by Lynne Graham
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.’
CHAPTER THREE
EMERGING from that emotive trip back more than five years into the past, Eden listened to the distinct tones of Damiano’s cultured drawl as he talked on the phone in her bedroom and slowly breathed in deeply.
Hadn’t his own sardonic question come true in the end? He had married her to get her into his bed and, understandably, having gone to such lengths and practised such patience, Damiano had expected a wildly sensual wedding night and an orgy of a honeymoon. Only that hadn’t come off either, Eden recalled, wretched tears gathering again as she stuck her face in a cushion.
‘I’m going to try and catch a couple of hours of sleep before I fold. I’m so tired, I feel like I’m only half conscious,’ Damiano admitted heavily from the bedroom doorway. ‘Do you want me to use the sofa?’
It was the last straw. He’d come back after five years and was offering to sleep on a sofa that was only four-foot long, even though there was a double bed in her bedroom and he had to have noticed it!
‘Please use the bed,’ Eden squeezed out, will-power keeping a tremulous wail of self-pity from escaping.
‘The limo will be here at seven to ferry me back out to the airfield. Wake me up in time,’ he urged.
It’s over, she tried to tell herself with accepting fatalism. It never worked. Just be grateful he’s alive. But it wasn’t enough—by no stretch of the imagination was it enough to compensate her for the devastating effect of Damiano walking back into her life like the ultimate fantasy and then walking back out again. Here she was curled up like a hedgehog hiding from him. More or less business as usual, then? Here she was demonstrating all over again the kind of lie-down-and-die passivity that drove Damiano clean up the walls!
Was this all she was capable of doing? Acting like a helpless victim who had no influence over her own misfortunes? How come she had just fallen straight back into that old bad pattern of behaviour when she had changed so much during his absence?
For she had changed, had had no choice but to become stronger and braver after what she had experienced. When Damiano had mentioned leaving again, shock had settled over her like a blinding, suffocating blanket. She had just shrunk in stature down to the level of a carpet fibre, all fight, all confidence, all strength leeched back out of her again as her worst fears came true.
So are you just planning to let go without an argument?
Eden unfurled herself and stood up. The bedroom door was slightly ajar. For how long had she been lost in her own thoughts? She pushed open the door an inch at a time, her heart thundering at the base of her dry throat. Damiano was fast asleep in her bed, his glossy black hair and his bronzed skin in stark contrast to the pale bed linen. He was lying on his stomach, the duvet tangled round his narrow hips, his powerful shoulders, muscular arms and the long, spectacular golden sweep of his back exposed. He was a riveting sight. Totally male, totally breathtaking.
How often had she sneaked a look at Damiano half naked? Her cheeks burned. Strange, wasn’t it, that she should have personally taken advantage of what she had consistently denied him? But hadn’t she always secretly enjoyed looking at him? Hadn’t a single glimpse of Damiano just with his shirt off thrilled her to death? But she hadn’t ever admitted that even to he
rself until now. The way she had been brought up such a sexual thought would have been considered shameless and not how a good and decent woman would think.
So she had been raised in a repressed and puritanical home with parents who had been heading for their sixties by the time she’d entered her teens. Why had she taken all that baggage with her into her marriage? Why hadn’t she tried to shake free of her inhibitions just a little? Well, the truth was, she was very stubborn and very proud. And so was Damiano. Neither one of them had been prepared to compromise.
That time she had offered herself and he had rejected her, what had she said?
‘I want a baby…’
Damiano had studied her with chilling dark eyes. ‘You just put a double lock on your own chastity belt. That has to be the least tempting proposition any woman ever offered me. When you want me and when you can prove that on my terms, I might consider coming back to your bed.’
Was it too late now? For Damiano had had to go missing before she’d been able to understand why he had been so angry with her that day. Eden’s hands curled into fists over her own past stupidity. The face-saving excuse of wanting a baby had been a huge mistake. Then he hadn’t appreciated just how desperate she had been or how she had naively believed that getting pregnant might have kept him with her.
She walked back out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. There was a bottle of vodka in the cupboard. Pam had given it to her for Christmas four years back, not then aware that Eden never touched alcohol. Yet another thing that had irritated Damiano: a bride who wouldn’t even touch champagne at her own wedding! But she needed Dutch courage before she could do what she had to do, didn’t she?
She poured herself a glass of vodka liberally combined with orange juice. Suppose he said no and fought her off? She would have to sort of creep up on him while he slept, not give him the chance to object. He had grabbed her and kissed her in the limo, hadn’t he? For a split second, it had been as if he’d been unable to keep his hands of her! There surely hadn’t been any women in that South American quarry and she had married a very highly sexed male. Turned him off it to the extent that she had actually started fearing that he might be obtaining what he no longer appeared to want at home elsewhere…