The Contaxis Baby (8 page)

‘You sound as if you’re just gasping to work,’ Sebasten mocked, knowing that there was no possibility on earth that the position would become permanent as it had been dreamt up at his bidding and styled to deliver the maximum pain for the minimum gain. He couldn’t wait to see her application form and discover how many lies she had put in print.

‘Of course I am…I’m skint!’ Lizzie exclaimed before she could think better of it.

As she encountered Sebasten’s enquiring frown, a wave of colour ran up from her throat to mantle her cheekbones. ‘Well, don’t tell me you’re surprised,’ she said ruefully. ‘I’m not living in a lousy bedsit so far out of the city centre so I’ll need to rise at dawn to get into work just for the good of my health!’

‘I can’t understand why you didn’t accept the apartment I mentioned…but then the offer remains open,’ Sebasten delivered.

‘Thanks…but I’ve got to learn to look after myself. I was so annoyed when I screwed up the painting project,’ Lizzie confided truthfully. ‘I didn’t appreciate that it wasn’t as easy as it looked and I hate giving up on anything! I should have stayed and watched those guys work and learned how to do it for myself.’

‘Let’s not go overboard.’ Sebasten reckoned that the number of fresh challenges awaiting her at CI would prove quite sufficient to occupy her in the coming weeks.

An hour and a half later, Lizzie scanned her appearance in the mirror in the opulent guest room she had been shown into in Sebasten’s beautiful town house. She had enjoyed freshening up in a power shower, for it was slowly sinking in on her that a thousand things that she had once taken for granted were luxuries she might never get to experience again. Her dress was leaf-green with a cut-away back and a favourite, but in the rush to leave her bedsit she had forgotten all her cosmetics.

As she descended the stairs she thought about how much she had appreciated not being shown into his bedroom as if how the evening might end was already accepted fact. It wasn’t. She had her interview tomorrow and she wanted to be wide awake for it and, furthermore, she suspected that it might be unwise to fall into Sebasten’s arms too soon, at least not before she had got to know him better.

When Sebasten watched her descend his magnificent staircase, he stilled.

Feeling self-conscious, Lizzie pulled a comic face. ‘Want to change your mind about being seen out with me? I forgot my make-up.’

‘You have fabulous skin and I like the natural look.’

‘All men say that because they think anything artificial is somehow a deception being practised on them but very few of them are actually wowed by the natural look if they get it!’ Lizzie laughed.

Their arrival at the latest fashionable eaterie caused a perceptible stir of turning heads and inquisitive eyes. Afraid of seeing any familiar faces and meeting with an antagonistic look which would take all the gloss off her evening, Lizzie looked neither to her right nor her left and stared into stricken space on the couple of occasions that Sebasten broke his stride to acknowledge someone, for she was terrified that he might try to introduce her using the false name she had given him. Mercifully he did not but she saw that there was no escaping the unpleasant fact that she would have to admit to lying and give him an acceptable explanation for her behaviour.

As soon as the first course was ordered, Lizzie breathed in deep and dived straight in before she could lose her nerve. ‘I have a confession to make,’ she asserted, biting at her lower lip, green eyes discomfited. ‘And I don’t think you’re going to like me very much after I’ve told you. My surname isn’t Bewford, it’s—’

‘Denton,’ Sebasten filled in, congratulating her mentally on her timing, for few men would contemplate causing a scene or staging a confrontation in a restaurant where, whether she had noticed it or not, they were the cynosure of all eyes. Yes, he had definitely found a foe worthy of his mettle.

Taken aback, Lizzie stared at him. ‘You already know who I really am?’

Never one to tell an untruth without good reason, Sebasten explained that he had seen her driving licence that morning a week ago.

Lizzie paled. ‘Oh, my goodness, what must you have thought of me?’ she gasped in shamed embarrassment, recalling his failure to await her emergence from his bathroom and his subsequent coolness on parting from her and now seeing both events in a much more presentable light. ‘I’m really sorry…and I’m just amazed that you wanted to see me again after I’d told a stupid lie like that!’

