When Only Diamonds Will Do (10 page)

Kim tossed her head. ‘Don’t waste your time trying to make me feel guilty about that,’ she said proudly. ‘You’d have got someone else to do it if it hadn’t been me, but no one,’ she assured him, ‘would have restored Saldanha as well as I could.’

‘Spoken like a true Theron,’ he drawled. ‘It’s just a pity you don’t—you haven’t to date—made it a happy home.’

She shrugged. ‘If you ever thought I was going to—’

‘Lie down in a bed of your own making?’ he interrupted sardonically. ‘All right, let’s talk about that, Kim.’ He closed the gap between them in a few steps.

She stood her ground. ‘Not
my
making,’ she denied through her teeth.

‘
Our
making, then.’ He stopped in front of her.

She shivered but she knew immediately that she should have run, she should not have allowed herself to be trapped by the fatal physical fascination he’d held for her almost from the start. How
could
she still feel like this about him? she wondered in fleeting despair. Her pulse started to race as he stared down at her mouth and then his hands circled her waist.

‘You said something about a “vastly better reason” for us to be married.’ He looked into her eyes and his hands moved on her waist. ‘There is, there always has been—and it’s this.’ He drew her into his arms.

‘Reith—’

It was a breath of sound but he ignored it. She thought
he was going to kiss her, but he said, barely audibly, ‘Remember doing this?’

Her eyes widened in surprise. ‘I…Yes. I mean—yes, of course, well …’ She closed her eyes and bit her lip in some confusion.

He laughed softly. ‘So do I. It went something like this, didn’t it?’ And this time he did kiss her.

Kim tensed but he took his hands from her waist and cupped her face and trailed his fingers down the side of her neck—and all the things he’d made her feel came back to haunt her. Things she hadn’t even been able to document to herself but now the memories of them, which must have lain just below the surface, were aroused. All her appreciation of his hard, honed bulk, the feeling of protection his arms around her had brought, the shivery delight caused by his fingers on her skin, the way her nipples flowered in almost unbearable expectation …

She was breathing raggedly as they drew apart and her legs felt unsteady. She was completely under his spell as she looked up into his eyes. There was not an ounce of fight left in her—she would have collapsed if he’d let her go, so great had been the impact of his kiss, so like a starving person brought to a feast had he made her feel.

Then, finally, a sound she knew well gained her attention. The familiar whirl of helicopter rotors as his company chopper settled onto the helipad outside.

‘You…What…Where?’ she stammered in disbelief. ‘Is that for you?’ She managed to sound more coherent.

He nodded. ‘I’m off to Geraldton.’

‘Did you know this?’

‘Did I know I was leaving tonight? Yes. Kim—’

She pulled herself out of his arms. ‘Don’t let me detain you.’

‘Kim—’ a glint of amusement lit his eyes ‘—I’m sorry, I’d forgotten. You’re not the only one somewhat…discomfited.’

‘Oh, I’ll be fine,’ she assured him and shrugged. ‘Just another of those ships in the night encounters we have from time to time.’

‘Kim,’ he said deliberately.

‘No, Reith, I’m really tired anyway. Get Alice to let me know your movements if they affect mine. Goodnight.’ She turned away as the helicopter pilot knocked on the back door.

But getting to sleep was another matter. She couldn’t stop thinking about how she couldn’t relinquish her opposition to the way Reith had married her but she couldn’t stifle her attraction to him either…She couldn’t quell her fears about the loner she sensed in him—and now knew it was not her imagination but a reality.

‘I have to do something, though,’ she whispered to herself as she dried her eyes and lay back. ‘This is so…so unlike me.’

To make matters worse for her, when she did fall into a restless sleep it was to dream of Reith and a girl with Darcy’s fair hair but with Reith always walking away from her …

She didn’t come into contact with her husband for nearly a week and then more or less by accident.

It was five o’clock on a sunny afternoon and she was dressing to go to a neighbour’s barbecue when she paused with her brush in her hand and a frown growing on her forehead. It wasn’t the sound of the chopper she was hearing but in the clear afternoon air she could hear a vehicle coming up the driveway that sounded just like Reith’s.

She walked over to the window and, sure enough, it was Reith—who was supposed to be in Adelaide.

She stood rooted to the spot, for some reason unable to move as she heard the car pull up, the front door open, then his footsteps on the stairs.

Thoughts raced through her mind: I don’t know what to say to him—I haven’t spoken to him since that evening!

‘Kim? Are you home?’

She tried to say yes, but nothing came out. She cleared her throat. ‘… In here.’

He came in and her heart seemed to beat somewhere up in her throat just at the sight of him. She forced herself into speech to counteract that accelerated heartbeat.

‘I thought you were in Adelaide.’

