Mother's Day Treats

CHAPTER FOUR

HAVING stolen one of Sebasten’s shirts from a unit in the dressing room to cover her halter top, Lizzie descended the stairs in hopeful search of a dining room. She was a bag of nerves, her heart banging against her ribs.

Sebasten had not even waited for her to emerge from the bathroom and he had sounded so cold and distant when he had said that he would see her downstairs. After the night they had shared, it was not the way she had naïvely expected him to greet her and now she was wondering in stricken embarrassment if he was eager just to get her out of his house. Perhaps only some refined form of good breeding had urged him to offer breakfast at noon.

One look and I was hooked…wasn’t that what Sebasten had told her the night before? For an instant, she hugged that recollection to her and straightened her taut shoulders. But then maybe that had only been the sort of thing the average male said when things got as far as the bedroom. When she had no other man to compare him with, how would she know? Furthermore, he wasn’t the average male, was he? Lizzie stole an uneasy glance at the oil paintings and the magnificent antique collector’s cabinet in the huge hall. Everywhere she looked, she was seeing further signs of the kind of stratospheric wealth that could be rather intimidating.

A manservant appeared from the rear of the hall and opened a door into a formal dining-room, where Sebasten was seated at the end of a long polished dining-table. Colliding unwarily with veiled dark golden eyes as he rose upright with the kind of exquisite manners that she was unused to meeting with, she felt a tide of colour warm her pale complexion, and broke straight into nervous speech. ‘I pinched one of your shirts. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘I should have sent out for some clothes for you,’ Sebasten countered, throwing her into a bewildered loop with that assurance and then the unsettling suspicion that he brought a different woman home at least three times a week. ‘My apologies.’

As the unfamiliar intimate ache at the heart of her tense body reminded her of just how passionate and demanding a lover Sebasten was, Lizzie dragged her tense gaze from his in awful embarrassment and sank down fast into a seat.

Sebasten was very tempted to give her a round of applause for her performance. The blushing show of discomfiture was presumably aimed at convincing him that she had never before spent a night with a man and faced him the next morning.

‘I have an apartment you can use,’ he murmured evenly.

Startled by that sudden offer of accommodation, Lizzie glanced up. ‘Oh…I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘I can’t bear to think of you being homeless,’ Sebasten quipped.

‘Well, I won’t be after I’ve found somewhere of my own, which I intend to do today,’ Lizzie hastened to add, grateful for the distraction of the food being presented to her by the manservant.

‘It’s not that easy to find decent accommodation in London,’ Sebasten countered.

‘I’ll manage. Thousands do and so will I. In fact, I’m looking forward to proving to my father that I can look after myself,’ Lizzie admitted. ‘I did offer to leave home after Dad remarried but he wouldn’t hear of it. He had a self-contained flat built in the stable block at the back of the house for me.’

Settling back in his antique rosewood carver chair, Sebasten cradled his black coffee in one lean brown hand and surveyed her with a frown-line dividing his level ebony brows. ‘I can’t understand why the indulgent father you describe should suddenly go to the other extreme and practically throw you out of your home.’

Visibly, Lizzie lost colour and after some hesitation said, ‘Dad thinks he’s spoilt me rotten—’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes,’ Lizzie confided ruefully. ‘And I have to be honest and admit that I loved being spoilt.’

‘Any man would feel privileged to offer you the same treatment,’ Sebasten drawled, smooth as glass.

Lizzie laughed out loud. ‘Stop sending me up!’ she urged.

Grudging appreciation flared in Sebasten’s veiled gaze. She was clever, he conceded. She had not snatched at the apartment he had mentioned and was determined to demonstrate an appealing acceptance of her reduced circumstances. ‘So what are your plans?’

Lizzie thought of the number of bills she had to settle and almost flinched. Before leaving home she had trotted up the sum total of her liabilities, and she was well aware that without her father’s generous allowance only the sale of her jewellery and her car would enable her to keep her head above water on a much smaller budget. However, she had no intention of startling him with those uncomfortable realities.

‘Somewhere to live is my first priority and then a job.’