‘As to what I thought…I assumed you would explain when the time was right and that you must have a very good reason for giving me a false name. As to not seeing you again…’ Brilliant dark golden eyes rested with keen appreciation on her lovely, flushed face, absorbing the anxiety stamped into every line of it with satisfaction. ‘I’m not sure that was ever an option. We shared an incredible night of passion and I want to be with you.’

Relief and shy pleasure mingled in Lizzie’s strained appraisal and she decided that she owed him the fullest possible explanation in return for his forebearance. ‘I was—er—sort of involved,’ she stressed with reluctance, ‘with Connor Morgan up until a few days before he died. I don’t know whether you’re aware of the rumours—’

Sort of involved? Sebasten wanted to laugh out loud in derision at that grotesque understatement. The troubled plea for understanding in her beautiful eyes was an even more effective ploy. Lounging back in his seat as the head waiter appeared to refresh their wine glasses, Sebasten endeavoured to ape the role of a sympathetic audience. ‘I had heard the suicide story but I also understand that he never made any such threat and that he left no note either.’

Relieved to hear him acknowledge those facts, Lizzie clutched her wine glass like a life belt and then put it down again, her hands too restless to stay still. ‘If I tell you the whole truth, will you promise me that you won’t repeat it to anybody?’

His contempt climbing at that evident request not to carry the lies she was about to tell to any other source, who might fast disprove her story, Sebasten nodded in confirmation but then murmured. ‘Connor called you Liz, not Lizzie…didn’t he?’

‘That was typical Connor,’ Lizzie sighed. ‘He had an ex called Lizzie and he always insisted on calling me Liza.’

‘So tell me about him…’ Sebasten encouraged.

‘I first met Connor just over three months ago. I liked him; well, we all did. He was the life and soul of every event.’ Lizzie frowned as she strove to pick her words, for inexperienced she might be, but she knew that discussing her previous relationship with the new man in her life might not be the wisest idea. ‘I suppose I developed quite a crush on him but I never expected anything to come of it. When he grabbed me one night at a party and kissed me and then asked me out, I was surprised because I didn’t think I was his type…and as it turned out, I wasn’t.’

‘Meaning?’

‘That four days before he died, I discovered that Connor had been using me as cover for his steamy affair with a married woman.’ Lizzie winced as Sebasten’s intent appraisal narrowed in disbelief. ‘I know it doesn’t sound very credible because Connor always seemed to be such an upfront guy but it’s the truth. I found them together and nobody could have been more shocked than I was.’

‘Who was she?’ Sebasten enquired, impressed by her creativeness in a tight spot, for her tale was a positive masterpiece of ingenuity. In one fell swoop, she sought to turn herself from a heartless little shrew into a cruelly deceived victim and Connor into a cheat and a liar. His anger on his late half-brother’s behalf smouldered beneath the deceptive calm of his appraisal.

‘I can’t tell you that. It wouldn’t be fair because I gave my word to the woman involved that I wouldn’t. She was very distressed and she regretted the whole thing and she broke off with him. All I can tell you is that he believed he was crazy about her but I think that for her it was just a little fling because she was bored with her marriage.’

‘I’m curious. Tell me her name,’ Sebasten prompted afresh, ready to put her through hoops for daring to tell him such nonsensical lies.

Her persistence made her squirm with obvious discomfiture. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. Anyway, now it’s all over and behind me, I can see that Connor really just treated me like a casual girlfriend he saw a couple of times a week…we didn’t sleep together or anything like that,’ she muttered, her voice dwindling in volume, but she had wanted to let him know that last fact. ‘But it was still a very hurtful experience for me and I didn’t like him very much for making such an ass of me.’

‘How could you?’ Sebasten encouraged, smoother than silk.

‘It wasn’t until I drove down to Brighton to try and pay my respects to his mother that I realised that I was getting the blame for his death. People just assumed that he’d got drunk and crashed his car because I had ditched him,’ Lizzie shared heavily.

Ingrid had not admitted that Lizzie had made a personal visit to her home, Sebasten recalled, hating the way women always told you what they wanted you to hear rather than simply dispensing all the facts. ‘What happened?’

