by Lynne Graham
Eden stifled a groan of her own. ‘The only woman I couldn’t satisfy was my wife.’ One very revealing statement from a male of Damiano’s sophistication and experience, she reflected in strong dismay.
‘It didn’t matter to me enough…I didn’t understand,’ she muttered in a tone of feverish regret, kissing a damp brown muscular shoulder in belated apology. She loved him so much. She had almost lost him. She was so hugely grateful that he had chosen to come back to her and give their marriage another chance.
‘Past and forgotten,’ Damiano assured her.
Suddenly she had a driving need to ask him if, as his family had insisted, he had considered divorcing her before he’d gone missing. But she hesitated and questioned whether she could handle a confirmation that would devastate her and add to her anxieties in the present. For if Damiano admitted that he had been on the brink of ditching her, wouldn’t she now feel as though she was still on probation? No, some questions were better left unspoken.
Damiano snatched her from such thoughts by tugging her up out of concealment. Lustrous eyes smouldering like topaz in sunlight, he shifted fluidly beneath her, urging her into stirring contact with his renewed arousal. ‘You know when I said that I wasn’t going to fall on you like a sex-starved animal, I was being a wolf in sheep’s clothing…I was lying my head off, tesoro mio,’ Damiano confided thickly. ‘I had been deprived for so long that not ripping off your clothes in the limo the first day was an act of remarkable restraint!’
‘R-really?’ Eden stammered hot-cheeked, helpless excitement gripping her as he crushed her parted lips hungrily under his, sending her senses reeling again with almost terrifying ease.
‘I didn’t want to risk scaring you into a fit… I intended to play a waiting game—’
‘No more waiting,’ she broke in urgently. ‘No need for any games.’
All hot-blooded Italian male at that moment, Damiano surveyed her, patently revelling in the response she could neither conceal nor control and the dark flood of sensual pleasure already taking hold of her as he touched her.
About an hour later, having satiated them both on high-voltage sex, Damiano announced with admirable energy that he was hungry and rang for some food to be brought up.
‘Service just like home…I take it,’ Eden teased, catching the oversized towelling robe he tossed onto the bed for her use.
Damiano frowned. ‘Obviously you didn’t appreciate that kind of service…’
She stiffened at that note of censure. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, come on…’ Damiano said drily. ‘You dump my name, walk out on my family and keep yourself by bloody sewing! You’re a qualified teacher. If you had to work, why didn’t you look for a teaching job more appropriate to your status?’
Eden had gone rigid. Tightening the robe into a waist-strangling knot, she scrambled off the bed, an angry flush mantling her face. ‘You are such a snob!’
‘Like hell I am!’ Damiano launched at her. ‘When you refused Nuncio’s support, you were also rejecting everything that I ever gave you—’
‘Your snobby name?’ Rage had come out of nowhere to engulf Eden. She was so furious, she was shaking. ‘Your ghastly family? What did you give me? A lot of jewellery and a flashy car and loads of credit cards and I was miserable!’
‘Were you really?’ Damiano purred between gritted white teeth.
‘Yes, I was… I only stuck it out because I loved you!’ Eden raged with clenched fists. ‘Once you were gone, I could happily have lived in a hedge and worked as a tramp—’
‘Tramps don’t work,’ Damiano inserted with cool, cutting logic.
‘If I had gone for a teaching job, I would have had to explain who I was and there’s something you don’t understand. I doubt if I would have got the job. People treat you like a leper when your husband has gone missing—’
‘Cut the melodrama,’ Damiano advised witheringly.
‘No, because you don’t know what it was like for me. People haven’t a clue what to say to a woman who was in my situation. They’re also terrified that you’re going to break down and embarrass them…although that type are preferable to the other sort who revel in every gruesome detail of your misery!’ she flung at him. ‘I wanted privacy and the only way I could have it was to set up a small business guaranteed not to attract attention.’
‘So that you could star as the all-singing, all-dancing sewing version of the Little Match Girl?’ Damiano drawled with silken scorn.