‘I was supposed to be but—’ he shrugged ‘—the meeting I had scheduled was cancelled.’ He looked her up and down, her long ink-blue skirt, her chic hyacinth pink silk shirt, the wide turquoise belt emphasizing her narrow waist, her jewelled sandals. ‘Going somewhere?’ he asked with a lifted eyebrow.

Kim nodded. ‘Pippa Longreach’s barbecue. I did tell Alice about it but she told me you’d be in Adelaide.’

‘I’d be in Adelaide,’ he echoed. ‘Just as well I’m not.’

‘Oh?’ she queried.

He smiled at her. ‘I can keep you safe from Lachlan.’

Kim blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know very well what I mean, Kim. He may be Pippa’s toy boy—’ he grimaced ‘—but he’s got a huge crush on you. Give me ten minutes; I need a shower.’ And he disappeared into his bedroom.

Kim stared after him, prey to a host of conflicting emotions. She’d been dreading this encounter.

She was thoroughly conscious that on the night of the fashion parade what she’d set out to achieve—a fact-finding mission, in essence—had rebounded on her somewhat.

In other words, Reith’s motivation for marrying her, other than physical attraction, was still unclear but her own motivation—her parents—had sounded, well, flimsy. Would it have been proudly foolhardy but somehow more—what was the right word—honourable?—to have turned his offer down?

She turned away, put her brush down and finished her make-up.

But of course—her hands stilled in the act of stroking mascara onto her lashes—her real fear about this meeting had been how she would react to him, how she would be able to defend herself against kissing him the way she had, if he called her to account over it, if he had that right.

She capped the mascara wand and picked up her
lipstick. But it had been quite normal, this first meeting after that night, she thought, as she painted her lips a soft luminous pink, then reached for a tissue to blot them. Would things stay that way between them, though, or was her moment of reckoning still to come?

P
IPPA
L
ONGREACH
’
s
barbecues were usually a lot of fun.

Pippa was an artist of quite some repute. In her fifties she’d divorced her second husband and was currently maintaining a toy boy who went by the name of Lachlan. He was ridiculously good-looking and well-built, with not a lot to say, however.

Although Pippa was primarily a painter, she was also a talented potter and screen-printer. Her home and its large terrace and garden showed off her art in many ways. There were pottery urns and statues in the garden and Pippa didn’t only paint on canvas, she painted on walls, ceilings and doors.

She was also a gourmet chef and she grew a lot of her own vegetables, fruit and herbs.

Not only were her barbecues delicious, but they were also visual feasts and you never knew who you were likely to meet—from the famous to the notorious.

It was a starry night above the lively throng of guests and there were fairy lights strung through the trees, beneath which long wooden tables and benches had been set up and laid with colourful crockery.

A pig spit-roasted over a bed of glowing coals was part of the first course, accompanied by delicious homegrown roasted beetroot and corn, new potatoes in their jackets drizzled with melted butter and parsley, and a divine ratatouille. Homemade cob breads and real butter were on the tables.

As if all that wasn’t enough, after a suitable interval Pippa served desserts, in typical Pippa style. She wheeled a whole trolley of them out: pavlovas topped with cream and passion fruit or cream and strawberries, a mocha soufflé, a brandy pudding, a sticky date pudding, orange glacé iced cupcakes …

Kim stared at the trolley, then turned to Reith, only to find him looking at her with comical disbelief, dismay and the same
will I be able to resist this?
expression that she wore.

She had to laugh and so did he.

He’d changed into jeans and boots and a cream linen shirt with patch pockets. During dinner he’d been good company but unobtrusively so.

Now, her smile faded and she turned away.

He drew a bottle of wine out of a pottery cooler and filled up her glass, then reached into an ice-filled tub, pulled out a beer and poured it into his glass.

‘Cheers,’ he said, touching his glass to hers.

‘Cheers,’ she repeated, still not looking at him.

‘Hasn’t been so bad, has it?’ He narrowed his eyes as he watched for her reaction.

Kim blinked. ‘No. I mean…I’m not sure what you mean. It’s been a lovely evening.’ She paused and
frowned. ‘Do you really believe what you said about Lachlan?’

Reith allowed his dark gaze to drift over to where Lachlan was sitting alone, looking magnificently moody, although he had been helping Pippa earlier.

‘Yep.’ He grimaced.

‘But he hasn’t been near me tonight and he’s never said a thing to me that could be construed as…as anything but…OK.’

‘Sensible guy,’ Reith commented dryly.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Kim stared at him with a frown in her eyes. ‘Surely not what I think?’

‘Surely yes.’ He shrugged and a fleeting smile twisted his lips. ‘You don’t honestly think I’d stand by and allow some overgrown hunk to pay attention to my wife? I—’

‘Reith—’ she broke in ‘—are you sure you’re not imagining it?’

‘Kim, no,’ he said impatiently. ‘I’ve seen the way he looks at you.’

