Damiano's Return

Now in intimate contact with his lean, muscular physique, Eden was in no doubt of the truth of that claim, but she was taken aback. ‘But you—’

‘I’m not so sensitive,’ Damiano growled. ‘And you can’t afford to be.’

Flung into disarray by that uncompromising approach, Eden quivered against him, the heat and hunger of him striking her at every treacherous pulse-point.

‘Damiano—?’

‘You want me too. The love might be fake but the sex is real,’ Damiano spelt out raggedly. ‘And I’m quite happy to settle for a great time in bed right now.’

Those words hurt her so much but she was painfully aware that he was hurting too and she blamed herself entirely for that. But so strained and unhappy did she feel that she genuinely believed she would not be able to respond. And then Damiano crushed her mouth under his with demanding hunger. It was a considerable shock for Eden to find herself not only responding but clinging with a kind of desperate fervour way beyond anything she had expected to feel.

‘You’re my wife…’ Damiano spelt out, releasing her swollen lips and then delving them apart with the invasive eroticism of his tongue before she could reply.

He sent such a jolt of sensual excitement leaping through her, she gasped beneath that onslaught. And so it went on. The stroke of his hand across her breast followed by the urgency of his mouth on the aching peak, arching her spine off the bed, making her cry out. By the time he discovered the moist readiness at the heart of her, she was way beyond control, possessed by a frantic intensity of need and excitement combined.

And then, without any warning at all, Damiano was suddenly thrusting her back from him, gritting out something savage in Italian. A split second later, Eden was sitting up in shock. In the shadowy path of the moonlight filtering into the room, she watched Damiano vault off the bed and stride into the bathroom. With an unsteady hand, she switched on the lights. She listened to the power shower he had had installed running at full force.

Shattered by his last-minute rejection of her, she got up, pulled on a light robe and sank down in the chair he had vacated earlier. Her body ached and she hated it for aching for she knew that what had just transpired was infinitely more important than any transitory pleasure. He had intended to make love to her. His body had been as eager as her own. But at the very last minute some mental barrier had triumphed and he had drawn back.

Damiano reappeared, a towel knotted round lean hips. ‘I’m sorry,’ he breathed starkly. ‘I thought I could be cool about it…but I can’t be. I can’t make love to you with this much anger in me. I might have hurt you.’

He said all that without looking at her once as if the very sight of her was suddenly an offence to him. His bronzed profile fiercely taut, he went through to the connecting dressing room where she heard him slamming through units and drawers and then talking on the phone in Italian. She just sat there white-faced and sick inside. Damiano might as well have hung out a placard printed with the words. ‘The end’. It was eleven at night. He had got out of bed, he was getting dressed.

She stood up, walked over to the open door and eavesdropped as he spoke tersely on the phone. Then she went into retreat again because she knew she was out of her depth and currently at a stand. She had told the truth and he could not accept it. He had contrived, however, to put on the act of the century. He had kept his rage under wraps. He was, she registered on a flood of desperate love, in infinitely more turmoil than she was.

He emerged from the dressing room, sheathed in a formal dark suit, hard, dark face as remote as the Andes. ‘I’m going back to London—’

‘Let me come with you…please.’

‘I need some time,’ Damiano breathed harshly, lifting a lean hand that wasn’t quite steady in an expressive motion that he did not complete. ‘You don’t want to be around me right now. I need to be on my own.’

‘Like Greta Garbo…’ she muttered helplessly.

‘Accidenti! You think I’m running away from this?’ Damiano roared at her, his control splintering into black fury right in front of her. She fell back a step in sheer fright. ‘I’m leaving for your sake. If I stay, I will very probably destroy what we have and I don’t want to do that, so give me some space.’

Dully she nodded and turned her pained eyes away. ‘I love you—’

‘It doesn’t feel like it,’ Damiano ground out, his accent very thick.

The most dreadful silence set in.

‘I’ve bought another country house in England…it was supposed to be a surprise,’ Damiano admitted bleakly. ‘You can go there as soon as you like. I’ll make the arrangements.’

‘You’re going back to the town house to live,’ she assumed, feeling as if she had been kicked. It was a separation, whatever he chose to call it.

‘No. The bank has an apartment I can use.’

Long after Damiano had gone, Eden sat on in the empty bedroom. She felt gutted. Was this the end of the transition period that she had been warned about? Stop avoiding the real issue here, her conscience urged her. Almost five years ago, she had created the current situation by being weak, sentimental and foolish. Damiano had come through hell to come home. No matter what the risk, it would have been wiser to tell him the whole story immediately. Secrecy and evasion did not instil trust. She, who had once prided herself on her honesty and her scruples, was ashamed of her own behaviour in retrospect. In his position, she too would have been angry, bitter and suspicious.