It was evident that he had made use of another bathroom while she hogged his own. His black hair was still damp, his strong jawline clean shaven and she couldn’t stop staring at him. Inherent strength and command were etched in his devastatingly attractive features and, regardless of the little sleep he had enjoyed, no shadows marked the clarity of his dark golden eyes. Even in his mood of cool reserve that increased her own apprehension as to how he now saw her, she was fascinated by him.

‘On the career front, try the Select Recruitment agency.’ Sebasten not only had a controlling interest in the business but also used it to recruit all his own personal staff. ‘I’ve heard that they’re good.’

‘They would need to be,’ Lizzie remarked with a wry twist of her lush mouth. ‘I have no references, only basic qualifications and very little work experience to offer.’

‘I’m sure you’ll manage to package your classy appearance and lively personality as the ultimate in saleable commodities. It all comes down to presentation. Concentrate on what you can do and not what you can’t,’ Sebasten advised.

Grateful for his advice and the indirect compliment, Lizzie nibbled at a delicious calorie-laden croissant spread with honey and sipped at her tea. Did he want to see her again? She thought not. As her hand trembled, the cup she held shook and she set it back on the saucer in haste. Don’t be such a baby, she urged herself furiously, willing back the stinging moisture at the backs of her eyes. Indeed she might console herself with the reflection that what had been so special for her had probably been equally special for him in that she could not credit that he made a regular habit of sharing cold showers with a drunk.

As the grandfather clock in the corner struck the hour, Sebasten rose to his feet again with a sigh. ‘I’m afraid I have a lunch engagement I can’t break at my club but my chauffeur will drive you back to wherever you’re staying. Please don’t feel that you have to hurry your meal.’

‘It’s OK…I’ve finished anyway.’ With a fixed and valiant smile, Lizzie extracted herself from behind the table with uncool speed and walked back out to the hall ahead of him, her hand so tight on her bag that her knuckles showed white. No, she wasn’t very good at this morning-after-the-night-before lark and possibly it was a lesson she had needed. Never, ever again would she drink like that, never, ever again would she let a squashed ego persuade her to jump into bed with a guy she had just met.

Possibly being awkward and gauche came naturally to her, Sebasten reflected in surprise, raising a brow at her headlong surge from his dining room. She was behaving like one of his dogs did when he uttered a verbal rebuke: as though he had taken a stick to her. He was pretty certain that Connor had not exercised similar power over her and grim amusement lit his keen gaze.

‘I might as well give you a lift,’ he proffered equably, determined to drag out her discomfiture for as long as he could. ‘What’s the address?’

Ensconced in the opulent limousine while Sebasten made a phone call and talked in Greek, Lizzie was just counting the minutes until she could escape his company. She watched him spread the long, shapely fingers of one lean, bronzed hand to stress some point that he was making and her tummy flipped at the helpless recollection of how he had made her feel in his bed: driven, possessed, wild, ecstatic. All unfamiliar emotions on her terms and mortifying and painful to acknowledge in the aftermath of an intimacy that was not to be repeated.

Having made arrangements to have her followed every place she went, Sebasten flipped open a business magazine out of sheer badness until the limo drew up outside the smart block of flats where she was staying. Only as she leapt onto the pavement like a chicken fleeing the fox did he lean forward and say, ‘I’ll call you…’

Lizzie blinked and her long, naturally dark lashes swept up on her surprised eyes as she nodded, staring back at him while his chaffeur hovered. ‘You don’t have my number,’ she suddenly pointed out and before he could be put to the trouble of asking for it, she gave him the number of her mobile phone.

When Lizzie finally sped from view, slim shoulders now thrown back, marmalade hair blowing back like a banner in the breeze and long, perfect legs flashing beneath her short skirt, Sebasten was recovering from the new experience of being told that nobody had a photographic memory for numbers and then directed to punch hers straight into his phone so that he didn’t forget it because she wouldn’t be at her current address much longer.

Without a doubt, he was now recognising what might have drawn Connor in so deep, Connor, who had had strong protective instincts for the vulnerable: that jolly-schoolgirlish bluntness she practised, that complete seeming lack of a cool front, that seductive, what-you-see-is-what-you-get attitude she specialised in. And it was novel, different, but it was indisputably a pose designed to charm and mislead, Sebasten decided in contemptuous and angry dismissal.

