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‘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?’
