The Contaxis Baby by Lynne Graham

about that. Lean, powerful face taut, he snatched her up off the floor and into his arms. Reasoning that sticking her in a guest room alone with her distress would not only seem odd but also suspicious behaviour for a male supposed to be interested in her, he carried her into his room, where he deposited her on the bed and backed off.
    With a tremendous effort of will, Lizzie gulped into silence and squeezed open her swollen eyes. It was true that she was very tired but it was her over-taxed emotions which had brought on the crying jag. In the frame she was in, she didn’t think that she was capable of having a relationship with anybody. She missed her home, she missed her father.
    ‘I’m sorry you met me last week,’ Lizzie confided abruptly. ‘You’re never going to believe that I’m not normally like this.’
    From the shadows outside the pool of light shed by the bedside lamps, Sebasten strolled forward. ‘Have a bath. Get some sleep. You’re exhausted.’
    ‘Not very sexy…Exhaustion, I mean,’ she muttered, plucking at the sheet with a nervous hand, peering out from under her extravagant torrent of hair, which shone with copper and gold lights.
    ‘I’ll be up later…I’ve got a couple of calls to make.’
    ‘Kiss me goodnight,’ Lizzie whispered on a breathless impulse before he reached the door.
    Sebasten stopped dead and swung round, emanating tension. ‘Surely, feeling so tired, you’re not up for anything tonight?’
    ‘So if there’s no—er sex, you don’t kiss either,’ Lizzie gathered and nodded, although she was cut to the bone at his rejection.
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
    ‘You don’t fancy me any more?’ Lizzie was determined to get an answer.
    Sebasten strode across the room, closed firm hands over her arms and hauled her up onto her knees on the mattress. She could have drowned in the pagan glitter of his splintering golden eyes. He brought his mouth plunging down on hers and it was like being pitched into a stormy sea without warning. Excitement shivered and pulsed through her in answer, heat and craving uniting at the thrumming heart of her body until she went limp in his hold, all woman, all invitation.
    ‘I hope that answers that question,’ Sebasten breathed thickly, dark colour accentuating his fabulous cheekbones as he let her sink back from him in sensual disarray.
    Lizzie had a soak in his sunken bath, let the water go cold while she waited for him to join her. Then, ashamed of her own wanton longing, she took advantage of another one of his couple of hundred shirts and climbed into bed. That fiery, demanding kiss had soothed her though and she drifted off to sleep with a dreamy smile on her face…

Chapter Five
    CHAPTER FIVE
    LIZZIE opened her eyes just when morning light was spilling through the bedroom and found Sebasten wide awake and staring down at her.
    She didn’t feel shy or awkward; she just felt happy that he was there. Indeed, so right and natural did it feel that she might have been waking up beside him for absolute years. But then had she been, she might have been just a little more cool at the effect of that all lean, bronzed, hair-roughened masculinity of his poised within inches of her. With a languorous stretch, she gazed up into the dark golden eyes subjecting her to an intense scrutiny and her heart fluttered like a frantic trapped bird inside her.
    ‘Good morning,’ she whispered with her irrepressible smile. ‘You shouldn’t stare. It wakes people up.’
    Three brandies and a cold shower had failed to cool Sebasten’s ravenous arousal and he had never been into celibacy. It was just sex, he reasoned, thought and integrity had nothing to do with it and denying himself was a pointless sacrifice when he had already enjoyed her.
    He threaded caressing fingers through a shining strand of her amber hair and then knotted it round his fist to hold her fast, his stunning eyes semi-screened by his lush black lashes to feverish gold. ‘Lust is