Someone To Steal Read Online Free PDF

actually.”
    “You’re not in much of a position to name terms, but I’m feeling generous. Go ahead.”
    “First, this is a one-time deal. I help you with one job. Singular. Second, the Graves earrings. The Deco fans. I want those.”
    “They’re in the auction. No chance.”
    “So buy them in the auction or substitute fakes. I want the real deal. My fence can tell if you try to pass off fakes to me.”
    “No.”
    “Then no deal. Shoot me,” she said, standing up.
    “You’d take death before losing out on the diamonds?”
    “For those diamonds? Absolutely.”
    He squinted at her over the gun.
    “I’m perfectly serious. Given that you have no real intention of shooting me, it seemed a safe bet,” Riley said. She grinned cheekily, gesturing to the safety—which was firmly in place. “So, do I have to call you The Sapphire Thief, or Mr. Thief, or what?”
    “You can call me Cain.”
    “Cain. Well, I really am Riley. So, can I get my earrings now?”
     

Chapter 4
     
    Cain Booth knew he shouldn’t have involved the girl.
    She was too fierce, too unpredictable. The truth was, he was already playing with fire on this job. Drafting Riley Stanhope into the mix was like pouring kerosene on his hands. He had known who she was when she introduced herself in Costa Rica. Her puppyish interest in him had provided a convenient cover to case the peach house on their detour before reaching the church. He knew she was young, impulsive, brilliant, and more than a little bit of trouble.
    I knew the first time I saw you that you were a devil, he thought, watching her bargain for the earrings. The kid was ballsy; he’d give her that. Full marks for audacity.
    Out of the stillness, a very small part of him, something like the ghost of his conscience, pulled at him. He actually thought about letting her go. He might have, too, if he hadn’t wanted her so much. Sure, it was a potentially lethal job, but if she’d wanted a safe, predictable life, she should have stuck to medical coding instead of stealing people’s shit. He crushed the last of his principles like a smoldering cigarette butt and decided if he were going to hell, he might as well have a bombshell date for the party.
    Cain told her to go straight home, to report to him in the morning at five. He exerted himself to sound menacing. She seemed unmoved by his theatrics, which amused him. Most people, men as well as women, were intimidated by him. This girl with her two-bit earring thefts, thought she was his equal and negotiated for diamonds. It made her damn near irresistible.
    When she was gone, he dumped the gun back in the drawer beside the bullets he’d never bothered to load, laughed, poured himself a drink. His winter was about to get a lot more interesting.
    He sat down in a chair beneath his wife’s painting of the green face. The face she’d said was her portrait of him; his acquisitiveness, his consuming greed. He liked to sit underneath it so he didn’t have to look at her reproach.
    Cain had been in his late twenties, ready to settle down and focus on his legitimate business. He wanted a wife who valued beautiful things as he did, who had an artist’s eye. By the time he got caught by the Russian mob, she was already disenchanted with Cain and had rekindled her affair with a gallery owner downtown. The distorted goblin face remained on his wall as a cautionary talisman, a reminder of how the would-be angel on his shoulder had seen him. Their relationship hadn’t been perfect, but her loss still ached.
    This girl wasn’t like Caryn. She was as arrogant, as bold, but wilder. She was the knife he could throw into the heart of the Russian mob. The instant he’d seen her turning flips in the narrow hotel gym, he’d known she was exactly what he needed. He’d just have to remind himself that he needed her in a bank vault in the Ukraine, not tangled up in his black cotton sheets.
    Cain retired for the evening, distracted but