‘Mrs Morgan said some awful things to me…I can forgive that,’ Lizzie stated but she still paled at the recollection of Ingrid Morgan’s vicious verbal attack on her. ‘I mean, she was just beside herself with grief and naturally Connor hadn’t admitted to his own mother that he was carrying on with someone else’s wife. She said that if I tried to go to the funeral she’d have me thrown out of the church!’

‘So you’ve been getting the blame for events that had nothing to do with you. That’s appalling,’ Sebasten commented with harsh emphasis.

‘It’s also why all my friends have dropped me and my father showed me the front door,’ Lizzie confided, grateful for the anger she recognised in both the taut set of his hard bone-structure and the rough edge to his dark, deep drawl, for she believed it was on her behalf.

‘Surely you could have confided in your own father?’

Lizzie tensed, averted her gaze and thought fast. ‘No—er—he knows the woman concerned and I don’t think I could rely on him to keep it quiet.’

‘I’m astonished and impressed by your generosity towards a woman who doesn’t deserve your protection at the cost of your own good name,’ Sebasten drawled softly.

‘Wrecking her marriage wouldn’t bring Connor back and I’m sure she’s learned her lesson.’ Lizzie studied her main course without appetite, certain that she had just put paid to any sparkle in the evening with her long-winded and awkward explanation.

Sebasten reached across the table and covered her clenched fingers where they rested with his own. ‘Relax…I understand why you lied to me. You were seriously scared that after one extraordinary night with you I might make a real nuisance of myself.’

After a bemused pause at that teasing and laughable assertion, Lizzie glanced up, amusement having driven the apprehension from her green eyes, and she grinned in helpless appreciation, for with one mocking comment he had dissolved her tension and concluded the subject. He was clever, subtle, always focused. Meeting his dark golden gorgeous eyes, she felt dizzy even though she was sitting down.

They had a slight dispute outside the restaurant when Sebasten assumed she was coming home with him.

‘Where else are you going to go?’ he demanded with stark impatience. ‘The decorators aren’t finished yet!’

‘How do you know that? By mental telepathy?’

‘I only needed to take one look at the havoc you wreaked with a paintbrush. They’ll be lucky to finish by dawn!’ Sebasten forecast.

‘Call them and check.’ Lizzie smothered a large yawn with a hurried hand, for she was becoming very sleepy.

‘I can’t…don’t know how to reach them. Even if they had finished you couldn’t sleep in a room full of paint fumes,’ Sebasten spelt out, getting angrier by the second because the very last thing he had expected from her was an exaggerated pretence of not wanting to share his bed again, most particularly when he was determined not to repeat that intimacy. ‘The bed I’m offering you for the night doesn’t include me!’

‘Oh…’ Lizzie computed that surprising turn of events and gave him full marks for not acting on the supposition that her body was now his for the asking. ‘That’s fine, then. Thank you…thank you very much.’

Never had Sebasten snubbed a woman with so little satisfying effect. With an apologetic smile, Lizzie climbed into his limo, made not the smallest feline attempt to dissuade him from the rigours of a celibate night and then compounded her sins by falling asleep on him. He shook her awake outside his town house.

‘Gosh, have I been asleep? How very boring for you,’ she mumbled, stumbling out of the car and up the steps, heading for the stairs with blind determination but pausing to remove her shoes, which were pinching her toes. ‘I’m almost asleep standing up. I shouldn’t even have had one glass of wine over dinner.’

But for all her apparent sleepiness, Lizzie was thinking hard. She might have been pleased that he had no expectations of her, but when it dawned on her that she was heading for his guest room and that he had still not even attempted to kiss her she was no longer quite so content. Telling him about Connor, it seemed, had been a horrible mistake. It had turned him right off her.

On the landing her stockinged feet went skidding out from under her on the polished floor and she fell with a wallop and hit her knee a painful bash. ‘What is it about your wretched house?’ she demanded, the pain hitting her at a vulnerable moment and bringing a flood of tears to her eyes. ‘It’s like…booby-trapped for my benefit!’