Home Paris Ben climbed the stairs from the metro station at Saint Germain and turned north on Rue Bonaparte under the late morning sun. Its rays did nothing to ease the winter cold, and he altered his route to his flat in the 16th arrondissement to take him past a favorite café. In the ten months of Ben’s posting there, Paris had stolen his heart. He loved his country, certainly, but his American roots had thinned. His parents had him late in life and passed while he was still muddling around in his six years at Rice University, deciding what he wanted to be when he grew up. He knew he didn’t want to be a cabinetmaker, so he’d sold the family business, the last tie binding him to his hometown, and moved on. No siblings. No connections. The Company sought out people like him. They’d recruited him—­rescued him—­during his first year as a commodities trader. Life at the schoolhouse ended nine months later with his death. Drug overdose. Tragic. His professors at Rice would have never guessed. The Company resurrected him in London as Ben Calix, and he’d never looked back. With a fresh cup of tea to warm…

CHAPTER EIGHT Peter Bernhardt woke up again. He felt odd, unlike anything he had yet experienced as a digital entity. His peripheral vision registered a clean engineering room’s wipeable acoustic tile ceiling and walls. From the ceiling hung three accordioned mobile ventilation ducts. He focused on the square mouth of one duct. The image was clear but edgy, as though his digital vision tried to blend each pixel together into an approximation of human sight, but had not quite succeeded. He lay supine in the center of the room, probably on a workbench or table. Raising his index finger, he tapped the surface three times and heard the muffled thud of a thick silicone skin on metal. The table seemed real, tangible, yet his finger felt jerky, electronic. He lifted his head and heard the faint sound of servos as he stared down along the length of the table at an android body. The skin appeared to be high-end silicon, with body hair tastefully punctured into the surface. The build was athletic, but not pumped. Slim, but not skinny. Pecs had definition and the stomach was flat, with a subtle six- pack. He lifted his head two centimeters more. Below…

It seems you played a few cards right, a familiar mental voice said as the butler opened the door to Branwyn’s room. I can’t enjoy a room like this as I once did, but it’s a much finer view than the inn. Yathana was lying across the foot of Branwyn’s bed, three feet of straight, razor-edged steel in a scabbard covered with midnight-blue silk, with thin golden chains connecting small amethysts and garnets. Her hilt appeared gold too—a thin layer of gilt did wonders—and the eye-sized fire opal in the center of her guard was now flanked by two chunks of amber on the quillons and another on the pommel. Seventeen years of partnership had given Yathana’s normal form time to sink very deeply into Branwyn’s consciousness, and even after two months of practice, the additions stood out whenever she had occasion to examine the soulsword. Adapting to the shifts in balance had come more easily, praise the Four. “It looks wonderful,” she said to the butler, though she really hadn’t even noticed the room save for marking a window opposite the door—real glass, not shuttered, and framed by heavy rose-pink curtains. “Thank you.” “The maids will have put your…

Excerpt from Eve Calder’s latest Cookie House mystery, “A Tale of Two Cookies,” exclusively for Fresh Fiction! Pastry chef and recent Manhattan transplant Kate McGuire is loving her new life on the laid-back island of Coral Cay, Florida. Now a junior partner in the Cookie House bakery, she’s thrilled when old pal Desiree announces a visit — and an impromptu beach wedding. When the marine biologist groom disappears on the eve of the wedding — after spotting criminals in a protected cove — Kate resolves to help her friend find out what really happened. Was it a case of cold feet or something much more sinister? *** Kate wheeled up to the Cookie House just as Andy Levy’s yellow van was pulling up to the curb. He hopped out with two brown-paper carry-out bags. “Don’t tell me you’re making deliveries now?” Kate asked the pub owner. “Hey, from what Sam said on the phone, it was a spaghetti-and-meatball  emergency,”  the pub owner returned,  his face lighting up. “So two specials coming up. And you might recognize the garlic bread—we used Sam’s baguettes.” “That smells wonderful,” Kate said. “But I’d have been happy to pick it up.” “Nah, we need a…

In this scene, Kára’s best friend, Brenna, is enduring a very difficult birth, and Joshua gets roped into helping. *** “You are the strongest here, and we need her up,” Hilda said. “The babe is coming finally, but it will be easier on them both that way.” She beckoned quickly to him, and he found himself walking over, inhaling fully to gain strength. But the heat and smells did not help him. ’Tis like birthing a foal, he told himself, which he had done many times before. He stepped up onto the bed, his boots planting behind the heavily burdened woman. “Do not let her slip,” Kára said, letting him grasp Brenna under her arms. He had no choice but to hold her under her ample bosom. Just like a mare in trouble. Like a horse. That is all. Done this dozens of times before. If Brenna could only neigh, he would have little problem with this. He opened his mouth to ask but decided against it. No woman he had ever met responded well to being asked to neigh. Joshua lifted and Brenna groaned, a sound torn from her straining body. Kára leaped up to loop her friend’s arms…

