Damiano's Return

‘I couldn’t even redecorate my own bedroom without offending someone…and you think I should have liked living like that? Always guests with us at meal times, always having to be polite and on my best behavior, never being able to relax, never being alone anywhere with you but in a bedroom—’

‘And there least of all if you could help it,’ Damiano slotted in reflectively. ‘You would fall asleep in company before you would go upstairs at night. I did get the message.’

At that unanswerable reminder and assurance, Eden turned pale. The pained resentment went out of her then as if he had punched a button. She was both taken aback and embarrassed that she should have dragged up something which was so outstandingly trivial and inappropriate in the light of what he had endured since. And so great was that sense of shamed self-exposure, she just turned round jerkily and hurried off into the kitchen, muttering feverishly, ‘You must want a coffee.’

She left behind her a silence, a huge silence.

With a trembling hand, she put on the kettle. ‘Do you want anything to eat?’

‘No, thanks,’ Damiano countered. ‘With Nuncio fussing round me like a mother hen, I was practically force-fed all the way from Brazil!’

He had followed her as far as the doorway. Out of the corner of her eye, she snaked a nervous glance at his enervating stillness. So tall, so dark, so heartbreakingly handsome. He was here, he was home—well, in her home temporarily. She loved this guy, she really, really loved this guy. And here she was raving at him about stuff that was five years out of date and of about as much relevance to him now as an old weather report!

Was she out of her mind? It wasn’t fair to hold his shock at the way she was living against him. He had left her behind in a mansion with twenty-five bedrooms and a full quota of domestic staff. Evidently, he had assumed that she would be protected by his brother’s wealth from the usual financial problems of a wife with a husband who had vanished. So it was understandable that he should be astonished, even annoyed to find her ensconced in a tiny flat, existing on a budget that wouldn’t have covered what his sister spent on shoes in a week.

‘I didn’t realize that you disliked living with my family…I never thought about that possibility,’ Damiano admitted flatly.

‘It’s all right…I don’t know why I mentioned it,’ Eden gabbled in an apologetic surge, desperate to placate. ‘It’s so unimportant now—’

‘No, it’s not. I’ll stay here until this evening but…’

Oh, dear heaven, he was going to leave her again! In a short space of time, it seemed she had alienated him, driven him off. A chill so deep it pierced her like a knife spread through Eden.

‘I just need more space around me right now…OK?’

‘OK…’ Eden whispered so low she was almost drowned out by the boiling kettle. Space? Personal space and freedom, the sort of psychological stuff the Foreign Office advisor had tried to give her a crash course in understanding, she presumed, feeling sick. He wanted space away from her, he wanted to escape from her after less than a hour. She felt as if the roof were coming down on her, crushing the breath from her body.

‘I’ve got twenty-four hours of meetings mapped out ahead of me already,’ Damiano said levelly. ‘There are legal niceties to be dealt with, press announcements to be made, new arrangements to be set in motion at the bank. I can’t stay here. I have to be in London.’

He had never intended to stay. This had just been a flying visit. Literally! While he’d spoken, she had started to make the coffee on automatic pilot but as he continued to speak, and her heart sank, automatic pilot failed her. She didn’t even notice that the cup she was filling was overflowing.

‘Porca miseria!’ Suddenly Damiano was right there behind her, his hands closing urgently over her taut shoulders as he yanked her back out of reach of the pool of boiling water about to cascade off the edge of the worktop. ‘You almost scalded yourself!’

Pale and trembling, Eden focused on the hot water pouring down on to the floor with dismayed eyes.

‘Just go and sit down…I’ll deal with the flood,’ Damiano asserted, thrusting her towards the door with determination. ‘I think you’re still in shock.’

From the sitting room Eden paused to look back and watch Damiano mopping up. ‘It just doesn’t seem real…you doing something domesticated like that, you being here,’ she mumbled unevenly.

She encountered brilliant dark eyes as intent on her as she was on him. ‘You’re as white as a sheet, cara. Sit down.’

She sat because she was honestly afraid that, if she didn’t, she might fall down. It seemed just a minute later but of course it must have been longer than that by the time Damiano reappeared and placed a cup of coffee in front of her. Damiano, who had once pressed a bell to get a cup of coffee or anything else he fancied. Yes, she thought in the disorientated manner of someone too strung up to reason rationally: Annabel would have come running back had Damiano so much as snapped his fingers. Even after he’d married! Struggling to get her wandering mind back under control, Eden fought for some semblance of composure.

