knew the truth.’ His lean dark features were taut. ‘Nor does his mother want it known even now.’

‘I haven’t mentioned it to anyone,’ Lizzie swore, assuming that fear of her having already been indiscreet had roused his concern on Ingrid Morgan’s behalf. ‘To be frank, after what I had to put up with on his and Felicity’s behalf, he wouldn’t be my favourite conversational topic.’

Although Connor was most definitely not Sebasten’s favourite topic either, Sebasten discovered that his thoughts continued to circle back in that direction. He sacked his memory in an effort to recall every word that Lizzie had said the night he took her out to dinner and she told him her side of the story on Connor. But he hadn’t been listening, not the way he should have been listening, for at that point he had believed that her every word was a lie.

‘So you can finally tell me where we’re going for our honeymoon?’ Lizzie carolled with rather contrived sparkle when they boarded his private jet some hours later.

‘Greece.’ Sebasten reflected that there had to be some evil fate at work, for he was taking her to the one place in the world that held once fond memories of Ingrid and Connor.

Still striving gamely not to react to his brooding aura, Lizzie smiled so wide her jaw ached. ‘You’re taking me to your home there?’

‘A private island.’ Not the brightest spark of inspiration he had had this century, Sebasten decided with grim irony.

‘Whose island?’

‘Mine.’

‘You own your own island?’

‘Doesn’t every Greek tycoon?’ Sebasten shrugged.

‘So I’m being dead vulgar and I’m impressed!’ Lizzie quipped, a glint of annoyance flaring in her green eyes.

They had enjoyed the most fabulous wedding. Sebasten had seemed to be in the best of humour and nothing had gone wrong that she knew of. So what was the matter with him? Was it only now sinking in on him that he was a married man? Was being married to her that depressing? Tears prickled at the backs of her eyes but her expressive mouth tightened and she lifted a magazine, enjoyed the superb meal she was served and said not another word.

Late evening, they arrived on the island of Isvos. The helicopter set them down within yards of a long, low, rambling house built of natural stone. Sebasten carried her over the threshold. ‘Bet you’re glad there isn’t a flight of steps!’ Lizzie giggled.

His brilliant gaze centred on her lovely laughing face and suddenly he smiled.

The interior enchanted Lizzie: polished terracotta floors, stone walls and rough-hewn support pillars of wood contrasted with glorious sheer draperies and pale contemporary furniture. In every main room, doors opened direct on to the beach and the whispering, soothing sound of the surf seemed to flow through the whole house.

‘I love it,’ Lizzie murmured with an appreciative smile. ‘It’s so peaceful.’

‘Ingrid Morgan helped to design it.’

Lizzie glanced at him in surprise. ‘I thought she used to be a very superior PA.’

‘She was but she was also my father’s mistress.’

Lizzie blinked and then her lush mouth rounded into a soft silent ‘oh’ of belated comprehension.

‘She ended it before Connor got old enough to suspect the truth and moved back to England.’

‘Has she ever come back here?’ Lizzie asked.

‘No. Ingrid’s not into reliving the past.’ His jacket cast on the chest at the foot of the handsome beech bed, Sebasten lounged back against the pale wood door frame, six feet four inches of glorious leashed male power and virility. ‘Neither am I as a rule. But, as I’m sure you’ll recognise, Connor is a subject we’ve never really discussed in any depth.’

‘Connor…?’ Lizzie repeated after a startled pause. ‘You want me to talk about Connor…in depth?’

Lean, powerful face taut with determination, Sebasten shifted a broad shoulder in a fluid movement. ‘We should get it out of the way.’

‘Well, excuse me…’ Green eyes wide with annoyance and discomfiture, Lizzie tilted her chin. ‘I wasn’t aware there was anything to get out of the way!’

‘I know next to nothing about your relationship with him,’ Sebasten countered with immovable cool.

‘This is our wedding night and you want me to rehash unpleasant memories of another man…is that right?’ Lizzie demanded, snatching in a sustaining breath in an effort to control the incredulous resentment splintering through her but failing. ‘Go take a hike, Sebasten!’

Sebasten straightened, beautiful dark eyes flaring stormy gold. ‘I might just do that.’

