Flawless Read online

  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

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  “JAKE, 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.”

  “You’re terrible,” giggled Julia. “You’ll do anything or anyone to make a sale, won’t you, Jake Meyer?”

  She seemed to have conveniently forgotten that it was she who’d dragged him into bed this morning and not the other way around.

  “Not true,” said Jake as he padded barefoot into the master bathroom, pulling up the jeans he hadn’t had time to take off. “I wouldn’t screw Antonia Jacobs if she promised to buy the Star of India from me.”

  Julia giggled again. Ron Jacobs was another studio boss, her husband’s great rival, and his wife was what was politely referred to in Beverly Hills society as “plus-sized.” “Don’t be mean,” she scolded. “Toni has a glandular problem; it’s not her fault. She’s got a heart of gold.”

  “Yeah, and an arse of lead,” said Jake, turning on the gold taps at one of the his-’n’-hers black onyx sinks in Julia’s bathroom and gently scrubbing the stone with soap and water. It never ceased to amaze him how women like Julia could show such genuine loyalty and sisterhood toward their girlfriends but thought nothing of screwing over their poor schmuck husbands. Of course, Al Brookstein might be doing the dirty on his wife too. A guy like that must have bimbos all over him, day and night. But he’d be hard pressed to find a better lay than the one he’d married. Jake should know.

  “What time do you think your old man might get back?” he asked, slipping the cleaned stone into a dry felt pouch in his pocket, then scouring the carpet for the few smaller strays that had fallen off the bed before. “He’s not gonna flake on me, is he? ’Cause I’ve got a lot of people interested in these pinks.”

  Julia’s beautiful, miraculously surgery-free face instantly hardened. She didn’t give a damn who else Jake slept with, but she’d never forgive him if he let another woman touch those diamonds. She was, in so many ways, a woman after his own heart.

  “He’ll be here,” she said frostily. “I told him three o’clock, to give us time to…you know.”

  “Negotiate?” suggested Jake, stuffing the rest of the diamonds into his briefcase and pulling his black T-shirt on over his head.

  “Exactly,” said Julia.

  Just then a door could be heard slamming downstairs and a loud, nasal voice began echoing around the house. “Ju-Ju? Jules? Are you there, honey?”

  Julia’s face drained of as much color as her professional fake-bake tan would allow, and she looked with wild-eyed panic at Jake. “Oh my God!” she whispered. “It’s him; it’s Al. He’s twenty minutes early, the stupid jerk. He’s never early!”

  Jake shook his head, looking remarkably unperturbed. “Some people are so thoughtless.”

  “This is not a joke,” hissed Julia, her voice half-whisper, half-sob. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  Grabbing her yellow Fred Segal sundress from the floor, Jake threw it at her, then pulled her roughly up off the bed and onto her feet. “Get into the bathroom and get dressed,” he said. “Lock the door. And take this with you.” Reaching into his jeans pocket, he pulled out the enormous rock that moments ago had been throbbing between her legs, and thrust it into her bewildered hand. “Go! I’ll deal with things here.”

  He straightened the bed in lightning-quick time, opened his briefcase, and hurriedly emptied the remaining pinks back onto the black satin bedspread. He barely had time to slip on his handmade Italian loafers and straighten his blond mop of hair before Al Brookstein stormed in, looking far from happy.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” he snarled at Jake. “Where’s my wife?”

  “She’s in the bathroom, looking at a fuck-off pink diamond I brought back from Siberia,” said Jake breezily. “What do you think of these?” He gestured to the jewels sprinkled across the bed.

  Ignoring him, Al marched over to the bathroom but found the door locked. “Julia?” he called. “You in there?”

  “Oh hi, Al. I didn’t hear you come in.” Appearing in the doorway in her cute yellow sundress and flip-flops, her long honey mane tied back in a ponytail, and her skin still slightly flushed from sex, she looked both utterly desirable and a picture of innocence. Al, a short, beetle-browed man in a crumpled suit who looked every one of his fifty-two years, softened slightly.

  “Jake was showing me some diamonds.” Julia smiled. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “Hmmm,” said Al, fingering the pink stone she handed him and calculating how much Meyer might try to charge him for it. The thing was almost the size of a fucking golf ball—never a good sign in his book. “He couldn’t show you downstairs?”

  Julia looked worryingly blank for a moment, but Jake came to her rescue.

  “I wanted her to see the color against a black background,” he said casually, “so we came up here. Nice bedding by the way, Alan. Very P. Diddy. Come and have a look.”

  Torn between annoyance at Jake, who he was sure was mocking him, and desperation to steer his young wife toward the smaller, more affordable diamonds, Al grumpily walked back over to the bed. He was a wealthy man, but Julia’s diamond obsession would have tested the bank account of the Aga Khan. Like many of Hollywood’s rich and powerful men, Al Brookstein had developed a distrust of Jake Meyer that bordered on loathing. Not only did the bastard look like Daniel Craig, with the sort of washboard abs that few fifty-something husbands could aspire to, but he was always sniffing around Julia and her friends, dangling bling in front of them like a fucking drug dealer. The mere sight of his distinctive blue-and-silver Maserati in the driveway just now had already brought on Al’s chest pains.

  “Pretty,” he said grudgingly, picking up a midsized stone. “How much?”

  “Al,” Julia chided him. “I’m sorry, Jake. My husband has no soul.” She was about to come out of the bathroom but thought better of it when an unmistakably fishy whiff of sex drifted up from her body, retreating ins
tead for a surreptitious wash while Al was still distracted.

  “Not at all,” said Jake brightly. “I’m always happy to cut to the chase and talk business. Perhaps you and I should go downstairs, Mr. B? Get down to the nitty-gritty, as it were.”

  “I’m not necessarily buying anything from you today, Meyer,” said Al, in the hopeless tone of a man who knows he is already defeated. “Let’s get that straight right off the bat.”

  “I want the big one!” yelled Julia from the bathroom.

  Jake smiled. Sometimes his job really was too easy.

  An hour later, pulling out of the Brooksteins’ wrought-iron gates onto North Canon Drive, Jake gave a little whoop of triumph. He’d just sold a three-carat hunk of GGG for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a man famed throughout the entertainment business for being one of the toughest negotiators in Hollywood. Flicking the switch to let the top down on his beloved customized convertible, he luxuriated in the sunshine that seemed to pour out of the LA sky like an inexhaustible stream of liquid butter, even in December. He often missed London, his mates, the pub, the know-it-all taxi drivers, the women with breasts that jiggled when they moved, and faces that moved when they talked. But he had to admit that Los Angeles could be a pretty spectacular place to live too, especially on days like today.

  Heading down the canyon into Beverly Hills proper, speeding past the seemingly endless rows of tasteless Persian mansions with their manicured lawns and vast, vulgar statues of lions in gold or marble guarding their gates, he couldn’t resist putting in a brief, gloating call to Danny. He imagined his brother freezing his ass off on a Manhattan street somewhere, soaked to the bone in icy drizzle, and began to feel even more pleased with himself as he selected the familiar number.

  “Dan?” The phone rang only twice before Danny picked up. “You’ll never guess what I’ve just done.”

  “Not now, Jakey,” came the terse reply. “I’ll ring you back.”