Damiano's Return

Eden folded her arms jerkily, her legs trembling beneath her. ‘No.’

‘Mark…every which way I turned, I came on Mark! You seemed much closer to him that you were to me,’ Damiano delivered grittily, black eyes beginning to take on a stormy glitter of gold, the determinedly level drawl now harshening. ‘Naturally I resented him; naturally I was jealous of him—’

‘J-jealous?’ Eden stammered with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach for that was something, and a very dangerous something, which she had never once suspected.

‘Remarkable that, isn’t it? That I should have been jealous of a weak, unscrupulous little jerk, who was openly out for everything he could get? Do you think Mark would have been such an attentive friend if you had married a poor man? He played you like a violin, Eden. I had to stand back and watch it!’

Every syllable of that contemptuous and humiliatingly accurate assessment of Mark’s character bit deep into Eden’s shrinking flesh. Damiano had seen what she had not. Just a few weeks ago, she would have loyally defended Mark. Now the knowledge that she had allowed Mark to blackmail her weighed her down with a numbing sense of her own inadequacy.

Damiano studied her with hard, biting derision, dark, deep-set eyes frighteningly bleak. ‘When my family turned against you after I went missing, Mark must have seemed like your only refuge. Presumably that’s how you ended up in bed with him,’ he breathed in a chilling assumption that shook her rigid. ‘Did you then tell yourself that you were in love with him?’

Eden was aghast at that question and even more by the reasoning he had employed, explaining to his own apparent satisfaction how she might have succumbed to such an affair. Registering that her efforts to defend herself had so far made no impression whatsoever on Damiano, she exclaimed, ‘I didn’t end up in bed with Mark! I swear I didn’t!’

His lean, powerful face grim, Damiano appraised her with embittered contempt. Swinging on his heel, he strode off, feet crunching on the gravel. The sun beating down on her, Eden stayed where she was, in so much shock she could not immediately react.

Damiano had sent her reeling with revelations of his own. She saw now that she was in much deeper trouble than she could ever have imagined. Damiano had always been jealous of her attachment to Mark! Jealous to the level of having once believed that her fondness for the younger man was threatening their marriage. For a split second she could have screamed her frustration to the skies for Damiano had carefully concealed that jealousy from her. And now circumstances had combined horribly to construct a scenario which Damiano appeared to find disturbingly credible. He was quite prepared to believe that, in the fraught aftermath of his own disappearance, she had turned to Mark for more than the comfort of friendship.

So hot that her dress was now sticking to her damp skin, Eden found her way out of the maze. Now she couldn’t believe she had been so stupid as to allow Damiano to walk away from her. In panic she raced through the beautiful gardens, heart thumping like a crazed drumbeat driving her on. She had to climb two long flights of stone steps to reach the terrace at the rear of the villa. She sped indoors, dizzy from exertion and frantic with fear that Damiano might already have swung back into his limo and departed.

When she found Damiano in the library which he had begun using as an office soon after their arrival, she fell still in the doorway, breasts rising and falling as she struggled just to catch her breath again. Relief filled her to overflowing in those first taut seconds.

His lean, strong-boned features savagely taut, Damiano sent her a dark look of scorching aggression. ‘Get out,’ he said softly, a slight tremor marring his usual even diction.

‘Not until you give me the chance to defend myself.’

Damiano gave a great shout of sardonic laughter. ‘Defend yourself? Who are you trying to kid? Do you think I don’t appreciate what’s been going on around me since I came home? Everybody but me knew that you had had an affair!’

‘But I didn’t have an affair!’ Eden flung back at him wildly.

‘Now I understand why Nuncio did not bring you to Brazil. Now I know why you ditched my name and went into hiding. You were embarrassed and ashamed—’

‘No, I was just fed up with your family and the whole stupid mess I’d landed myself in! I only made one mistake, Damiano. When the press erroneously identified the woman in that photograph as me, I was faced with a very difficult choice,’ Eden insisted in growing desperation as she moved deeper into the room, her whole concentration bent on him. ‘If I spoke up and pointed out that that woman was Tina, I was going to wreck her marriage and she begged me to keep quiet—’

‘Tell me, how long did it take you to come up with this melodramatic tale in which you were the only victim and every member of my family was rotten to the core?’ Damiano slashed back at her in unconcealed disgust.

‘Tina said it was my fault that her affair with Mark was exposed and, in a twisted way, she was right,’ Eden conceded shakily.

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘That there wouldn’t have been a story if that paparazzo photographer hadn’t assumed that that woman kissing Mark was me! And my only claim to fame was being the wife of a well-known banker who had gone missing in a huge shower of publicity. That was what made me a target and that was what made that story of my supposed infidelity worth printing!’

‘I am never going to believe that someone as prim and proper as you used to be agreed to be labelled an adulteress for Tina’s benefit!’ With that seething proclamation of disbelief, Damiano strode past her, long, powerful strides carrying him towards the stairs at a far faster rate than she could emulate.

‘All right, what I did was downright stupid but you should know me better!’ Eden protested as she hurried breathlessly up the stairs in his stormy wake. ‘I thought you were dead. I was trying to cope with my own grief. I really didn’t want to feel responsible for Tina losing Nuncio as well!’

With a ground-out exclamation in Italian, Damiano fell still on the landing, his lean hands clenching into powerful fists. ‘Stop this now! Where is your dignity?’

‘When have I ever lied to you?’ Eden demanded rawly.

She looked up at him. He looked back down at her. The atmosphere was thick with sizzling undertones. She collided with his stunning dark golden eyes and finally saw the tremendous pain he was attempting to hide from her, the savage restraint he was exerting over his emotions.

Eden trembled, tummy churning. She sensed that she had finally said something that penetrated, something he was finally prepared to consider.

The silence hung like a giant weight ready to fall.

Damiano’s black spiky lashes lowered, eyes narrowing to glit

tering pinpoints of ferocious intensity. ‘You have never had cause to lie to me before.’

Eden flinched as if he had struck her, the feverish colour in her cheeks draining away, ‘And you have never trusted me,’ she muttered in a stricken tone of discovery. ‘Evidently you didn’t even trust me when we were first married. What did I ever do to deserve that?’

Dark blood scored the high cheekbones which stood out with such chiselled prominence below Damiano’s bronzed skin. He said nothing.

Eden mounted the remaining stairs until they were level, the shock and hurt in her eyes unconcealed. ‘You hid so much from me five years ago…I had no idea that you resented Mark. I really didn’t understand what I was dealing with until now.’ Her throat aching with unshed tears, Eden turned away. ‘That’s, it, then, isn’t it? Because I don’t have any proof of my innocence to offer you!’

As she headed down the corridor to their bedroom, a lean hand suddenly snapped round her wrist, staying her. Damiano scanned her strained, tear-wet face with savage dark golden eyes. ‘What do you mean, “That’s it”?’

Eden pulled free of him in an equally abrupt movement. Even though she was shaking like a leaf and starting to feel rather dizzy, she thrust up her chin in challenge. ‘Well, what do you think I mean?’

Eyes a scorching, aggressive gold, Damiano growled, ‘No way are you leaving me!’

Thoroughly confused by that assurance when she had assumed he was set on walking out and leaving her, Eden blinked. ‘B-but—’

‘You tell me the truth and I’ll attempt to put this matter behind us.’ Damiano gritted out each word of that promise as if it physically hurt.

Eden was so taken aback she simply gaped at him.

‘The truth,’ Damiano emphasised.

‘But you won’t believe me.’