Читать книгу Damiano's Return - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 7

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.

‘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.’