Sweet Revenge

high-powered flashlight, but it wasn’t necessary here. Every inch of the room had been memorized. Three steps, then a turn to the right. Seven steps, then left. A staircase wound there up to the second floor with abalustrade hand-fashioned with brass leaves and cherubs. In the alcove below was a high marble pedestal. There was a sculpture on it, pre-Columbian and priceless. The thief ignored it and moved silently into the library.
    The safe was behind the collected works of Shakespeare. The thief laid a finger on
Othello
, tipped it back, then spun around as the lights flooded on.
    “As they say,” came a calm, beautifully modulated voice, “you’re busted.”
    The woman in the doorway was dressed in a glimmering pink negligee, her pale, angular face gleaming with night creams and her silvery-blond hair swept back from her brow. At first glance she would have been taken for a youthful forty. She admitted to forty-five, which was still five years shy of the mark.
    She was small, and unarmed, unless the banana in her hand counted. With her head thrown back dramatically, she pointed the banana at the thief. “Bang.”
    The thief let out a sound of disgust and dropped into a deep leather chair. “Dammit, Celeste, what are you doing up?”
    “Eating.” To prove a point, she nipped off a bite of banana. “What are you doing skulking around the library?”
    “Practicing.” The voice was husky, low, but definitely feminine. She began to peel off her gloves. “I nearly robbed you blind.”
    “Thank goodness I raided the refrigerator.” Celeste swept across the room as she had swept across so many stages. Pieces of her roles remained with her, from Lady Macbeth to Blanche DuBois. It was the toughness of her own character, the one-time New Jersey native who had stormed her way to Broadway, that allowed Celeste Michaels to dominate the sum of her strongest parts.
    “Adrianne dear, not that I like to criticize, but it isn’t really cricket to burgle when you have a key.”
    “I didn’t use it.” Pouting, Adrianne pulled off the cap. Her hair, nearly as black, fell past her shoulders. “I came down from the roof.”
    “You—” Celeste took a deep breath, knowing it would do no good to shout. Instead, she sat in the chair facing Adrianne. “Are you crazy?”
    She merely shrugged. It was, after all, a question she’dheard before. “It nearly worked. If you had any willpower, it would have worked.”
    “So it’s my fault.”
    “Well, it doesn’t matter now, Celeste.” Adrianne leaned forward, gripping the older woman’s hands which were studded with a sapphire on the left ring finger and a diamond on the right. Adrianne’s were bare. Any rings she owned had been sold long before she’d begun her career. “You wouldn’t believe how it feels, to hang over the city that way. It’s so quiet, so solitary.”
    “So birdbrained.”
    “Darling, you know I can take care of myself.” Adrianne touched her tongue to her top lip. Her mouth was wide and generous, as her mother’s had been. “Aren’t you wondering why your alarm didn’t sound?”
    Celeste adjusted the hem of her negligee. “I’m sure I don’t want to know.”
    “Celeste.”
    “All right, why?”
    “I turned it off this afternoon when we had lunch.”
    “Thank you very much. You left me unprotected against the underworld.”
    “I knew I’d be back.” Because the energy was still flowing, Adrianne rose to pace the room. She was a small, delicately built woman who moved like a dancer, or like a thief. Her hair skimmed down her shoulder blades, straight as an arrow, lifting and falling as she turned. “It was so easy once I thought it through. I doctored the alarm, so that when you turned it on, it short-circuited the terrace doors. I waltzed in a couple of hours ago and chatted with the security guard. His wife’s arthritis is acting up again.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “So I told him you weren’t feeling terribly well and left some flowers for you. When he got involved with answering a tenant’s summons, I sneaked up the staircase.”
    Celeste raised one pale blond brow, a handy little gesture she’d cultivated decades before. “I was feeling quite well until a few minutes ago.”
    “I took the elevator from the fifth floor up to the roof,” Adrianne continued. “I had the rope in my bag. Then it was over and down and through.”
    “Fifty stories, Adrianne.” It wasn’t easy to block out the fear, but