The Contaxis Baby (14 page)

When was she planning to tell him about the baby? She drifted off to weary sleep on the admission that she was not yet strong enough to face another confrontational scene.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ON MONDAY morning, Sebasten thought his personal staff were all very quiet in his radius and he assumed that the Sunday Globe gossip column had done the rounds of the office.

He swore that he would not think about Lizzie. At eleven he found himself accessing her personnel file. When he discovered that she had been reprimanded for the printing of four hundred copies of a photo of himself, all hope of concentration was vanquished. He was annoyed that he liked the idea of those photos.

Sebasten did not believe in love. He was crazy about Lizzie’s body…and her smile…and her hair. He had enjoyed the way she chattered too. She talked a lot, which in the past was a trait which had irritated him in other women, but Lizzie’s chatter was unusually interesting. He had also liked the easy way she would reach out and touch him; nothing wrong with that either, was there? It didn’t mean he was infatuated or anything of that nature, merely that he could still appreciate her good points.

On the other side of the equation, she was a rampant liar and she must have slept with his half-brother and he could not work out how he had managed to block that awareness out for so long. At the same time, he could no longer credit the dramatic contention that Lizzie had driven Connor to his death. Ingrid had needed someone to blame. But Connor had got behind the wheel of his car, drunk. That car crash had been the tragic result of his half-brother’s recklessness and love of high speed.

At that point, without any prior thought on the subject that he was aware of, Sebasten decided to settle that outstanding bill he had seen in Lizzie’s bedsit. She couldn’t prevent him from doing that, could she?

That same day, Lizzie went into work and found herself the target of covert stares and embarrassing whispers. Only then did she recall the article that had been in the newspaper the previous day. In a saccharine-sweet enquiry, Milly Sharpe asked her where she would like to work and Lizzie reddened to her hairline.

‘Any place,’ Lizzie answered tautly and ended up at a desk in a corner where she was given nothing like enough to keep her occupied.

She saw then that continuing employment in Sebasten’s company could well be less than comfortable for her. During her lunch break, she called into the employment agency across the road from the CI building and enjoyed a far more productive chat with one of the recruitment consultants there than she had received at the establishment which Sebasten had recommended a month earlier.

‘You have a great deal of insider knowledge and experience in the PR field,’ the consultant commented. ‘I’m sure we can place you in a PR firm. It would be a junior position to begin with, and of course you’re entitled to basic maternity leave, but if you prove yourself you could gain quite rapid advancement.’

On Tuesday, Sebasten took sudden note of how very long it had been since he had staged a meeting with the accounts team on the sixth floor and he instructed his secretary to make good that oversight. That Lizzie worked on that floor was not a fact he allowed to enter his mind once. On Wednesday, he was infuriated by the announcement that the accounts meeting could not be staged until Friday, as key personnel were away on a training course.

On Thursday, Ingrid phoned Sebasten and demanded to know if it was true that he had been seeing Liza Denton. Sebasten said it was but that it was a private matter not open to discussion, and if Ingrid’s shock at that snub was perceptible Sebasten was equally disconcerted by the very real anger that leapt through him when the older woman then made an adverse comment about Lizzie. On Friday, Sebasten arrived at the office even earlier than was his norm, cleared his desk by nine, strode about the top floor unsettling his entire staff and checked his watch on average of once every ten minutes.

On the sixth floor, Lizzie’s week had felt endless to her. She was craving Sebasten as though he were a life-saving drug and hating herself for being so weak. She knew she had to tell him that she was pregnant, but while she still felt so vulnerable she was reluctant to deal with that issue. Mid-week, during the extended lunch break she hastily arranged, she had an interview for a position with a PR firm but had no idea whether or not she was in with a chance. On Friday morning, Milly Sharpe greeted her arrival at work with a strange little smile and put her on the reception desk.

When Sebasten strode out of the lift, the first person he saw was Lizzie. Lizzie, clad in a yellow dress as bright as sunshine. He collided with her startled green eyes and walked right past the senior accounts executive waiting to greet him without even noticing the man.

‘Lizzie…’ Sebasten said.

