Killer Diamonds

by Rebecca Chance

  ‘I’m disappointed,’ Angel said, sending a curl of smoke up to the mirror above. ‘Aren’t you going to blow me even once, for old times’ sake?’

  ‘Well, maybe for you,’ Nicole said, reaching out a hand to tweak one of his nipples. ‘For old times’ sake. You’re in great shape, Angel.’

  ‘I’m vain,’ he said negligently. ‘I play tennis and squash every day and eat paleo.’

  Nicole looked appreciatively down his body. Long, strong limbs and a nicely muscled chest, with a stomach that wasn’t rippled with muscle but smooth and flat: a tennis player’s body, not a bodybuilder’s. He was very well proportioned, the slimness of his hips making his cock look even bigger by contrast, and very smooth – only a light dusting of golden hair on his thighs and forearms, the nest of curls at his groin a deeper guinea-gold, as were the damp tufts of hair at his armpits.

  However elegant and lean his body was, though, it was Angel’s face that melted so many hearts. He fully lived up to the name his mother had given him on first sight of his delicate features; his wide, amethyst eyes were just as stunning on a grown man as they had been on a small child, and although his fair curls were darker now, deep gold rather than white-blond, they still framed his face like a halo. His features were those of a Byronic hero, with his high forehead, straight nose and full, almost pouty lips the colour of raspberry sorbet.

  ‘You know, I think you’re dead wrong about the calorie content of come,’ he said, reaching for his phone. ‘I’d be a lot fatter if you were right. And look what great bodies gay men have! It’s just not possible.’

  Nicole frowned as she took this in. Angel was thumbing his phone, tapping those words into a search engine.

  ‘If that bitch did it deliberately,’ she said with rising wrath, ‘I’m going to – ugh, I don’t know what I’ll do, but something really, really bad . . .’

  ‘Five to ten calories, tops,’ Angel announced cheerfully. ‘Thank God. No saturated fat, only one per cent cholesterol, and phew, a very low sodium content. And . . . drumroll, wait for it . . . carbohydrate content negligible. Effectively zero per cent. You’ve been had, Nicole. Some jealous bitch want to steal your man away from you?’

  ‘That fucking cow,’ Nicole said with real venom, sitting up to stub out her cigarette, twisting to the ashtray on the bedside table. She was so slim that her flat stomach barely bulged as she did so. ‘I’m going to have to think up something really awful to revenge myself.’

  ‘Roofie her and shave her head,’ Angel said. ‘Go old-school.’

  ‘Honestly, you’re right,’ Nicole said. ‘Remember when I did that to that slut Gisele at school because she was Herr Hoffman’s little whore and I was crazy about him? We didn’t have roofies then, though. I had to get her really drunk on Martini Dry.’

  ‘Didn’t she burn her arse on a radiator?’ Angel said, exhaling another curl of smoke. ‘Or am I thinking of someone else?’

  ‘No, it was perfect!’ Nicole said, cheering up at the memory. ‘I got her to drink nearly the whole bottle on a dare, and then when she passed out I shaved her head with Panio’s electric razor.’

  ‘God, he was so hairy!’ Angel said. ‘He looked like he was wearing a black mohair sweater underneath his shirt. Put me off Greek boys for years.’

  Nicole giggled.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘after I shaved her head I left her there with all the hair just lying around her, but she must have got up in the middle of the night and gone for a wee – all that Martini – and instead of going to the loo, she sat down on the bathroom radiator instead and pissed on it right there, and she burnt her bum in stripes – it was one of those old iron metal ones. She was so out of it she didn’t even realize what she’d done till she woke up later and started screeching in pain. Matron had her face down in the infirmary for three days. She couldn’t sit down properly for at least a week.’

  Nicole smirked.

  ‘And Herr Hoffman liked to do it best with the girl sitting on his lap in her little tennis skirt, so by the time she was fit to go again I’d been in there for weeks fucking him dry,’ she finished with great satisfaction. ‘He was a bit of a disappointment, actually. Not that big and he didn’t last that long. But I still fucked him all the rest of the term, just to piss off Gisele.’

