The Chocolate Ship (2003)

Marissa Monteilh's novel, published by Avon in 2003, follows Mia White, a Los Angeles woman whose rule is that when she is done with a man she is done for good, and Miles Lewis, the smooth stranger she meets at the Inglewood post office. Nearly three years later, their friends are talking about a voyage on the Chocolate Ship, billed by its promoters as the first Black-owned cruise ship. (Open Library)

Watches

Swatch watch: Rushing a birthday gift certificate for her mother into the mail on a gloomy Saturday morning, in an old Lakers cap and a faded sweatsuit, Mia catches a tall stranger in black Iceberg checking her out. Beside her he has the presence of a movie star: a diamond-cut silver cross on an S-link chain, diamond studs she guesses at two carats each and a platinum Swatch that has to be a high-end model. He offers her a Montblanc to write down her number and introduces himself as Miles Lewis. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: His platinum Swatch watch had to be a high-end model and his diamond studs must have been two carats each. (Marissa Monteilh, The Chocolate Ship, scan cataloged as Avon Books, 2003, pp. 6 to 7, where the sentence runs across the page break; he gives his name on p. 7; Internet Archive scan OCR)