Damiano's Return. Lynne Graham

reaction. Strangers who had to be well aware just what a charade her marriage had become by the time Damiano had gone missing. She ought to be used to that reality now, the knowledge that nothing had been too sacred to commit to an information file somewhere. But then the behaviour of Damiano’s family in recent days spoke louder than any volume of words.

      Nonetheless, after Damiano had vanished, there had been a full-scale investigation by both the British and the Italian authorities. Financial experts had gone in to check that the Braganzi Bank was still sound. They had looked for fraud or evidence of blackmail or secret accounts. They had even looked for links between Damiano and organised crime syndicates. Then they had turned their attention to his own family circle to see if anybody there might have employed a hitman to get rid of him while he was abroad.

      No stone had been left unturned. No opinion had gone unsought. No question had been too personal or too wounding to ask. Damiano had been too rich and way too important to just disappear without causing muddy ripples of suspicion to wash over everybody connected with him. And nobody had suffered more than Eden, the wife his snobbish siblings had secretly despised, the wife who had swiftly become the target of their collective grief and turmoil. Nuncio and his sister, Cosetta, had turned on Eden like starving rats on prey. She had even been blamed for the fact that Damiano had gone to Montavia in the first place.

      ‘In situations such as this, we normally arrange specialist counselling and a period of protective isolation for the victim,’ Rodney Russell remarked, ‘but your husband has categorically refused that support.’

      ‘I believe Damiano said he would prefer prison to counselling,’ the superintendent said with wry amusement.

      A cup of tea was settled on the low coffee-table in front of Eden. ‘You’ve had a major shock,’ the female constable said kindly. ‘But you’re going to be reunited with your husband this afternoon.’

      At that staggering reminder, Eden rose in one jerky motion and walked into her bedroom several feet away. She closed her eyes again, fighting for some semblance of composure. Damiano was alive; Damiano was on his way home. To her? She scolded herself for letting her thoughts slide once again in the wrong direction. A selfish direction. If Damiano wanted her now, she would be there for him. Naturally, obviously. In fact, if Damiano had asked for her, nothing would keep her from his side!

      Had Nuncio kept quiet about her supposed affair, after all? Yet if he had, what excuse had he given Damiano for his failure to bring Eden out to Brazil with him? And what was Damiano likely to say when he came back? How was she to explain why she had left the Braganzi family home? Shed his name to hide behind another name? Built a new life far from what had so briefly been hers?

      Struggling to suppress her mounting fears, Eden focused on the framed photo by her bed. Damiano smiling. All sleek, dark good looks and cool Italian charisma. It had been taken on their honeymoon in Sicily. But they had only been together seven months in total. Long enough though for her to see him withdraw from her, for her to stop expecting the connecting door between their bedrooms to open again, for him to start spending more and more time abroad on endless banking business. Long enough to break her heart. Love like that didn’t go away. Love like that just hurt.

      A light knock sounded on the ajar bedroom door. ‘Are you all right?’

      Mastering concerns which were pushing her close to panic at what should have been a most ecstatically happy moment, Eden turned a pale, tear-wet face to the young female officer. ‘What now?’

      ‘We’ll leave for the airfield in half an hour. If I were you I’d shut up shop for the day and just think about what I wanted to wear.’

      Wear? Eden swallowed a shaken laugh. Damiano… Damiano. What had he suffered? Kidnapped, his life threatened, seriously injured, locked up in some primitive foreign prison. Damiano, whose life had not prepared him in any way for such an ordeal. Damiano, born to wealth, command and supreme privilege. Once he had liked to see her in green. That thought just popped up out of nowhere and spawned a second, no less trivial recollection. Green had been his favourite colour.

      She ransacked her wardrobe with suddenly frantic hands. Maybe he only wanted to see her to say, ‘Hi, I’m back but…’ without his precious family hanging around in the background. And Annabel, his first love, his true love. How could she have forgotten Annabel? Annabel Stavely, Damiano’s ex-fiancée, who in the years since had had a child by a father she had refused to name but who remained single. Eden raised her hands to her face. Her hands were shaking, her palms cold and damp. She was a basket case with an out-of-control mind and the most desperate crazy desire to shout and scream with excitement and fear at one and the same time…

      The phone rang barely a minute before Eden and her escort left the apartment.

      ‘Eden?’ It was Damiano’s younger brother, Nuncio.

      Shaken that her brother-in-law should finally call her after so many years of silence, Eden literally stopped breathing. She was instantly afraid that he was ringing as his brother’s messenger to say that Damiano would not, after all, be flying on to see her and she whispered strickenly, ‘Yes?’

      ‘I have told Damiano nothing. How do I welcome him home with such news?’ Nuncio demanded in a tone of bitter condemnation. ‘I was forced to lie and say that we had lost contact with you after you moved out. But you had better tell him the truth for I will not stand by and see my brother made to look a fool by my silence!’

      The truth? As Eden replaced the phone again with a trembling hand her own bitterness almost prompted her to pick it up again and call Nuncio back. But it was the temptation of a moment and swiftly set aside. In any case, he would never believe her, would he? Neither he nor anybody else would believe or indeed even want to believe the real truth, which was that her two best friends had betrayed her and ultimately left her to carry the can.

      ‘You must understand that the man you remember won’t be the man who will be coming home to you,’ Rodney Russell informed her with daunting conviction as they sat in the back of the unmarked police car on the way to the airfield. ‘It will be a great strain for both of you to rebuild your relationship—’

      ‘Yes…of course.’ Wishing he would stop winding her up with such warnings, Eden listened with veiled and ever more anxious eyes. The lecture about post-traumatic stress syndrome had been scary enough.

      ‘Damiano is returning to a world he lost five years ago. It will be a challenge for him to adjust. He will suffer from mood swings, frustration and a sense of bitter injustice at the years that have been stolen from him. At times, he will crave solitude, but at other times he may relentlessly seek out company. He may be withdrawn, moody, silent or he may put on the macho-man act of the century but it won’t last—’

      ‘No?’ she queried tautly.

      ‘Try to appreciate that however your husband reacts now will not be a fair indication of how he’ll be when he has come to terms with what has happened to him. This will be a transition period for Damiano.’

      ‘Yes.’ That last assurance had sent her heart sinking like a stone. She wasn’t stupid. Was he warning her that Damiano might be seeking her right now but that in a few weeks he might walk away again? Did he think she fondly imagined that paradise might now be miraculously reclaimed from the debris of a marriage foundering five years ago? She was not so simple, nor so foolishly optimistic. She expected nothing, would ask for nothing from Damiano. She just wanted and desperately needed to be there for him. But she was challenged to believe that Damiano might need her. Damiano Braganzi had never been known to admit a need for anybody or anything.

      It had been she who’d said, ‘I love you,’ but he had never said those words. Yet once he had said them to Annabel, hadn’t he? Or at least he had had them etched on a beautiful gold necklace: ‘All my love, Damiano.’

      ‘I think some fresh air would do you good, Eden,’ the superintendent cut into her increasingly frantic thoughts and she realized only then that the car had arrived at the airfield.

      ‘Yes…yes, it would.’ She slid out of the car and breathed in deep in an effort to steady