At that threat, fear touched Lizzie deep and that very fear that he might walk out only increased her fury. ‘Wasn’t it bad enough that you spent most of the trip here hardly speaking to me? I put up with that but I can’t stand moody people. You never know where you are with them—’

‘I am not moody,’ Sebasten grated in an electrifying undertone. ‘But when you admitted that you saw a likeness between me and Connor, yes, it did give me pause for thought. It made me wonder just what you first saw in me…’

Understanding came to Lizzie and she studied him with angry, hurt condemnation, for she could not change the reality that she had met his brother first. ‘You have to be the most possessive guy I’ve ever met—’

Sebasten shot her a fulminating look. ‘I’m not and I have never been possessive—’

‘Volatile…possessive…jealous. Pick any one of them and they every one fit! If I’d just popped out of a little locked box somewhere the first night we met, you’d have loved it! How could you ask about Connor tonight of all nights? Do you honestly think I want to talk about how I found him and my stepmother in bed together?’ Lizzie slung at him in furious reproach. ‘You haven’t got a romantic, sensitive bone in your body!’

The bathroom door slammed and locked on Lizzie’s impassioned exit. Sebasten strode out onto the beach, angry with her, angry with himself, angrier still with Connor, now that he finally knew how brutal an awakening she had had to that affair. But he was not volatile. Nobody had ever accused him of that before. He was a very self-controlled guy. As for being possessive, what was wrong with that? Theo mou…she was his wife! A certain amount of possessiveness was a natural male instinct. As for that other tag, he wouldn’t even dignify that suggestion with consideration.

Lizzie’s frustration was overborne by tears of sheer tiredness. Where did Sebasten get the energy to be so volatile? At least though she now understood what had been riding him since the reception. She should never have mentioned that bit about there being a resemblance between him and his half-brother. She sank down on top of the comfortable bed, thinking that in just a moment she would go and track Sebasten down and smooth things over. After all, it was kind of sweet: Connor couldn’t have held a candle to Sebasten in looks, personality or desirability.

When Sebasten strolled back in off the beach half an hour later, Lizzie was sound asleep. Clad in something filmy the colour of rich honey, she was curled up on top of the shot-silk spread. When he saw the faint track of a tear stain on her cheek, he suppressed a groan and raked long brown fingers through his tousled black hair. Why did he go off the rails with Lizzie? Connor had caused her a lot of grief. On the same score, his own conscience was hardly whiter than white and she was carrying his baby…

Lizzie wakened with a start and sat up. The doors on to the beach were still wide but now framed a spectacular crimson and gold sunrise over the bay. The indented pillow beside hers indicated that at some stage of the night Sebasten had joined her and she groaned out loud: she must have slept like a log. Sliding out of bed, she went into the en suite bathroom to freshen up and wondered where the heck Sebasten was.

When she returned to the bedroom, she stilled in relief. Sebasten was sprawled on the floor cushion by the doors watching the sun rise and her mouth ran dry. His strong brown back was bare and his well-worn jeans outlined every line of his narrow hips and long, powerful thighs. When he turned his arrogant dark head to look at her, deceptively sleepy golden eyes accentuated by the darkness of his lashes, he just took her breath away.

‘Hi…’ he said softly, extending a lean hand to her in welcome.

‘You should’ve woken me up last night—’

Sebasten tugged her down beside him and pulled her back against him. ‘Be honest…you were exhausted. A siren wouldn’t have wakened you—’

‘But you could have,’ Lizzie whispered, curving back into the sun-warmed heat of him and tightening his arms round her for herself.

‘Call it the first selfless act of a lifetime pethi mou,’ Sebasten teased huskily, brushing her tumbled hair from one slim shoulder and pressing his expert mouth to her exposed skin in a caress that sent a helpless shiver of response coursing through her.

She twisted round in a sudden movement that took him by surprise and locked her lush lips to his with a hunger she couldn’t hide.

‘And this is the second unselfish act…’ Sebasten shared with a ragged edge to his dark, deep drawl as he lifted her and set her back from him. ‘Breakfast awaits you…’

‘B-breakfast?’ Lizzie stammered in total disconcertion.

‘You can have me for dessert if you want,’ Sebasten promised with husky amusement, vaulting upright with easy grace and pulling her with him to walk her out onto the terrace, where fresh rolls, cereal and fruit were already laid on the table.

