high-end jewellery boutiques. The opulent shopfront sat adjacent to the rival business where Kimberley worked. No coincidence, she thought bitterly, just as it was no coincidence that Ric Perrini was here in Auckland ushering her to his car.
Perrini was Howard Blackstone’s right-hand man, second in command at Blackstone Diamonds and head of the mining division, that position of power a legacy of his short-lived marriage to the boss’s daughter. No doubt her father had sent him to fetch her; the question was why.
On his last visit to Auckland, Howard had attempted yet again to lure her back to Blackstone’s, to the job she’d walked away from the day she walked out on her marriage. That meeting had escalated into an ugly word-slinging bout and ended with Howard vowing to write her from his will if she didn’t return to Blackstone’s immediately.
Two months later Kimberley was still here in Auckland, still working for his sworn enemy at House of Hammond. They hadn’t spoken since; she hadn’t expected any other outcome. When her father said he was wiping his hands of her, she took him at his word.
Yet here she was, being rushed toward a gleaming black limousine by her father’s number-one henchman. She had no clue why he’d changed his mind or what the media presence signified, apart from more Blackstone headlines and the certainty that she was being used. Again. Sending Perrini was the final cruel twist.
By the time they arrived at the waiting car, her blood was simmering with a mixture of remembered hurt and raw resentment. The driver stowed her luggage while Perrini stowed her. She slid across the silver-grey leather seat and the door closed behind her, shutting her off from the cameras that seemed to be multiplying by the minute.
Perrini paused on the pavement beside the hired car, his hands held wide in a gesture of appeal as he spoke. Whatever he was saying only incited more questions, more flashbulbs, and Kimberley steamed with the need to know what was going on. She reached for her door handle, and when it didn’t open she caught the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Could you please unlock the doors? I need to get out.”
He looked away. And he didn’t release the central locking device.
Kimberley’s blood heated from slow simmer to fast boil. “I am here under duress. Release the lock or I swear I will—”
Before she could complete her threat, the door opened from outside and Perrini climbed in beside her. She’d been closer inside the airport terminal, when he’d shielded her from the cameras with the breadth of his body, but then she’d been too sluggish with disbelief to react. Now she slid as far away as the backseat allowed, and as she fastened her seat belt the car sped away from the kerb.
Primed for battle, she turned to face her adversary. “You had me locked inside this car out of earshot while you talked to the media? This had better be good, Perrini.”
He looked up from securing his seat belt and their eyes met and held. For the first time there was nothing between them—
no distraction, no interruption—and for a beat of time she forgot herself in those unexpectedly blue eyes, in the unbidden rush of memories that rose in a choking wave.
For a second she thought she saw an echo of the same raw emotion deep in his eyes but then she realised it was only tiredness. And tension.
“I wouldn’t be here,” he said, low and gruff, “if this wasn’t important.”
The implication that he would rather be anywhere but here, with her, fisted tightly around Kimberley’s heart. But she lifted her chin and stared him down. “Important to whom? My father?”
He didn’t have to answer. She saw it in the narrowing of his deep-set eyes, as if her comment had irritated him. Good. She’d meant it to.
“Did he think sending you would change my mind?” she continued coolly, despite the angry heat that churned her stomach. “Because he could have saved himself—”
“He didn’t send me, Kim.”
There was something in the delivery of that simple statement that brought all her senses to full alert. Finally she allowed herself to take him all in. He was not lounging with his usual arrogant ease but sitting straight and still. Sunlight spilled through the side window onto his face, highlighting the angles and planes, the straight line of his nose and the deep cleft in his chin.
And the muscle that ticked in his jaw.
She could feel the tension now, strong enough to suck up all the air in the luxury car’s roomy interior. She could see it, too, in the grim line of his mouth and the intensity of his cobalt-blue eyes.
Despite 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 grownup 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