She stared at him with her lips parted. ‘Well, he’s wasting his time,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t like him, I don’t like the way he’s sponging off Pippa.’

‘Pippa’s old enough to be able to work things out for herself,’ he drawled, ‘but I’m glad you don’t like him. Maybe, one day, he’ll even be on the receiving end of some of your famed Theron arrogance—No—’ he put his hand on her arm as she went to jump up ‘—don’t. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about Lachlan or the party in the first place.’

She subsided and looked confused. ‘What were you talking about?’

He paused and stretched out a hand to touch the gold bracelet she wore on her right wrist, giving her goose bumps as his long fingers played with the little links. And he seemed content to concentrate on what he was doing until, at last, he raised his dark gaze to hers.

‘Us,’ he said. ‘Our last meeting was traumatic, to say the least, but it hasn’t been so bad being in each other’s company tonight, has it?’

A slow tide of colour mounted in Kim’s cheeks and she lowered her lashes to hide the confusion in her eyes.

‘You were worried about it?’ he hazarded.

She could only nod after a moment.

‘Of course, it’s always easier in the midst of a crowd,’ he suggested rather quizzically.

Kim glanced around at the ‘crowd’ but no one seemed to be taking the least interest in them. Then she looked directly at him at last. ‘I…I suppose so,’ she agreed.

‘So, despite the fact that we make good sparring partners, we’re also good in crowds, you and I.’

‘What are you getting at now, Reith?’ she enquired with a frown.

He shrugged. ‘Just putting together a base table of the things we
can
do together.’

Kim stared at him and her lips twitched in spite of herself. ‘You can’t go very far on…That’s only two.’

‘I left out the most notable one. We’d need to be alone, as we were the other night until fate intervened—’ he looked heavenwards a shade dryly ‘—to
go into that.’ He watched with interest as another tide of colour rose in her cheeks.

Kim bit her lip. ‘I thought I might have to account for that—talking of base tables and things,’ she added with a touch of tartness. ‘I presume that’s what you’re on about?’

He played with her bracelet in silence for a few moments, then, ‘Any thoughts you’d like to contribute? At all?’

Kim hesitated, then she said slowly and painfully, ‘There is a physical attraction, but how do you know what the real thing is?’

‘Love?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t. Perhaps only time can tell.’ He stared into her eyes.

‘What was her name?’ Kim heard herself asking barely audibly. ‘Darcy’s mother.’

She flinched as she saw the hardening of his expression and was quite prepared for him not to answer, but he said after a little pause, ‘Sylvia. Sylvie or even Syl for short.’

‘Did she…No.’ Something inside her made her draw the line at asking him any more about Darcy’s mother but it had also prompted her to think about his life at the time and before. ‘You told me you didn’t really grow up in a boundary rider’s hut.’

He grimaced. ‘No. But I did grow up on a remote cattle station. All the same, I went to the station school and my mother was a teacher so I had that influence
before she took off for parts unknown. I’m told I was reading the Bible when I was four.’

Kim blinked as she absorbed this and at the same time absorbed the flicker of something cold in his eyes as he’d mentioned his mother. And she remembered what he’d said once about not forgiving his parents.

‘So…so your father was a cattleman?’

He shook his head. ‘My father was a chartered accountant who got caught up in a scam that was not of his making. He got barred all the same and never recovered from the shame of it all. He wasn’t even a boundary rider, which at least sounds a bit romantic; he was the station bookkeeper.’

Kim stared at him with her lips parted. ‘That’s…awful.’

He shrugged. ‘He certainly made heavy weather of it. He was cynical and untrusting.’ He paused. ‘If there was ever any joy in him it all got leached out. What persuaded my mother to stay with him as long as she did I don’t know but the one thing I found hard to forgive her for was not taking me with her when she decamped.’

Kim’s eyes were huge now. ‘That’s worse. So your mother ran away? How could she have left you, though? What was she like?’ she asked with a frown.

‘She was bright and bouncy, she was fun and she always tried to make the best of things. I think she came to know it was never going to work but my father would never let me go. She may even have thought he’d “go easier” on me if she wasn’t there.’ He shrugged. ‘All he said when he read the note she left was, “Good riddance”.’

‘Did he go “easier” on you?’

‘It wasn’t in him to go easily on anyone.’ He smiled dryly. ‘It’s all water under the bridge now, although—’ he paused and narrowed his eyes ‘—you said something once about an exclusion zone. I think it was something Sylvie found she couldn’t get through, while I couldn’t even put a name to it or understand it; I think that in hindsight, at least. What a pity,’ he said with considerable irony, ‘hindsight couldn’t be foresight.’

‘Are you…Are you doing enough for Darcy, Reith?’ Kim heard herself asking urgently after she’d thought all this through. ‘I mean—why does he have to go to boarding school?’

Reith finally stopped fiddling with her bracelet and took a draught of his beer. ‘It’s a very good boarding school.’

