Damiano's Return

Eden almost knocked her cup and saucer over as she made a sudden lunge at her bag to dig out her diary. Another wave of that irritating dizziness washed over her, forcing her to lift her head again and breathe in deep before she felt able to check dates in her diary. She thought about the light-headed sensations which had been annoying her for almost a week and discovered that her period was a few days late. Her cycle was normally regular.

A beatific glow slowly enveloped Eden. She might be pregnant right now, she thought in shock; right this very minute, she might be pregnant! And how would Damiano feel about that? Well, the guy who had said he was tough would just have to be tough. What she really needed was confirmation one way or the other from a doctor and she wasted no time in reaching for the phone.

After Damiano had gone missing, Eden had just about broken her heart over that reality that there had not been the slightest chance of her being pregnant. Although she had chosen to stop taking the contraceptive pill, Damiano had not shared her bed again in those final weeks. She had believed then that in her situation a child would have been an enormous comfort.

As soon as she had had lunch, Eden was driven back to London to keep an immediate appointment with the Harley Street medical practitioner whom the Braganzi family patronised. She prayed while the pregnancy test was being done. Twenty minutes later, she settled back into the limo shaken, smug and over the moon.

Indeed, Eden did not begin descending to planet earth again until she went to bed that night in solitary state at Greyscott Hall. With increasing anxiety, she was by then wondering how Damiano would react to the news that she was carrying his child. The insane desire to rush straight to the phone and tell him in the hope of bringing him home had receded fast. Five years ago, admitting to Damiano that she wanted a baby had gone down like a lead balloon. And how could Damiano possibly want her to have his baby now when they were estranged?

Everything always seemed to condense down to one humiliating fact: Damiano did not love her. If he had ever loved her, he would have told her. She had never forgotten Annabel Stavely, egged on by Cosetta, showing off her necklace etched with a loving inscription from Damiano. Even so, back then, she had often wondered what Damiano had found to love in Annabel. The redhead’s undeniable physical perfection? Her endless joy in shopping? Her enthusiastic description of each designer garment purchased? Her apparent inability to utter a single intelligent sentence? While prepared to admit that she had scarcely been an unprejudiced judge, Eden had been stumped.

At noon the next day, having entertained herself with a trip to the nearest design and interiors shop and returned with a couple of wallpaper books, Eden was down on her knees in the nursery. To cheer herself up, she was comparing the merits of fluffy bunny rabbits on a border as opposed to dancing teddy bears, and when she heard footsteps behind her she simply assumed it was the housekeeper.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘Love those drunk-looking teddy bears…’ Damiano breathed without warning above her head. ‘But why are the rabbits jumping over gates like sheep?’

Eden froze.

‘Artistic licence, I expect,’ Damiano answered for himself, his dark, deep drawl so constrained it screamed his tension louder than any tannoy. ‘Not very sophisticated but certainly novel.’

CHAPTER NINE

IN DISCOMFITED haste, Eden flipped shut both the wallpaper books. ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ she admitted before she could think better of it.

‘Do I need to make an appointment now?’ Damiano enquired tautly.

‘Of course not.’ Eden did not notice the hand he extended to help her up off her knees. She was flustered and waiting for him to ask why she had been studying nursery wallpapers. She smoothed down her fitted short-sleeved apricot blouse and the toning cotton skirt she wore with nervous hands. ‘When did you arrive?’

Damiano flashed her a narrowed glance from spectacular dark, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones taut. ‘Almost an hour ago. I expected to stumble upon you faster.’

He had been in no hurry to find her, Eden translated, heart sinking at that amount of reluctance after a separation which had lasted three days. Not that three days was that long a space of time, she tried to tell herself. She focused on him with helpless intensity, greedily absorbing every detail of his appearance. The sophisticated pale grey suit cut to enhance every hard line of his wide shoulders, narrow hips and long, powerful thighs. The black silk luxuriance of hair, the strong masculine profile, the authority and intrinsic sensuality of a breathtakingly attractive and powerful male.