Taken aback by his sudden appearance, Lizzie nodded in slow motion as though to confirm her identity while her gaze welded to him with electrified intensity. His sheer physical impact on her drove out all else. She drank him in, heart racing at the sudden buzz in the atmosphere and there was not a thought in her head that was worthy of an angry, bitter woman. His luxuriant black hair gleamed below the lights and her fingers tingled with longing. His brilliant golden eyes, semi-screened by his spiky lashes, set up a chain reaction deep down inside her, awakening the wicked hunger that melted her in secret places and made her tremble.

‘So…’ His mind a wasteland, his hormones reacting with a dangerous enthusiasm that made lingering an impossibility, Sebasten snatched in a deep, sharp breath. ‘How are you?’

‘OK…’ Lizzie managed to frame after considerable effort to come up with that single word.

‘I have a meeting…’ Sebasten swung away, her image refreshed to vibrance in his memory.

As he strode down the corridor, Lizzie blinked and emerged from the spell he had cast. A slow, deep, painful tide of colour washed over her fair complexion. A burst of stifled giggles sounded from the direction of Milly Sharpe’s office, which overlooked Reception, and her heart sank. Had she somehow shown herself up? Well, what else could she have done when she had just sat staring at Sebasten like a lovesick schoolgirl? Squirming in an agony of self-loathing and shame, Lizzie decided she would not be around when Sebasten emerged from his meeting again.

That afternoon the recruitment agency called and informed her that Robbins, the PR firm, were keen for her to start work with them the following week. Deep relief filled Lizzie to overflowing and she accepted the offer. Away from Contaxis International, she would be better able to put her life together again and possibly it would be easier to face telling Sebasten what he would eventually have to be told.

On Friday evening, for the sixth night in a row, Sebasten stayed home and brooded. He didn’t want to go out and he didn’t want company.

Lizzie called her father for a chat. He seemed very preoccupied and apologised several times for losing the thread of the conversation. She asked what he had decided to do about Mrs Baines, the housekeeper, whom Felicity had wanted dismissed.

Maurice Denton released a heavy sigh. ‘I offered Mrs Baines a generous settlement in recognition of the number of years she’d worked for us. She accepted it but she was very bitter and walked out the same day. Felicity was delighted but I must confess that the whole business left a nasty taste in my mouth.’

‘How is Felicity?’

‘Very edgy…’ the older man admitted with palpable concern. ‘She bursts into tears if I even mention the baby and when I suggested that I ought to have a word with the gynaecologist she’s been attending, she became hysterical!’

Lizzie raised her brows and winced in dismay. Was her stepmother heading for a nervous breakdown? All over again, she felt the guilty burden of the secret knowledge she was withholding from her father. Then she wondered how Maurice Denton, never the most liberal of men and very set in his traditional values, would react to a daughter giving birth to an illegitimate child and paled. Such an event might well sever her relationship with her father forever…

On Sunday morning, Sebasten again lifted the Sunday Globe, which he had always regarded as a rubbish newspaper aimed at intellectually-challenged readers. However, he only wanted to check out that Patsy Hewitt had not picked up any other information relating either to himself or Lizzie. The front page was adorned with the usual lurid headline offering the unsavoury details of some sleazy affair, he noted, and only at that point did he recognise that the article was adorned with a photo of Connor.

And Sebasten was gripped to that double-page spread inside the paper with a spellbound intensity that would have delighted Patsy Hewitt, who had found ample opportunity to employ her trademark venom after doing her homework on Lizzie’s stepmother, Felicity Denton. Mrs Baines, the Denton housekeeper, had sold her insider story of Felicity’s affair for a handsome price and Connor, even departed, still had sufficient news value to make the front page with his once tangled lovelife.

Lizzie was still in bed asleep when her mobile phone began ringing. Getting out of bed to answer it, she was bemused to realise that it was a former friend calling to express profuse apologies for misjudging her over Connor.

‘What are you talking about?’ she mumbled.

‘Haven’t you seen this morning’s Sunday Globe yet?’

Learning that Mrs Baines had sold her story of Felicity’s affair with Connor shook Lizzie rigid. No longer did she need to wonder why her stepmother had been so eager to get rid of the family housekeeper: Felicity had been justifiably afraid that Mrs Baines knew too much. Had Connor visited the Denton home as well? Lizzie wrinkled her nose with distaste. The housekeeper had probably known about that affair long before she herself did.

Over an hour later, Lizzie arrived at her family home to find it besieged by the Press. A half-dozen cameras flashed in her direction and she had to fight her way past to get indoors. Her father was sitting behind closed curtains in a state of severe shock.