  ‘So,’ Angel said, extinguishing his own cigarette and sitting up, ‘poor little Gisele had stripes all over her arse, did she?’

  Nicole flipped onto her stomach and reached back to trace lines down her smooth bottom.

  ‘Like this,’ she said, watching him with her head turned to one side on the pillow, her hazel eyes bright. ‘And this, and this . . .’

  ‘I think,’ Angel said, his cock hardening as she drew her finger slowly along her buttocks, ‘that we should recreate that effect for old times’ sake. Don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, wriggling contentedly. ‘God, Angel, we have to talk business! You keep distracting me! I’ve got this fantastic proposition for you. A massive score. Really, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’

  ‘But darling, I don’t want a timeshare in Florida!’ Angel said, swinging his long legs off the bed.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said, giggling. ‘As if. No, it’s genius. We could both make a fortune. It’s very devious, though.’

  ‘Sounds right up my street,’ Angel said as he strolled over to the wall of built-in wardrobes that lined one whole side of the large bedroom. ‘You must tell me all about it after I’ve striped your bottom.’

  From one of the wardrobes, he retrieved something that he swished menacingly through the air as he returned to the bed.

  ‘Ooh! A proper cane!’ Nicole said in delight. ‘Just like Madame Martel had!’

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ Angel said smugly, ‘but it’s exactly the same one. I convinced her to give it to me when I left school. I said I wanted a fond memento that would always remind me of her in the years to come.’

  ‘You were always her favourite,’ Nicole said. ‘Teacher’s pet.’

  ‘She let me do some of the canings in my last year,’ Angel said. ‘You were gone by then, of course. I often used to fantasize it was your arse I was striping.’

  ‘Well, now it is!’ Nicole reached forward, grabbed a pillow and slid it under her hips.

  ‘I won’t go mad,’ he said, running the cane down the cleft of her buttocks, making her writhe a little in anticipation. ‘Just a few perfect strokes, some pretty red lines I can look at later while I fuck you from behind. Trust me, I was Madame Martel’s best student.’

  The cane lifted and came down with a hiss as it sliced through the air and onto Nicole’s left buttock. As promised, it was the lightest of touches, far away from anything that could have cut the skin, and it left a straight red stripe, perfectly vertical, which caused the wielder of the cane to smile in satisfaction.

  ‘I think there’s room for five more,’ he said delightedly. ‘Oh, Nicole, you’re going to love how this looks. Really, it’s just like being back at school!’

  Chapter Five

  Tylösand, Sweden – the same afternoon

  Christine Smith was sweaty and pink-cheeked, her leg muscles aching, her chest heaving from her long scramble along the crags and rocky outcrops that lined this part of the Swedish shoreline. Glancing at her watch, she was taken aback to see she had been walking – or rather hiking – for almost two hours; she wasn’t naturally sporty. Clearly, she had needed to burn off even more frustration than she had realized.

  Christine was taking a huge risk being here in Sweden, rather than back in London at her desk at Berkeley, the auction house where she worked. Every day that she woke up in her luxurious room at the five-star Hotel Tylösand, she was digging a deeper hole for herself, because it meant that another twenty-four hours had passed without her achieving what she had come here to do. She was spending money she didn’t have, and because she had taken unpaid leave from work, she was depleting her scanty resources without the anticipation of much sal
ary landing in her account at the end of the month.

  God knew, even a whole month’s salary wasn’t exactly a generous sum. Auction houses famously paid their lower-grade staff very little – those jobs were usually taken by scions of rich families, fresh from an Art History degree at Cambridge or the Courtauld Institute, who were supported by trust funds and had rent-free accommodation at the flat in Eaton Square their family used as London digs. Christine had only snagged the post of assistant gemmologist in Berkeley’s Fine Gems department because her qualifications were as close to perfect as humanly possible. Birmingham University might not have the glamour of Cambridge or the Courtauld, but its three-year BSc in Gemmology and Jewellery Studies was the most respected degree in her field, and she had been not only the most gifted but the most hardworking student, according to her professors, for many years.

