‘OK. In the first minute, my driver was killed in front of me,’ Damiano delivered with grim abruptness, his hard bone-structure clenching, his eyes shadowing. ‘I was bundled into the back of a covered truck and beaten up. Standard stuff.’
Her tummy lurched with nausea and she lost colour. ‘But why did these soldiers go after you in the first place? What did they hope to achieve?’
‘Some total idiot decided that by holding me hostage they might magically get the previous government’s loans written off.’ Damiano’s hard mouth twisted with derision at that fanciful belief. ‘Then once I was taken, someone rather brighter realised that kidnapping an international banker would hardly impress the world with the new regime’s credentials…or attract any further investment.’
She nodded jerkily, fighting not to think of him being beaten up but tears were burning the back of her eyes.
‘Suddenly I was a liability, surplus to requirements. The only way I managed to stay alive until the camp was attacked was by persuading the commanding officer that I was so filthy rich, he could ransom me back to my family for his own personal profit,’ Damiano revealed flatly.
She shuddered. ‘And then you were hurt again—’
‘When the rebel forces attacked, a grenade was thrown into the hut where I was being held. When I came round, I was being carted through the jungle on a pallet. Both my legs were broken…I was totally helpless and temporarily blinded by the explosion,’ Damiano recalled with a grimace. ‘I also had a fractured skull. But I acted a lot more confused than I was until I had come up with a credible identity with which to satisfy my rescuers that I was on their side. Then just when I had got mobile enough to make a covert break for the nearest border, the field hospital was overrun by government troops.’
‘And then you dared not admit who you really were,’ she completed heavily for him, recognising what a bitter source of frustration that must have been after he had gone through so much.
‘The months after that were the toughest,’ Damiano confided grimly. ‘I spent a lot of time isolated in a punishment cell because I was always getting into fights.’
Eden gaped at him. ‘Always getting into fights? You?’
Damiano dealt her an impatient look. ‘Two of the guys I went in with were murdered by other inmates,’ he told her flatly. ‘I’d be dead if I hadn’t learned to defend myself. By that stage, I was convinced I was going to spend the rest of my natural life locked up. For a while, I didn’t much care what happened to me! It was months before we were sentenced for our supposed crimes against the state. Only then did I realise that I’d be released in a couple of years.’
Eden coiled her hands tightly together, feeling the full guilty weight of her own naivety about what it was like to live in such tough conditions. ‘It must have been hell for you,’ she mumbled, and the minute she’d said that she wished that she could have come up with something less inane.
But a long dark shadow fell over her. Damiano reached down and separated her trembling hands to tug her upright. His spectacular dark, deep-set eyes glittered with hard self-assurance. ‘Montavia taught me to value what I have. Not to live in the past when I was damned lucky just to survive! I lost my freedom but I didn’t lose anything that really mattered. And now that I am home, I will be ruthless in discarding anything I don’t want from my life!’
Her eyes slid fearfully from his, tummy somersaulting at that blunt declaration of intent. What would he do when she told him about Mark and Tina? Whose story was Damiano most likely to believe? Hadn’t Damiano always shown more faith in his family than he had shown in her? She had a horrendous vision of being ruthlessly discarded from Damiano’s life in the way he had just mentioned. Damiano might not waste much time agonising over whether or not she might be guilty.
Nor could she easily forget all that the man from the Foreign Office had warned her about. What if Damiano’s present desire for her was just a temporary thing? A transitional phase? He had never said that he loved her. Yet he cared about her and he still found her physically attractive. That latter combination wasn’t a lot though, was it? How would she bear it if Damiano chose to walk away from her in a few weeks’ time? And how much more likely was that development when he learnt about that wretched affair and his faith in her was tested?
‘What’s wrong?’ Damiano asked, terrifyingly attuned it now seemed to her every change of mood.
‘Nothing!’ Thinking at frantic speed, she tilted her head to one side. ‘I was actually wondering how you contrived to arrive here ahead of me last night. You never did explain that.’
‘I walked out early on the board meeting at the bank.’
In considerable disconcertion, Eden stared at him.
‘In five years the bank has had three different acting chairmen. With that many changes of policy, not to mention lax management, profits have dropped. They want me back in spite of the fact that I’m out of touch.’ Damiano’s expressive mouth curled. ‘In fact they want me back like yesterday.’
‘So…er, why did you leave the meeting early?’
His strong jawline squared. ‘I saw no reason why I should allow myself to be put under pressure the instant I arrive home. The Braganzi Bank must wait.’