Forty-eight hours after Damiano’s departure, Eden flew back to London and was driven out to Greyscott Hall.

It was a charming Elizabethan manor house set in wooded parkland. Damiano had phoned her twice since his return to London but the smooth impersonality of those dialogues had done little to raise her spirits. Indeed as she walked into the beautiful hall scented with the sweet perfume of a gorgeous arrangement of roses she was anxiously thinking that Damiano had cunningly contrived to rehouse her. Should he decide not to return to their marriage, he would not have the inconvenience of either moving himself or asking her to move.

‘The instant I saw the video tape the agent sent, I knew you’d fall in love with Greyscott,’ Damiano had informed her expressionlessly on the phone. ‘It’s full of character. It’s big but it’s not pretentious. It has a homely aspect.’

To Eden’s knowledge, no Braganzi, raised from birth to consider magnificence their natural milieu, had ever aspired to live in any building which might be described by that word, ‘homely.’ Was it any wonder that she should feel nervous when Damiano had emphasised that Greyscott Hall was to be the home of her dreams?

The housekeeper took Eden on a guided tour. Even in the troubled mood she was in, Eden was entranced by her surroundings. Knole sofas covered with tapestry and a delightful window-seat adorned the sunlit room which overlooked the rose garden. Damiano had bought some of the contents of the house. He had also hired a design company to furnish the empty spaces in the main reception rooms and the master bedroom, so that the hall was ready for immediate occupation. So far, Eden had not been able to tell what was original and what was not and she was impressed by the care that had been taken. That timeless air of welcoming warmth and ever so slightly faded charm which was the hallmark of an old country house had been maintained.

‘I believe you’re a keen needlewoman,’ the housekeeper remarked with a warm smile, spreading wide the door on a wonderful sewing room kitted out with every possible aid for such a purpose.

‘Yes, I am.’ But tears of disconcertion pricked Eden’s eyes as she studied the array of equipment which included an elegant antique tapestry frame. Obviously Damiano remembered her stitching away all those years ago in the drawing room at the town house. In those days, she had used sewing as a distraction. With her hands busy and her head bent, it had been easier to ignore the snide comments and scornful looks which had come her way when Damiano had not been present.

Eden walked over to the window and kept her eyes very wide until she had herself under control again. The male who had gone to so much trouble on her behalf had really thought about what would make her happy. It was ironic that the evidence of Damiano’s desire to surprise and please her should now inspire only a distressed awareness of what she had so recently lost. Everything at Greyscott Hall had been planned and executed before Damiano had received that newspaper cutting.

Would she ever see Damiano again? She could not prove that s

he had remained faithful to their marriage. Nor in the circumstances did she feel that she could fault his distrust. As she wandered round the upper floor of her new home, it seemed perfectly credible to her that Damiano might not physically meet with her again. It would be so much easier for him to write their marriage off and call in the lawyers. After all, he had managed to live without her for a very long time. Surely he would remind himself of that unfortunate reality?

How much had those ecstatically happy weeks at the Villa Pavone actually meant to Damiano? Wasn’t she inclined to place far too much importance on what they had shared? In fact, wasn’t she guilty of being hopelessly naive? Damiano had spent four and a half years in prison. Then he had flown to Italy to embark on sun-filled weeks of sexual intimacy with a very willing and available partner and all the freedom, relaxation and comfort he could handle. Just about any man, fresh from a similar ordeal, would have thoroughly revelled in all that was on offer!

Hurriedly suppressing thoughts which threatened to drag her down into despair, Eden stilled the doorway of a room whose former purpose was still evident in the built-in corner cupboard. The worn hand-painted panels depicted children’s toys. The nursery, she reflected gloomily—the nursery destined never to be filled.

But mere seconds in the wake of that thought, an extraordinary realisation struck Eden. Naturally, she was no longer taking the contraceptive pill which she has used when they had first been married. Well, whoopee, Eden, why has it taken until now for you to recall that fact? Dumbstruck by the belated awareness that she and Damiano had been making love without the slightest consideration of consequences for several weeks, Eden walked very slowly downstairs to be served with morning tea.

Damiano’s miraculous return from the dead had simply blasted all such practicalities from her mind, Eden acknowledged in a daze. It had been almost five years since either of them had been required to consider precautions against pregnancy. Well…Damiano had not been any quicker off the mark than she had been on that count. Indeed, babies might well have come via the stork story the way the two of them had been behaving!