by Lynne Graham
‘Shush…’ Damiano scolded with a wince at the sound of that word and he lifted her hand, spread her fingers and pressed his lips almost reverently to her palm. Then he raised his handsome dark head and surveyed her with immense appreciation. ‘I may not have respected your moral scruples before we got married, cara mia…but I clung to my memory of them every day I was in prison.’
‘Hmm…’ Eden’s voice was so small it was practically inaudible. ‘Would you have divorced me?’
‘What is this preoccupation with that subject?’
‘I’m…I’m just curious,’ she mumbled half under her breath.
Sì…probably,’ Damiano groaned in frustration at her persistence. ‘Out of pride and jealousy and pain. Now you’re annoyed with me, aren’t you?’
Eden had flipped away from him onto her side. ‘No!’
With a throaty chuckle, Damiano tugged her relentlessly back into his arms. ‘Don’t you know how much I need you?’ he husked, stringing out a teasing line of kisses across her sealed lips. ‘Now, I’ve never told any woman that before—’
Involuntarily, a smile crept up on her tense mouth. ‘So macho—’
In the midst of that sentence, he brought his mouth down with sexy provocative heat on hers and she knew she hadn’t spoken when she should have spoken but, once he had said that about divorce, she knew she just couldn’t take that big a risk. She would tell him before they left Italy and returned to London, she promised herself. Chain him to a wall first, lock every exit, she told herself fancifully.
Over three weeks later, Eden strolled through the wild woodland at the lower end of the Villa Pavone’s terraced gardens. Damiano had been away for thirty-six hours in Rome. He had asked her to accompany him but she had said no. Saying no had cost her but they had spent endless days and nights solely together and intelligence had warned her that it was time to stand back and not cling like a neurotic.
This time, Damiano was going to come home. In her head she knew that but she hadn’t slept a wink the night before because there was no common sense to be found in her heart. She missed him so much, she was counting the hours and minutes still to be got through. He was due home in the evening. He had phoned her several times. Once in the middle of the night to complain that he kept on waking up because she wasn’t there. She had oozed sympathy but she had liked that—oh, yes, she had liked that, wouldn’t have been at all happy if he had slept like a log without her.
Damiano was more hers than he had ever been. Damiano was treating her like the most precious and wonderful woman in the world. It seemed that losing each other had taught them to value each other more and value pride a great deal less. And, of course, loving him to bits helped. Not to mention the mutually insatiable passion which she no longer felt threatened by. Indeed, she thought, feeling a slight flush warm her face, she was pretty shameless in that department now. Well, in her estimation, she was. Almost every problem resolved…just the one left.
However, it did take courage to face up to the nasty necessity of finally telling Damiano about Mark and Tina’s affair and the consequences she had foolishly brought down on herself. But, Eden reflected anxiously, it had to be done. Tiring of the shaded walk, she wandered off it into the sunlit maze between towering dark hedges as impenetrable as walls. Would she be able to find her way to the centre without Damiano’s superior sense of direction as guidance?
‘Ed-en!’
A huge smile of surprise flashed across her face as she recognised that distant call. Evidently, Damiano had returned from Rome sooner than he had expected. She yelled back and cursed the fact that she had gone into the maze. Excitement had caused her to lose her bearings and, absurdly, she had to keep on shouting.
It was ironic that while she was attempting to find the fastest way out again, she instead found herself on a one-way path and ended up at the centre of the maze instead. The fabulous fountain there shot sprays of glittering water high into the hot still air. ‘I’m at the fountain!’ she called with a grin and the knowledge that she would never let on that she had arrived there accidentally.
‘Per amor di Dio…I am not in the mood for some stupid game!’
That comeback made Eden flush in disconcertion. But then possibly he was tired and had been searching the extensive gardens for longer than patience could bear. About thirty seconds later, she heard his footsteps crunch on the gravel surface within the maze. ‘I’m not playing a game…it’s just I thought you could come in quicker than I would find my way out!’ she announced on a note of apology.