Did I really make him put my number straight into his phone? Lizzie asked herself in shock as she stepped into the lift. Oh, well, he already knew how keen she was and at least that way she deprived herself of the time-wasting comfort of wondering if he had just forgotten her number when he didn’t call. And he wouldn’t call, she was convinced he wouldn’t call, because he had been polite but essentially aloof.

At no stage had he made the smallest move to touch her in any way and yet he was a very hot-blooded guy, the sort of male who expressed intimacy with contact. Indeed, looking back to the instant of their first meeting the night before, she was challenged to recall a moment when he had not automatically maintained some kind of actual physical contact with her. Yet in spite of that, when she joined him for breakfast he had been as remote as the Andes around her. Then why had he offered her the use of an apartment? Maybe such a proposition was no big deal to a male who might well deal in property, maybe it had even been his way of saying thanks for a sexually uninhibited night with a total tart. After all, weren’t all single men supposed to secretly crave a tart in the bedroom?

As Jen answered the doorbell, Lizzie was pale as death from the effects of that last humiliating thought.

‘You have a visitor,’ Jen informed her in a disgruntled tone, her pretty face stiff with annoyance. ‘Your stepmother has been plonked in my sitting room since twelve, waiting for you to put in an appearance.’

At that announcement and the tone of it, Lizzie stiffened in dismay. What on earth was Felicity playing at? All that needed to be said had been said and it was still a punishment for her to even look at her stepmother. And did Jen, who had invited her to stay in the first place, really have to be so sour?

‘Look, I’ll get changed and get rid of her and then I’ll be out of here just as fast as I can get my cases back into my car,’ Lizzie promised, hurrying down to the bedroom, refusing to subject herself to the further embarrassment of greeting Felicity in an outfit that spelt out the demeaning truth that she had not slept anywhere near her own wardrobe the night before.

Clad in tailored cream cotton chinos and a pink cashmere cardigan, Lizzie walked into Jen’s sitting room ten minutes later. Felicity spun round from the window, a tiny brunette, barely five feet one inch tall with a gorgeous figure and a tiny waist that Lizzie noted in surprise was still not showing the slightest hint that she had to be almost four months pregnant. Her classic, beautiful face was dominated by enormous violet-blue eyes. Predictably, those eyes were already welling with tears and Lizzie’s teeth gritted.

‘When your father told me what he had done, I was devastated for you!’ Felicity gushed with a shake in her breathless little-girl voice. ‘I felt so guilty that I had to come straight over here and—’

‘Check out that I would continue to keep quiet about you and my former boyfriend?’ Lizzie slotted in with distaste, for the brunette’s shallow insincerity grated on her. ‘I gave you my word that I wouldn’t talk but it’s not something I want to keep on discussing with you.’

‘But how on earth will you cope without your allowance?’ Felicity demanded. ‘I’ve been thinking…I could help you out. Maurice is very generous and I’m sure he wouldn’t notice.’

Hush money, Lizzie found herself thinking in total revulsion. ‘I’ll manage.’

Felicity gave her a veiled assessing look that was a poor match for her tremulous mouth and glistening eyes. ‘You’ve never been out there on your own and you don’t know how hard it can be. If only I didn’t have our baby’s future to think of, I swear I would have told your father the truth.’

The truth? And which version would that be? Lizzie thought back to the conflicting stories that Felicity and Connor had both hurled at her in the aftermath of her inopportune visit to the cottage which had become their secret love-nest. Her stepmother’s priorities had been brutally obvious. Felicity had had no intention of surrendering her comfortable lifestyle and adoring older husband to set up home with an impecunious lover. As he had listened to the brunette lie in her teeth about their affair and accuse him of trying to wreck her happy marriage, Connor’s jaw had dropped, his disbelief palpable. When her stepmother had followed up that with the announcement that she was pregnant, Lizzie’s shock had been equal to Connor’s devastated response.

Dredging herself back from her disturbing recollections of that day, Lizzie was so uncomfortable that she could no longer stand to look at the other woman. ‘Dad will come round in his own good time. And with Connor gone, you have nothing to worry about.’

