Vows & a Vengeful Groom

by Bronwyn Jameson

  Unfortunately it wasn’t that simple.

  An initial inspection located only three bodies in the wreckage, meaning one of the men—and the marine police couldn’t even speculate on whether this was passenger or crew member—remained missing. Due to the depth of the water and adverse weather conditions brewing off the coast, the recovery operation could take several days. The process of formal identification would require the use of dental records and DNA matching, which, their police contact warned them, could take weeks rather than days.

  Looming over it all was the real and sobering possibility that the lost body might never be found…and that it could be Howard.

  The waiting continued. Kimberley appreciated being included in the inner information circle this time, and for that she thanked Perrini. Or she would once they got through the weekend and the incessant phone calls. As the Blackstone PR mouthpiece she’d decided to be more open with the press, in the hope that regular statements and updates would result in more factual stories and less speculation.

  So far it seemed to be working. Several business and social commentators had already reported on the prodigal daughter’s return to Blackstone Diamonds, and she’d taken a deep breath and agreed to an interview for a magazine piece at a date to be fixed. Positive press, she reminded herself, when her heart palpitated at the thought of such public exposure of her private self.

  “Good start,” Perrini said, in one of their few moments alone. It was late Saturday afternoon and the official gatherings and press updates had given way to the personal. Garth, her uncle Vincent and two of Howard’s yacht club cronies had called at various intervals during the afternoon to offer sympathy and support. None had left. Sonya’s tea had given way to Howard’s best whisky, and Kimberley had retreated to the terrace for a brush with solitude.

  That’s where Perrini found her and those small words of praise resulted in an inordinate rush of satisfaction. Perhaps because his expression conveyed more than words, perhaps because she was enjoying their stolen seconds of privacy a little too much. Perhaps because, for a whisper of time, their incendiary boardroom kiss sizzled the air between them.

  She liked that it wiped her mind of the deathly images imprinted in the past forty-eight hours, that it melted the icy weight of angst in her stomach, that it focussed everything on this moment, this connection, this enlivening flame in her senses.

  “I hope it’s the right start,” she said in response to his comment…and because she couldn’t resist the thinly veiled allusion to what lay unfinished between them.

  “It is.” Arrogant, supremely certain, his gaze lingered on her mouth for a telling second before drifting back to her eyes. “I like that you seized the opportunity and ran with it.”

  “I gather you’re talking about the magazine article?”

  “Of course…unless you prefer to talk about us.”

  Did she? Her heart skipped an erratic beat as she met the still intensity of his gaze. Asking too much, too fast, too soon, that look sizzled through her, charging her senses with renewed memories of their white-hot kiss and the press of his body hard against hers. A loud burst of laughter from inside the house broke the connection, reminding her they weren’t alone. Reminding her that she’d given no thought to discretion in those crazy lost-to-the-world moments when he’d lifted her onto a cherrywood sideboard.

  And that she’d given no thought to what was next.

  “No.” She lifted her chin and shook her head resolutely. “Not yet.”

  “When you are ready—” for a scant second his fingertips skimmed the back of her hand, a touch as dark and hot and double-edged as his words “—you know where to find me.”

  He left soon after, but those final words and his dark, velvet touch kept Kimberley intimate company throughout a night of little sleep. She woke early, out of sorts with herself for chickening out of that talk, not just the previous evening but ever since she learned of his intentions. He wanted her. Five minutes of hot magic in the boardroom had demonstrated that desire. But on what terms?

  And what of tomorrow?

  Did she even want to know, when the answer might reveal future needs she could not deliver?

  Her heart constricted with an aching trepidation that sent her rocketing out of bed, too antsy to lie still any longer. She pulled on three-quarter yoga pants and a sports singlet, comfort clothes that made her feel no less comfortable in her own antsy skin. She needed to get out, to escape the claustrophobic press of this house and her restless mind.

  What she needed was a long, energetic walk. Her mind conjured her favourite jaunt of old, the path that dipped and rose from beach to clifftop between Bondi and Bronte. Open air, the sea breeze on her skin, the challenge of attacking steep rock stairs and on a leisurely return trip, sinking her toes into the silky Glamarama sand…

  Yes. That’s exactly what she needed.

  It was early, so early that she beat the notoriously early-rising Sonya downstairs. If she left now she might also beat the Sunday crowds who flocked to the popular coastal walk. Although she’d been given carte blanche access to the extensive Miramare garage, she dithered several minutes before jotting a note and grabbing the keys to Sonya’s compact Mercedes.

  Fifteen minutes later she parked at the northern end of Bondi Beach and attacked the mile-long stretch of sand at a testing pace. Despite the early hour she wasn’t lonely, passing steady walkers and being overtaken by the serious exercise nuts. At the top of the first steep rise she paused to catch her breath and to absorb the stunning moment of daybreak over the Pacific horizon. Far below, waves crashed and foamed against the dark shelves of rock; far above, real estate battled for a share of the compelling view.

  One of those houses was Perrini’s.

  Would he be up, enjoying his first coffee on the deck outside his bedroom? Or was he still asleep, long limbs spread-eagled across the king-size bed, covers kicked free by a restless, overheated body?

