the muggy summer morning Kimberley felt an icy shiver of foreboding. Beneath the warmth of her holiday tan her skin goose-bumped. Something was very, very wrong.
“What is it?” Her fingers clutched at the handbag in her lap, gripping the soft leather straps as if that might somehow anchor her against what was to come. “If my father didn’t send you, then why are you here?”
“Howard left Sydney last night. Your brother received a phone call in the early hours of this morning when the plane didn’t arrive in Auckland.”
“Didn’t arrive?” She shook her head, unable to accept what he wasn’t telling her. “Planes don’t just fail to arrive. What happened?”
“We don’t know. Twenty minutes out of Sydney it disappeared from radar.” His eyes locked on hers, and all she needed to know was etched in their darkened depths, and in the dip of his head and the strained huskiness of his next words. “I’m sorry, Kim.”
No. She shook her head again. This couldn’t be happening. How could her all-powerful, larger-than-life father be dead? On the eve of his greatest moment, the day when he’d vowed to rub the Hammonds’ faces in his accomplishments right here on their home turf.
“He was coming for the opening of the Queen Street store,” she said softly.
“Yes. He was due to leave at seven-thirty but there was a delay. Some contracts to be signed.”
There always were. Every childhood memory of her father concerned business papers, negotiations, dealing in the fabulous wealth of the diamonds that underpinned it all. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him dressed in anything other than a business suit. That was his life.
Diamonds and contracts and making headlines.
“When I saw you at the airport,” she said, “with all the cameras and media hubbub, I thought it was to do with the opening. Some strategy he’d come up with to grab attention for the new shop.” The awful reality of tomorrow’s headlines churned through her, tightening her chest in a painful vise. “They were there because they knew.”
While she’d been enjoying her last walk on the beach, her last breakfast of papaya and mango and rambutan, while she’d laughed with the resort staff and flirted with the twenty-year-old charmer seated next to her on the flight home—
“I didn’t know,” she said on a choked whisper. Despite their bitter estrangement of the past decade, despite everything she held her father accountable for, she’d grown up adoring the man and vying with her brother to win his favour. For thirty-one years he had shaped her decisions, her career, her beliefs. For the last ten of those years she’d done everything she could to distance herself, but he was still her father. “I walked out of the terminal and into those cameras…. How did they know?”
“About your father?” He exhaled, a rough sound that doubled as a curse. “I don’t know. They shouldn’t have had names this quickly. They sure as hell shouldn’t have known you were coming through the airport this morning.”
The sick feeling in Kimberley’s stomach sharpened. She hadn’t worked her way around to that, but now he’d brought it up. Her forehead creased in a frown. “How did you know where to find me?”
“When you didn’t answer your phone, I called your office.”
“Last night?”
“This morning.”
Kimberley digested that information. Obviously he didn’t mean in the predawn hours when her brother Ryan first received the news, otherwise he wouldn’t have called her office. Wouldn’t have found someone—Lionel, the office manager, no doubt—to point him in the direction of the airport. “You didn’t call me as soon as you heard?”
“No.” His voice dropped to the same harsh intensity that darkened his eyes to near black. “This wasn’t something to hear over the phone, Kim.”
“You thought it might be better if I heard from a news crew?” she asked.
“That’s why I flew over here. To stop that happening.”
“Yet it almost did happen.”
“Because Hammond’s office manager wouldn’t give me your flight information over the phone.” Ric ground out that information with barely leashed restraint. He didn’t need her derisive tone reminding him of his impotent frustration on the drive to and from the city, not knowing if he’d make it back in time to meet her flight. Not knowing if the media would discover her whereabouts when that information had been deliberately withheld from him.
It hadn’t been a surprise, just a damn aggravation.
There was no love lost between the employees of House of Hammond and Blackstone Diamonds. The enmity of a thirty-year feud between the heads of the two companies—Howard and his brother-in-law, Oliver Hammond—had spilled over and tainted relationships into the next generation. Kimberley had reignited the simmering feud when she took a position assisting Matt Hammond, the current CEO of House of Hammond.
“You can’t blame Lionel for exercising caution,” Kim said archly, as if she’d read his mind.
There was something in that notion and in her tone that trampled all over Ric’s prickly mood. Ten minutes together and despite the gravity of the news he’d brought, they teetered on the razor’s edge of an argument. He shook his head wearily and let it roll back against the cool upholstery. Why should he be surprised? From the moment they’d met, their relationship had been defined by fiery clashes and passionate making up.
He’d never had a woman more difficult than Kim…nor one who could give him more pleasure.
When the phone call about Howard came in, he’d made the decision to fly to her without a second’s hesitation. As much as he hated what had brought him here, he relished the fact it would bring her home. She belonged at Blackstone’s. Ric sucked in a deep breath, and the scent of summer that clung to her skin curled into his gut and took hold.
Just like she belonged in his bed.
“You must have left very early this morning,” she said.
“I was on my way back to Sydney from the Janderra mine when Ryan called. An emergency trip, last minute, so I took the company jet. When Howard knew I wouldn’t be back, he chartered a replacement for his trip.”
“You were already in the air. That’s why you were the one to come.”
Ric turned his head slowly and found himself looking right into her jade-green eyes. They were her most striking feature, not only because of that dramatic colour offset by the dark frame of her brows, but because of how much they gave away. The trick, he’d learned, was picking the real emotion from the sophisticated front she used to hide her vulnerabilities.
Not that Kim ever admitted to any weakness. She was her father’s daughter in that regard. And right now she was working overtime to keep both him and the shock of the news he’d delivered at arm’s length.
“It didn’t matter where I was,” he said, strong and deliberate. “I would have come, make no mistake.”
“To tell me my father was d—”
“To