CHAPTER NINE

‘FELICITY walked out late last night. A friend in the media phoned to warn her about the story appearing in the Sunday Globe,’ Maurice Denton shared in a shattered tone as Lizzie paced the room, too restive to stay still. ‘Felicity isn’t coming back. She made it clear that she wants a divorce.’

‘But…but what about the baby?’ Lizzie pressed, disconcerted by the speed and dexterity of her stepmother’s departure from the marital home.

The older man regarded her with hollow eyes. In the space of days, he seemed to have aged. ‘There is no baby…’

Lizzie’s mouth fell wide. ‘You mean, Felicity’s lost it…oh, no!’

‘There never was a baby. She wasn’t pregnant. It was a crazy lie aimed at persuading you not to tell me about her affair with Connor.’ Her parent shook his greying head with a dulled wonderment that he could not conceal. ‘Felicity thought that if she tried, she could get pregnant easily and then pretend she’d mixed up her dates. But it didn’t happen: she didn’t conceive. As time went on and she was forced to pretend to go to pre-natal appointments she decided that she would have to fake a miscarriage…thank heaven, I was spared that melodrama!’

‘Do you think…er…Felicity’s having a breakdown?’ Lizzie suggested worriedly. ‘I mean, maybe it was one of those false pregnancies that come from genuine longing for a baby—’

‘No.’ Maurice Denton’s rebuttal was flat, bitter. ‘Last night, she informed me that she didn’t even like children and that she was fed up not only with the whole insane pretence that she had foisted on us all but also sick and tired of living with a man old enough to be her father! She wasn’t even sorry for the damage she did to you, never mind me!’

Lizzie flinched. ‘I’m so sorry…’

‘Perhaps when a man of fifty-five marries a woman more than thirty years younger he deserves what he gets. Why didn’t you come to me about her and the Morgan boy?’

‘I…I told myself I couldn’t tell you for the baby’s sake…but possibly, I just couldn’t face the responsibility.’ Listening to the mayhem of raised voices outside the front door, Lizzie said gently, ‘Look, maybe the reporters will go away if I make a statement to them…what do you think?’

‘Do as you think best,’ Maurice Denton advised heavily. ‘Felicity is gone and it can only be Felicity or you that those vultures are interested in. I’ve never had much of a public profile.’

Lizzie went outside to address the assembled journalist and parry some horrendous questions of the lowest possible taste. ‘Was Morgan sleeping with both you and your stepmother?’

‘Connor and I were only ever friends,’ Lizzie declared with complete calm.

‘What about you and Sebasten Contaxis?’ she was asked.

‘Oh, I’m not friends with him!’ Lizzie asserted without hesitation and there was a burst of appreciative laughter at that response.

It was only later while she was making a snack for her father that she truly appreciated that her own name had been cleared. Would Sebasten find out? Sooner or later, he would discover that he had targeted the wrong woman. How would he react? But why should she care? What he had confessed to doing was beyond all forgiveness. She looked into the fridge, where a jar of sun-dried tomatoes sat, and her tastebuds watered. Sun-dried tomatoes followed by ice-cream. She shut the fridge again in haste, unnerved by recent food cravings that struck her as bizarre.

An hour later, Sebasten sprang out of his Lamborghini outside the Morgan household in the leafy suburbs. A lingering solitary cameraman took a picture of him. Waving back the bodyguards ready to leap into action and prevent that photo being taken, Sebasten smiled. Sebasten had been smiling ever since he read Patsy Hewitt’s hatchet job on Lizzie’s stepmother. The wicked stepmother, a typecast figure and a perfect match to Sebasten’s own prejudices. He could not imagine how he had contrived not to register that Lizzie’s father had a very much younger wife who bore more than a passing resemblance to the evil queen in Snow White. He could not imagine how it had not once crossed his mind that Lizzie might be engaged in protecting a member of her own family.

‘Lizzie’s not friends with you, mate,’ the cameraman warned Sebasten.

‘Watch this space,’ Sebasten advised with all the sizzling, lethal confidence that lay at the heart of his forceful character. He just felt happy, crazy happy, and all he could think about was reclaiming Lizzie.

‘She’s a gutsy girl…I wouldn’t count my chickens.’

Sebasten just laughed and leant on the doorbell and rattled the door knocker for good measure.