‘That’s a wicked thing to say…’ Felicity condemned tearfully.

But deserved, Lizzie reflected. It would be a very long time before she forgot the flash of relief that she had seen in the brunette’s face when she had first learnt that Connor had died in a car crash. But then what was the point of striving to awaken a conscience that Felicity did not have? The brunette had few deep emotions that did not relate to herself.

As soon as Felicity had gone, Lizzie got stuck into repacking her luggage. Jen appeared in the bedroom doorway and remarked. ‘If it’s any consolation, we were all eaten alive with raging envy when you landed Sebasten Contaxis last night…’

Encountering the sizzling curiosity in the pert blonde’s gaze, Lizzie coloured and concentrated on gathering up the cosmetics she had left out on the dressing-table.

‘Mind you,’ Jen continued, ‘I hear he’s a real bastard with women…lifts them, lays them, then forgets about them. But then who could blame him? He’s a young, drop-dead gorgeous billionaire. Women are just arm candy to a guy like that and of course he’s happy to overdose on the treats.’

Even as a chill of dismay ran over Lizzie that Sebasten’s reputation should be that bad with her sex, she angled up her chin. ‘So?’

‘When you get dumped, everyone will crow because you weren’t entitled to get him in the first place. He dates supermodels…and let’s face it, you’re hardly in that category. It’s my bet that, once he gets wind of all the nasty rumours there have been about you and Connor, you’ll never hear from him again!’

‘Thank you for the warning.’ In one move, Lizzie carted two cases out to the hall in her eagerness to vacate the blonde’s apartment. ‘But I wasn’t actually planning on dating Sebasten. I was just using him for a one-night stand.’

Twenty minutes later, Lizzie climbed into her Mercedes four-wheel-drive and the startled look on Jen’s spiteful face travelled with her. It had been a cheap, tasteless response but it had made Lizzie feel just a little better. So where did she go now that she was truly homeless and friendless? Well, she had better try to sell her little horde of jewellery first to get some cash so that she could pay upfront for accommodation.

One week later, Lizzie dealt her new home a somewhat shaken appraisal. Six nights in an overpriced bed and breakfast joint and then this…

Her bedsit was a dump and, as far as she could see, a dump with no secret pretensions to be transformed into a miraculous palace. But then neither her car nor her jewellery had sold for anything like the amount that she had naïvely hoped, and until she had actually trudged round the rental agencies and checked the newspapers she had had no idea just how much it actually cost to rent an apartment. Any solo apartment, even the tiniest was way beyond her budget and, since she had been reluctant to share with total strangers, a bedsit had been her only immediate option.

But on the bright side, she had an interview the next day. When she got a job she would make new friends and then possibly find somewhere more inspiring to live, and in the meantime life was what you made of it, Lizzie told herself sternly. She would buy herself a bucket of cheap paint and obliterate the dingy drabness of the walls rather than sit around drowning in self-pity!

Sebasten had not called. Well, had she really expected him to? An aching wave of regret flooded Lizzie. It was so hard for her to forget the sense of connection that she had felt with him, that crazy feeling that something magical was in the air. Indeed she had slept with her mobile phone right beside her every night. However, the something magical had only been her own stupid fantasy, she conceded, angry that she still hadn’t managed to get him out of her mind. After all, if what Jen had said about Sebasten’s reputation was true, she had had a narrow escape from getting her heart broken and stomped on. In any case, how could she possibly have explained why she had lied and given him a false surname?

Reading his security chief’s efficient daily bulletins on Lizzie’s fast-disintegrating life of ease and affluence had supplied the major part of Sebasten’s entertainment throughout the past week.

Lizzie had been conned into flogging her six-month-old-low mileage Mercedes for half of its worth and then ripped off in much the same way when it came to parting with her diamonds. Having run a credit check on her, Sebasten had appreciated the necessity for such immediate financial retrenchments and could only admire her cunning refusal to snatch at his offer of an apartment. Evidently, Lizzie was set on impressing on him the belief that she was not a gold-digger or a free-loader. Now in possession of both her Merc and her jewellery and having paid very much more for both than she had received for either, Sebasten was ready to make his next move.

