by Abby Green
‘Wine?’
Sebastian looked wildly at Daniel for a moment, acutely aware of Aneesa sitting down beside him, her scent on the air. He finally got out a strangled, ‘Yes, red, please.’ And managed to sit down again too.
Aneesa smiled widely at Daniel, hoping that her inner turmoil wasn’t evident on her face. ‘No wine for me, thanks. I’ll just have water.’
And then they were alone. Aneesa looked anywhere but at Sebastian, and the tension mounted, until suddenly, to her utter horror and chagrin, she heard herself say with an edge to her voice, ‘I hope I’m not keeping you from any commitments tonight?’
Sebastian was to her left at the head of the table, one leg touched off hers, making her blush and move her own away from the contact.
‘No.’ He drawled, ‘No … commitments. I’m all yours.’
She looked at him abruptly—was he flirting with her? But even as her heart started to thump perilously, she saw that he looked far from flirtatious, more coolly stern. She let out a breath and struggled for equilibrium. ‘That’s good. I’d hate for you to feel like you had to entertain me.’
Sebastian had to curb his impulse to tell her exactly what he did want and at that moment Daniel returned with drinks. The thought that she might possibly be concerned about him seeing other people sent a rush of something far too disturbing to analyse through him. And when she was so close like this, it was hard to try and recall why he shouldn’t be wanting her.
Aneesa was relieved to have something else to focus on and concentrated on her starter and main course as if it was the most interesting thing she’d ever encountered. Right at that moment she couldn’t see herself sticking it out living in Sebastian’s apartment for longer than another day, never mind a couple of months.
‘So, how did you end up in Bollywood movies?’
His question took her aback and she looked at him to see that he was relaxed in his chair, watching her. Suddenly her appetite fled and she put down her knife and fork.
She took a sip of water, mouth instantly dry. She’d answered this question a million times, what was wrong with her? She just hated that she’d been so duped by such a shallow world for so long….
‘I was in a shopping mall with school friends when I was seventeen. We were in our final year and a scout from a model agency spotted me.’ She shrugged, feeling embarrassed. ‘The next thing I knew, I was being entered for Miss India and I won … and after that the movie offers came flooding in.’
Sebastian’s eyes were narrowed on her. ‘You sound like you regret it.’
She shrugged again, avoiding his eye, fingers pleating the heavy linen napkin. ‘I was young and spoilt. I got seduced very easily into a world that’s very false.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘Unfortunately for a long time I believed everything people were saying to me, believed in a myth …’
‘Believed that your fiancé loved you.’
Aneesa sucked in a breath and looked up into Sebastian’s glittering blue gaze. He sounded so … sympathetic. She nodded. ‘Yes, that too. But it was my own fault. If I hadn’t become so blinded and self-absorbed I would have spotted him a mile away.’
Sebastian grimaced. ‘If only it were that easy. Hindsight is a great thing.’
Aneesa half smiled and saw Sebastian’s gaze drop to her mouth, making it tingle. She blushed again.
His gaze lifted. ‘So … do you regret it? Do you miss it?’
Aneesa half shrugged and shook her head at the same time. ‘I regret my own immaturity, but no, I don’t miss it, and that’s been a surprise. I’ve realised that it wasn’t really me after all.’
She quirked a smile. ‘Before I got so entranced by my own reflection I actually wanted to study medicine and had all the grade A’s to back it up.’ Her smile faded. ‘And yet my parents stood by me and let me change course. And I repaid them by humiliating them in public in front of everyone they know.’
To her surprise Sebastian leaned forward and took the hand that was compulsively pleating the napkin. His hand was warm on hers, making tingles shoot up her arm, to her breasts where she could feel her nipples stiffen into points.
‘You can’t beat yourself up forever. You said yourself that you’ve paid them back.’
She was more than moved by the glimpse of the man she’d met that first night and terrified that he would see something of her reaction. She pulled her hand free. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’
She didn’t see the way his jaw clenched. And to her utter relief Daniel came in at that moment and brought tea and coffee, and cleared away the dinner plates. Sebastian served them both and then indicated that they should take their drinks into the living room.
Aneesa curled up on a big chair far from the couch where Sebastian was once again sprawled out, his long powerful body attracting her eyes more than she could resist. He’d flicked a remote and the low soothing tones of jazz flooded the room from discreet speakers. To try and distract herself from the seductive music she asked, ‘So what about you? How did you end up in the hotel business?’
He cast her a glance, clearly reluctant to divulge anything. Aneesa was just regarding him steadily.
Sebastian felt a constriction in his chest. He always did, whenever anyone wanted to probe into his life, and yet … he’d just asked Aneesa about her life and was still reeling slightly from the depths she’d hidden from him, and the world.
He ran a hand through his short hair, the gesture unconscious. ‘I remember being taken to a hotel with my brothers and sister for one of our birthdays when I was much smaller. It was one of the best hotels in London and I’d never seen anything like it.’
