Damiano's Return

‘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.’