When her mobile phone sang out its musical call, Lizzie was standing on top of three suitcases, striving to get the paint roller to do what it was supposed to do as easily as it did in the diagram on the back of the pack. It had been so long since her phone rang that it took her a second or two to recognise the sound for what it was. With a strangled yelp, she made a sudden leap off the precarious mound of cases, the roller spattering daffodil-yellow paint in all directions as she snatched up her phone with all the desperation of a drowning woman.

‘Sebasten…’ Sebasten murmured.

Lizzie pulled a face, suddenly wishing she knew at least three Sebastens and could ask which he was. At the same time, she rolled her eyes heavenward, closed them and uttered a silent heartfelt prayer of thanks. He had called…he had called…he had called!

‘Hi…’ she answered, low-key, watching paint drip down from the ceiling, knowing that she had overloaded the roller and now wrecked her only set of sheets into the bargain and not caring, truly not caring. Her brain was in a blissful fog. She couldn’t think straight.

‘You’d better start by giving me your address,’ Sebasten told her before he could forget that he wasn’t supposed to know it already.

Lizzie rattled it off at speed.

‘Dinner tonight?’ Sebasten enquired.

Her brain peeped out from behind the romantic fog and winced at that last-minute invitation. Breathing in deep and slow, she dragged her pride out of the hiding place where it was eager to stay. ‘Sorry I can’t make it tonight.’

‘Try…’ Sebasten suggested, a wave of instant irritation gripping him. ‘I’ll be abroad next week.’

Lizzie paled at that additional information and then surveyed the devastation of the room which she had only begun to paint. ‘I really can’t. I’m in the middle of trying to decorate my bedsit—’

‘I’ve had some novel excuses in my time but—’

‘If I leave it now, I’ll never finish it…are you any good at decorating?’ Lizzie asked off the top of her head, so keen was she to break into that far from reassuring response of his.

‘Never wielded a paintbrush in my life and no ambition to either,’ Sebasten drawled in a derisive tone of incredulity, thinking that she was taking the I’m-so-poor façade way too far for good taste. Decorating? Him? She just had to be joking!

Wishing she had kept her mouth shut, Lizzie felt her cheeks burning. Of course, a male of his meteoric wealth wasn’t about to rush over and help out. But it was hardly her fault that she wasn’t available at such very short notice, and for all she knew he had only called because some other woman was otherwise engaged. ‘Oh, well, looks like I’m on my own. To be frank, it’s not a lot of fun. I’d better go…I’ve got paint dripping everywhere but where it should be. Maybe see you around…thanks for calling. Bye!’

Before she could weaken and betray her anguished regret, she finished the call. Maybe see you around? Lizzie flinched. Some chance! Her fashionable nights out on the town in the top clubs and restaurants were at an end.

In outraged disbelief, Sebasten registered that she had cut him off. Who the bloody hell did Lizzie Denton think she was? When the shock of that unfamiliar treatment had receded, a hard smile began to curve his wide, sensual mouth. She was trying to play hard to get to wind him up and increase his interest. He phoned his secretary and told her to find him a decorator willing to work that night.

By six that evening, Lizzie was whacked and on the brink of tears of frustration. Practically everything she possessed including herself was covered with paint and the first layer on the ceiling and two of the walls had dried all streaky and horrible. When a knock sounded on the door, she thrust paint-spattered fingers through her tumbled hair and tugged open the door.

Sebasten stood there like a glorious vision lifted straight from some glossy society-magazine page. His casual dark blue designer suit screamed class and expense and accentuated his height and well-built, muscular frame. A flock of butterflies broke loose in her tummy and her heartbeat hit the Richter scale while she hovered, staring at him in surprise.

‘What are you wearing?’ Sebasten enquired, brilliant golden eyes raking over what looked very like a leotard but his true concentration absorbed by the lithe perfection of the female body delineated by the thin, tight fabric. Instantaneous lust ripped through him and smouldering fury at his lack of control over his own libido followed in its wake.

‘Exercise gear…I didn’t have anything else suitable.’ She was unsurprised that he was staring: she knew she had to look a total fright with no make-up on. ‘I’d have been better doing it naked!’ she quipped tautly, her mind a total blank while she tried to work out what he was doing on her doorstep.