He wasn’t about to reveal to Aneesa how it had made an impact on him because it had been so ordered and sleek. A world away from their chaotic home life in rambling Wolfe Manor, which had been too huge to instil any kind of order. He also wasn’t going to reveal how his father had got blind drunk and the staff had discreetly whisked him away to a suite until he’d slept the excess off. And how that was the first time Sebastian had ever seen anyone make his father and his embarrassing behaviour disappear.
On some level since then, he’d wanted to have that control, and as he’d grown older, he’d wanted to own that control. Ironically he’d never felt in less control right now.
Instead he just said to Aneesa, ‘I went to college and studied business and economics. Once I inherited my share of my father’s money, I invested it in a hotel in London which was just a shell of a dilapidated Georgian building. It’s right beside an old church, so I saw the potential for it becoming a wedding venue as well as being a perfect base for a hotel. I had an excellent architectural design team, and once that one had taken off, the rest followed all around the world.’
‘You must have been so young—that’s an incredible achievement.’
He looked at Aneesa and was blinded momentarily by the chocolate brown of her huge eyes, and the way she was backlit by the inky starry London sky. He cursed himself. What was wrong with him? He hated the pride that suffused him even as he clamped down on it.
The truth was, that for all of his success he’d long ago dismissed compliments as they invariably came with strings attached. But Aneesa had sounded utterly genuine. He came from a family of high achievers and had never felt that his had been any more than anyone else.
He looked away. ‘I was young, yes, but no younger than you when you became a success.’
Aneesa felt the sting of his tone. He hated talking about himself and his innate modesty made something inside her feel weak, when she was used to dealing with huge egos.
‘You have a lot of brothers and … one sister?’
He glanced at her and again she had the distinct impression that he was only answering on sufferance and at any moment he’d clam up and tell her to mind her own business.
‘I have five half-brothers and one full brother, Nathaniel, the actor.’ Something indecipherable flashed in his eyes before he said, ‘And yes, I’ve one sister, Annabelle.
She’s a photographer.’
‘Do you see them much?’
He looked at her properly now with a clear warning in his eyes and answered tightly, ‘We’re all in different places and see less of one another now, but if we’re in the same city we endeavour to try and meet up.’
‘Your father …?’
At that Sebastian rose to his feet with a fluid move. Tension crackling off his form. ‘If you don’t mind I have a couple of things to attend to in my study. I’ll say goodnight.’
Aneesa nodded faintly and said goodnight, watching as he strode out of the room. And I’ll ask you not to poke your nose into my private life again was all he hadn’t said.
Aneesa put down her cup of tea and curled back into the chair. Sebastian was more of an enigma than ever. The fact that she was carrying his child clearly didn’t give her access into his family history. And why was he so guarded about it? All she’d been able to glean from the tiny bit of research she’d done was that there had been some scandal, and that his father was dead … and no matter that he said he saw his siblings, evidently they weren’t all that close.
Aneesa forced her mind away from the torrent of questions and waited until she knew Sebastian was likely to be well ensconced in his study before she went to bed.
A couple of nights later Aneesa couldn’t sleep and sat watching the gloriously beautiful inky skyline of London from her bedroom window. The questions reverberating in her head were no less now than they had been. But Sebastian couldn’t have made it clearer that she’d strayed too far off the path. They’d shared meals, but he’d skilfully diverted all questions away from himself and focused solely on her. He was as stubborn as a mule.
And through it all, making Aneesa go slightly crazy, was the ever-ratcheting sexual tension she felt, when she had no indication from Sebastian that he felt the same.
She caught looks every now and then but he’d look away and she’d feel like she’d imagined them. That she was fantasising. And, she assured herself now, she was. Sebastian was putting up with her, that was all. They’d had one night, and that was it. The only reason they were together now was because of the consequences of that night.
She sighed deeply and had to acknowledge that, despite everything, she’d settled into Sebastian’s somewhat ascetic apartment. She’d noticed his patterns of sleeplessness over the weekend, hearing him get up and move around or go out only to return an hour later, because invariably she was awake too, her body too hot to sleep. Hot with the changes due to the pregnancy and hot because she couldn’t seem to stop having lurid X-rated dreams about him.
And she’d also noticed his punishing regime of exercising. If he wasn’t out jogging he was down in the private gym either swimming length after length or punching a boxing bag.
She remembered that he’d been in the pool that night she’d burst into his suite in Mumbai. She longed to ask him why he insisted on such a regime but knew he wouldn’t welcome her curiosity.
Despite mentioning his extensive family, he had no pictures of them dotted around the apartment. Aneesa thought nostalgically of her own chaotic family home in Mumbai where you couldn’t move for knocking down a slew of pictures of her huge extended family.
If it hadn’t been for Daniel, who lived in the apartment directly below Sebastian’s, she would have felt very lonely. Aneesa had shown Sebastian her book on pregnancy and asked him if he wanted to read it, and when she’d seen the way he’d paled she’d hurriedly taken it back. She knew the baby hadn’t been planned and that this was hardly a conventional situation but he seemed to react in such a viscerally negative way that she longed to know more about why that was. Even though she knew he was hardly likely to tell her.
