The Missing Gem

Prologue

Nicole's eyes fluttered open as she woke up to the sound of the birds singing and the sunlight peeking through the hotel room's windows. 

What are blackout curtains for? She thought to herself  while she lazily dragged her hand to the black bedside table to grab her phone and check the time. It was 08:24 A.M. 

She groaned and rolled to the side to face her boyfriend, Matt, who was still sleeping peacefully despite the light that met the darkness in the room. She felt the urge to wake him up and head downstairs with him to get breakfast and get ready to spend another day at the beach, but she also felt like that would be selfish of her so she rested her back against the surprisingly comfortable mattress and faced the ceiling, sighing. 

She could not go back to sleep and just laying in bed doing nothing while staring at a white wall was so not her thing, she was so not that type of girl. She needed to do something with her time, so she sat up on her bed and grabbed her white laptop that was sitting next to her phone and started typing away, as fast as her fingers would let her, and yet not quick enough to catch up with how fast her mind was going. 

The London sky was the perfect mix of purple and blue, you know, that color that you can't quite identify? All Rachel knew was that she loved the sight and it inspired her to pick up her camera and snap a shot at the perfect skyline of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. 

She didn't choose to be a photographer in the lands of her majesty, but destiny certainly did and it brought her to the place where she'd find the love of her life.

She scrunched her nose at the words she put on the screen and after a quick thought about what the beginning of chapter ten sounded like she continued her line of thought and kept on typing.

She wasn't a writer per say - she wanted to be one and was working for it but that dream proved to be a lot harder than she thought it would be when she started typing the first words of the first chapter, thinking in all her innocence that that was all it took for an editor to actually choose her and her book and publish them. Meanwhile her bills and her rent weren't going to pay themselves so she spent eight hours of her days, if not more, at a law firm where she worked as a personal assistant slash confidant slash secretary to Diane Fitzgerald, a corporate lawyer and her best friend since kindergarten. 

It was a job good enough to cover her monthly bills and some shopping sprees she went on Saturdays with said best friend, plus it had a good health insurance but it was still something she had to drag herself to wake up in the morning to do. It wasn't like writing. It wasn't her passion.

At eight-thirty in the morning of her last day in paradise - aka the Bahamas - with her boyfriend next to her in a heavenly place, only a few steps away from the beach, all she could and wanted to do at the moment was write, write and write. It was her passion, ever since she was a child she's always loved reading books and writing little stories and now, at the young age of twenty-four she was finally starting to make her dream come true. 

Once she could finish the draft of the whole novel to present to the publisher she could actually get somewhere with her writing and do what she's always wanted to do her whole life. 

While she typed furiously on the keyboard, like she always did when she had an idea and felt inspired and on a roll, as she was going halfway through her tenth chapter, she felt a body moving next to her. It was Matt but she didn't bother to say much, just in case he wanted to go back to sleep, and instead she tried to apply less pressure on the keyboard so the sound wouldn't wake him up. She failed to do so, Matt was up already and with his face still buried in the white fabric of the pillow, he put one arm around her stomach.