Damiano's Return

Eden was appalled to appreciate that she had forgotten that that news would greet Damiano on his return. Old news to everybody else but not to him. When Damiano had gone missing, his grandmother had been devastated. Stress had undoubtedly contributed to the heart attack which had killed her and Damiano had to know that, Eden conceded painfully, for Damiano was no fool.

‘I gather Nonna was in the midst of yet another grand restoration project at the time.’ Repressed emotion roughened Damiano’s vowel sounds and she swallowed hard on the thickness in her own throat. ‘In her will, she specified that the Villa Pavone should be completed and maintained until I had been legally presumed dead. Since that fact is not generally known, I hope this Tuscan palazzo will supply us with a peaceful bolt-hole free from the attentions of the paparazzi.’

Finally daring to accept that Damiano intended them to stay together in the immediate future at least, Eden slowly released her pent-up breath, her worst fear now banished.

Damiano curved long, sure fingers below her chin and turned up her face, dark, deep-set eyes demanding that she stop evading his gaze. ‘I shouldn’t have pitched that stuff at you in the bedroom,’ he asserted with cool clarity. ‘You believed I was never coming back. You thought I was dead. I haven’t got the right to interrogate you about the past five years. Rationally, I know that. But for a few minutes, waking up as I did, I over-reacted—’

‘But I went on feeling married… I went on thinking about you even though you weren’t there,’ Eden protested with urgent tautness.

‘Sì…I checked the dust pattern below the photograph of me by the bed,’ Damiano said with a wry self-mockery that just tore at her heart. ‘I know you didn’t just drag it out of the closet for show today.’

Tears lashed the back of her eyes as she thought of him checking in such a way. ‘You mentioned Mark,’ she reminded him tremulously, dropping her head again, still metaphorically waiting for the axe to fall.

‘I’m afraid I never did warm to your childhood playmate.’ Damiano shrugged as if to stress how trivial he considered that former response on his own part. Yet Eden was surprised for she had never realised that he disliked the younger man. Indeed, at her request, more than five years earlier, Damiano had hired the younger man to help manage the Braganzi country estate outside Oxford. However, by the time a tabloid photographer had taken a covert picture of Mark passionately embracing a small slim blonde woman, Mark had actually been working out his notice for the Braganzi family. The estate had been joint-owned by the brothers. Nuncio, challenged by the prospect of maintaining the same high-rolling lifestyle without Damiano’s assistance, had sold it.

But Damiano definitely didn’t know about her supposed affair with Mark, Eden registered with heady relief. He couldn’t know and still refer to Mark in that dismissive tone of disinterest. Furthermore, Damiano was taking her to Italy with him. This was not the time to start making awkward confessions and explanations, was it? Most particularly when she herself was innocent of any wrongdoing. Why dredge up all that nonsense now? Of course, she would raise the thorny subject some time with him, but at that moment all Eden wanted to concentrate on was holding onto her long-lost husband by any means within her power.

‘Damiano…there hasn’t been anybody else—’

‘I don’t need you to say that just for the sake of it. I’m not asking.’ His sculpted cheekbones might have been carved from bronze as he made that assurance.

‘But I’m telling you all the same.’ Eden gazed up at him with clear eyes. ‘Just for the record, there hasn’t been.’

Damiano studied her with glittering intensity. ‘If that’s true, what was that astonishing seduction scene all about?’

Finally Eden grasped why he doubted her plea of innocence. Hot pink flooded her complexion. Her own unusually bold behaviour in the bedroom had roused his suspicions and brought on the very accusations which she had most feared!

‘I know I made a mess of it,’ she muttered in mortified discomfiture, studying the carpet, ‘but I just wanted to…I just wanted to do something you would like for a change—’

‘Something I would like,’ Damiano repeated in a roughened undertone that sent a current of alarm down her spine. ‘Like a sort of big reward for me coming home alive—’

Eden paled. ‘It wasn’t like that—’

‘You had to jump off the teetotal wagon to do it too,’ Damiano continued grittily as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘A sexual invitation in broad daylight, no less—’

The tension in the atmosphere gave her a panicky sensation in her tummy and once again she tried to intercede. ‘Damiano—’

‘I think I need to make one thing clear before we go to Italy,’ Damiano murmured with a chilling bite that took her back five long years. ‘I don’t want you doing anything solely to please me.’

‘Sorry…?’

Damiano studied her bewildered face with grim intensity. ‘Do you think I want you pandering to me like some harem slave trying to gratify her owner?’ he demanded with icy distaste. ‘Do you really think I’m that desperate?’

‘I was just trying to show you how much you meant to me,’ Eden framed with desperate dignity, hurriedly turning away from him before she broke down. Like some harem slave? She cringed at that label.

His long, lean, powerful body tensing in receipt of that patently sincere response, Damiano expelled his breath in an abrupt hiss. ‘I’m sorry—’

‘No, I’m sorry that I’m still such a big let-down—’

From behind her, Damiano closed his arms around her but Eden was rigid with the pain she was holding in. ‘That’s not true, cara—’

‘Yes, it is…you didn’t want me,’ she pointed out chokily.

‘

Per amor di Dio! Is that what you think?’ Damiano groaned above her head, his strong arms wound round her tightly. ‘What do you think kept me going in that bloody hell-hole of a prison? Inspiring recollections of making deals at the bank?’ His dark, deep drawl dismissed that idea with incredulous scorn. ‘It was the thought of you…and the prayer that you would still be waiting for me when I got out of there!’

In astonishment, Eden stiffened, afraid to believe and then desperately wanting to believe what he was telling her. Tears of joy and relief shone in her eyes. ‘Then wh-why—?’

‘Am I ranting and raving at you?’ Damiano filled in jaggedly and, unusually, he hesitated before continuing. ‘I think possibly lack of sleep and feeling very claustrophobic in these surroundings.’

Claustrophobic? Eden was suddenly aghast at her own stupidity. When he had mentioned needing space around him, she had totally misunderstood. It was indeed a very small flat, the sitting room the only area where two people could move without one continually standing back to let the other pass. And why on earth had she woken Damiano up when he was so exhausted? What strange madness had possessed her?

‘You go back to bed,’ she urged protectively and she tugged free of his arms with regretful determination. ‘If we’re being picked up at seven, I have a lot of things to take care of—’

‘Sì…’ Damiano sank down on the bed with lithe grace. ‘I suppose you’ll need to inform the school that you’re resigning—’

‘The school?’

‘Wherever you’re teaching now.’ Long lashes lowered over his eyes as he settled back against the pillows and slowly stretched. Still clad in his jeans, he was a devastatingly attractive vision of relaxed masculinity. So powerful was her own response to that awareness that she looked away from him in embarrassment. ‘I’m sure you don’t like leaving your pupils in the lurch but my need for you is greater, cara.’