‘Are the staff invisible?’ Lizzie asked as he tugged out a seat and tucked her into it.

‘I made it. The staff will be very discreet and only show up when necessary—’

‘And where do they hang out the rest of the time?’

‘In the main house across that hill.’ Sebasten nodded in the direction of the thick pine grove that ran on steep sloping ground right down to the edge of the sea.

‘There’s another house?’

‘This place wasn’t impressive enough to satisfy my father’s wives. I use the main house when I’m entertaining. When I’m on my own, I come here.’

That he had brought her with him made her smile. When she had finished her tea, he peeled a peach for her, fed her with it segment by segment. She collided dizzily with smouldering golden eyes and licked his fingers clean of the peach juice. He closed his hands over hers and tugged her upright.

‘Ready and willing,’ Sebasten husked.

The well-worn denim of his jeans made that so obvious that her cheeks burned with colour but her awareness of his rampant arousal only heightened her own. Driven by the taut sensitivity of her breasts and the ache stirring at the very heart of her, she pushed into connection with every hard, muscular angle of his lean, powerful frame. He knotted his fingers into the tumbling torrent of her hair and claimed her ready mouth with explicit passion.

‘I make a really mean breakfast,’ he teased as he swept her quivering body up into his arms and carried her back to bed.

‘But can you do it…every morning?’ Lizzie mumbled, trying to hold her own in the breathless dialogue while struggling with his zip.

‘Try me…’ Sebasten took care of that problem for her by ripping off his jeans with single-minded purpose and dexterity. ‘You wouldn’t believe how sexy it feels to know that your woman carries your baby inside her.’

‘Honestly?’ Lizzie opened wide, uncertain eyes, met the fiery confirmation in his intent gaze, and relief and appreciation filled her.

‘Honestly,’ Sebasten confirmed with the slashing charismatic smile that always made her heart lurch inside her and he deprived her of her nightdress with smooth expertise.

Empowered by that declaration, Lizzie began, ‘About last night, what you said about Con—’

‘Shut up,’ Sebasten warned without the smallest dip in that blazing smile. ‘I was way out of line—’

‘But—’

‘Close your eyes and pretend we have only just arrived,’ he urged, finding the tender peak of her breast with caressing fingers and depriving her of both breath and concentration.

He took her into a sensual world where all that mattered was the next sweet, drugging high of sensation. He let the heat of his mouth trail over her tender, pouting flesh and a long sigh was driven from her lungs. He lingered over the distended little buds until her sigh had become a moan she wasn’t even aware of making and she was shifting her hips in a restive movement, unable to stay still.

‘Sebasten…’ she gasped as he worked his erotic passage down over the quivering muscles of her tummy. ‘I want you…’

‘Not yet,’ he asserted, parting her slender thighs with ease and embarking on an intimacy that was new to her.

Shaken as she was, her eyes flew wide. ‘No…’

But he transformed her negative into a helpless positive within seconds and drove her crazy with a pleasure that came close to torment. She was out of control, abandoned to the urgent need he had driven to an ever greater height. At the instant that her heart was a hammering thunder-beat in her ears and her whole quivering body was sensitised to an almost unbearable degree, he came over her and entered her in a single smooth-driving thrust. Excitement flung her so high, she couldn’t catch her breath. She lifted herself up to him, moved against him in a helpless frenzy of need and then cried out as the shock waves of climax took her to an ecstatic peak and then released her again.

She felt soft with love, weak with fulfilment. Revelling in the peaceful aftermath of passion, she rubbed her cheek against a satin-smooth muscular brown shoulder. Happiness cocooned her as he hugged her close. He might not love her but he was very affectionate, she acknowledged, suppressing the inner sense of loss that that first acknowledgement threatened.

‘Just to think, pethi mou,’ Sebasten murmured with raw satisfaction as he gazed down into her warm green eyes, ‘nobody but me is ever going to know how fantastic you really are.’

‘Trust you to find a new slant on marriage,’ Lizzie whispered with amusement.

Dark golden eyes welded to her, he brushed a kiss across her lush reddened mouth and breathed rather like a guy steeling himself to make a major statement. ‘What we have is special…really special.’

