Sweet Revenge by Nora Roberts Page A

the oppressive heat. The taste of sickness was still in her mouth as she closed her eyes.
    “Madame? May I serve you and the mademoiselle a drink after we have taken off?”
    “Yes.” She didn’t bother to open her eyes. “Bring my daughter something cool and sweet.”
    “And for you?”
    “Scotch,” she said dully. “A double.”

Chapter Six
    Celeste Michaels loved a good drama. As a young child she had made up her mind to be an actress—not just an actress, but a star. She had begged, wheedled, sulked, and cajoled acting lessons out of her parents, who indulgently believed their little girl was going through a phase. They continued to think so even when they drove Celeste to auditions, rehearsals, and performances in community theater. Andrew Michaels was an accountant who preferred to look at life as a balance sheet of profit and loss. Nancy Michaels was a pretty housewife who enjoyed making fancy desserts for church socials. Both of them believed, even after theater began to dictate their lives, that little Celeste would outgrow her love of greasepaint and curtain calls.
    At fifteen Celeste decided she was born to be blond and had tinted her tame brown hair to a golden halo that would become her trademark. Her mother had shrieked, her father had lectured. Celeste’s hair had stayed blond. And she had won the part of Marion in her high school’s production of
The Music Man.
    Once Nancy had complained to Andrew that she might have been able to handle it better if Celeste had been involved with boys and liquor rather than Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams.
    The day after she received her high school diploma, Celeste moved from the cozy New Jersey suburb of her childhood to Manhattan. Her parents saw her off on the train with a mixture of relief and bafflement.
    She auditioned, scrounging up enough to pay for her acting lessons and the rent on her fourth-floor walkup byflipping hamburgers and frying eggs at a greasy spoon. She married at twenty, a relationship that began with a bang and ended with a whimper a year later. By then Celeste had stopped looking back.
    Just over ten years later she was the reigning lady of theater with a trail of hits behind her, a trio of Tonys, and a penthouse on Central Park West. She’d sent her parents a Lincoln for their last anniversary, but they still believed she’d come back to New Jersey when acting was out of her system and settle down with some nice Methodist boy.
    Just now, pacing the airport lounge, she welcomed the relative anonymity of the theater actress. If people noticed her, they saw an attractive blonde, sturdily built and of average height. They didn’t see the sultry Maggie the Cat or the ambitious Lady Macbeth. Not unless Celeste wanted them to.
    She checked her watch and wondered again if Phoebe would be on the plane.
    Nearly ten years, she thought as she took a seat and searched through her bag for a cigarette. They had become close friends quickly when Phoebe had come to New York to film on location for her first movie. Celeste had just ended her marriage and had been feeling a bit rough around the edges. Phoebe had been like a breath of fresh air, so funny and sweet. Each had become the sister to the other that neither had been born with, visiting coast to coast when possible, piling up huge long distance phone bills when it wasn’t.
    No one had been more thrilled when Phoebe had been nominated for an Oscar. No one had cheered more loudly when Celeste had won her first Tony.
    They were opposites in many ways. Celeste was tough and driven, Phoebe malleable and trusting. Without realizing it, they had given each other a balance, and a friendship each would always cherish.
    Then Phoebe had married and flown off to her desert kingdom. Correspondence had become sporadic after the first year, then almost nonexistent. It had hurt. Celeste would never have admitted it to anyone, but Phoebe’s gradual termination of their friendship had hurt very much. On the