A shout echoed from the street, muffled in the light fog that coated the city. When she'd arrived ten minutes earlier, she'd considered the fog a blessing, but its rapid swirl and increasing weight had her reconsidering that decision.
Who the bloody hell would be shooting at her?
And how did they even know she was up here?
Rowan kept moving, her breath heavy, even as the questions swirled through her mind faster than the fog around her body. A small nook sat between two chimneys—sitting room and study respectively—and she moved determinedly onward over the rough tiles to give herself a moment to regroup in relative safety.
Obviously the jewelry extraction—the evening's main event—was off.
Now she just had to figure out how to get off the roof undetected.
The small space enveloped her as she slid her body between the twin columns of old brick and took her first easy breath since the gunshot. Voices still echoed from the street, but they'd grown fainter and she didn't think it was only from the fog.
Her plans for the evening ran through her mind's eye on the same steady loop she'd not been able to get out of her head since her first visit to the townhome six months before. Her dear friend Bethany Warrington couldn't stop talking about her mother's latest gift from her father—a diamond-and-ruby bracelet purported to have been worn by Queen Victoria.
While Bethany might have been dear, she was altogether too dim and had blithely provided the combination to the jewelry safe her mother kept in her bedroom as she'd fiddled her way through it three times before successfully cracking it on the fourth.
Since the bracelet was basically sitting there for the taking, Rowan could hardly ignore the windfall and had plotted how she'd get in and out when Bethany's family took their annual jaunt to the Cote d'Azur.
On a rather huge level, Rowan knew what she was doing was wrong. Even if she could work her way past the clear directive in the Ten Commandments, she also knew by her actions she betrayed a friend
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