‘Is it?’ she muttered, wanting more, striving to silence that need inside her and be happy with what they had.

‘Yes.’ Sebasten was just a little annoyed that she seemed so indifferent to his attempt to impress on her how much he valued her. ‘We’re so close, I can feel it.’

‘Oh…’ Lizzie snuggled into him.

‘I’ve never been that great at getting close to women,’ Sebasten confided, soothed by the fact that she was now wrapped round him like a vine. ‘But you’re different. You’re very open.’

‘Have you ever been in love?’ she muttered in as casual a tone as she could muster.

Sebasten tensed. ‘No…’

And with that Lizzie had to be content.

Two weeks later, Lizzie shimmied into a dress the shade of copper and noted how well it became the very slight tan she had acquired in the heat of the Greek sun.

Emerald drop earrings dangled from her ears and an emerald and diamond necklace encircled her throat. Sebasten had given her the earrings at the end of the first week and the necklace just the night before. Lizzie smiled. She had never been so happy. Even the reality that her beautiful dress was just a tinge too neat in fit over breasts that had made an inconvenient gain in size as her body changed with early pregnancy couldn’t cloud her good mood.

They had had lazy golden days on the beach, eating when they felt like it, swimming when they felt like it, staying in bed when they felt like it and talking long into the night over the exquisite dinners the staff served on the terrace in the evening. On a couple of occasions they had walked down to the sleepy little village at the harbour and dined in each of the two taverns, where they had been treated like guests of honour. Other days they had flown over to the bigger, busier islands like Corfu to shop or dine or dance.

She had learnt a lot about the male she married. She had also been both disconcerted and touched when he had said he would be cutting back on his trips abroad so that he would be able to spend more time with her and the baby.

‘It’ll be difficult for you,’ she had remarked.

‘It’s my choice, just as it was my father’s choice to be a stranger to me throughout my childhood. He was never there,’ Sebasten had admitted, his strong jawline squaring as he voiced a truth that his sense of family loyalty had always forced him to repress. ‘He expected his wives to do his job for him but they didn’t. It was much easier to leave me in the care of the staff or pack me off to boarding school.’

For the first time, Lizzie had recognised the strength of his sense of responsibility towards their unborn baby and her heart had gone out to him as she understood that his own experiences had made him all the more determined to ensure that his own child would receive very different treatment. But for the early loss of her mother, her own childhood had been secure and loving and she began to grasp the source of Sebasten’s innate complexity. He had been forced to depend on his own inner resources at too early an age.

Yet throughout those two glorious weeks they shared, Sebasten continually surprised and delighted her with the unexpected. The night that he found her eating sun-dried tomatoes with a fork direct from the jar she had brought out to Greece with her, he had laughed at her embarrassment over her secret craving and carried both jar and her back to bed. But within twenty-four hours a ready supply of Greek sun-dried tomatoes had been flown in.

‘It’s a Greek baby,’ he had pointed out cheerfully.

She would never have dreamt of telling Sebasten but she truly believed he was a perfect husband. He was romantic, although without ever seeming to realise that he was being romantic. He was also incredibly passionate and tender as well as being the most entertaining male she had ever been with. In short, he was just wonderful. She could not credit that she had been so worried that he might not be ready for the commitment of marriage. She was convinced that at any moment he would open the subject of their living in separate houses when they returned to London and talk her out of what she had already decided had been a very stupid idea.

It was the last night of their honeymoon. Sebasten had selected it as the night they would cast off their newly married seclusion and host a party at the big white villa over the hill. He wanted to entertain all the Greek friends and business acquaintances who had not been able to make it to a wedding staged at such short notice.

‘You look fantastic in that dress,’ Sebasten informed her as he entered the bedroom.

Lizzie encountered the appreciative gleam in his gaze and just grinned. ‘You picked it. The emeralds look spectacular with it too. Thank you.’

‘Gratitude not required. Those emeralds accentuate your eyes and I had to have them, pethi mou.’

She looked so happy, Sebasten thought with a powerful sense of achievement and satisfaction. He could not believe that she would insist on living apart from him when they got back home again. If she had begun to care for him even a little again, she would surely change her mind.

‘How did you get so friendly with Ingrid Morgan?’ Lizzie asked as she kicked off her shoes to walk barefoot across the sand. The path that led up through the pine wood to the main house was on the other side of the beach. ‘You never did explain that.’

