Page 1 of Her Diamond Deal with the CEO

CHAPTER ONE

STEADYINGHERSELFONthe pale golden sand, Ondine breathed in deeply. Dipper’s Beach was too narrow and steep for the tourists who flocked to the Florida coastline so, aside from the occasional crab and the seagulls that stalked the shoreline, it was almost always deserted.

But she preferred it like that.

It was the first time in nearly three weeks that she wasn’t working so she could have had a lie-in this morning. Only her brain had jerked awake as it always did, one minute before her alarm went off. She could have rolled over and gone back to sleep, but she loved the early mornings when the sun was turning the sky above her beach house shell-pink. It was the one time of day she could call her own. When she wasn’t working.

She squinted upwards. At work, there was never time to pause or linger. But here on the beach nobody would be trying to catch her eye or snapping their fingers. There was just the sun, the sky and an endless blue sea.

Her gaze narrowed on the shimmering water framed between the grass-edged dunes.

As a child, she was average at most things but swimming had been her ‘superpower’. The one thing she’d excelled at in a family of high achievers. Every day she’d trained before school and almost every weekend she’d swum in competitions. Briefly, ludicrously, she’d even imagined herself stepping onto a podium but then she’d got injured and nowadays she swam for pleasure and for her job as a lifeguard at Whitecaps, the exclusive beachside hotel in Palm Beach favoured by the wealthy and beautiful.

Not that she got a chance to use her skills very often.

Unlike the public pool where she’d worked before, most of the Whitecaps residents preferred to lounge by the pool rather than swim in it, and the same was true of the hotel’s private stretch of beach.

It was her second year at the hotel and now, as well as being a lifeguard, she worked most evenings as a waitress in the bar and restaurant. Her mouth twisted. She didn’t hate either of her jobs; it just wasn’t how she’d pictured her life. Two jobs. Two divorces. Living in some rented beach shack—

But the tips were phenomenal, and thanks to Vince, her useless second ex-husband, that mattered more than job satisfaction.

Thinking about the pile of brown envelopes sitting on her kitchen counter, she felt her stomach knot. Sometimes, normally after a particularly exhausting shift, she tried to work out how many glasses she would have to collect before she would be debt-free. Mostly though she was too tired to do anything but eat a bowl of pasta or, more lately, cereal and go to bed.

‘Hola, Ondine. Cómo está hoy?’

Spinning round, Ondine smiled at the elderly woman with pristine grey hair who was walking towards her. Dolores was her nearest neighbour and even though she was eighty-one years old, she walked her fawn-coloured chihuahua, Hercules, along the beach twice every day.

‘Are you swimming today,chica? But you have the day off, no?’

‘Hola, Dolores. Hi, Herc.’ She double-kissed the older woman’s cheeks, then reached down to stroke the little dog’s velvety ears. ‘I’m not in until this evening, but I thought I’d get up and have a swim, and now I’m glad I did.’ Her eyes tracked down the empty beach. ‘It’s so beautiful and peaceful today.’

‘Not so peaceful last night.’ Glancing out to the beautiful white yacht anchored close to the shoreline, Dolores clicked her tongue disapprovingly so that the dog’s chin jerked upwards. ‘Such noise. Music and shouting. All kinds of goings-on. Some people are so thoughtless.’ She sniffed. ‘Anyway, you enjoy your swim,chica.’

‘Thanks, Dolores. See you tomorrow. Bye, Herc.’ She smiled as Dolores waved the chihuahua’s tiny paw.

Out at the sea, the yacht danced lightly on the waves.

Once upon a time it might have impressed her, but she worked in Palm Beach. There were as many yachts as there were palm trees.

Unzipping her hoodie, she pushed her shorts down her thighs and kicked off her flip-flops. The sand was like warm sugar and for a moment she just stood there, wiggling her toes. ‘That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.’ That was something her mum used to say but it was hard to feel rich when your kitchen counter was piled high with unpaid bills.

Her feet stilled. She should have kept a closer eye on Vince. She knew he liked to spend money but she hadn’t wanted to admit to herself that she had messed up again. Married the wrong man,again.

Her eyes fixed on the yacht, her heart thumping heavily against her ribs as she remembered the end of her first marriage. Garrett’s infidelity had been humiliating, devastating, but she could have coped, had been coping. Only then, three weeks later, before she had plucked up the courage to tell them she was getting divorced, her parents had died in a car crash.

She shivered in the warm breeze. Overnight, she had become an orphan, and her fifteen-year-old brother’s guardian. She’d moved back to Florida to look after Oliver, and a month later, she’d met Vince at the hardware store. He’d made her laugh and when he’d asked her out, he’d made her laugh again. When he’d taken her out, he’d made her feel sexy.

It was a textbook rebound relationship, but that hadn’t stopped her sayingyeswhen Vince had proposed. A year later, the marriage had been over, confirming, as if she’d needed further proof, that she was not the marrying kind. This time her pride had taken less of a hit but she’d lost her home, and she was still paying off the credit-card bills.

The one small sliver of silver in the cloud of debt was that Oliver’s college fund was tied up in some savings plan. She felt some of the tightness in her chest loosen. Unlike her, Oli knew exactly what he wanted to be and he had the brains and the determination to make it happen. Right now, he was volunteering at an outreach clinic in Costa Rica before he started medical school in September.

She frowned, her gaze snagging on the yacht.

There was someone on deck. Not someone. A man wearing a dark jacket and trousers, his white shirt loose around his throat. She watched as he crouched down and picked up a bottle, shook it and then raised his arm, crooking his elbow as if he was about to hurl it into the sea.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she whispered.

As if he had heard her, the man looked up, and she felt a flicker of something hot and tingling like electricity snap up her spine. He couldn’t see her face. She knew that because she couldn’t see his, but she could see his powerful body silhouetted against the sky, sunlight clinging to his outline, gilding him in a wash of clear gold like a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

---