Someone To Steal Read Online Free

dark eyes that didn’t quite manage to hide their feral intelligence. Riley scribbled notes on a scrap of paper, systems to look up and learn to conquer.
    She had a week until the auction, and she’d have the earrings in her possession before the event. She was tempted to go to the auction itself afterward, since it was set to open with a showing of the flapper movie from its original film reels, followed by a twenties-style soiree. It sounded like a hell of a shindig, but she’d skip it and take the Art Deco diamond earrings instead.
    It would be a most profound pleasure to relieve the haughty and deceitful Cain Booth of the care of one of his precious charges. His boasts of how impenetrable his penthouse was made her itch to circumvent those measures to stroll in and take the diamonds. He might be able to outrun her in the gym, outsmart her in the streets, but there was no better cat burglar than Riley. She knew that with research and practice, she could defeat the system, defeat the man who’d rejected her, and get something pretty she wanted in the process. It was the very definition of win-win, to her mind. She only wished there were some way she could rub his face in it. Riley herself, that girl from Costa Rica he couldn’t even bother to have a fling with, would steal his treasure.
    He lived on the top floor of a renovated historic building. She found sample floor plans on the building’s web site and used photos taken of the interior of his penthouse for the magazine feature to construct a map. Reading up on Coritech Security Solutions, she found diagrams and video of how the system itself worked. It was state-of-the-art and the marketing department evidently liked to show it off, providing her with extensive online footage.
    There was also a Japanese youth who had tried various antics with his parents’ new Coritech residential system to see what would set it off. Video surveillance, motion, thermal and pressure detectors, intrusion alarms, glass break sensors—Booth’s place was better protected than the US Mint, as far as Riley could tell. He had no safe or vault, as he’d remarked in the article, because he had no need of such a measure. Works of art, he said, were created to be seen and enjoyed, not locked away.
    She chose moisture-wicking clothes, her lightest running shoes, her tiniest tools, and the sensor glove for the job. She had watched the demonstration videos of the Coritech system so many times she could quote the narration. She ordered a small thermal sensor and tested it repeatedly until she figured out how cool her body temperature would have to be to avoid triggering the sensors with her heat. She planned to stand on the roof of his building, cooling her core temp just enough to pass, since the sensor was only on the front door. She packed freezable ice packs to put on her neck and under her arms.
    Pressure-wise, she had sufficient acrobatic experience to vault herself onto furniture. The Japanese boy’s attention-seeking shenanigans provided her with the information that the system has a slight vulnerability in detecting very fast movements. Normal walking pace or even a jog triggered intrusion alarms, but a sprint or handspring might be quick enough to elude the tracking.
    Riley decided to enact her plan the night that Graves was being honored with a street naming and reception at City Hall, two days prior to the auction. Surely the actress’s executor and esteemed family friend would attend such an event and leave his apartment complacently vacant for a few hours. It would be undisturbed upon his return, apart from the negligible absence a pair of fan-shaped baubles.
    Her planning, interrupted only by Tico and transcriptions, swallowed the time until the big night. Refreshing the cat’s water and food, she turned on the local news for a live view of the red carpet at City Hall. She didn’t see Booth, but he might have already arrived. Riley left the TV on for Tico, checked the