‘Between the ages of eight and eleven, I spent every vacation here with Ingrid and Connor. My father would just fly in for a few days here and there,’ Sebasten explained wryly.

‘Every vacation?’ Lizzie queried in surprise.

‘It suited Andros. He was between wives. Ingrid treated me the same way she treated Connor and I began to think of them as my family.’ Sebasten grimaced as if to invite her scorn of such a weakness on his part. ‘It ended the day I asked my father when he and Ingrid were getting married.’

‘Was marriage so out of the question?’

‘By that stage they had already had a stormy on-and-off relationship that spanned quite a few years. He never thought of her as anything other than a mistress and he’d convinced himself that I was too young to ask awkward questions. But he took me back to our home in Athens that same evening and I was an adult before I met Ingrid again.’

‘That was so cruel!’ Lizzie groaned.

No longer did she wonder why he had once admitted to not trusting her sex, for he had been let down by the only two women he had learned to love when he was a child. His mother had walked away through her own personal choice but Ingrid Morgan had had no choice, for she had had no rights over her lover’s son.

Why the hell had he told her all that? Sebasten asked himself in strong exasperation. Lizzie’s eyes were glistening with tears and, even as he was warmed by her emotional response on his behalf, he was embarrassed by it too.

Ahead of them lay the big, opulent white villa built by Andros Contaxis for his second wife. Lizzie had had a lengthy tour of the house the week before. While a hugely impressive dwelling with as many rooms as a hotel, it lacked character and appeal. Considering that problem and keen to change the subject to one less sensitive, she murmured in a bright upbeat tone, ‘I’ve got so many plans for the house. I can hardly wait to get home to make a start. I really will need the advice of a good interior designer, maybe even an architect.’

Sebasten absorbed that admission in angry, startled bewilderment. He assumed she was referring to the house he had offered her for her own sole occupation in London. How the hell could she exude such enthusiasm for literally throwing him back out of her life again? Had nothing that they had shared in recent days made her reappraise that ambition? What was he? A negotiable part of the old sun, sea and sex vacation aboard? Or just a rebound affair after Connor that was now leading to its natural conclusion? Obviously not much more, for all that he was the father of the baby she carried!

Surprised by his silence, Lizzie coloured, for she had assumed that he would be pleased. But then possibly he believed that when they were only just married she had some nerve announcing that she planned to redesign one of his homes. After all, it should have been his suggestion, rather than hers, she thought in sudden mortification. Just because her own father had always preferred to let the women in his life take care of such matters did not mean that Sebasten had a similar outlook.

‘Of course,’ she added hurriedly, striving to backtrack from her stated intention without losing face, ‘change doesn’t always mean improvement and it could be a mistake to rush into a project that would be so expensive—’

‘Spend what you like when you like,’ Sebasten delivered in a derisive undertone. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

Shock sliced through Lizzie. As they entered the villa she stole a shaken glance at his lean, hard profile, wondering what on earth she had said to deserve such a response. Whatever, it was obvious that Sebasten was angry. Furthermore, once their guests began arriving in a flood, Sebasten roved far and wide from her side, leaving her more than once to assume the guise of a faithful follower. He also talked almost exclusively in Greek, which she supposed was understandable when he was mixing with other Greeks, but on several occasions when she was already aware that their companions spoke English he left her feeling superfluous to their conversations.

‘You have all my sympathy,’ Candice, a beautiful and elegant brunette, remarked to Lizzie out of the blue.

Having already been informed by Candice that she had once dated Sebasten, Lizzie tensed. ‘Why?’

‘Sebasten doesn’t quite have the look of a male who has taken to marriage like a duck to water.’ Exotic dark eyes mocked Lizzie’s flush of dismay at that crack. ‘But then some men are just born to prefer freedom and it is early days yet, isn’t it?’

That one stinging comment was sufficient to persuade Lizzie that Sebasten was making a public spectacle of her. Seeing him momentarily alone, she studied him. He looked grim without his social smile, pale beneath his usually vibrant olive skin tone, and concern overcame her annoyance. She hurried over to him and said ruefully, ‘Are you going to tell me what’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing’s the matter.’ Hard golden eyes clashed with hers in apparent astonishment.

