Jaq’s Harp
Futuristic Romance/Twisted Fairytale/Biopunk -- Short (ebook)
In a world of floating islands and bio-engineered beans, the bad guys are taken down by agents of the Mother organization—agents like Jacqueline “Jaq” Robinson. Instead of accepting her next routine assignment, she sets out on a mission of her own—to destroy Giant Corp, the company responsible for her sister’s wasting illness. Jaq must steal her cure from Giant’s headquarters high above the city…even though she’ll be brought face-to-face with Harper English, the man who left her to go deep undercover at Giant.
For Harp, Jaq had been a distraction the mercenary thought he couldn’t afford. But once he sees her again, Harp knows he’s made a mistake. Even though she vowed he won’t have her again, it’s clear they still have a powerful attraction. Harp’s determined to get a second chance with Jaq—if they can escape Giant Corp and get back to solid ground in one piece…
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EXCERPT from Jaq's Harp
Text Copyright © 2011 by Ella Drake
Cover Art Copyright © 2011 by Harlequin Enterprises Limited
Permission to reproduce text granted by Harlequin Books S.A. Cover art used by arrangement
with Harlequin Enterprises Limited. All rights reserved. ® and ™ are trademarks
owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its affiliated companies, used under license.
Chapter One
Jacqueline threw the digi-missive across the room to shatter into tiny shards of tech. Her latest assignment would waste her talents taking out a little band of smugglers. She wanted a much bigger target. No, not wanted. Needed.
She needed to take down Giant Corp.
She stalked past the sparsely furnished front room, through the dim hallway and into the back room of her small apartment, toward the hacking cough. On Jaq’s bed, her sister, Merrilyn, stared listlessly at the ceiling as a bloodied cloth flittered from her hand to the floor. Jaq sat on the edge, careful not to jostle the one and only person dear to her. Well, the only one left who took up residence in her personal space.
“I told you not to trust Giant Corp.” She ran a hand through Merry’s blond hair, so like her own.
Merry’s slight pat on her arm reassured her, though only a little. “They said the treatments would work. What else could I do?”
“What else, besides sell your condo and leave us destitute to pay for a charade?” Jaq clucked soothingly to take the bite from her remark. She had other reasons to distrust Giant, but Merry didn’t know about those.
“Don’t go to work,” Merry pleaded. Too weak to keep a hold, her hand fell back to her side and she closed her eyes, her lashes dark against her pale skin. “I’d rather never recover than have you do such horrible work.”
“I’m good at it. I’ll be fine.” Yes, she would be fine. She was good at what she did at Mother, the secret espionage arm of the Global Organization of Strategic Equity, de facto government of New Castle.
“You’ll be fine?” Merry took a deep shuddering breath. “Then why are you chewing your nails again?”
She yanked her hand away from her mouth and rose without disturbing the sheets clinging to the wasted body beneath. Damn. She hadn’t mangled her nails like this since… No. She wouldn’t think of him.
“I love you, sister.” Merry’s strained voice cracked. She coughed, the spasms lifting her slight frame off the bed.
“I’ll send the nurse.” She backed out of the room while Merry shook her head with the barest movement.
It didn’t matter what Merry thought. To afford the nurse, Jaq had to work, and damn if she’d waste her time on the penny ante stuff. The medical bills to keep Merry alive had bankrupted them both.
Right on time, the nurse arrived in her bright white jumper, her perfunctory nod to Jaq showing her usual taciturn nature. This efficient dark-haired woman had been on the job for two months but Jaq barely knew her. With a bit of guilty relief, she shrugged into her threadbare jacket, hurried down the corridor to the lift, and spent the short ride down torn between going back and screaming inside the empty tin can. She did neither before she escaped onto the teeming streets of New Castle, a city so large it covered a quarter of the continent.
Without greeting or apology, a man in a drab tunic bumped past her to go in her building. She didn’t recognize him. Not surprising since the high-rise held thousands. Nothing but dingy gray concrete buildings and lines and lines of carts selling food, housewares and the latest psychedelics.
A hovercraft she couldn’t afford zinged by with low humming. She stepped onto the moving walk and shrugged. “Don’t need a stinking hover.”
The low-flying mechanical transports wouldn’t get her where she needed to go.
She looked up despite herself. Most landers never did.
Above the ground, trees and low-flying birds—scarcely topping the highest scraper—the floating islands slowly circled the city, never casting their shadow in one place for too long. The constant, tempered blue sky dispersed around the black circle dotted with red engine lights. Rising from the platform structures, visible from the ground, tall mansions and spires disappeared into the clouds.
One of those islands held the corp she now existed to take down. Even before Merry’s illness, she’d been aware of Giant Corp’s greed and Mother’s reasons for looking into them. Up there, she’d find a way to make them pay for what they did to Merry. Up there, another agent, a charming dark-haired one, pursued a similar mission. If he’d done his job, the Giant would’ve fallen before Merry got hurt.
Honk.
She snapped her chin down. A hovercraft swung by close enough for the air to push aside the flap of her jacket. She stepped back onto the moving path and kept her attention on the ground rushing by. A pair of couriers crashed in the street next to her. One wore a shabby jacket like hers. The other, one of the special aeroweave tunics that glittered silver. Nobody stopped to see if they were all right. Edging her foot to the side of the walk, she nudged aside a gawker toward the exit. Before she could reach it, the two couriers were on their feet, cursing and gesticulating wildly at each other, so she stayed on the moving conveyor belt.
Several walk switches, a jaunt in a subcar and a retinal scan later, she entered Mother headquarters. The long, sprawling building resembled a warehouse more than an office building. From the outside, nobody would guess this was home to a spy agency that employed agents, mercenaries and rogue scientists to keep the megacorps in line.
This early in the morning, the place appeared empty. All the better, really. Her steps echoed on the shined floor in the wide sparse corridors.
Just as expected, the equipment chief, who practically lived at Mother, bustled about in the basement where the mercs got their daily rations of mechguns, lasers and a multitude of nanodevices to get them into impossible places. And out again. Usually.
“Monsieur Bovine.”
Dressed in his standard drab browns, the beefy man with a drooping mouth blinked at her from his desk. He smiled warmly. “Jaq.”
Nobody called her Jacqueline. Or, for that matter, Mademoiselle Robinson. “Remember those beans you told me about?”
