Damiano's Return

Eden stifled a groan of her own. ‘The only woman I couldn’t satisfy was my wife.’ One very revealing statement from a male of Damiano’s sophistication and experience, she reflected in strong dismay.

‘It didn’t matter to me enough…I didn’t understand,’ she muttered in a tone of feverish regret, kissing a damp brown muscular shoulder in belated apology. She loved him so much. She had almost lost him. She was so hugely grateful that he had chosen to come back to her and give their marriage another chance.

‘Past and forgotten,’ Damiano assured her.

Suddenly she had a driving need to ask him if, as his family had insisted, he had considered divorcing her before he’d gone missing. But she hesitated and questioned whether she could handle a confirmation that would devastate her and add to her anxieties in the present. For if Damiano admitted that he had been on the brink of ditching her, wouldn’t she now feel as though she was still on probation? No, some questions were better left unspoken.

Damiano snatched her from such thoughts by tugging her up out of concealment. Lustrous eyes smouldering like topaz in sunlight, he shifted fluidly beneath her, urging her into stirring contact with his renewed arousal. ‘You know when I said that I wasn’t going to fall on you like a sex-starved animal, I was being a wolf in sheep’s clothing…I was lying my head off, tesoro mio,’ Damiano confided thickly. ‘I had been deprived for so long that not ripping off your clothes in the limo the first day was an act of remarkable restraint!’

‘R-really?’ Eden stammered hot-cheeked, helpless excitement gripping her as he crushed her parted lips hungrily under his, sending her senses reeling again with almost terrifying ease.

‘I didn’t want to risk scaring you into a fit… I intended to play a waiting game—’

‘No more waiting,’ she broke in urgently. ‘No need for any games.’

All hot-blooded Italian male at that moment, Damiano surveyed her, patently revelling in the response she could neither conceal nor control and the dark flood of sensual pleasure already taking hold of her as he touched her.

About an hour later, having satiated them both on high-voltage sex, Damiano announced with admirable energy that he was hungry and rang for some food to be brought up.

‘Service just like home…I take it,’ Eden teased, catching the oversized towelling robe he tossed onto the bed for her use.

Damiano frowned. ‘Obviously you didn’t appreciate that kind of service…’

She stiffened at that note of censure. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, come on…’ Damiano said drily. ‘You dump my name, walk out on my family and keep yourself by bloody sewing! You’re a qualified teacher. If you had to work, why didn’t you look for a teaching job more appropriate to your status?’

Eden had gone rigid. Tightening the robe into a waist-strangling knot, she scrambled off the bed, an angry flush mantling her face. ‘You are such a snob!’

‘Like hell I am!’ Damiano launched at her. ‘When you refused Nuncio’s support, you were also rejecting everything that I ever gave you—’

‘Your snobby name?’ Rage had come out of nowhere to engulf Eden. She was so furious, she was shaking. ‘Your ghastly family? What did you give me? A lot of jewellery and a flashy car and loads of credit cards and I was miserable!’

‘Were you really?’ Damiano purred between gritted white teeth.

‘Yes, I was… I only stuck it out because I loved you!’ Eden raged with clenched fists. ‘Once you were gone, I could happily have lived in a hedge and worked as a tramp—’

‘Tramps don’t work,’ Damiano inserted with cool, cutting logic.

‘If I had gone for a teaching job, I would have had to explain who I was and there’s something you don’t understand. I doubt if I would have got the job. People treat you like a leper when your husband has gone missing—’

‘Cut the melodrama,’ Damiano advised witheringly.

‘No, because you don’t know what it was like for me. People haven’t a clue what to say to a woman who was in my situation. They’re also terrified that you’re going to break down and embarrass them…although that type are preferable to the other sort who revel in every gruesome detail of your misery!’ she flung at him. ‘I wanted privacy and the only way I could have it was to set up a small business guaranteed not to attract attention.’

‘So that you could star as the all-singing, all-dancing sewing version of the Little Match Girl?’ Damiano drawled with silken scorn.

‘I’ll have you know that I’m making a darned good living!’ Eden countered furiously. ‘And I’ll happily go back to it any time. Just you say the word!’

In the explosive silence that followed that threat a soft knock sounded on the door. Eden whipped round and stalked out through the French windows spread wide on the balcony outside. With trembling hands, she gripped the worn stone balustrade and stared out into the starry night. The lake far below reflected the pale crescent moon. She breathed in and shivered at the temper which had ripped up through her without warning. It was stress, she finally acknowledged. How could any woman be blissfully happy when she was being blackmailed and living in mortal terror of an exposure that might cost her the man she loved? She had to tell Damiano about Mark and Tina’s affair within the next few days.

‘At the press conference, there were a lot of cracks about how you chose to support yourself in my absence,’ Damiano admitted from behind her.

Recalled from her frantic and fearful thoughts, Eden paled in dismay. ‘The press already know where I was living…about the shop?’

‘Evidently…come and get something to eat.’ Damiano detached her death grip on the balustrade and stepped back again. ‘Listen to me. Snobbery has nothing to do with this issue—’

‘No?’

‘No. What disturbs me is the fact that you so quickly rejected our whole life and everybody and everything connected with me. In my mind those are exactly the things to which I should have held fast in the same position.’

As he made that honest admission, tears of shame at the truth she was refusing to tell him swam in her eyes. Had her position not become untenable with his hostile family, she would have chosen to stay in the town house. She whirled round into his strong arms like a homing pigeon. She drank in the warm, wonderfully familiar scent of him like an addict without hope of reclaim and muttered hoarsely, ‘I’m sorry that you got embarrassed like that at the press conference—’

‘Dio mio, cara… I’m not so sensitive. I have skin like a rhino after Montavia.’ Damiano gazed down at her with sardonic amusement. ‘Nothing short of the news that you had been working the streets to survive would have fazed me!’

Or that she had been blamed for having a torrid affair mere months after he had disappeared? Stifling that enervating thought, Eden let him usher her back indoors.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I REALLY do want to know everything that happened to you in Montavia,’ Eden murmured seriously.

His lean, strong face taut, Damiano studied her where she sat on the edge of a padded lounger by the side of the superb swimming pool. He hauled himself up out of the water with easy strength, wet and bronzed and stark naked. She blushed furiously, struggled to rescue her concentration, but his sheer magnificence challenged her hard.

It was mid-afternoon the next day and after a late and leisurely lunch they had finally dragged themselves out of the bedroom. She ached all over from the wildness of their lovemaking but there had been something even more precious about just being together even though they hadn’t talked about anything in particular. And she knew that Damiano had felt that too for neither one of them had made the slightest effort to go to sleep in spite of their exhaustion.

Snatching up a fleecy towel, Damiano gave her a wry look of comprehension. ‘The kidnapping is a long way back in the past for me, cara.’

‘I’d still like to know…I need to know,’ Eden persisted.

The quiet broken only by the background buzz of the

crickets lingered.