House of the Rising Sun Read Free

her. He’d know what to do, how to handle it. That’s what fathers did, wasn’t it?
    At least that’s what Harlow’s father did in her fantasies. And fantasies were all she had, because Olivia Goodwin hadn’t only kept that secret from the paparazzi; she’d also kept it from her daughter.
    Oh, Harlow had tried to find him. She’d searched every possibility she could think of, traced her mother’s path during the month of her conception, but her mother had been on tour fora movie premiere. Thirty-eight cities in twelve different countries. The number of men she could have come in contact with was staggering.
    Harlow’s father, whoever he was, remained a mystery.
    Heart aching with the kind of loss she’d come to think of as normal, she tossed the papers onto her desk, collapsed onto her unmade bed and dropped her head into her hands. The five-monitor computer station on her desk hummed softly, a sound she generally considered soothing, but today it only served to remind her of how royally she’d been duped. Damn it.
    The client who’d hired her to test his new security system and retrieve a set of files had actually given her false information. She’d ended up hacking into what she’d belatedly guessed was his rival’s company and accessing their top-secret formula for a new drug protocol. Shady SOB.
    She shuddered, thinking what her punishment might have been if she’d actually delivered that drug formula into her client’s hands, but a sixth sense had told her to get out right after she’d accessed the file. Something in her head had tripped her internal alarms, something she’d be forever grateful for if only it had gone off sooner. She’d ditched the info and hurriedly erased her presence. Almost. Obviously not enough to prevent herself from being caught.
    Times like this she cursed the “gift” she’d been born with. Well, the first one, the ability to feel people’s emotions through touch, that one she always cursed. And really it was more than emotion. She saw images, heard sounds, even picked up scents from people. Which all added up to an intense overload—sometimes pleasurable but too often painful—that she preferred not to deal with. The second gift was the way she seemed to be able to read computers. She didn’t know how else to describe it, but they responded to her like she could speak binary code without even trying. Finding her way into a motherboard tookno more effort than opening a door. That gift had given her a career. A slightly questionable one at times. But a job was a job. Except when it brought her clients like this last one.
    A client who was now in the wind, the twenty large she’d charged him not even a down payment on her fine. She should have known something was up when he’d paid in cash, his courier a shifty-eyed sort who was probably as much fae as he was something else. She shuddered. That cash, tucked away in a backpack under the bed, was the only thing the court hadn’t been able to seize. Everything else was frozen solid until she paid the fine or did her time.
    She flopped back on the bed and folded her arms over her eyes. She was about as screwed as a person could get.
    Her eyes closed but it didn’t stop her brain from filling her head with the one name she was doing her best not to think about.
    The one person capable of helping her. The one person who’d been the greatest source of conflict in her life.
    Olivia Goodwin.
    Her mother.
    Harlow hadn’t
really
spoken to her mother in years. Not since their last big fight and Olivia’s umpteenth refusal to share any information about her biological father. For Harlow, it was difficult to say what hurt worse—not knowing who her father was or her mother not understanding the gaping hole inside Harlow where her father was missing and yet her mother somehow thinking she could still make things okay between them.
    The cycle usually started with Olivia barraging Harlow with pleas to move to New Orleans. Harlow