Just ten feet away from her, Damiano strode suddenly into view. He stopped dead then as though a repelling forcefield surrounded her. And he looked at her as he had never in his life looked at her. With seething anger and derision and hatred. And that quickly, Eden knew, long before he spoke, even before he flung the newspaper cutting in his hand, that she had waited far too long to tell him that story…
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE newspaper cutting fluttered down onto the sunlit gravel. Eden gave the crumpled snap of Tina and Mark’s torrid embrace only a brief and pained glance.
‘It is your deliberate deception that disgusts me most!’ Damiano breathed in a stupendously quiet assurance that nonetheless cut through the surging silence like a whiplash. ‘At every opportunity when you might have spoken up, you chose to lie.’
‘No, I haven’t told you any lies,’ Eden murmured tautly, snatching in a breath of the hot, still air, perspiration dampening her upper lip. ‘It was Tina who had the affair with Mark. That is Tina, not me, in that photograph, Damiano—’
‘Accidenti! I’m not listening to nonsense like that—’
Eden’s pale face tightened. ‘Well, while you’re not listening, would you please tell me where you got that cutting from?’
His aggressive jawline clenched. ‘Yet another one of the well-wishers who appear to surround me but, on this occasion, an anonymous one. That tabloid trash was delivered to me by special courier this morning. It was sent from London.’
Eden was fighting to keep calm, fighting to stay in control and not give way to the reality that she was weak with shock. ‘Probably by Tina. Now that she views me as a threat, she’s keen to see me drummed out of the family. If you think about this awful business calmly—’
‘Calmly?’ Damiano derided thickly as if he was having difficulty even getting that word out, but volume-wise he was doing very well.
‘I swear that I have never been intimate with Mark. We haven’t ever even kissed. It was always a platonic friendship…’
Ashen below his bronzed skin, Damiano continued to stare at her with unreadable fixity, eyes black as obsidian, stunningly handsome features as inflexible as a stone carving.
Knowing as surely as if he had told her that he was recalling that she had once admitted to having had a teenage crush on Mark, Eden trembled and set off hurriedly on another track. It was dreadful that her mind should let her down in the midst of such a confrontation. But panic had such a grip on her, she couldn’t get her teeming thoughts in order or even work out quite where to begin to tell her side of what had happened almost five years earlier.
‘I didn’t know Mark and Tina were having an affair until the story broke in that newspaper,’ she told him tautly. ‘Mark visited the town house a great deal those first weeks after you were missing. He and Tina got on well but I never thought anything of that…I mean, why would I? I was too wrapped up in my own misery to be that observant. Tina began to suggest that we went down to the country house at Oxford at weekends. Mark was still working there then—’
‘You’re wasting your time with this,’ Damiano drawled lethally. ‘I lost my freedom, not my brain, in South America.’
Eden just kept on talking for, now that she had begun, she could not stop the words spilling out. ‘We would drive down in my car. Tina said it was good for me to have to do something that I had to think about and she was probably right…I was like a zombie then. She left me alone a lot those we
ekends but it never occurred to me that she was with Mark. I wasn’t much company, so I wasn’t surprised when she would say she was off to visit friends and she took my car…where are you going?’ she gasped as Damiano simply swung on his heel and started to walk back into the maze.
‘You’re telling me lies a child could tear apart. Mark was your friend. Mark was your constant visitor. Mark was living down on our country estate purely because you insisted that I employ him. But then you always had to keep Mark within reach. Why the hell did you marry me?’
Eden unfroze from her stupor and raced after him. ‘How on earth can you ask me that?’
Damiano stilled without turning back to her, broad shoulders taut with savage tension beneath the fine cloth of his charcoal-grey jacket. ‘I don’t trust my temper…I don’t want to continue this pointless dialogue—’
‘You owe it to me to hear me out!’ Eden broke in incredulously.
