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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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SEBASTEN had had a hell of a night.
Most of their guests had travelled home. Some who had had to stay overnight at the villa at least retired early, but those who did not kept him up until almost dawn. For what remained of the night he paced the room next to Lizzie’s and fought the temptation to disturb her so that they could talk again. While Lizzie breakfasted in bed at his express instruction, he had to assume a cheerful-host act until the merciful moment that the last of their visitors had departed. However, by that stage it was time to embark on their return trip to London.
Lizzie came downstairs dressed in a dark green shift dress, her hair pulled back in a sophisticated style, all but her lush pink lips and the tip of her nose hidden behind a giant pair of sunglasses.
‘How do you feel?’ Sebasten asked, striving to suppress the recollection of finding her bedroom door locked when he had tried to make the same enquiry earlier in the day.