  The image took root in her brain, and she couldn’t pry it loose. Nor could she prevent herself turning back and then taking the detour up the steep hill to the headland. When she turned into his street her heart was pounding, not from exertion but with nervous tension.

  She didn’t know what she was doing here. From the street-side, a privacy wall and the steep drop of the site protected most of his house from view. She had no clue if he was home or not. The sensible course of action would be to turn around and hotfoot it back to the car. The nonsensible, risky, spur-of-the-moment thing involved her mobile phone and a speed-dialled number.

  A light came on in a second-floor window. His bedroom. Her stomach tightened with a new and different tension.

  “Kim.” The deep morning huskiness of his voice curled through her, tightening to a stark ache low in her belly. It was desire. It was loneliness. It was the lure of a light in his bedroom window and the sound of her name on his tongue. “It’s hellish early. Is everything all right?”

  “Yes.” No. Not exactly. Why hadn’t she composed something to say before hitting that button? “I was just wondering if you were home,” she finally managed to say. “I’m in the neighbourhood and I just—” She closed her eyes, her fingers tightening in a deathgrip around her palm-size phone. “I seized the opportunity and ran with it.”

  He opened the door before she rang the bell, and for several electric seconds they stood in silence, their eyes locked. Kimberley did notice that he wore trousers and nothing else—nothing except a narrow-eyed look of intense, primal concentration that would have knocked her off her feet if he hadn’t snaked out a hand and pulled her inside.

  Vaguely she registered him reaching out to push the door shut behind her. Mostly she registered the scent that clung to his skin, the unique combination of expensive soap and male heat she’d labelled Ricaroma way back then. It still had the power to make her hormones sit up and pant.

  For a long, thick beat he studied her face, her heightened colour, the jut of her tightened breasts in a top not d
esigned for aroused nipples. “Do you want to talk?” he asked, and those female hormones rolled over and begged.

  “No.” She met his hungry look, direct, honest. “Not talk.”

  One of the things she’d always appreciated in Perrini was his ability to judge the moment. He could match words with the smoothest orators on the planet, but he knew when talk wasn’t necessary, when action spoke with the greatest eloquence.

  Without a word he led her by the captured hand to the elevator. From ground floor to second, he kissed her with the exact intensity she needed to eat away the last flutter of nerves. As he backed her toward the master bedroom, those first greedy seconds eased into a sultry meeting of lips, tongues, mouths.

  Oh, yes, the man knew when and how to use his mouth to devastating effect.

  In the doorway he paused, to tug the elastic from her ponytail, to drag her singlet over her head, to hold her arms trapped while he took her in with a low, thorough look that screamed through her senses. This was her chance to slow things down and rethink, to step away from temptation and think this through.

  From the moment she’d turned on the clifftop path and caught a glimpse of the ivory stucco walls, the jutting balconies, the glint of daybreak on bedroom glass, she’d been steel to a magnet, powerless to resist the pull. She didn’t want to think. She wanted to feel, to drive the past days from mind and body with the purest, most absolute, life-giving pleasure. The kind she had only experienced in this man’s expert hands.

  Stretching up, she kissed the raspy line of his jaw, the indent in his chin, the velvety fullness of his mouth, and they sunk into another long, deep soul kiss that waltzed them in perfect, thigh-brushing synch toward the bed. She lapped up the dark flavour of his mouth, savoured the heat and texture of his hands as they palmed her shoulders, her upper arms, the blades of her shoulders.

  Eventually he eased the connection with a delicate trail of nips from her bottom lip to her jaw and earlobe. “Shave,” he muttered, demonstrating the need with a momentary brush of his whiskery cheek against hers.

  “Shower,” she murmured, thinking about her earlier exertion and then his beautiful, big, shower-with-friends-size room.

  Thinking about him, naked and wet, his hands sliding over her skin, filled her veins with a heavy, languid beat. Their gazes connected and the same primal drumming burned in his eyes and tightened his expression. He lifted a hand, knuckles skimming over her hair before he twisted a hank around his fingers and urged her closer. When her taut nipples came into scorching contact with the hard wall of his chest, all the air left her lungs in a fractured gasp.

  Eyes locked on his, she shifted her hands from his waist to the front fastening of his trousers but he stilled her fingers beneath the flat of one hand. “It’s been too long,” he told her bluntly, “to stand much play.”

  “Too long…without?”

  “Without you.” The honesty of that statement and its inherent message—this is you, this is different—resonated through her blood and into her heart. When he released her hair and his fingertips teased across the rise of her breasts, she swallowed a lump of hot, desperate desire.

  “Same,” she said, stepping out of her shoes, her hands already peeling down her pants until she stood naked before him. “I’ll turn on the shower.”

  He didn’t let her shave him but he joined her beneath the double showerheads. He stepped straight into her arms and into a kiss that was strong and bold and without pretence. They explored each other’s bodies with the same intense, unhurried thoroughness, until his hands moulded her bottom and drew her up against his thick arousal. Their mouths came apart but their gazes held the connection as he rocked her slowly, deliberately, stoking the restless fire and testing the tenuous limit of their control.

