Damiano's Return

CHAPTER TWO

FOR a couple of minutes, Damiano simply stood there holding Eden and she got the chance to get a partial grip on herself again and recall that they were in a public place.

‘OK?’ Damiano checked softly.

Eden breathed in shakily and lifted her head. ‘I love you so much.’

She hadn’t planned to say it, had not even thought of saying such a thing but the words came out in what felt like the most natural declaration in the world. She encountered eyes so dark and intent they were black. Unfathomable. A tiny spasm of fear tensed her muscles. Suddenly she became conscious of how rigid he was, how tight was the control he had over himself.

‘And even after all this time, not a single doubt. I have to be the luckiest guy in the universe, cara,’ Damiano responded with a roughened edge to his dark deep drawl, black eyes flashing gold as he scanned her anxious face, and then bent to sweep back up the travel bag he had set down. ‘Come on, let’s get rid of the welcome committee.’

He kept his arm round her narrow shoulders and walked her over to where the others hovered. Eden was still trembling, her mind in a tail-spin. She couldn’t focus on what she had just said or his reaction. It was an effort to think far enough ahead to put one foot in front of the other and move. Yet on some subconscious level she sensed the difference in him but could not put a label on what it was. Damiano had always been very controlled and very hard to read. He kept the volatile and expressive Italian side of his powerful personality under wraps. Except in bed.

That recollection made her cheeks burn and then slowly pale again. The luckiest guy in the universe? No, not in the bedroom with a wife he had once called the biggest prude in the western world! No, she had been a really dismal failure in that department, hampered by both her upbringing and her inhibitions, but most of all in the end by his dissatisfaction. For the more exasperated Damiano had become, the worse the problem had got. By then aware that everything she did and didn’t do behind the bedroom door was under censorious appraisal, Eden had felt a shrinking reluctance she hadn’t been able to hide from him. The pleasure he had given her had had a price tag attached and the cost had been too high for her pride to bear.

But when Damiano had gone missing, when she had had to face up to the appalling reality that he might be dead and might never come home to her again—oh, how she had beaten herself up for her failings then! In retrospect, her own hang-ups had begun to seem pathetic and selfish. Chewing at her lower lip, utterly dislocated from the dialogue which Damiano was coolly maintaining with what he had called the welcome committee, she focused on the long silver limousine pulling up with a surprised frown.

‘The car’s here. I don’t want to hang around,’ Damiano stated with a blunt lack of social pretence she had never heard him use before.

‘Am I allowed to ask where you’re heading, Mr Braganzi?’ Rodney Russell enquired with the edged delivery of a male who, with the arrival of that chauffeur-driven car, had just been made to feel even more superfluous to requirements.

‘Home…where else?’ Damiano responded.

Home? Dear heaven, was he planning on having them driven straight back to London and yet another family welcome? A joyous celebration at which she would simply be the spectre at the feast?

‘Where is home?’ Damiano prompted with a rueful laugh as he strode towards the limousine. ‘You had better give the driver directions.’

Her level of panic momentarily subsided at that clarification and she scolded herself for forgetting that, of course, he was already aware that she was no longer living in the vast Braganzi town house in London. However, he seemed to have taken that development in his stride. Having done as he requested, she climbed into the luxurious rear passenger seat. But the sense of panic swiftly returned to reclaim her. She had not thought beyond the moment of seeing Damiano again, indeed had barely attempted to even visualise what she could not imagine after so long. But now she felt like someone in a canoe without a paddle heading for the rapids.

‘This feels weird to me too. Don’t worry about it, cara,’ Damiano breathed, reaching out without warning and closing his big hand over her tautly clenched fingers. ‘No long-winded explanations of anything today. I’m back. You’re here. That’s all that matters at this moment in time.’

Eden stared at him. It seemed to be entirely the wrong time to be registering just how gorgeous he still was. The classic features, the superb bone-structure, the sensual curve to his perfectly modelled mouth. Damiano was stunningly good-looking but, unlike many such men, intensely masculine. Senses starved of him were already reacting to that unfortunate reality. The old familiar shame flooded her as she recognised the coil of heat in her belly, the swelling heaviness of her breasts beneath her clothing. Inwardly she cringed at how inappropriate and humiliating those responses were in the presence of a male who had rejected her outright on the one occasion she had plucked up the courage to invite him back to the marital bed. No, he definitely wasn’t going to need her that way, she reminded herself, mortified by her own foolish susceptibility.

Once she’d got a hold on her embarrassing thoughts and tamped them firmly down again, her anxious eyes roved over his strong dark features and now marked the changes. His hard cheekbones might have been chiselled out of bronze and carried not an ounce of superfluous flesh. He was pale beneath that bronzed tan, his brilliant deep-set dark eyes shadowed with exhaustion. He would have had so much news to catch up on with his family that he probably hadn’t slept on the flight back to England. In fact, he looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week.