How can I describe the chaos that is a dim sum restaurant in the heart of San Gabriel Valley at 11 a.m.? The place is filled with close to a hundred round tables, each one occupied by a different family, many of them with three to four generations of people present—there are gray-haired, prune-faced Ah Mas holding chubby babies on their laps. Steaming carts are pushed by the waitresses, though if you called them “Waitress” they’d never stop for you. You must call them Ah Yi—Auntie—and wave frantically as they walk by to get them to stop. And once they do, customers descend like vultures and fight over the bamboo steamers inside the cart. People shout, asking if they’ve got siu mai, or har gow, or lo mai gai, and the Ah Yis locate the right dishes somewhere in the depths of their carts. My Mandarin is awful, and my Cantonese nonexistent. Ma and the aunts often try to help me improve by speaking to me in either Mandarin or Indonesian, but then give up and switch to English because I only get about 50 percent of what they’re saying. Their grasp of the English language is a bit wobbly,…

She’d been searching for William and found the duke. And how she found him. A magnificent undressed chest hit her line of vision. No lady would keep looking, but she couldn’t close her eyes. Sweat beads from the tips of his black tresses, now wet and mussed, traversed his temples to his strong neck, chest, trickling to a muscled abdomen, and…dear Lord. She sucked in her breath. The warm buzzing in her ears heightened, as did the rush of blood in her head. This…this was…an onslaught on her senses. No amount of ancient texts she’d read or sensual paintings she’d studied or her time outside of England had prepared her for the sight of a real, vibrant, half-naked man. Liar. I have seen countless laborers and servants toiling undressed. She huffed. All right, this man then. She was breathless at the sight of Saxton. And whyever was he standing in their stables in such an indecent state? “You want something, miss?” William’s voice broke through her mindless state. Drat. She had frozen. They had stopped their work and had been looking at her for a while. Worse, she only stared at Aetius. And he knew it. She could tell by…

In this excerpt, Captain Benjamin Frakes is taking the flirtatious August Weatherby to a ball to act as his bodyguard. Much as he tries to ignore his irritatingly attractive carriage-mate, he doesn’t do a very good job of it… The carriage came to a shrieking halt. Benjamin peered out of the window at the lamp-lit street. At first he saw no one of importance. Crowds of chattering people, gentlemen and ladies enjoying the night…and then, slipping from the threshold of a doorway like a smiling shadow, was Weatherby. Benjamin swallowed, a lightning bolt of pure awareness travelling from head to foot. He was at risk. Of course he was. At risk of making a complete fool of himself over a man ten years younger than himself, and ten times more attractive than anyone he’d met in years. “Goodness.” Weatherby’s voice filled the carriage. “Surprisingly small in here.” A flash of silver disappeared into the coachman’s palm as Weatherby climbed into the carriage, all black curls and bright eyes and dark velvet. He waited until the door closed, then turned to Benjamin with that unmistakable smile. “How cosy we shall be.” Nodding warily, Benjamin moved closer to the window as the…

Chapter One Juliet, I think we should go over the rules one more time,” my best friend, Shelby, said to me while anxiously wringing her hands. I wanted to remind her that we were wearing gorgeous formal gowns and standing backstage in a massive theater filled with some of the most famous people in the world. This was the kind of moment we’d dreamed about having when she’d been sick. I wanted her to live in the moment with me. But I knew why she couldn’t, so instead I nodded. “Tell me again.” “When the cameras are on, make sure that you don’t do anything that will draw attention to yourself, or else you’ll get kicked out and then Allan’s mom will hate me forever.” I reached over to squeeze her hand. Even while Shelby had been going through the worst parts of fighting leukemia, she was always so serene and calm. A year after she was officially declared to be in remission, she’d met Allan Standish, and they’d both fallen quickly and hard. I hadn’t been the least bit surprised when he proposed to her two weeks ago, even though they’d only been dating for about three months. Apparently…

Maeve felt her heart pound. In the time Ivy had been there, she’d already wandered off twice. The staff all knew she should have been placed in a home more suited to someone with Alzheimer’s, but Ivy’s son had begged the powers that be to let her stay at Willow Pond until a bed became available at the new memory care facility opening in Savannah, and everyone suspected that a little extra money had changed hands to make it happen. Now, Maeve turned to see if the old woman had moved to a different seat, but all she saw were seventeen crooked backs straightening up as seventeen pairs of eyes peered over the railing, and then all she heard were seventeen voices starting to whisper. Maeve hurried down the steps. “Ivy?” she called, scanning the wide front lawn and gardens. “Ivy!” she shouted, feeling the icy fingers of worry grip her heart. “She’s right there,” a deep voice behind her called. Maeve turned and saw Aristides Lincoln standing at his full height–six feet two instead of his hunched-over five feet ten–pointing. Maeve turned, and through the sun-dappled curtain of willow branches and wispy Spanish moss, she spied a tiny figure…