Damiano's Return

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 just 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…

Her parents had married late in life and she had been an only child, her father the gamekeeper on a remote Scottish estate. One of her earliest memories was the hum of the sewing machine for her mother had been a gifted seamstress whose talents had brought in much-needed extra income. Hard work had been respected and idle chatter discouraged in a household in which emotions had been kept private and demonstrative affection had been rare.

By the time that Eden had gained her teaching qualification at college, her mother had died and her father had asked her to return home to live. When the sole teacher in the tiny local school had taken maternity leave, Eden had been engaged to fill the temporary vacancy. Over the years, the Falcarragh estate on which she had been born had changed hands many times. Having gone out of private ownership, it had been traded just like a business investment and had long been run by a London-based management team of executives, who had rarely visited but who had excelled at cutting costs.

Even though she had by then been twenty-one, love and its attendant excitements had played little part in Eden’s life. The estate manager’s son, Mark Anstey, her childhood playmate, had remained her closest friend. As a teenager, however, she had had a major crush on Mark. She had only outgrown it when she’d realised that although she’d been very fond of him, she just hadn’t been able to imagine kissing him. Mark had felt more like the brother she had never had.

Damiano had stridden into Eden’s life that same winter when his car had gone off the road in the snow. Her father had been away from home, staying with his brother who had been ill. The adverse weather had closed the school early the day before. The following evening, Eden had been astonished when the dogs had started barking to warn her of a visitor for, with blizzard conditions, threatening outside, all sensible people had been safe indoors.

Answering the door, she’d stared in initial dismay at the very tall and powerfully intimidating figure which Damiano had cut in a snow-encrusted black coat.

‘Mi dispiace,’ he stated hoarsely, frowning with the effort concentration took. ‘But I need…I need the phone.’

Registering only that he was feverishly flushed, swaying on his feet and showing the confusion brought on by being frozen, Eden stopped being intimidated at speed. If he collapsed, she knew she wouldn’t be capable of lifting so big a man. With innate practicality, she closed her hand over his sleeve and urged him over the threshold. ‘Come in at once…’

She guided him towards the warmth of the hearth but not too close to the heat. ‘Phone…per favore,’ he said again, his dark-timbred drawl accented, the words slightly slurred, but it was still a remarkably attractive voice.

Stretching up on tiptoe, Eden instead began to remove the very heavy and sodden coat he wore, forcing him to release the travel bag he still clutched as if his life depended on it. Finding the jacket of the business suit he wore beneath damp, she scurried round him to unbutton it and ease him out of that as well. Damiano, silent for possibly the only time in their entire acquaintance, stood there registering complete bewilderment at what she was doing and blinking lashes long as black silk fans. ‘Signóra?’

‘You must have a death wish,’ she groaned out loud. ‘Such unsuitable clothing for this weather—’

She hauled a blanket out of the chest by the wall and tried to reach up high enough to drape it round his shoulders, finally surrendering and planting a hand to his broad chest in an effort to persuade him down into the armchair behind him.

‘Small…angel?’ he queried, gazing down at her with bemused fascination, dark as midnight eyes lingering on her delicate features as he clumsily pinned her hand in place with ice-cold fingers. ‘No rings…single?’

‘Sit down,’ Eden told him, hurriedly pulling her hand free.

He sank down heavily into the chair but continued to stare at her.

Eden arranged the blanket round him and then crouched down at his feet to remove his wet shoes and socks as quickly as she could, continuing to talk for fear that he might still lapse into unconsciousness. ‘What’s your name?’