‘I don’t owe you anything now…’ Damiano vented a sudden raw and bitter laugh that made her shiver. ‘But thanks for a few memorable lays.’
‘Just you turn round and say that to my face!’ Eden launched at him shakily.
Unexpectedly, Damiano did swing back. ‘Do you know what I really thought was wrong with our marriage before I went to Montavia?’
Eden folded her arms jerkily, her legs trembling beneath her. ‘No.’
‘Mark…every which way I turned, I came on Mark! You seemed much closer to him that you were to me,’ Damiano delivered grittily, black eyes beginning to take on a stormy glitter of gold, the determinedly level drawl now harshening. ‘Naturally I resented him; naturally I was jealous of him—’
‘J-jealous?’ Eden stammered with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach for that was something, and a very dangerous something, which she had never once suspected.
‘Remarkable that, isn’t it? That I should have been jealous of a weak, unscrupulous little jerk, who was openly out for everything he could get? Do you think Mark would have been such an attentive friend if you had married a poor man? He played you like a violin, Eden. I had to stand back and watch it!’
Every syllable of that contemptuous and humiliatingly accurate assessment of Mark’s character bit deep into Eden’s shrinking flesh. Damiano had seen what she had not. Just a few weeks ago, she would have loyally defended Mark. Now the knowledge that she had allowed Mark to blackmail her weighed her down with a numbing sense of her own inadequacy.
Damiano studied her with hard, biting derision, dark, deep-set eyes frighteningly bleak. ‘When my family turned against you after I went missing, Mark must have seemed like your only refuge. Presumably that’s how you ended up in bed with him,’ he breathed in a chilling assumption that shook her rigid. ‘Did you then tell yourself that you were in love with him?’
Eden was aghast at that question and even more by the reasoning he had employed, explaining to his own apparent satisfaction how she might have succumbed to such an affair. Registering that her efforts to defend herself had so far made no impression whatsoever on Damiano, she exclaimed, ‘I didn’t end up in bed with Mark! I swear I didn’t!’
His lean, powerful face grim, Damiano appraised her with embittered contempt. Swinging on his heel, he strode off, feet crunching on the gravel. The sun beating down on her, Eden stayed where she was, in so much shock she could not immediately react.
Damiano had sent her reeling with revelations of his own. She saw now that she was in much deeper trouble than she could ever have imagined. Damiano had always been jealous of her attachment to Mark! Jealous to the level of having once believed that her fondness for the younger man was threatening their marriage. For a split second she could have screamed her frustration to the skies for Damiano had carefully concealed that jealousy from her. And now circumstances had combined horribly to construct a scenario which Damiano appeared to find disturbingly credible. He was quite prepared to believe that, in the fraught aftermath of his own disappearance, she had turned to Mark for more than the comfort of friendship.
So hot that her dress was now sticking to her damp skin, Eden found her way out of the maze. Now she couldn’t believe she had been so stupid as to allow Damiano to walk away from her. In panic she raced through the beautiful gardens, heart thumping like a crazed drumbeat driving her on. She had to climb two long flights of stone steps to reach the terrace at the rear of the villa. She sped indoors, dizzy from exertion and frantic with fear that Damiano might already have swung back into his limo and departed.
When she found Damiano in the library which he had begun using as an office soon after their arrival, she fell still in the doorway, breasts rising and falling as she struggled just to catch her breath again. Relief filled her to overflowing in those first taut seconds.
His lean, strong-boned features savagely taut, Damiano sent her a dark look of scorching aggression. ‘Get out,’ he said softly, a slight tremor marring his usual even diction.
‘Not until you give me the chance to defend myself.’
Damiano gave a great shout of sardonic laughter. ‘Defend yourself? Who are you trying to kid? Do you think I don’t appreciate what’s been going on around me since I came home? Everybody but me knew that you had had an affair!’
‘But I didn’t have an affair!’ Eden flung back at him wildly.