But there was an edge there now in that lean strong face that hadn’t been there before. A tough, hard edge stamped like an overlay of steel on him. The smooth, sophisticated coolness she recalled had been replaced by a colder, deadlier quality. She had seen it in action with the welcome committee. There had been no apologetic pretence about his impatience to be gone. His accent had altered too. Five years of speaking Spanish and nothing else, no doubt carefully modelling his speech pattern on those around him. He was a very clever guy. He had not become the chairman of the Braganzi Bank by birth and precedent as his late father had. He had been voted in at the age of twenty-eight because he was quite simply brilliant at what he did.

The silence had become charged with an intensity she didn’t understand. A slight frown-line indented her brow as she connected with his eyes. Eyes that now burned like golden flames. In a sudden movement, he meshed his other hand into her hair and brought her startled mouth up under his.

It was a shockingly intimate and shockingly unexpected sensual assault. Indeed, Eden, accustomed to the belief that her husband found her about as physically appealing as an ice bath, could not have been more stunned. The plunging eroticism of his tongue searching out the tender interior of her mouth shook her to her very depths and then sent such a current of scorching excitement through her that a strangled gasp was wrenched from her.

Instantly, Damiano released her, feverish colour scoring his cheekbones as he took a swift look at her shaken face, lowered his thick black lashes and breathed in a hoarse undertone, ‘Mi dispiace…I’m sorry, I can’t think what came over me.’

Neither could Eden but most ironically she hadn’t been about to complain. Her heart was banging as if she had run a three-minute mile. Her wretched body was tense and expectant; it had been so long since she had been touched in an intimate way. And she was hugely embarrassed because it was so obvious that Damiano regretted having kissed her. Lowering her head in self-protection, she chose to study their still-linked hands instead. Just grabbing was a sort of guy thing, she decided, trying to work out what had motivated Damiano, which was a challenge. After all, he had always confounded her understanding.

His hand tightened its grip on hers. ‘Did I hurt you?’

‘No…’ So great was her self-consciousness, her response was a mere thread. Just grab me any time you like, she would have said to him had she had the nerve to credit that such an invitation would be welcome. But she didn’t have the nerve and laboured under no such confidence-boosting belief in her own powers of attraction. Five years earlier, in a desperate attempt to save their marriage, she had tried to bridge the estrangement between them and failed miserably. Shortly before that disastrous trip to Montavia, Damiano had rejected her. He had said no to the offer of her body. What was more, he had said no with the kind of sarcasm which had cut her to the bone.

In the taut silence she brought her other hand round his and then, finally noticing the unfamiliar roughness there, turned his hand over and looked at it, for want of anything better to do. In complete bewilderment, she ran a fingertip over his scarred knuckles, his broken nails, and checked his palms. It was the hand of a man accustomed to hard and unrelenting manual labour.

‘Challenge for the manicurist,’ Damiano commented lazily.

‘But…but how—?’

‘I spent over three years working in a quarry six days a week. There wasn’t much in the way of machinery—’

‘A q-quarry?’ Eden stammered, cradling his hand between both of hers with the most giant surge of shocked protectiveness surging up through her. A quarry? Damiano labouring in a quarry?

‘After the first year, the military government awarded political status to all rebel prisoners. Good move. If you’ve banged up about a quarter of the entire male population and the country is so poor you can’t afford to feed them, you have to prepare the footwork for an amnesty to let them out again,’ Damiano explained levelly. ‘And put them to work in the short-term so that they can produce enough not to be a burden on the economy.’

‘A quarry…’ Eden framed in shaken disbelief, emotion overpowering her even in the face of that deadpan recitation. ‘Your poor hands…you had s-such beautiful hands—’

‘Dio mio…I was glad to work! Beautiful hands?’ Damiano countered with very masculine mockery. ‘What am I? A male model or something?’

Squeezing her eyes tightly shut against the stinging tears already blinding her, Eden lifted his hand to her face and kissed his fingers. She couldn’t have spoken or explained why to save her life, but she could no more have prevented herself from doing it than she could have stopped breathing.

In the aftermath of that gesture, the silence was so charged it just about screamed out loud.

Damiano withdrew his hand. Eden raised her face and clashed with stunned dark eyes and her face began to burn up like a bonfire.

‘What’s got into you?’ Damiano demanded raggedly, his disconcertion over her emotional behaviour unconcealed.

‘I’m…I’m sorry…’ she mumbled, wishing a big hole would open up and swallow her, suddenly feeling so absolutely foolish.

‘No…don’t apologise for possibly the only spontaneous affection you have ever shown me!’ Damiano urged, studying her with bemused intensity.

‘That’s not true,’ she whispered in dismay at that charge, uttered with such assurance as if it were a fact too well-known to be questioned.

But Damiano forestalled any further protest on her part by suddenly leaning forward to frown out at the suburban street the limo was now traversing to ask in honest bewilderment, ‘Where on earth are we going?’

Eden tensed, ‘My flat. It’s on the outskirts of town—’

‘You left our home to move into a town flat?’ Damiano demanded in astonishment. ‘I assumed that you had moved to Norfolk so that you could live in a country house!’