Eden swallowed hard on a statement which he would have once considered heresy. Once Damiano had lived for the Braganzi Bank, the cut and thrust of the money markets, the latest exciting and all-important deal. He had been a thriving workaholic who had taken twelve-to eighteen-hour working days in his stride. Damiano had sandwiched their marriage into the tiny spaces left over between appointments, trips abroad, late-night business powwows and a social life that had occupied several evenings a week.
‘In about three weeks’ time, I’ll be attending another meeting in Rome. My Italian colleagues are possibly just a fraction more aware of what a man wants and needs after a long time away from his woman…’ Damiano gazed down at her with a sudden outrageously wolfish grin, white teeth flashing, brilliant eyes full of self-mockery.
‘Are they?’ Her mouth ran dry and her heartbeat quickened. Beneath the onslaught of that teasing appraisal, that sexy assessing look he never made the slightest attempt to downplay, she felt as dizzy as a teenager. Damiano could shamelessly telegraph hot desire across a crowded room with a single lingering glance.
‘Especially when the guy concerned is aware that his wife was once one of the most neglected wives in London—’
‘But you used to notice me around bedtime—’
That charismatic grin merely slanted in easy acknowledgement of that direct hit. ‘It didn’t get me far, did it? You had me climbing walls in frustration—’
‘But not any more,’ she inserted in haste, struck afresh by the dangerous mistakes she had made during those early months of marriage. Such a gorgeous guy denied sex, made to feel unwelcome the one place he had had a right to feel welcome. Some men would have given up on her and strayed.
‘You just made me want you more and more…’ Damiano laughed throatily and grabbed her up into his arms, smouldering eyes raking over her heart-shaped face. ‘In fact I don’t mind admitting that, in the dark, you and your inseparable nightie gave me some incredibly exciting climaxes. There was always that aura of the forbidden to revel in. Not to mention the wonderful night I discovered that you were biting the pillow because you were so scared of making a noise. I suppose you didn’t want to encourage me with the idea that you could be enjoying yourself that much—’
Cheeks aflame, she exclaimed, ‘No…it was the knowledge that your sister, Cosetta, was in the room next door!’
In the very act of stepping down into the pool and lowering her into the shimmering turquoise water, Damiano stilled, sudden comprehension flaring in his spectacular dark golden eyes. ‘Per amor di Dio…you were that self-conscious?’ he groaned, all amusement vanquished as he caught her close to him. ‘That never occurred to me. What a baby you still were…and you do choose your moments, don’t you? Just when
I was about persuade you out of your bikini and into rampant sex outdoors…’
Damiano’s provocative drawl broke off at that precise moment, brows pleating at the clackety-clack noise of an approaching helicopter in the skies above. ‘What the hell?’ he began indignantly as if he owned the airspace as well as most of the land in sight.
A huge grin crept up to curve Eden’s trembling mouth. ‘And here you are stuck in the water naked as a jaybird. Suppose it’s the paparazzi?’ she whispered wickedly. ‘I know you love risk, Damiano…but if Nuncio thought the shares might crash if you appeared in denim, what will happen if you appear in nothing but your skin?’
Even so, it was a shock to them both when the helicopter flew directly overhead and then began a descent on the far side of the villa. ‘Visitors?’ Eden yelped aghast.
Meshing one lean powerful hand into her hair, Damiano tipped her face up. ‘You little witch,’ he husked in a sexy growl, scanning her with hot, dark appreciative eyes and claiming her startled mouth in a devastatingly hungry kiss that wiped helicopters, visitors and even the fact she was standing in water right out of her mind.
Damiano lifted his head again, splaying his hands possessively over her bottom to urge her against his hotly aroused length. Then with an impatient curse in Italian, he set her back from him with pronounced reluctance. ‘Who outside the family knows that we are here?’
It was some time before Eden discovered the answer to that salient question. While Damiano was able to dress at speed in the changing area by the pool and head straight off to greet their visitors, she had only a wrap to pull on over her wet bikini and had to rush upstairs to find clothes.
When she came down again, she walked straight into the main salon, a grandiose state room furnished on a princely scale with Brussels tapestries and magnificent gilded furniture. Even Damiano had been thrown by the sheer size of it when they had done a casual mini-tour of the principal rooms on the ground floor the night before. Immediately recognising the slim redhead seated all by herself on a sofa, Eden hurried to greet the other woman.