‘I’ll have you know that I’m making a darned good living!’ Eden countered furiously. ‘And I’ll happily go back to it any time. Just you say the word!’
In the explosive silence that followed that threat a soft knock sounded on the door. Eden whipped round and stalked out through the French windows spread wide on the balcony outside. With trembling hands, she gripped the worn stone balustrade and stared out into the starry night. The lake far below reflected the pale crescent moon. She breathed in and shivered at the temper which had ripped up through her without warning. It was stress, she finally acknowledged. How could any woman be blissfully happy when she was being blackmailed and living in mortal terror of an exposure that might cost her the man she loved? She had to tell Damiano about Mark and Tina’s affair within the next few days.
‘At the press conference, there were a lot of cracks about how you chose to support yourself in my absence,’ Damiano admitted from behind her.
Recalled from her frantic and fearful thoughts, Eden paled in dismay. ‘The press already know where I was living…about the shop?’
‘Evidently…come and get something to eat.’ Damiano detached her death grip on the balustrade and stepped back again. ‘Listen to me. Snobbery has nothing to do with this issue—’
‘No?’
‘No. What disturbs me is the fact that you so quickly rejected our whole life and everybody and everything connected with me. In my mind those are exactly the things to which I should have held fast in the same position.’
As he made that honest admission, tears of shame at the truth she was refusing to tell him swam in her eyes. Had her position not become untenable with his hostile family, she would have chosen to stay in the town house. She whirled round into his strong arms like a homing pigeon. She drank in the warm, wonderfully familiar scent of him like an addict without hope of reclaim and muttered hoarsely, ‘I’m sorry that you got embarrassed like that at the press conference—’
‘Dio mio, cara… I’m not so sensitive. I have skin like a rhino after Montavia.’ Damiano gazed down at her with sardonic amusement. ‘Nothing short of the news that you had been working the streets to survive would have fazed me!’
Or that she had been blamed for having a torrid affair mere months after he had disappeared? Stifling that enervating thought, Eden let him usher her back indoors.
CHAPTER SIX
‘I REALLY do want to know everything that happened to you in Montavia,’ Eden murmured seriously.
His lean, strong face taut, Damiano studied her where she sat on the edge of a padded lounger by the side of the superb swimming pool. He hauled himself up out of the water with easy strength, wet and bronzed and stark naked. She blushed furiously, struggled to rescue her concentration, but his sheer magnificence challenged her hard.
It was mid-afternoon the next day and after a late and leisurely lunch they had finally dragged themselves out of the bedroom. She ached all over from the wildness of their lovemaking but there had been something even more precious about just being together even though they hadn’t talked about anything in particular. And she knew that Damiano had felt that too for neither one of them had made the slightest effort to go to sleep in spite of their exhaustion.
Snatching up a fleecy towel, Damiano gave her a wry look of comprehension. ‘The kidnapping is a long way back in the past for me, cara.’
‘I’d still like to know…I need to know,’ Eden persisted.
The quiet broken only by the background buzz of the
crickets lingered.
‘OK. In the first minute, my driver was killed in front of me,’ Damiano delivered with grim abruptness, his hard bone-structure clenching, his eyes shadowing. ‘I was bundled into the back of a covered truck and beaten up. Standard stuff.’
Her tummy lurched with nausea and she lost colour. ‘But why did these soldiers go after you in the first place? What did they hope to achieve?’
‘Some total idiot decided that by holding me hostage they might magically get the previous government’s loans written off.’ Damiano’s hard mouth twisted with derision at that fanciful belief. ‘Then once I was taken, someone rather brighter realised that kidnapping an international banker would hardly impress the world with the new regime’s credentials…or attract any further investment.’
She nodded jerkily, fighting not to think of him being beaten up but tears were burning the back of her eyes.
‘Suddenly I was a liability, surplus to requirements. The only way I managed to stay alive until the camp was attacked was by persuading the commanding officer that I was so filthy rich, he could ransom me back to my family for his own personal profit,’ Damiano revealed flatly.