‘It wasn’t as simple as that, Damiano. For a start I wouldn’t have had the money to buy myself a house and what would I have lived on? Air?’ Eden heard herself respond with helpless defensiveness. ‘The bank may have continued trading after your disappearance but all your personal assets were frozen which meant that I couldn’t touch any of your money—’

‘Naturally I am aware of that fact,’ Damiano cut in drily. ‘But are you seriously trying to tell me that my brother was not prepared to support you?’

It was amazing just how swiftly they had contrived to arrive at the very nub of the problem. The hard reality that Eden had become estranged from his family during his absence, news that would never, ever have gone down well with a male as family orientated as Damiano. And news which would go down even less well should he be told the truth of why the bad feeling had reached such a climax that she had no longer felt able to remain under the same roof.

‘No, I’m not trying to tell you that,’ Eden countered tightly, unable to bring her eyes to meet his in any direct way, playing for time while she attempted to come up with a credible explanation. ‘I just felt that it was time I moved out and stood on my own feet—’

‘After only four months? It did not take you long to give up all hope of my return!’ Damiano condemned grittily.

The sudden silence reverberated.

And then Damiano made an equally abrupt and dismissive movement with one lean brown hand. ‘No, forget that I said that! It was cruelly unfair. Nuncio himself admitted that he had believed me to be dead the first month and you never grew as close to my family as I had once hoped. The crisis of my disappearance divided you all rather than bringing you closer together—’

‘Damiano,’ Eden interceded tautly on the defensive.

‘No, say no more. I would accept no excuses from Nuncio and I will accept none from you. That my brother should have flown out to Brazil without bringing my wife with him struck me as beyond the bounds of belief!’ Damiano admitted grimly, his firm mouth hardening. ‘Only nothing could have more clearly illustrated how deep the divisions between you had become—’

‘Yes…but—’

‘My disappointment at that reality was considerable but it is not something which I wish to discuss right now,’ Damiano interrupted with all the crushing dismissal he could bring to any subject which annoyed him and which she well recalled from the distant past.

Eden had gone from shrinking terror at what might be revealed if she dared to protest her own innocence to instinctive resentment of that innately superior assurance. Dear heaven, did he think they were all foolish children to be scolded and set to rights on how they ought to be behaving? And then just when she was on the very brink of parting her lips and disabusing him of that illusion, it occurred to her that it would be wiser to let him think as he did for the present. Let sleeping dogs lie…only for how long would they lie quiet? Stifling that ennervating thought, Eden swallowed hard.

However, she need not have worried about where the conversation was going for at that point the limo drew up outside the narrow building where she both lived and worked. Damiano gazed out at the very ordinary street of mixed housing and shops with raised ebony brows.

‘It may not be what you’re used to but it’s not as bad as it looks.’ Eden took advantage of his silence to hurriedly climb out and lead the way, only to find herself hovering when Damiano paused to instruct the chauffeur in Italian. The limo pulled away from the kerb again and drove off.

Well aware that Damiano would not associate her with the name James etched in small print below the sign, ‘Garment Alterations,’ on the barred door, Eden hastened on past and mounted the steep stairs. The shop was shut. On Wednesday, most of the local shops took a half-day.

With a taut hand, she unlocked the door of her flat. Damiano strode in. In one all-encompassing and astonished glance he took in the compact living area and the three doors leading off to bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. ‘I can’t believe you left our home to live like this!’

‘I wish you’d stop referring to the town house as our home. It may have been yours but it never felt like mine,’ Eden heard herself respond, surprising herself with her own vehemence as much as she could see she had surprised him, for he had come to an arrested halt.

Damiano frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Living in the town house was like living in a commune—’

‘A commune?’

‘The communal Italian way of living; no matter how big the house is, there is never one corner you can call your own,’ Eden extended jerkily.

‘I was not aware that you felt like that about living with my family.’ Damiano’s outrage purred along every syllable of his response.

Eden knotted her trembling hands together. She was shaken by the strength of her desire to shout back at him for his refusal to accept the obvious and understand. That lack of privacy had contributed to their problems.

‘Although I consider it beneath me to make the reminder, you came from a home no bigger than a rabbit hutch where I am quite sure it was an even bigger challenge to find a corner you could call your own,’ Damiano framed with sardonic bite.

It was so crazy to be arguing about such a thing now. Her brain acknowledged that reality but, hurt that he should refer to the vast difference between their backgrounds, she could not keep her tongue still. ‘So because you viewed our marriage as being along the lines of King Cophetua and the beggar maid—’

‘King…who?’

‘I was supposed to be grateful to find myself in a house that belonged to not just one but two other women!’

‘What other women?’ Having given up on establishing who the fabled King was, Damiano was studying her now as if she were slow-witted.

Eden’s hands parted and then knotted into fists. ‘Nuncio’s wife, Valentina, and your sister, Cosetta. It was their home long before I came along—’

‘I cannot believe we are having this absurd argument.’

‘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.