‘To be frank, I was thinking…thinking in depth,’ Damiano extended flatly, snapping her out of the abstracted thoughts that were already beginning to make her face burn. ‘Trying to work out what to say to you and, I’m afraid, not getting anywhere fast.’

That honest admission struck Eden with force and filled her with fear. Nobody with any finer feeling found it easy to find the right words with which to break news that would hurt. ‘Let’s go downstairs,’ she urged, swiftly stepping past him.

No, he wasn’t the type to bring in the lawyers without telling her first face to face that he wanted a divorce. There was nothing cowardly about Damiano and nothing underhand. His cool reserve might once have defied her comprehension but he had returned to her, considerably more willing to express what he felt and what he thought. Her fingers fluttered across her tummy in a fleeting protective gesture that she hurriedly cut short. Telling Damiano that she was expecting their first child promised to be a most humiliating challenge. From his point of view, that could hardly be good news, but she had no doubt that he would politely strive to hide that reality for her sake. Her throat thickened with tears.

Damiano followed Eden into the sitting room. Eden left him again to order coffee but she was ashamed of that weak prompting to play for time. The arrival of coffee was hardly likely to deflect Damiano from his purpose.

When she reappeared, Damiano was lodged by the stone fireplace. The angles of his lean, strong face were tense. ‘It’s ironic to think that this is really our first home. I don’t think the town house counts.’

Eden was at the stage of reading threatening vibrations into everything that now passed his lips. She was convinced that the irony he saw in his purchase of Greyscott Hall as their first supposed home was that he now knew he would never share it with her. ‘No, I suppose it doesn’t,’ she agreed tightly. ‘Are you planning to sell the Villa Pavone?’

Dark golden eyes veiled, Damiano shot her a sudden frowning glance. ‘That idea hadn’t occurred to me. But I believe that the villa should be opened to the public for some part of the year in honour of my grandmother’s work.’

A light knock on the door heralded the arrival of coffee. Eden busied herself over the cups but her hands were all fingers and thumbs and she had to do everything very slowly. The atmosphere was so full of charged undertones that her tummy was in knots and her palms damp.

‘Grazie…’ Damiano breathed flatly, retreating back to the fireplace with his cup and saucer as if there were a dividing line down the centre of the room and he could only briefly visit the zone designated as hers. ‘Do you like the house?’

‘It’s really beautiful. I was delighted with the sewing room too. That was a lovely idea,’ Eden completed in a voice that just trailed away on the reflection that that reminder of his warmer intentions towards her might now be unwelcome.

Across the room, a shaft of sunlight playing over his dark, well-shaped head, Damiano stared down fixedly into his black coffee.

Eden feasted her attention on him, noting the taut line of his beautifully shaped mouth, and then watched his cup rattle on the saucer for a split second before she realised that he couldn’t hold his hand quite steady. Almost as quickly, Damiano set his coffee down with a low-pitched exclamation in Italian.

Strained dark eyes claimed hers before she could evade that contact. ‘I very much regret what happened in Italy—’

Eden went r

igid, registering that the main issue could no longer be avoided. ‘Fine, absolutely fine,’ she slotted in with a mindless desire to stop him speaking before he could say anything that might hurt her.

The silence smouldered.

‘No, it wasn’t fine,’ Damiano contradicted. ‘I should never have reacted as I did. I owe you an explanation.’

Eden tore her pained gaze from his. She rose from her seat because sitting still had suddenly become impossible for her and she walked over to the windows. She did not want any long-winded explanations. She knew how he felt; she wasn’t stupid. He had been willing to give their marriage another chance but the belief that she had had an affair had blown that ambition out of the water.

‘When I saw that newspaper cutting, I was confronted by my biggest fear,’ Damiano admitted in a driven undertone. ‘And I am very conscious that I did not shine like a star in dealing with it.’

‘But I understood how you felt,’ Eden conceded heavily.

That tabloid story furnished with a convincing photograph and backed by her own suspicious silence on the subject would not have impressed any man with a belief in her innocence.

‘I doubt it…’