Daniel had long gone home and Aneesa was in bed as Sebastian sat in a chair in his study and looked out at the glittering view of night-time London, with its millions of lives and stories unfolding.
The past few days had been torture for him. The reality of having Aneesa in his apartment—asking questions, under his feet, around every corner, her scent lingering in the air, listening to her husky laugh while talking to Daniel—was enough for him to think he was going demented. Her barrage of questions the other night had made him feel like a cornered animal. She’d pushed so many buttons at once that it had taken all his restraint just to get up and leave her.
And yet, curiously, he felt no compunction to see the back of her, which was a contradiction that did not sit well with him. As if by osmosis things had already started to appear—a bunch of flowers in a vase in the hall which Daniel had defensively declared had been for Aneesa, to brighten the place up; a cashmere scarf thrown casually over the couch in the living area; a pair of sneakers by the main door that looked tiny enough to belong to a child which had precipitated the memory of that night, when he had removed her wedding shoes and kissed her hennaed feet … and there was still her scent, everywhere her scent.
The thought of taking another lover while she was here now was … impossible. As impossible as it probably would have been even without her presence. She filled his every waking and sleepless moment. She was all he saw when he swam length after length, or as sweat dripped into his eyes when he punched out all of his nameless aggression; and curiously for the first time the aggression was harder to pull up. He found the punch bag annoyingly ineffectual now. And he’d craved it all weekend.
And the baby—all the talk of doctors and arrangements about this tiny being who was still being formed had made him feel disconnected. Whenever Sebastian tried to think about it, he felt a leaden weight inside him, like he just couldn’t connect with the reality. He envied Aneesa’s clear bond; he saw the way her hand would unconsciously go to her belly and her face would soften, her eyes glowing with some secret light.
But the truth was, becoming a father terrified the living daylights out of him. There was so much to fear; that he would become as cruel and mercurial as his father had been. As irrational as it was, he had a visceral feeling that perhaps this could be passed down in the genes. And, how could he know that once Aneesa had the baby she wouldn’t succumb to depression like his own mother had? It had been exacerbated to the point that eventually his mother had ended up in full-time care when he and his brother had still been tiny. The effect of that had been devastating, and was still felt today.
He didn’t want to be responsible for creating an awful legacy like his parents had, and had nothing to go on in terms of seeing how his siblings might handle it, as none of them had had children yet.
Sebastian had known very few moments of stability in his life, so to try and contemplate it now was … impossible. And in truth he didn’t want to contemplate it because the memories it brought up were too painful. He’d already begun having those dreams again and knew it was the prospect of the baby that had sparked them … because he was terrified that any child of his would endure what he had endured.
But eclipsing all that was the raging burning desire for Aneesa. Every bone in his body ached for her—for her touch, her scent. To have her surround him like she had that night, with such sweet openness, such innate sensuality. He sought it now on an instinctive level almost as if he knew that she might have the power to calm the demons in his head. Even while she was the cause of some of them.
He’d told himself she was danger with a capital D, and that, she undoubtedly was. He’d had to struggle to maintain control of his animal impulses around her, and to rebuff her natural gregariousness and desire to know everything about everything, and everything about him.
At that moment, something inside him broke, some control he’d been clinging onto. She was here, in his life, pregnant with his child, and she wasn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future, and he needed release because he would explode if he tried to keep this wall up any longer….
With a rising sense of urgency and resolve firing his blood he stood and went straight to Aneesa’s room. When he opened the door he saw that the bed was empty and immediately felt an uncomfo
rtable lurch in his chest, but then he registered a movement near the window and saw her there, sitting on the wide window seat, legs tucked up under her chin, looking out at the view exactly as he had just been.
Except now she was looking at him and he could see those huge eyes widen. She wore a long T-shirt and her legs were bare and his body hardened in an instant. He walked over to her and she swung her legs down and stood.
‘Sebastian? Was there something you wanted?’ Her voice was husky and reached down inside him where he couldn’t escape from this desire anymore.
He came right up to her and pulled her into his arms and already he could feel his mind settle, even as his heart thundered and his body ached. ‘You, Aneesa … I want you.’
Aneesa barely had time to register what was happening before she felt Sebastian’s mouth settle over hers and she groaned in supplication. He’d walked right out of her fantasy and into her room and for a second she’d thought she was dreaming. But it wasn’t a dream when she could feel his tall lean length against hers, and his arms were wrapped around her so tight she could barely breathe. The sizzling, simmering tension she’d felt hadn’t been one-sided—the relief made her feel faint.
With impatient hands he tugged at her T-shirt until she had to lift her arms and let him pull it off. He stood back for a moment, his eyes raking over her almost feverishly, and Aneesa felt a dart of trepidation at the heated fervour in his eyes, almost as if he’d consume her with just a look.
He started to take off his own clothes, practically ripping his shirt, yanking down his trousers, until he stood before her, naked. Not another word had been exchanged; they were both breathing heavily, desire saturating the air between them. The world could have stopped outside and they wouldn’t have noticed, both greedily taking in the other’s body as if relearning it.