Yarrow Read Online Free Page A

salesgirl working for him so that he could just sit back and watch her work while he collected the loot. Not that Captain Computer was actually out of the red yet, as Stella liked to remind him whenever he brought the idea up. Didn't matter to her that it'd boost sales.
    "Twenty-five sixty-five?" Henri asked him.
    "Well, I could sell you something cheaper," Rick told him, "but if you're looking for efficiency…"
    Just buy the sucker, he thought as he went through his spiel for the third time that day to the same customer. Henri Cuiscard nodded sagely, looking from the baffling— as far as he was concerned— array of hardware to his brochure and back again. He clutched the brochure as though it would impart comprehension simply by his holding it.
    "These… ah… floppy disks," he began again. "How do they work?"
    "It's very simple," Rick replied, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. "They're like a phonograph record, except instead of one long spiral groove, they have a number of magnetic rings to store the data. This one can hold up to 576,000 characters. You insert it here and…"
    Stella, he thought desperately. I need a salesclerk.
    Two miles west and slightly north of Captain Computer, Stella Sidney was studying a statistical report in her office at Tunney's Pasture and wondering, not for the first time in recent weeks, why she and Rick were still together. She sighed, trying to keep her mind on her work, but last night's argument after returning from the Ex stayed in the forefront of her mind and refused to be dislodged. It was as though they'd fallen into a downward spiral in their relationship, and the more they worked— or at least she did— at making it any better, the deeper and faster they fell.
    Surprisingly, Cat felt better after lunch. Melissa had been very supportive, and Cat realized that it was her own fear of inadequacy that had kept her from confessing her block before this. The depression that had been glooming her steps for the past few weeks was somewhat lifted, burning away like mist before the sun. If she looked hard, she could actually see the odd ragged patch of blue sky. She didn't expect to go home and pound out a hundred pages of wonderful material. But Melissa had assured her that they'd get an extension on the deadline.
    "I'll convince them to go for an autumn release," she said just before they left the restaurant. "The Borderlord should be doing well in paperback by then. Maybe we can get them to spring for a new double-headed promotion— the old paperback and the new cloth."
    That would give Cat at least another five to six months to come up with something publishable. And it removed the pressure of the deadline that had been hanging over her head. Or at least the immediacy of it.
    Standing on the sidewalk in front of Noddy's, she watched Melissa head off, then caught a glimpse of her own face on a poster in the window of Arkum Books, a couple of doors down from the restaurant. It was an ad for her latest book. "The Borderlord," the blurb read. "By the author of Yarthkin, the winner of the World Fantasy Award."
    The artist's conception of Aldon of the Borders wasn't exactly the way she'd pictured the character, but at least he hadn't been turned into a brawny barbarian hefting a sword, with some waxy-faced, impossibly-proportioned woman clutching at his leg. That had happened with the initial print run of The Sleeping Warrior. It was her first book, and when she got her author's copies and saw the cover illustration, she thought she'd die of embarrassment. For weeks she refused to go into bookstores, afraid that somehow the people browsing in them would connect her to that garish cover and judge her accordingly.
    It was Melissa who'd written a cover-approval clause into all subsequent books— quite a coup for an unknown author, as Cat had been at the time. Melissa had also managed to convince McClelland and Stewart to pick up her latest book— another coup, considering that