She shuddered. ‘And then you were hurt again—’
‘When the rebel forces attacked, a grenade was thrown into the hut where I was being held. When I came round, I was being carted through the jungle on a pallet. Both my legs were broken…I was totally helpless and temporarily blinded by the explosion,’ Damiano recalled with a grimace. ‘I also had a fractured skull. But I acted a lot more confused than I was until I had come up with a credible identity with which to satisfy my rescuers that I was on their side. Then just when I had got mobile enough to make a covert break for the nearest border, the field hospital was overrun by government troops.’
‘And then you dared not admit who you really were,’ she completed heavily for him, recognising what a bitter source of frustration that must have been after he had gone through so much.
‘The months after that were the toughest,’ Damiano confided grimly. ‘I spent a lot of time isolated in a punishment cell because I was always getting into fights.’
Eden gaped at him. ‘Always getting into fights? You?’
Damiano dealt her an impatient look. ‘Two of the guys I went in with were murdered by other inmates,’ he told her flatly. ‘I’d be dead if I hadn’t learned to defend myself. By that stage, I was convinced I was going to spend the rest of my natural life locked up. For a while, I didn’t much care what happened to me! It was months before we were sentenced for our supposed crimes against the state. Only then did I realise that I’d be released in a couple of years.’
Eden coiled her hands tightly together, feeling the full guilty weight of her own naivety about what it was like to live in such tough conditions. ‘It must have been hell for you,’ she mumbled, and the minute she’d said that she wished that she could have come up with something less inane.
But a long dark shadow fell over her. Damiano reached down and separated her trembling hands to tug her upright. His spectacular dark, deep-set eyes glittered with hard self-assurance. ‘Montavia taught me to value what I have. Not to live in the past when I was damned lucky just to survive! I lost my freedom but I didn’t lose anything that really mattered. And now that I am home, I will be ruthless in discarding anything I don’t want from my life!’
Her eyes slid fearfully from his, tummy somersaulting at that blunt declaration of intent. What would he do when she told him about Mark and Tina? Whose story was Damiano most likely to believe? Hadn’t Damiano always shown more faith in his family than he had shown in her? She had a horrendous vision of being ruthlessly discarded from Damiano’s life in the way he had just mentioned. Damiano might not waste much time agonising over whether or not she might be guilty.
Nor could she easily forget all that the man from the Foreign Office had warned her about. What if Damiano’s present desire for her was just a temporary thing? A transitional phase? He had never said that he loved her. Yet he cared about her and he still found her physically attractive. That latter combination wasn’t a lot though, was it? How would she bear it if Damiano chose to walk away from her in a few weeks’ time? And how much more likely was that development when he learnt about that wretched affair and his faith in her was tested?
‘What’s wrong?’ Damiano asked, terrifyingly attuned it now seemed to her every change of mood.
‘Nothing!’ Thinking at frantic speed, she tilted her head to one side. ‘I was actually wondering how you contrived to arrive here ahead of me last night. You never did explain that.’
‘I walked out early on the board meeting at the bank.’
In considerable disconcertion, Eden stared at him.
‘In five years the bank has had three different acting chairmen. With that many changes of policy, not to mention lax management, profits have dropped. They want me back in spite of the fact that I’m out of touch.’ Damiano’s expressive mouth curled. ‘In fact they want me back like yesterday.’
‘So…er, why did you leave the meeting early?’
His strong jawline squared. ‘I saw no reason why I should allow myself to be put under pressure the instant I arrive home. The Braganzi Bank must wait.’
Eden swallowed hard on a statement which he would have once considered heresy. Once Damiano had lived for the Braganzi Bank, the cut and thrust of the money markets, the latest exciting and all-important deal. He had been a thriving workaholic who had taken twelve-to eighteen-hour working days in his stride. Damiano had sandwiched their marriage into the tiny spaces left over between appointments, trips abroad, late-night business powwows and a social life that had occupied several evenings a week.
