When Only Diamonds Will Do by Lindsay Armstrong Page B

close to losing it, Saldanha meant even more to her than ever.
    But there were other things that weighed on her and filled her with a feeling of guilt at times—how lightly she’d taken everything that had made up her old life. Expensive schooling, then a gap year backpacking around Africa and Asia. University, all the right clothes, all the right friends, her horses, her parents’ wealth.
    She’d heard it said that Damien and Kimberley Theron went around as if they owned the district. She’d ignored the jibe at the time but now she was forced to look back and acknowledge that she may have, at times, behaved like a spoilt socialite.
    If so, it sometimes helped to remind herself that at the grand old age of twenty-two she’d come to earth with an almighty bump. And she would never forgive herself for not noticing the dire straits her parents had got themselves into sooner.
    Thinking of her parents led her to wondering—yet again—if Reith had sent them on a luxury cruise to relievethe pressure of their shock and disapproval about their daughter’s marriage.
    That’s me, she reminded herself. And she had to confess it made things much easier because, since they’d got back, the sting and impossibility of it all seemed to have subsided.
    Yes, her mother had several times tried to dig below the surface Kim presented of a busy, capable if not deliriously happy wife, until Kim had sat her down one day, taken Fiona’s hands in hers and said, ‘Mum, I’m fine. Please don’t ask me to explain things between me and Reith…they’re complicated but he’s no monster and…I am fine.’
    Fiona had grimaced, then said tremulously, ‘I just wish we were a happy family again. I hardly see anything of Damien these days.’
    ‘You’re lucky to see him at all,’ Kim had replied, then bitten her tongue. ‘But you’ve got me,’ she’d teased then.
    And her mother had hugged her mightily.
    One of the other aspects of her new life that was more rewarding than contemplating how things had changed for her, was dealing with Reith’s motherless son.
    For the most part, Darcy Richardson appeared to be a perfectly normal ten-year-old. Unlike his father, he was fair with hazel eyes and freckles, but it had struck Kim early on that he was just too perfect. He was polite, he had beautiful manners, he ate everything that was put in front of him and he came and went from his boarding school every second weekend with no sign of any regrets, no evidence of homesickness, no elationat being home either. In fact she got the feeling he was happier at school.
    Once, Kim had involuntarily said to Reith as they’d dropped Darcy back at school, ‘Is he a bit traumatized?’
    Reith had stared at the image of his son diminishing in his rear-view mirror and, as she’d watched him, Kim had taken an unexpected breath.
    There was not much she cared to admit she admired about Reith Richardson, but for one moment she’d seen a sort of suffering in his eyes she hadn’t expected him to be capable of feeling.
    ‘He…he can be a little hard to get through to sometimes,’ he’d said.
    ‘Because he lost his mother? And now his grandmother?’
    Reith had accelerated the car down the school drive. ‘He never knew his mother, but that’s obviously a cross to bear for any child. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to spend as much time with him as I’d like to have.’
    ‘That’s not unusual for a father, a breadwinner,’ Kimberley had said slowly. ‘Perhaps especially without a wife. What about your parents? Did they help out?’
    He’d cast her a look of such irony, she’d been jolted. ‘My parents?’ he’d said. ‘My mother left home when I was ten and my father never recovered. He died before Darcy was born.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d murmured and one glance beneath her lashes at his harsh features had not encouraged her to pursue the subject.
    It hadn’t left her, though, and she might not have mentioned it or discussed it with