Authors: Tilly Bagshawe
Flawless
Also by Tilly Bagshawe
Do Not Disturb
Fame
Scandalous
Adored
Showdown
Sidney Sheldon’s Mistress of the Game
Sidney Sheldon’s Angel of the Dark
Sidney Sheldon’s After the Darkness
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2010 Tilly Bagshawe
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612186948
ISBN-10: 1612186947
“J
AKE, BE CAREFUL!
You’ll lose the stones!”
The panic in Julia Brookstein’s voice was unmistakable as she reached down the side of the bed, her long fingers searching blindly through the cream shag-pile carpeting for a missing pink diamond.
“Sweetheart,” Jake Meyer’s gravelly, infinitely sexy North London accent whispered in her ear, “I carried these stones across three continents. I ran checkpoints full of armed police in Chechnya, dodged bandits in the hills of Kazakhstan, and even made it through a knife fight with some particularly tricky Triads in dear old London before I got them this far. Trust me, I’m not going to lose the finest natural pinks I ever laid eyes on under a bed in Beverly Hills. Now come here.”
Pinning both her arms above her head in the soft, marshmallow mound of pillows behind them—how the fuck did she and Al sleep on so many pillows? They must get terrible neck aches—he ran his tongue slowly along the length of her collarbone, the stubble on his chin barely grazing the tops of her massive, perfectly spherical breasts. Scattered across the black satin counterpane were more glittering diamonds, each the same translucent pink of guava flesh. Scooping some up with his left hand, Jake began dropping them carelessly onto her naked body,
smiling with satisfaction at the way they glowed against the smooth, bronzed skin of her belly and thighs.
“Oh, Jake!” she gasped, clutching wildly at his blond hair as his tongue moved tantalizingly lower. Her legs had begun to twitch with excitement, and he could feel her toes stiffen and arch beneath him, a sure sign that she was close to a climax. “Put one inside me! Please. I want to feel it inside me!”
Jake Meyer had slept with a lot of rich, married women like Julia. They were his bread and butter as a diamond dealer in Beverly Hills, and seducing them sexually went hand in hand with the job of seducing them with the gems he brought back from Russia and Africa. Or in this case, from a little-known facility in New Jersey that made some of the best simulants—fake diamonds—in the world. The little pink stones that Julia had so admired were in fact man-made garnets—gadolinium gallium garnets to be precise, known in the trade as GGG—and were almost completely worthless. But they looked the part, every bit as brilliant and dispersive as the real thing, as long as you didn’t scratch them. Jake was betting that neither Julia nor her husband, Al, a fearsomely powerful studio boss, would know the difference. Julia, a woman for whom size clearly mattered, would be delighted with the necklace and matching bracelet he’d have made up for her. Her old man would be convinced he’d beaten Jake down to a bargain-basement price. And Jake would walk away with a very tidy profit. Everyone’s a winner!
At thirty-five, Jake and his twin brother Danny were well on their way to becoming the most successful independent diamond dealers in the US. A pair of Jewish wheeler-dealers from North London and the third generation of Meyers in the diamond trade, they had moved to America in their late teens to set up the now hugely profitable Solomon Stones, with Danny working the East Coast market and Jake responsible for LA and the West. Their father, Rudy, had been a world-renowned cutter as well as a part-time smuggler in his younger days, working
the dangerous but lucrative market of Zaire. Ironically, their grandfather, Isaac, had spent most of his adult life working for the CSO, the De Beers cartel in London set up to limit the supply of diamonds to the market and capture illegally smuggled stones in an attempt to keep prices both constant and high. To say diamonds ran in the Meyer blood would be an understatement. But neither Isaac nor Rudy had had the gift of the gab, that innate talent for salesmanship so powerful it becomes more of a compulsion than a skill, that the twins were both born with. By the age of ten, Jake and Danny already had a lucrative playground business at St. Michael’s Primary School, Primrose Hill, selling cigarettes and liquor that they’d painstakingly decanted into candy wrappers and bottles of Coke, respectively. Three expulsions and a smattering of O levels later, they left school to work as full-time apprentices to their father. It soon became apparent to Rudy that neither boy had the patience or the temperament to make a master cutter. When he caught Jake trying to sell bags of worthless shavings from his workshop at Camden Market as “genuine diamond dust”—not just trying but succeeding, and at quite a price too—he bowed to the inevitable. Two years later he agreed to provide his sons with the seed capital to start Solomon Stones, buying them each a one-way ticket to America.
Success was by no means instant. Diamond dealing is a tough game, fraught with dangers at all levels, both physical and economic. The Meyer brothers were fast-talkers and had an instinctive feel for a good deal and a kosher stone, but they lacked vital experience. Even professional jewelers with years in the business are often unable to tell the difference between a rough diamond and a skillfully cut and coated piece of glass. At the end of their first year, having worked like dogs to build up a nascent client base and generate some savings, Jake and Danny lost everything on a single shipment of stones from a supposedly reliable cutting center in Israel. Like every other rookie dealer, they learned the hard way that there is no comeback with diamonds, no sale or
return, no redress. It’s still a handshake business, a closed and uniquely male club. By virtue of their birth, the Meyer boys were members of that club, but that wasn’t protection enough. After all, the value of a handshake depends on whose hand it is you’re shaking. From that point on, they never wholly trusted anyone except each other. And they made a vow to stick to what they knew, never getting greedy, keeping their operation small and focused and, crucially, well below the radar of the big cartels and established, gang-funded dealerships.
As the years passed their mistakes grew fewer, their client base expanded, and they woke up one morning to find themselves small but established players in the biggest market for polished diamonds in the world. If their family name and good instincts helped them with suppliers, it was their looks and charm that made them favorites with clients. Although twins, they weren’t identical. Danny was a good inch shorter than Jake and more stocky, and although they had the same, unnervingly intense violet-blue eyes and thick, dirty-blond hair, Jake was undoubtedly the more classically good-looking of the two. With his long, straight nose, arrogantly curling upper lip, and growling, bearlike voice that reduced women to quivering mounds of desire whenever he opened his mouth, he was a natural choice for the looks-obsessed Hollywood market. Danny was handsome too but in a softer, more understated way that played well with the more sophisticated and conservative New York women whom it was his job to impress. Both brothers were possessed of the sort of untiring libidos usually associated with basketball players or porn stars. The first time Jake bedded Julia Brookstein, she’d told him it felt like being ravished by a death-row prisoner on day release. He was renowned among the diamond-buying wives of Los Angeles for fucking every beautiful woman like she might be his last.
Sliding farther down the bed until his feet touched the padded satin footboard and his head was positioned perfectly
above Julia’s billiard-ball-smooth waxed pussy, he slipped the largest of the pink stones into his mouth. Grinning as her butterscotch thighs parted like the Red Sea to receive him, he gently pulled apart her glistening pink labia and, using his tongue, pushed the “diamond” high up into the hot, wet tunnel of her vagina.
“Hmmm.” She moaned with pleasure, clamping her legs tightly around him, and he glanced up just long enough to see the lust dilating her pupils and her lips open expectantly before returning his attention to her clitoris. Flicking his tongue across it as lightly as a dying butterfly fluttering its wings, he mentally counted to three. Right on cue Julia came, stifling her cries with a pillow as her body shuddered with spasm after spasm of pure ecstasy. With each wave of orgasm, the stone slipped lower and lower, until eventually it oozed out of her body back onto the bed, dewy wet and shining with her juices.
“Beautiful. Like watching an oyster giving up its pearl,” sighed Jake, easing himself back up the bed until he was lying beside her, face-to-face. “I’d better clean that one up and give it a quick polish before your husband sees it.”