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 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