‘In about three weeks’ time, I’ll be attending another meeting in Rome. My Italian colleagues are possibly just a fraction more aware of what a man wants and needs after a long time away from his woman…’ Damiano gazed down at her with a sudden outrageously wolfish grin, white teeth flashing, brilliant eyes full of self-mockery.
‘Are they?’ Her mouth ran dry and her heartbeat quickened. Beneath the onslaught of that teasing appraisal, that sexy assessing look he never made the slightest attempt to downplay, she felt as dizzy as a teenager. Damiano could shamelessly telegraph hot desire across a crowded room with a single lingering glance.
‘Especially when the guy concerned is aware that his wife was once one of the most neglected wives in London—’
‘But you used to notice me around bedtime—’
That charismatic grin merely slanted in easy acknowledgement of that direct hit. ‘It didn’t get me far, did it? You had me climbing walls in frustration—’
‘But not any more,’ she inserted in haste, struck afresh by the dangerous mistakes she had made during those early months of marriage. Such a gorgeous guy denied sex, made to feel unwelcome the one place he had had a right to feel welcome. Some men would have given up on her and strayed.
‘You just made me want you more and more…’ Damiano laughed throatily and grabbed her up into his arms, smouldering eyes raking over her heart-shaped face. ‘In fact I don’t mind admitting that, in the dark, you and your inseparable nightie gave me some incredibly exciting climaxes. There was always that aura of the forbidden to revel in. Not to mention the wonderful night I discovered that you were biting the pillow because you were so scared of making a noise. I suppose you didn’t want to encourage me with the idea that you could be enjoying yourself that much—’
Cheeks aflame, she exclaimed, ‘No…it was the knowledge that your sister, Cosetta, was in the room next door!’
In the very act of stepping down into the pool and lowering her into the shimmering turquoise water, Damiano stilled, sudden comprehension flaring in his spectacular dark golden eyes. ‘Per amor di Dio…you were that self-conscious?’ he groaned, all amusement vanquished as he caught her close to him. ‘That never occurred to me. What a baby you still were…and you do choose your moments, don’t you? Just when
I was about persuade you out of your bikini and into rampant sex outdoors…’
Damiano’s provocative drawl broke off at that precise moment, brows pleating at the clackety-clack noise of an approaching helicopter in the skies above. ‘What the hell?’ he began indignantly as if he owned the airspace as well as most of the land in sight.
A huge grin crept up to curve Eden’s trembling mouth. ‘And here you are stuck in the water naked as a jaybird. Suppose it’s the paparazzi?’ she whispered wickedly. ‘I know you love risk, Damiano…but if Nuncio thought the shares might crash if you appeared in denim, what will happen if you appear in nothing but your skin?’
Even so, it was a shock to them both when the helicopter flew directly overhead and then began a descent on the far side of the villa. ‘Visitors?’ Eden yelped aghast.
Meshing one lean powerful hand into her hair, Damiano tipped her face up. ‘You little witch,’ he husked in a sexy growl, scanning her with hot, dark appreciative eyes and claiming her startled mouth in a devastatingly hungry kiss that wiped helicopters, visitors and even the fact she was standing in water right out of her mind.
Damiano lifted his head again, splaying his hands possessively over her bottom to urge her against his hotly aroused length. Then with an impatient curse in Italian, he set her back from him with pronounced reluctance. ‘Who outside the family knows that we are here?’
It was some time before Eden discovered the answer to that salient question. While Damiano was able to dress at speed in the changing area by the pool and head straight off to greet their visitors, she had only a wrap to pull on over her wet bikini and had to rush upstairs to find clothes.
When she came down again, she walked straight into the main salon, a grandiose state room furnished on a princely scale with Brussels tapestries and magnificent gilded furniture. Even Damiano had been thrown by the sheer size of it when they had done a casual mini-tour of the principal rooms on the ground floor the night before. Immediately recognising the slim redhead seated all by herself on a sofa, Eden hurried to greet the other woman.