  For a second Kimberley could do nothing but ride the wave of erotic pleasure that flooded her, then he lifted her and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his sleek, wet flanks. She felt him, hard and hot between her legs, and need—unbearably intense—swelled in her breasts and in her female core and in her heart.

  Eyes linked with his, she saw the momentary hesitation and felt the slight withdrawal, and guessed its cause.

  “No,” she whispered, not wanting to break the moment, only wanting him inside her like this, with nothing between them. “There’s no need.”

  “You’re protected?”

  “I’m…yes. There’s no risk of pregnancy.”

  Something fierce flared in his eyes, a blaze of possessiveness that caused her heart to contract and ache with the truth of the statement. No risk of conception, unless by some miracle. Then he carried her from the shower to the dressing room. He set her down on the vanity, the cool marble surface a shockingly erotic contrast to her overstimulated skin and to the heat of his hands. They spanned her waist, drawing her forward while he fed on her mouth, her throat, her breasts.

  When he fingered her slick heat, she moaned into his mouth and then his hands on her thighs opened her and anchored her when the first measured thrust of his body filled her with unbelievable heat and sensation and with a vicious jab of regret for their years spent apart.

  In the supercharged intensity of that intimate coupling, Kimberley saw the same complex mix of sensual awe and conflicted emotion in his eyes. She lifted her fingers to his mouth and felt the warm slough of his breath when he spoke low and ardent. “Welcome home, babe, where you belong.”

  She wrapped her legs higher, drawing him deeper and pulling him into a kiss that strengthened their intimate connection. Beneath her hands the harshly etched muscles of his back reflected his restraint as he started to move with a slow, controlled cadence. The pleasure was exquisite, immense, impossible.

  Her hands slid lower, relearning the shape of him as her body relearned the power of his restrained strength with each deep thrust. She traced the long planes of muscle, the dimples at the base of his spine, the taut muscles of his behind.

  And when she reached lower still, a deep shudder racked his body. His head lifted, eyes fiercely hooded as he dragged her bottom lip between his teeth and changed the angle to rock deeply against her pelvis. He didn’t need to touch her anywhere else, didn’t need to do anything except look at her. He drove her to a climax that shattered into a spray of vivid brilliance in her blood and in her flesh and in her heart.

  Ric leaned his unashamedly bare hip against the doorframe and watched her come awake with the quickness he remembered from the past. No slow stretches and yawns for Kim, her eyes opened clear and focussed, her brain already geared for action. Despite the second thoughts he imagined ticking through her agile brain right now, he smiled with satisfaction, not only because he’d taken her to bed and made love to her another time with complete, inventive thoroughness, not only because she was still here and he was thinking about a third time, but because she looked so right in his bed.

  “I wondered if you’d ever wake.”

  “Worn out,” she murmured. The contented light in her eyes as she found him watching her was a kiss to the heart. “What time is it?”

  “Quarter after midday.”

  “You’re kidding.” A frown formed between her brows. “I didn’t expect to be away so long.”

  “That’s a problem?”

  “Only that I took Sonya’s car. She might wonder….”

  When she swung her legs out of bed, Ric abandoned his nonchalant stance and moved swiftly to prevent her exodus. He sat on the edge of the mattress, trapping the sheet beneath him. Unless she wanted to slide butt-naked from under that sheet gripped across her breasts, he had a captive audience. He intended having that talk now, and finding out what prompted her surprise visit.

  “How long did you expect to be gone?” he asked.

  “When I left home, it was to do the Bronte walk. That’s all.”

  “And this—” he gestured between them with his fingers “—was a spur of the moment impulse? Alternate exercise? What, exactly?”

  “An impul
se,” she admitted, hunching her shoulders into a tight shrug. “After this weekend, everything about the crash seemed a little too real and…graphic. I wanted to take an hour to forget about searches and victims and means of identification. I wanted those images out of my mind.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Yes.” Her gaze lifted, stark and luminous with the same emotion that coloured her voice. “Thank you…not only for this morning, but for everything this weekend. I appreciated being included in the meetings, even though Ryan disapproved. And thank you for allowing me to make the media statements.”

  “That’s your job.”

  “I’m not officially on the payroll until tomorrow,” she pointed out. Then said, “Thank you for calling Danielle and getting her back so swiftly. Sonya needed her family around her this weekend.”

  “No need to thank me,” Ric said quietly. “She’s the closest I have to family.”

  “I noticed.”

  “And you don’t approve?”

  “I don’t understand,” she clarified. Then she shook her head and blew out a breath. “No, that’s not quite right. I think I understand all too well.”

  Alerted by the edge to her voice, Ric’s gaze narrowed on her face. “What is it you think you’re seeing here, Kim?”

  “My father welcomed you with open arms when you married me, and it wasn’t only as an approved son-in-law. He’d always looked on you as a surrogate son, a replacement for the one he’d lost.”

  This revelation wasn’t news to Ric, he’d always suspected that part of Ryan’s antagonism toward him was based on a similar belief. But that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. Not when coming from Kim. Not when it was just plain ludicrous. “Howard never saw me as a substitute for James. Why would he, when he believed James was still alive?”