‘Now I understand why Nuncio did not bring you to Brazil. Now I know why you ditched my name and went into hiding. You were embarrassed and ashamed—’
‘No, I was just fed up with your family and the whole stupid mess I’d landed myself in! I only made one mistake, Damiano. When the press erroneously identified the woman in that photograph as me, I was faced with a very difficult choice,’ Eden insisted in growing desperation as she moved deeper into the room, her whole concentration bent on him. ‘If I spoke up and pointed out that that woman was Tina, I was going to wreck her marriage and she begged me to keep quiet—’
‘Tell me, how long did it take you to come up with this melodramatic tale in which you were the only victim and every member of my family was rotten to the core?’ Damiano slashed back at her in unconcealed disgust.
‘Tina said it was my fault that her affair with Mark was exposed and, in a twisted way, she was right,’ Eden conceded shakily.
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘That there wouldn’t have been a story if that paparazzo photographer hadn’t assumed that that woman kissing Mark was me! And my only claim to fame was being the wife of a well-known banker who had gone missing in a huge shower of publicity. That was what made me a target and that was what made that story of my supposed infidelity worth printing!’
‘I am never going to believe that someone as prim and proper as you used to be agreed to be labelled an adulteress for Tina’s benefit!’ With that seething proclamation of disbelief, Damiano strode past her, long, powerful strides carrying him towards the stairs at a far faster rate than she could emulate.
‘All right, what I did was downright stupid but you should know me better!’ Eden protested as she hurried breathlessly up the stairs in his stormy wake. ‘I thought you were dead. I was trying to cope with my own grief. I really didn’t want to feel responsible for Tina losing Nuncio as well!’
With a ground-out exclamation in Italian, Damiano fell still on the landing, his lean hands clenching into powerful fists. ‘Stop this now! Where is your dignity?’
‘When have I ever lied to you?’ Eden demanded rawly.
She looked up at him. He looked back down at her. The atmosphere was thick with sizzling undertones. She collided with his stunning dark golden eyes and finally saw the tremendous pain he was attempting to hide from her, the savage restraint he was exerting over his emotions.
Eden trembled, tummy churning. She sensed that she had finally said something that penetrated, something he was finally prepared to consider.
The silence hung like a giant weight ready to fall.
Damiano’s black spiky lashes lowered, eyes narrowing to glit
tering pinpoints of ferocious intensity. ‘You have never had cause to lie to me before.’
Eden flinched as if he had struck her, the feverish colour in her cheeks draining away, ‘And you have never trusted me,’ she muttered in a stricken tone of discovery. ‘Evidently you didn’t even trust me when we were first married. What did I ever do to deserve that?’
Dark blood scored the high cheekbones which stood out with such chiselled prominence below Damiano’s bronzed skin. He said nothing.
Eden mounted the remaining stairs until they were level, the shock and hurt in her eyes unconcealed. ‘You hid so much from me five years ago…I had no idea that you resented Mark. I really didn’t understand what I was dealing with until now.’ Her throat aching with unshed tears, Eden turned away. ‘That’s, it, then, isn’t it? Because I don’t have any proof of my innocence to offer you!’
As she headed down the corridor to their bedroom, a lean hand suddenly snapped round her wrist, staying her. Damiano scanned her strained, tear-wet face with savage dark golden eyes. ‘What do you mean, “That’s it”?’
Eden pulled free of him in an equally abrupt movement. Even though she was shaking like a leaf and starting to feel rather dizzy, she thrust up her chin in challenge. ‘Well, what do you think I mean?’
Eyes a scorching, aggressive gold, Damiano growled, ‘No way are you leaving me!’
Thoroughly confused by that assurance when she had assumed he was set on walking out and leaving her, Eden blinked. ‘B-but—’
‘You tell me the truth and I’ll attempt to put this matter behind us.’ Damiano gritted out each word of that promise as if it physically hurt.
Eden was so taken aback she simply gaped at him.
‘The truth,’ Damiano emphasised.
‘But you won’t believe me.’