Damiano's Return

‘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?’

‘Damiano…’

She looked up and focused properly on his features for the first time since his arrival. She stilled, her absorbed gaze roving slowly over that startlingly handsome lean, dark face, her breath tripping in her throat. Even wet, he was just so incredibly good-looking. Gorgeous bone-structure, incredible eyes.

‘Damiano,’ she repeated shakily.

He gave her a sleepy but charismatic smile that rocked her heart on its axis and said something else in his own language.

With extreme effort she dragged her attention from him and unzipped his travel bag in search of warm dry clothing. She extracted a pair of khaki jeans and an oatmeal sweater, the quality of both attracting her notice but not to the extent they should have done for she had little knowledge of designer labels. Was he a tourist? He was hardly dressed for the winter sports season. The coat and the suit were of the type a city businessman would wear to a formal meeting.

‘You get changed while I’m heating up some soup for you,’ she instructed him in an authoritative voice, the one she used with the rebellious older boys in her classroom. ‘Don’t you dare go to sleep on me!’

But even as she walked into the small scullery her heart was hammering so hard, she had to snatch in a sustaining breath and she could not resist the urge to glance back over her shoulder at him and look again.

She collided with beautiful dark deep-set eyes that made her feel dizzy and brainless for the first time in her extremely sensible life. ‘You do look an angel…’ he told her stubbornly.

‘That’s enough,’ she tried to say briskly.

‘No, it’s only a beginning.’

And so it was. But, unfortunately, a beginning for two people without the slightest thing in common. Damiano soon recovered from that rare vulnerability which she found so very appealing. Having already discovered to his cost at the roadside that the reception was too poor in the area for his mobile phone to work, he was amazed when she let drop that her father had only got the landline phone connected the previous year and that the same problem with bad reception had prevented them from ever owning a television.

He was even more astonished that she didn’t own a car. Yet he himself had climbed the steep-rutted track which ran over a mile down to the road and only a four-wheel drive could traverse it in bad weather. With her father away and the estate vehicle he utilised only insured for his use, Eden had been without transport. To get to school that week, she had been walking down to the road and catching a lift with one of her pupil’s parents.

After eating, Damiano again requested the use of the phone and, since she naturally gave him privacy to make that call, she didn’t pick up any hint of who he actually was. Mightn’t she have drawn back and protected herself that night had she known how wealthy and powerful a male she had brought in out of the storm?

Indeed, although he later carelessly dismissed her claim as utterly ridiculous, Eden remained convinced that Damiano had deliberately avoided telling her that he owned the Falcarragh estate. In addition, he had not mentioned the Braganzi Bank or, for that matter, any facet of his high-powered lifestyle which might have alerted her to his true status. He had been content to allow her to believe that he was merely one of the salaried London executives involved in the running of the estate. Why, she had never understood, unless it had simply amused him.

By the time she showed Damiano into her father’s bedroom, for he had no option other than to spend the night, she had talked herself hoarse. He had dragged the unremarkable story of her life out of her with a determination that only an ill-mannered response could have forestalled. And she had been flattered and fascinated by the heady effect of his powerful personality, megawatt charm and stunning good looks all focused exclusively on her.

The next morning, after the snowplough had been through, he insisted on making his own way down to the road to be picked up, but before he departed he asked her to have dinner with him that night and she agreed; of course she did. She suppressed the awareness that her father would disapprove of her dating a male he would regard as one of the ‘bosses’. Rain came on that afternoon and Damiano arrived at the door in one of the estate four-wheel drives.

He had taken a room in the only local hotel and was critical of the meal they received in the cosy bar. Naturally. While she saw nothing wrong with anything they were served, the meal could hardly have been of the standard to which Damiano was accustomed. It was like a dream date for Eden to be seen out with a male whom other women couldn’t take their eyes off. She adored his good manners, hung on his every witty word of conversation and marvelled at his ability to reach for her hand and hold it as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

And then, on the drive home, her dream bubble burst.

‘I would have asked you to stay the night with me at the hotel but I imagine that the local teacher has to be careful of her reputation in a rural area like this,’ Damiano remarked with incredible cool. ‘It’s fortunate that you don’t have neighbours.’

He had known her for precisely twenty-nine hours and already he was expecting her to sleep with him! Eden was shocked out of her enchanted cloud of romance, embarrassed and then angry with him for wrecking everything and angry with herself for having foolishly expected more of him. With the exception of his singularly smooth and sophisticated approach, it seemed that, after all, Damiano was little different from the college students who had hassled her with crude pick-up lines and horribly blunt sexual invitations.

‘I have no intention of letting you stay the night,’ Eden breathed curtly.

‘That was a negative,’ Damiano mused with indolent, even amused unconcern. ‘I’m gifted at changing negatives into positives.’

Tears burned the back of her eyes but rage gathered inside her. ‘That kind of behaviour isn’t part of my life and it never will be—’

‘You’re planning to become a nun?’ Damiano incised with lashings of mockery, quite undaunted by her attitude. ‘Let me tell you something about Italian men…we’re extremely persistent when we want something—’

‘I do not want to discuss this!’ Eden interrupted in growing mortification. ‘Just drop the subject—’

‘I’m an upfront guy, cara. And, at my age, I cannot imagine having a relationship without sex—’

‘Well, I’m not planning on having a physical relationship with anybody until I get married!’ Eden shot back at him between gritted teeth.

Damiano was so shattered by that accidental admission which he had provoked her into making that he shot the car to a mud-churning halt outside her home and turned to scrutinise her with openly incredulous eyes. ‘You’re kidding me?’

Releasing her seat belt, as desperate now to escape him as she had been to be with him earlier in the evening, Eden scrambled out of the car. ‘Goodnight!’

Damiano sprang out of the driver’s seat and intercepted her before she could reach the door. ‘You’re still a virgin?’

Nobody had ever spoken that word to Eden’s hot face before and she could think of nobody she could have wanted to hear it from less. He said it in the same tone of disbelief which some people reserved for UFOs.

‘Urgent re-think…possibly the concept of enjoying out mutual passion tonight was slightly premature,’ Damiano groaned with unashamed regret.

Eden was hauling her keys out of her bag with a shaking and desperate hand. If she had had wings, she would have spread them and flown away. Sex had never been mentioned in her home, nothing so intimate ever discussed. Apart from frequent references to the social and moral consequences of casual intimacy, sex had been no more prevalent a subject in the city vicarage where she had boarded with her uncle’s family while at college. ‘Please shut up,’ she gasped.

‘I’m trying to understand what’s going on here—’

‘I made it quite clear—’

‘But you’re surely not expecting me to propose marriage to get you into bed?’ Damiano persisted with sardonic cool.

And reacting to that wounding sarcasm, she slapped him. Without thinking about it, without meaning to do it, she just lifted her hand and slapped him across one high, hard cheekbone.

‘You—’

‘I’m sorry but—’

Damiano surveyed her with outraged eyes that turned gold in anger and pulled her to him with powerful hands to crush her startled mouth under his with an explosive passion that just blew her away.

Releasing her again, Damiano studied her shocked face and the hectic flush he had fired in her cheeks and suddenly, without the slightest warning, he laughed with genuine amusement. ‘Some day soon, I swear you’re going to be begging me for that, cara mia. I can wait for the day.’

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