Ten minutes to wait after five years? She was such a bag of nerves. She paced the Tarmac, ignoring the door open in welcome at the small passenger terminal. She smoothed trembling hands down over the fine green wool dress which was absurdly warm for a summer day but all that she still possessed in that colour.
‘Russell is only doing his job as he sees it,’ the senior policeman remarked quietly, ‘but, accordingly to my sources, your husband is in remarkably good condition both physically and mentally.’
Eden nodded, a little of her tension ebbing, and then she heard a distant whirr. She jerked, throwing her head back to search the sky with fraught eyes. She saw a dark speck, watching it growing larger, her whole being centering on the helicopter as it came in to land. She still could not quite credit that Damiano was on that craft, that Damiano was about to emerge and walk across the Tarmac towards her.
In spite of everything she had been told, she was still terrified that somehow all these people and even his family had got it wrong and that the man who had turned up in Brazil wasn’t really who they thought he was. An impostor—well, why not? Wasn’t that at least possible? Mightn’t somebody have boned up on Damiano’s life and even had plastic surgery? Wouldn’t it be worth a try to step into the shoes of so very rich a man? And wouldn’t Nuncio, who had worshipped the ground his elder brother had walked on and who had been inconsolable when he’d gone missing, have been an easy and credulous target?
Rigid, she watched the helicopter settle down about a hundred feet away. A door thrust open. She trembled, cold and clammy with fear. And then she saw a very tall, very well-built male springing out, with long, powerful black-jean-clad legs, and also wearing a white T-shirt and leather flying jacket. Black hair, far longer than she would have expected, blew back from his lean, hard-boned features. His skin was deeply bronzed. Her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t breathe. There was just this massive explosion of crazy joy inside her and she didn’t notice herself moving forward at first hesitantly and then breaking into a run.
Damiano let her run to him. He just came to a halt about thirty feet from the helicopter. Later she would remember that, wonder about it. But at that instant she was all reaction and no thought. Every prayer answered, every fear for that moment forgotten, Eden just hurled herself at his big powerful frame, heart racing so fast she reeled dizzily against him as he closed his arms around her.
‘You missed me, cara?’ His rich, dark drawl wrapped round her, shutting out everything else as he bent his head down to her level.
Her face was squashed into his chest. He smelt so good, he smelt so familiar and she drank him in as if he were life-giving oxygen. ‘Don’t joke…please don’t joke!’ Eden sobbed into his shirt, clinging to him with both hands to stay upright.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR a couple of minutes, Damiano simply stood there holding Eden and she got the chance to get a partial grip on herself again and recall that they were in a public place.
‘OK?’ Damiano checked softly.
Eden breathed in shakily and lifted her head. ‘I love you so much.’
She hadn’t planned to say it, had not even thought of saying such a thing but the words came out in what felt like the most natural declaration in the world. She encountered eyes so dark and intent they were black. Unfathomable. A tiny spasm of fear tensed her muscles. Suddenly she became conscious of how rigid he was, how tight was the control he had over himself.
‘And even after all this time, not a single doubt. I have to be the luckiest guy in the universe, cara,’ Damiano responded with a roughened edge to his dark deep drawl, black eyes flashing gold as he scanned her anxious face, and then bent to sweep back up the travel bag he had set down. ‘Come on, let’s get rid of the welcome committee.’
He kept his arm round her narrow shoulders and walked her over to where the others hovered. Eden was still trembling, her mind in a tail-spin. She couldn’t focus on what she had just said or his reaction. It was an effort to think far enough ahead to put one foot in front of the other and move. Yet on some subconscious level she sensed the difference in him but could not put a label on what it was. Damiano had always been very controlled and very hard to read. He kept the volatile and expressive Italian side of his powerful personality under wraps. Except in bed.
That recollection made her cheeks burn and then slowly pale again. The luckiest guy in the universe? No, not in the bedroom with a wife he had once called the biggest prude in the western world! No, she had been a really dismal failure in that department, hampered by both her upbringing and her inhibitions, but most of all in the end by his dissatisfaction. For the more exasperated Damiano had become, the worse the problem had got. By then aware that everything she did and didn’t do behind the bedroom door was under censorious appraisal, Eden had felt a shrinking reluctance she hadn’t been able to hide from him. The pleasure he had given her had had a price tag attached and the cost had been too high for her pride to bear.
But when Damiano had gone missing, when she had had to face up to the appalling reality that he might be dead and might never come home to her again—oh, how she had beaten herself up for her failings then! In retrospect, her own hang-ups had begun to seem pathetic and selfish. Chewing at her lower lip, utterly dislocated from the dialogue which Damiano was coolly maintaining with what he had called the welcome committee, she focused on the long silver limousine pulling up with a surprised frown.
‘The car’s here. I don’t want to hang around,’ Damiano stated with a blunt lack of social pretence she had never heard him use before.
‘Am I allowed to ask where you’re heading, Mr Braganzi?’ Rodney Russell enquired with the edged delivery of a male who, with the arrival of that chauffeur-driven car, had just been made to feel even more superfluous to requirements.
‘Home…where else?’ Damiano responded.
Home? Dear heaven, was he planning on having them driven straight back to London and yet another family welcome? A joyous celebration at which she would simply be the spectre at the feast?
‘Where is home?’ Damiano prompted with a rueful laugh as he strode towards the limousine. ‘You had better give the driver directions.’
Her level of panic momentarily subsided at that clarification and she scolded herself for forgetting that, of course, he was already aware that she was no longer living in the vast Braganzi town house in London. However, he seemed to have taken that development in his stride. Having done as he requested, she climbed into the luxurious rear passenger seat. But the sense of panic swiftly returned to reclaim her. She had not thought beyond the moment of seeing Damiano again, indeed had barely attempted to even visualise what she could not imagine after so long. But now she felt like someone in a canoe without a paddle heading for the rapids.
‘This feels weird to me too. Don’t worry about it, cara,’ Damiano breathed, reaching out without warning and closing his big hand over her tautly clenched fingers. ‘No long-winded explanations of anything today. I’m back. You’re here. That’s all that matters at this moment in time.’
Eden stared at him. It seemed to be entirely the wrong time to be registering just how gorgeous he still was. The classic features, the superb bone-structure, the sensual curve to his perfectly modelled mouth. Damiano was stunningly good-looking but, unlike many such men, intensely masculine. Senses starved of him were already reacting to that unfortunate reality. The old familiar shame flooded her as she recognised the coil of heat in her belly, the swelling heaviness of her breasts beneath her clothing. Inwardly she cringed at how inappropriate and humiliating those responses were in the presence of a male who had rejected her outright on the one occasion she had plucked up the courage to invite him back to the marital bed. No, he definitely wasn’t going to need her that way, she reminded herself, mortified by her own foolish susceptibility.
Once she’d got a hold on her embarrassing thoughts and tamped them firmly down again, her anxious eyes roved over his strong dark features and now marked the changes. His hard cheekbones might have been chiselled out of bronze