‘I’m not saying it isn’t,’ she replied impatiently.

‘He seems happy there.’

‘He seems too happy there,’ Kim observed. ‘I mean—’ she gestured ‘—I get the feeling he’s relieved to go back, although not so much now he’s got Rusty—incidentally, I meant to ask you about that. The local gymkhana is coming up. Can I enter them? It’ll be during the school holidays.’

‘If they’re good enough. What? Jumping? Dressage?’

‘I’ll look at the programme. He’s really come along amazingly well—Darcy, I mean.’

Reith looked amused. ‘He should. It’s in his blood on both sides.’

‘You ride? You rode—of course you did!’ Kim
marvelled at her own stupidity. ‘Why don’t you ride at Saldanha?’ She stared at him questioningly.

‘Never seem to have the time.’

There was a whoosh as a bonfire was lit and flames and glowing points of light flew skywards.

Kim blinked and watched for a while but she had something on her mind, brought there by his story and the loneliness he must have experienced. ‘Reith, why don’t you bring Darcy home?’ she asked at last.

Reith took a draught of his beer and put his glass down. ‘Kim—’ He stopped abruptly, then said deliberately, ‘I can’t guarantee Saldanha as a happy home for him.’

Kim clicked her tongue in annoyance. ‘I have never shown the slightest animosity towards you in front of Darcy—and don’t you dare dispute that,’ she warned him with her most haughty expression.

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said with mock meekness. ‘But living together all the time is different.’

‘Is that one of the reasons you married me?’ she asked out of the blue as the thought struck her. ‘If so, why didn’t you say so?’

‘You mean you’d have married me happily because of my son?’ He tilted his head to one side to look at her quizzically. ‘Pity I didn’t think of that. Incidentally, Kimberley Theron—’ he pressed on as she made to speak ‘—I had no intention of asking you to marry me.’

‘Blackmailing me into marrying you, don’t you mean?’

He rubbed his jaw. ‘Whatever—until you took your family’s side that day in the pub.’

‘You expected me to…to take your side?’ she said raggedly and gestured helplessly as she couldn’t go on, so extreme was her frustration.

‘I expected at least one of you to take a sane, rational, businesslike view of the matter,’ he said coolly. ‘I even thought we, you and I,’ he said deliberately, ‘had got on well enough for you to assess the facts first before you gave me my marching orders.’

Kim opened her mouth to say something bitter and pithy but she was reminded suddenly of her feeling of discomfort at the time when she was using her father’s arguments—discomfort because they hadn’t sounded sane, rational and businesslike?

‘I also found it hard to believe you didn’t know who I was,’ he said.

Kim blinked several times. ‘Come again?’

He shrugged. ‘It was hard to imagine how they’d been able to keep it from you.’

She swallowed and drank some of her wine. ‘That was partly my fault. I should have realized something was wrong.’ She shook her head. ‘I must have been blind. If it’s any comfort to you, Reith Richardson—’ her eyes were sombre ‘—there’s an awful lot I’ve taken myself to task for since you—’ she grimaced ‘—came into my life.’

‘Change was going to happen for you anyway, Kim. It would have been someone else changing your life if it hadn’t been me,’ he said quietly.

A sparkle of amusement lit her eyes for one brief moment. ‘They might not have wanted to marry me, though.’

She propped her chin on her hand and looked into the firelight for a long moment. Until it slowly dawned on her that Reith had gone very still as he stared at her. She had no idea that her profile was exquisite in the firelight against the darkened sky, that her skin was rose on gold, her hair more gold than red in the same firelight and her eyes like sapphires.

She lifted an eyebrow at him. ‘Penny for them?’

He seemed to come back from a long way away. He finished his beer and said, as he put his glass down and squared it with the edge of the table, ‘We don’t need to be married any more, Kim. Oh—’ he gestured as her eyes widened and she paled ‘—don’t worry about your parents.’

‘I don’t understand!’

They were back at Saldanha.

They’d taken a distracted leave of Pippa—at least Kim had been distracted. Reith had been perfectly normal. And on the short drive home she’d struggled to find words through the utter sense of shock she was experiencing, whilst he’d said nothing at all and hadn’t appeared to be struggling with anything.

‘Reith,’ she implored, all but tripping over her skirt and Sunny Bob as she climbed out of the car.

‘It’s over, Kim,’ he said as he unlocked the door and gestured for her to precede him into the house. ‘I’ll move out tomorrow. That’s all there is to it.’

Kim stalked inside and waited for him to do the same. Then she stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Reith Richardson,’ she said precisely, ‘I’ve spent all the
time I’ve known you on one kind of a roller coaster or another. Equally, I’ve had to make do with the limited information you see fit to feed me and I’m sick to
death
of it. So hand over my car keys. They’re on the table behind you.’ She put out a hand imperiously.