The Contaxis Baby

‘Do you make a habit of this kind of behaviour?’ he demanded rawly.

As she was assailed by that gritty tone, all desire to giggle was squashed at the source. ‘No…you’re the first…sorry,’ Lizzie slurred, sinking back to the carpet again.

Vaulting to his feet, Sebasten strode over to the phone by the bed and lifted it to order a large pot of black coffee and sandwiches to be brought upstairs. Then he contemplated his victim with brooding intensity and his long, powerful legs carried him over to the windows. Depressing the locks, he thrust the French windows back to let in the cold night air.

As that chilly breeze touched her slender bare back, Lizzie gave a convulsive shiver. Sebasten surveyed her without remorse. He would sober her up and then have her conveyed home. Wrenching the top sheet from the bed, he flung it over her prone body and gathered her up with determination to carry her into the adjoining bathroom.

‘Sleepy…’ Lizzie mumbled.

‘You need to wake up,’ Sebasten informed her, settling her with some difficulty onto the seat in the spacious shower cubicle and hitting the buttons to switch on the water. Only as the water cascaded down did he appreciate that he hadn’t removed the sheet. Then he no longer felt quite so comfortable with her semi-clad state.

As the water hit her, Lizzie opened bewildered and shaken eyes. ‘No…don’t want to be wet,’ she framed weakly.

‘Tough,’ Sebasten told her, barring the exit in case she made a sudden leap for freedom.

Far from making a dive for it, in slow motion and wearing an only vaguely surprised expression, Lizzie slithered off the seat like a boneless doll into a heap on the floor of the cubicle.

‘Up!’ Sebasten urged in exasperation.

Lizzie curled up and closed her eyes, soothed now by the warm flooding flow of water. ‘Sleepy,’ she mumbled again. ‘Night…night.’

Teeth gritted, Sebasten stepped into the shower to hit the controls and turn the water cold. She uttered a satisfying yelp of surprise as the water went from warm and soothing to icy and tingling. However, Sebasten got so wet in his efforts to haul Lizzie’s uncooperative body back up onto the seat, he ended up squatting down to hold her up and suffering beneath the same cold gush.

‘C-cold!’ Lizzie stammered.

‘I’m freezing too!’ Sebasten launched, shirt and trousers plastered to his big, powerful body as the same chill invaded him. He withstood the onslaught with masochistic acceptance. Served him bloody well right, he thought grimly. She was way too young and immature for him. What had got into him? Bringing her home had been a mistake and he had never sunk low enough to take advantage of a stupid woman.

‘Very…cold,’ Lizzie moaned.

‘And you said you weren’t an airhead,’ Sebasten recalled out loud with a deep sense of injustice, watching her wet hair trail in the water, looking down at her miserable face which was now—aside of the odd streak of mascara—innocent of all cosmetic enhancement. She still had perfect skin and amazing eyes, he noted. But he could not credit that he was trapped in his own shower with a drunk woman. He didn’t get into awkward situations like that.

‘Not,’ Lizzie pronounced with unexpected aggression, her chin tilting up.

A loud knock sounded on the door in the bedroom beyond. With a groan, Sebasten put her down but she slumped without his support. A vision of having to explain a drowned woman in his shower overtaking him, he switched off the water.

‘Don’t move…’ he instructed Lizzie as he strode back to the bedroom, dripping every step of the way.

A faint flush over his hard cheekbones as the member of staff presenting the laden tray of coffee and sandwiches stared in open stupefaction at his drenched appearance, Sebasten kicked the door shut again and set down the tray beside the bed.

When he returned to the bathroom, Lizzie was striving to crawl out of the shower on her hands and knees and being severely hampered by the trailing sopping sheet.

‘Feeling a little livelier?’ Sebasten quipped with dark satire.

‘Feel…a-awful!’ Lizzie stuttered through teeth chattering like castanets and she laid her head down and just sobbed in weakened rage. ‘Hate you!’

She looked pathetic. Sebasten snatched up a big bath towel, crouched down to disentangle her from the sheet and wrapped her with care into the towel. Hauled up into a standing position, she fell against him like a skater on ice for the first time and he lifted her up and carried her through to the bedroom to settle her back on the bed. Keeping a cautious eye on her in case she fell off the bed too, he backed away to strip off his own wet clothing and pitch the sodden garments onto the bathroom floor.

It was like babysitting, he decided, his even white teeth gritting. Not that he had ever done any babysitting, for Sebasten was not in the habit of putting himself out for other people. But the comparison between his own erotic expectations earlier in the evening and reality was galling to a male who was accustomed to a life than ran with the smooth, controlled efficiency of an oiled machine.