‘You’re just coming apart at the seams…’ Damiano groaned, bending over her without warning and lifting her up, only to lay her down again full length on the sofa. He snatched up the throw from the arm of one of the chairs and carefully arranged it over her. He hunkered down on a level with her, smoothed her hair back from her drawn face and breathed in a ragged undertone of regret. ‘I’ve always been such a selfish bastard.’

The rawness of his emotions was etched in every line of his lean strong face. In the whole of their marriage, Damiano had never behaved as he just had or indeed looked or spoken as he did then. Eden was transfixed. Guilt…was this guilt she was hearing, guilt that he had hurt her? For she had made a hash of things within the first minute of seeing him again. Telling him she loved him! Dear heaven, where had her wits and her pride been? Five years on from a marriage he had long known to be a mistake! It was a wonder that he had even been prepared to give her these few hours. He was trying to let her down gently but equally impatient to get back to his own life. Back to the bank, back to the family from hell…

‘I have had a long time to think about our marriage,’ Damiano stated almost harshly.

‘I know…’ She shut her eyes because she just wanted to shut him up before he said more than she could stand to hear. She did not want the full spotlight of his attention on her. She just might break down and start sobbing and pleading.

‘I was cruel…’

She jerked her chin in dumb acknowledgement and then whipped over on to her side, turning her narrow back to him, so much tormented emotion swilling about inside her, she was afraid she would break apart under the pressure. She crammed a fist against her wobbling mouth, willing herself into silence.

‘I tried to make you into something you couldn’t be…’

Sexy, adventurous, wanton, seductive. That was what he had wanted. That was what he hadn’t got. The sort of female who pranced about in front of him in silk underwear and was willing to have sex somewhere other than in a bed with all the lights switched off. The sort of female who played a more active part, who did something more than simply lie there. The sort of female who was able to show him that she wanted him.

‘I had unrealistic expectations,’ Damiano breathed in a driven admission.

Formed by a vast experience of other women to who such outdated inhibitions had evidently been unknown, she reflected with a bitter sense of squirming failure.

‘I wasn’t used to hearing that word, “no”…’

Well, he had certainly heard it a lot both before and after he’d married. Would it really have killed her to take her clothes off in front of him or let him undress her ju

st once? Couldn’t she have said, ‘yes’ that time he had started kissing her in the car when he had come back from a long business trip?

‘What I’m trying to say is that I was wrong to make the bedroom such an issue…do you think you could say something?’ Damiano murmured tautly.

‘Nothing to say,’ Eden whispered, keeping her back turned to him, tears running down her cheeks.

The silence fizzed like the shaken bottle of a soft drink, threatening explosion from pent-up pressure. She had done the wrong thing again. He wanted her to talk but what on earth did he expect her to say? Everything he had said meant just one thing to Eden: he wanted a divorce, a civilised one where blame was shared and platitudes were mouthed and nobody held spite. So he was smoothing over the past, trying to change it. What else could he be doing when he said he should not have made the bedroom such an issue?

For wasn’t sexual satisfaction of major importance to most men? And, to a male of Damiano’s ilk, a taken-for-granted expectation. After years of being pursued, flattered and treated to every feminine wile available, a rich and powerful man took it as his due that he would marry a sensual woman. But then she knew why Damiano had ended up asking someone as unsuitable as she had been to marry him, didn’t she? Her tummy turned over. On the rebound from Annabel, he had been a male used to winning every time, and had been challenged by Eden’s refusal to sleep with him.

‘I’ve got some calls to make,’ Damiano said flatly.

‘I’m sorry, I—?’

‘No!’ Damiano countered with grim disapproval. ‘I do not want to hear you always apologising. You weren’t like that when I married you…I made you that way by acting like a bully!’

So taken aback was Eden by that declaration that she opened her eyes and lifted her head with a jerk, but the only reward she received was the decisive snap of the bedroom door closing. A bully? Was that how she had made him feel with her inability to talk or respond on the level he required? That idea pained her even more and sent her thoughts winging back into the distant past…