This car is your perfect match, she’d told him a couple of miles back. Now, the thick ache in her throat made it impossible to answer his question.
At the next red light he reached across and put his hand over hers, where they lay tightly clenched in her lap. The unexpected gesture was so comforting and so strengthening that she immediately found her voice. “I wish you’d stop being so nice,” she snapped. “It makes me nervous.”
He cut her an inscrutable look from behind his sunglasses. “A temporary aberration. Don’t get too used to it.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she said dryly. Then she shook her head when she realised that once again he’d shocked her out of her wretchedness. “Thank you,” she repeated, this time with sincerity.
“For?” The lights changed and he took his hand back, using it to guide the powerful sports car through the gears as they climbed the curves of New South Head Road.
“For breaking the news to me in person. For rescuing me at the airport and bringing me home. For keeping me together along the way. I do appreciate it, Ric. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” They travelled another block before he added, “You called me Ric. I must be making progress.”
She’d called him Perrini from their very first meeting, a ruse to remind him of their business relationship because she hadn’t trusted his smooth moves or her body’s unruly responses to him. They’d had to work together and she’d wanted to keep it professional. She’d fought the good fight for almost two months. And after they’d hooked up she kept on using his surname out of habit—and to tease him when he got all he-man insistent about her calling him Ric.
Now she’d done so to show the sincerity of her thanks. “It was a temporary aberration,” she said coolly. “Don’t get too used to it.”
He laughed, a two-note snort of amusement that pierced Kimberley’s numbed senses. It was dangerous, letting him charm her so easily, so quickly, but this was a temporary situation. A week at most, and she would be returning to Auckland. And right now she needed that charm and the sound of laughter because they’d arrived in Vaucluse and were climbing the street lined with multimillion-dollar homes to the most spectacular of all.
Miramare.
For the first twenty years of her life the three-storey white mansion had been Kimberley’s home. She’d never been struck by its majesty, its size, its opulence, until now as Perrini downshifted gears to negotiate the thick cluster of news teams waiting outside the security gates, and turned into the driveway. And there it was, rising before them like a Venetian palace. A home fit for the man the media dubbed Australia’s King of Diamonds.
A man who’d forbidden her from ever darkening this doorstep again when she defied his will and refused to return to work for Blackstone Diamonds.
A maelstrom of conflicting emotions—resentment, anguish, anticipation, anxiety—stormed through her as Perrini parked beneath the porte cochere. Although her gaze was fixed on the steps leading to the grand entrance, she heard the subtle scrunch of leather and sensed him shifting in his seat to face her. Her heart beat like a tom-tom drum high in her chest.
“Good to be home?” he asked.
Now there was a question! Was this home? Would her family welcome her back into their home?
When she’d quit her job at Blackstone’s and joined House of Hammond, she’d also deserted her family. That’s how it was between the two sides of the family. You chose your team: Blackstone or Hammond. There was no common ground, no fraternity, and it had never been as simple as birth name.
Sonya Hammond was the perfect example. Her mother’s much younger sister moved in with the Blackstones as a teenager. Staying after Ursula’s death completed her estrangement from her brother Oliver Hammond and his family.
But Kimberley was more worried about Ryan’s reception than Sonya’s. Her younger brother had endured his ups and downs with Howard but now he headed the Blackstone Jewellery chain, which placed him very firmly in the Blackstone camp. He didn’t approve her defection—his word, used when he’d called to try his hand at changing her mind—any more than he’d approved of her affair with, and subsequent marriage to, Perrini.
And Perrini’s question still stood unanswered.
Good to be home?
“I’m feeling many things,” she said frankly. “Good is not one of them.”
“Care to elaborate?”
Slowly she turned to face him. “I wouldn’t be here but for one thing.”
Their eyes met, the knowledge a shock of understanding that sharpened his expression into tight lines and shadowed planes. If Howard were here, she wouldn’t be. It was as simple—and as complicated to her psyche—as that.
Before Perrini could respond, something distracted him and the atypical hesitation caused her to turn back toward the house. Sonya stood on the top step, her willowy figure framed by the open front door. Kimberley’s heart beat even harder in her chest.
“She hasn’t changed,” she murmured.
Still tall, slender, beautiful, her aunt Sonya was dressed elegantly in a skirt and heels, her brown hair pulled back in the same conservative style. A warm smile graced her lips as she lifted her hand in welcome.
She looked so heartwrenchingly familiar, so Sonya, that Kimberley struggled to contain the squeal of joy that exploded inside her. Reflexively her hand lifted to the chatelaine necklace she wore around her neck, Sonya’s gift on her twenty-first birthday. Each exquisitely crafted antique charm was a symbol. Love. Fertility. Protection. Strength. Eternity.
After the dissolution of her marriage she’d put it away in its box, unworn but not forgotten. Until recently when she’d started wearing it again. She wiped away the tears that blurred her vision, then allowed Perrini to help her from the low-slung car so she could run up the stairs and into her aunt’s open arms. Then she knew why she wore the necklace.
It was her connection to home, to Sonya, whose embrace reminded her what it should feel like to come home. Tears she’d refused to cry for her father fell unrestrained as she breathed the familiar scent of her aunt’s Chanel No. 5 and felt the comforting pat of her hand on her arm.
I should not have let Perrini and my father keep me away this long. I should not have given them that power.
“I’m sorry,” she choked out fiercely through her tears. “I’m so very sorry.”
Sonya’s hug tightened for a moment as she whispered, “We all are, honey. About everything.”
Long before Kimberley was ready her aunt broke the embrace. Taking a half step back Sonya smiled through her own tears as she took Kimberley’s hands in hers. “It is so good to have you back home again, Kim, and to see you looking so beautiful…despite the circumstances.”
“It is so good to be here, despite everything that has kept me away.”
Rough emotion dimmed the light in Sonya’s warm hazel eyes. “Let’s not talk about that now. Come inside. Your brother is out on the terrace with Garth. I’m sure you can’t wait to see them both again. And Danielle arrived a little while ago, too. She flew down from Port Douglas as soon as she heard.”
Danielle was Sonya’s daughter, and she must have been waiting just inside the door for the perfect moment to make her appearance. She had changed. Between seventeen and twenty-seven Danielle Hammond had grown into a copper-haired beauty with her mother’s willowy build and a tan befitting her Port Douglas, Queensland home.
Golden eyes welling with tears, she hurried over to embrace Kimberley with the same warmth as her mother and her