‘Close the windows…’ Lizzie begged, deciding there and then as cold dragged her mind from its former fog that she had fallen live into the hands of a complete sadist.

‘Yes, you’re definitely waking up now.’ Sheathed only in a pair of black designer jeans, Sebasten crossed the room to pull the French windows shut.

Lizzie blinked and then contrived to stare. The jeans fitted him as well as his own bronzed skin, accentuating his flat, muscular stomach, his narrow hips and long, hard thighs. Colouring, she looked away, sobered up enough already by the shock of that cold shower to cringe with mortification. Sebasten tugged her forward, tossed pillows behind her to prop her up and proceeded to pour the coffee.

‘Don’t feel like coffee—’

‘You’re drinking it,’ Sebasten told her and he laid the tray of sandwiches down beside her. ‘Eat.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ she dared in an undertone.

‘You need food to soak up the booze in your system,’ Sebasten delivered with cutting emphasis.

Squirming with shame and embarrassment, Lizzie reached for a sandwich. ‘I don’t get drunk…I’m not like that…I just had a hideous day—’

‘So you decided to give me a hideous evening,’ Sebasten slotted in with ungenerous bite. ‘Count your blessings—’

‘What blessings?’ Lizzie was fighting hard to hold back the surge of weak tears that that crack had spawned.

‘You’re safe and you’re still all in one piece. If you’d picked the wrong guy to spring this stunt on, you might not have been,’ Sebasten pointed out.

Chilled by what she recgonised as a fair assessment, Lizzie swallowed shakily and made herself bite into the sandwich. It was delicious. Indeed, she had not realised just how hungry she was until that moment. In silence, she sipped at the black coffee, wincing with every mouthful, for she liked milk in her coffee, and worked her way through the sandwiches.

Sebasten watched the sandwiches melt away and noted that for all her slenderness she had a very healthy appetite. ‘When did you last eat?’ he finally asked drily.

‘Breakfast,’ Lizzie worked out with a slight frown and that had just been a slice of toast. Lunch she hadn’t touched because just beforehand her father had phoned to say that he was coming home specially to talk to her and her appetite had vanished. As for supper, well, Jen hadn’t offered her anything but her first alcoholic drink of the evening.

‘No wonder you ended up flat on your face on my carpet,’ Sebasten delivered as he topped up the cup she had emptied.

Lizzie paled. ‘Not the world’s most forgiving person, are you?’

‘No.’ Sebasten made no bones about the fact. ‘What did your “hideous” day encompass?’

Lizzie looped unsteady fingers through her fast-drying hair to push it back from her brow and muttered tightly. ‘My father told me to move out and get a job. I was very upset—’

‘At twenty-two years of age, you were still living at home and dependent on your family?’ Sebasten demanded in surprise. ‘Are you a student?’

Lizzie reddened. ‘No. I left school at eighteen. My father didn’t want me to work. He said he wanted me to have a good time!’

Sebasten scanned the delicate diamond pendant and bracelet she wore, conceding that they might well be real rather than the imitations he had assumed. Yet she didn’t speak with those strangulated vowel sounds that he associated with the true English upper classes, which meant that she was most probably from a family with money but no social pedigree. He was wryly amused that Ingrid, who was obsessed by a need to pigeon-hole people by their birth and their bank balance, had taught him to distinguish the old moneyed élite from the nouveau riche in London society.

‘And, no…having a good time did not cover my behaviour tonight!’ Lizzie advanced in defensive completion. ‘That was a one-off!’

‘So you were very upset at the prospect of having to keep yourself,’ Sebasten recapped with soft derision and innate suspicion that her apparent ignorance of who he was had been an act calculated to bring his guard down. ‘Is that why you came home with me?’

Startled by that offensive question, Lizzie sucked in a sudden sharp breath. As the fog of alcohol released her brain, she had already absorbed enough of her surroundings to recognise that she was in the home of a male who inhabited a very much wealthier and more rarefied world than her own. She lifted her chin. ‘No, to tell you the truth, now that I’m recovering my wits, I haven’t the foggiest idea why I came home with you because I don’t like you one little bit.’

A disconcerting smile flashed across Sebasten’s dark, brooding features. Angry green eyes the colour of precious emeralds were hurling defiance at him and her spine was as rigid as that of a queen in a medieval portrait. Unfortunately for her, though, her tangled hair and the bath towel supplied a ridiculous frame for that attempt to put him in his place.