  For Christine, there had never been any other option but hard work. Taken into care at five, she had ended up with foster parents whose house was run like a business, taking in as many children as they could with the consideration entirely on how to maximize the stipend they were paid per head. It was a dormitory rather than a home, the children expected to stay out until dinnertime and head straight to their rooms after bolting down their meal – rooms they shared with as many other kids as could be crammed into them.

  Christine’s escape had been the library during the day and borrowed books at night, headphones in her ears to block out the mayhem of the other foster kids fighting around her, a torch under the covers to read after lights out. When, at fifteen, she had come across a crime novel in which the detective had had to consult a gemmologist at an auction house about whether a diamond necklace was real or fake, it was as if the torch had turned to illuminate her own face. That was the career for her, she had known instinctively, and she had never wavered from it. Like a child taking part in a school play and realizing they want to be an actor, or seeing a pianist on TV and suddenly craving to take piano lessons, Christine had known not only that she wanted to be a gemmologist, but that she would have a natural talent for it.

  Every decision after that had been made with a single goal in mind: to secure a place on that degree course, to be elected a Fellow of the Gemmological Institute of Great Britain, and to get a job at an auction house, becoming head of her department just like the character in the novel. However, once the dust had cleared and the frenzy of studying, interviewing for jobs and proving herself at work had abated, Christine had looked around Berkeley and realized that her path to the head of department office – the partnership track – would not be achieved with what had worked for her so far, a combination of innate ability and sheer graft.

  Because the crucial element she lacked was the range of social connections with which her colleagues had been born. They would routinely hear about estates that were about to become available for auction because of the impending death, say, of a rich great-aunt with an enviable collection of fine art, or ceramics, or jewellery, and they would move in to steer the heirs and executors to Berkeley. In addition, they knew hedge-funders and property moguls who could afford to splurge on lavish purchases. Although Berkeley was increasingly reliant on Christine’s abilities for authenticating gems, those skills would not get her promoted. She was watching colleagues who had been hired at more or less the same time as her rise through the ranks in various departments, and it was not because their knowledge of Old Master paintings or Japanese netsuke was encyclopaedic. It was because they drank champagne on Jermyn Street with those hedge-funders, spent weekends shooting grouse with aristocrats, could bring a steady stream of sellers and buyers to Berkeley.

  Christine could never compete with their level of access to the one per cent – the people they had grown up with, the ones they had met at private school or university or clubs on Pall Mall. She needed, she gradually realized, to pull off a major coup if she were to stand any chance of getting onto the partnership track; otherwise she would be Berkeley’s back room expert forever, her expertise ensuring her a job for life, but one that paid a comparative pittance. And there would be no point in changing jobs. If Christie’s or Sotheby’s or Bonhams had an opening for a star gemmologist, Christine would definitely be a serious contender, but she would face exactly the same problems there as she did at Berkeley.

  So she had applied her brain to the situation, as she had done when she was strategizing how to become a gemmologist: confronted the extent of the task in front of her, calculated what she would need to do to achieve her goal. The trouble was that she had only seen a single genuine possibility, and it was extremely unlikely that she would be able to pull it off. This trip to Sweden was costing her a fortune, and it wasn’t as if she had savings to fall back on.

  Living in London was horrifically expensive. She couldn’t possibly afford a deposit for a mortgage on what Berkeley paid her, and her rent consumed a significant amount of her income. She was already relying on her credit cards, something that terrified her. Her biological family were in and out of prison; she had had no ties to them since she was taken into care. She had been forced to be her own safety net, and it always felt as if she was just one step away from the edge of the abyss.

  Already, she was fielding irate calls and emails from her boss, who was becoming increasingly vexed not only at her absence but that Christine, who had pleaded a vaguely described family emergency, wasn’t able to give a fixed return date. The appraisals were piling up, and she was the only one in the Fine Gems department who could be trusted with the most delicate and complicated of them. But no one was indispensable, and her boss was beginning to make noises to that effect.

