Damiano's Return. Lynne Graham

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 The smooth, sophisticated coolness she recalled had been replaced by a colder, deadlier quality.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