‘But I’ve hardly seen you this evening—’

‘Do we need to stick together like superglue?’ Sebasten elevated a sardonic ebony brow. ‘I have to confess that after two weeks of round-the-clock togetherness, I’m in need of a breather and looking forward to leading more separate lives when we get home.’

The silence enclosed her like silent thunder.

‘Believe me, you’re not the only one,’ Lizzie breathed, fighting to keep her voice level.

She walked away but inside herself she was tottering in shock and devastation. How could he turn on her like that when she had believed them so close? She loved him to distraction but how could she allow herself to love someone that ruthless in stating his own dissatisfaction with their marriage? What had gone wrong, how it had gone wrong without her noticing seemed unimportant. All that mattered was that once again she herself had been guilty of making a fatal misjudgement about how a man felt about her.

Oh, she knew he didn’t love her but she had believed that they were incredibly close for all that. Hadn’t he said so himself? But then, what did she believe? What Sebasten said in bed or what he said out of it? She knew which version her intelligence warned her to place most credence in. She gazed round the crowded room but all the faces were just a blur and the clink of glasses, the chatter and the music seemed distant and subdued. Then, without her even appreciating the fact, the most awful dizziness had taken hold of her. As she lurched in the direction of the nearest seat she was too late to prevent what was already happening, and she folded down on the carpet with a stifled moan of dismay.

Already striding towards her, alerted by her striking pallor and wavering stance, Sebasten was right on the spot to take charge but cool did not distinguish the moments that immediately followed Lizzie’s fainting fit. Never an optimist at the best of times, in the guilt-stricken mood he was in, Sebasten was convinced he’d killed her stone-dead and the reality that there were at least three doctors present was of no consolation whatsoever.

Lizzie recovered consciousness to find herself lying on a sofa in another room. Three men were hovering but Sebasten was down on his knees, clutching one of her hands, much as if she were on her deathbed. She blinked, almost smiled as her bemused gaze closed in on his lean, strong face, and then she remembered his words of rejection and what colour she had regained receded again and she turned her head away, sucking in a deep, convulsive breath.

‘Only a faint, nothing to really worry about,’ Sebasten’s best friend from university asserted in bracing Greek. ‘A mother-to-be shouldn’t be standing for hours on end on such a warm and humid evening—’

‘And not without having eaten any supper,’ chimed in another friend.

‘She has a fragile look about her,’ the third doctor remarked, his more pessimistic and cautious nature a perfect match for Sebasten’s. ‘Entertaining two hundred people tonight may well have been too much for her. This is a warning to you. She needs rest and tender care, and try to keep the stress to a minimum.’

Sebasten was feeling bad enough without the news that his lack of care on almost every possible count had contributed to Lizzie’s condition. He scooped her up into his arms. ‘I’m taking you up to bed.’

Lizzie made no protest. The more she thought about his rejection, the more anguished she felt, and what self-discipline she had was directed towards thanking the doctors for their assistance and striving to behave normally.

By the time Sebasten had carried Lizzie up to the master-bedroom suite and settled her down on the vast circular bed that had sent her into a fit of giggles when she first saw it, even he was a little out of breath. But so shattered had he been by her collapse and by the gut-wrenching punishment of having been forced to think of what life might be like without her that Sebasten was desperate to dig himself back out of the very deep hole that fierce pride had put him in.

‘I was lying in my teeth when I said I was tired of us being together,’ Sebasten confessed in a raw, driven undertone.

Thinking that now he felt sorry for her and blamed his own blunt honesty for causing her stupid faint, Lizzie flipped over and presented him with her back. ‘I’d like to be on my own.’

‘I’m sorry I was such a bastard,’ Sebasten framed half under his breath, his dark, deep drawl thick with strain. ‘I don’t want to score points any more. I do want you to be happy—’

‘Then go away,’ she muttered tightly.

‘But I need you in my life.’ Sebasten forced that admission out with much the same gritty force as a male making a confession while facing a loaded gun.

A solitary tear rolled down Lizzie’s taut cheek. Obviously he had recognised just how devastated she was at the concept of having to let go of her dream of a happy, normal marriage. ‘I don’t need you,’ she mumbled flatly.