  The irony of Christine’s current situation had not escaped her. All her fellow guests at the Hotel Tylösand were here, on this stunning stretch of the south coast of Sweden, for rest and relaxation. It was a spa hotel, so even if they were attending a conference in the business centre during the day, afterwards, with typical Scandinavian ease about their bodies, the participants would don robes and head for the huge inside pool and Jacuzzis, the steam rooms, water massage and outside hot pool to unwind. They would each choose a lounger in the glass-walled relaxation room with its panoramic views over the seashore and lie there as if in bed, watching the sun set behind the waves and the stars come out.

  Only Christine was tense, on high alert, in the midst of all this luxury and ease, despite the fact that she had never stayed in such a luxurious resort hotel in her life. Even on an overcast September day, it was breathtaking. Her room had a balcony with a stunning view over the sand dunes that sloped down to the grey waters of the Baltic Sea beyond. Every morning as she pulled back the curtains, the sight of the sky meeting the sea, broken only by the pretty island with its little red and white lighthouse seeming to float just off the coast, gave her precisely the sense of calm and peace that the hotel had been designed to evoke for its guests.

  For about a minute, she thought grimly now, as she stood, catching her breath after a steep ascent, on the high rocky outcrop at one end of the wide sandy beach directly below the hotel. I feel lovely and floaty and peaceful for about a minute, until I remember how much this is costing me and start freaking out that it’ll all be in vain. That all my planning and scheming and sneakiness have been for nothing.

  Because I’m beginning to be afraid that even after I’ve spent all this money taken time off from work I can’t afford and pissed off my boss so much that I’ll be lucky not to get the sack when I get back to London, I’ll never manage to meet Vivienne Winter . . .

  The wind was wild this afternoon, lathering the sea into a frenzy. Waves crashed against the rocks below Christine like hammer blows, the spume hitting the stone then bouncing and tumbling up, twisting in the strong breeze, big white bubbles as frothy as if they had been formed in a high-powered Jacuzzi and then fired from a water cannon. Some, rebounding from the tips of the rocks, flew so fast through the air that they landed metres from the sea on the thick grass and broom close to Christine’s feet. Sh
e bent down, fascinated, and slipped her hand under one; it rested on her palm, much denser and firmer than a soap bubble, its consistency like whipped egg white, before she pursed her lips and blew it away, watching it turn and flip through the air once more.

  I am not going to see this as a metaphor, hopes and dreams whirling up in the wind then crashing on the rocks, she told herself firmly. I’m a sensible, practical person in the middle of taking a calculated risk that might get me sacked with no way to pay off the enormous credit card bill I’m busy racking up . . . Oh God . . .

  Standing up again, she took a deep breath of fresh, cool, salty air. It was wonderfully invigorating, and reminded her suddenly that it had been hours since she ate. The breakfast buffet at the hotel was unbelievable: as well as an omelette station, there was a huge spread of meats, cheeses, smoked salmon, caviar, herring and some other weird fish that Christine was completely unable to deal with first thing in the morning, not to mention any other time. You ordered your cold drinks by pressing a button on an iPad next to a single tap that then miraculously dispensed whatever you had selected; how they did that, she had no idea. It was like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

  And there were two entire tables laden with more varieties of pastries, breads and rolls than Christine had ever seen before. Swedish people clearly loved their carbs. Her favourite was the rye crispbread, baked in a giant circle two feet wide; it was shaped like a wheel, with a hole in the middle to allow the big flat pieces of bread to be slotted over the central spindle of a specially made wooden serving platter, so that you could break off as much or as little as you wanted.

  Despite having tucked into a large ham and leek omelette, made to order, with tomatoes and peppers on the side, plus of course the crispbread, Christine was now starving. That was what a nearly two-hour trek would do for you. But it was a huge nuisance, because she was trying to fill up on breakfast – included in the room rate – and eat lightly at her two subsequent meals, in order to save money.