Christmas
Past
by Susanna
Fraser
Entangled Ever After
Release Date: November 25, 2013
Time-traveling PhD student Sydney
Dahlquist’s first mission sounded simple enough—spend two weeks in December
1810 collecting blood samples from the sick and wounded of Wellington’s army,
then go home to modern-day Seattle and Christmas with her family. But when her
time machine breaks, stranding her in the past, she must decide whether to
sacrifice herself to protect the timeline or to build a new life—and embrace a
new love—two centuries before her time.
Rifle captain Miles Griffin has
been fascinated by the tall, beautiful “Mrs. Sydney” from the day he met her
caring for wounded soldiers. When he stumbles upon her time travel secret on
Christmas Eve, he vows to do whatever it takes to seduce her into making her
home in his present—by his side.
Excerpt:
“What is that
thing?”
His voice shook
a little, she thought. But not much. He was an officer and a gentleman, so he
couldn’t let himself freak out over something new and strange. If he was scared,
he hid it well. She admired that. As a time traveler, she tried to live by the
same kind of code.
“A carriage,
sir,” she said. “And a broken one, at that.”
“No, Mrs.
Sydney,” Captain Griffin said in a tone that reminded her of Professor
Krakowski in lecture mode. “Itappears to be a carriage, externally. Inside is
something very different. I saw it. I may not understand the evidence of my
eyes, but I’ve never been given to hallucinations. And,” he added with a
musing, distant look that called her mentor even more strongly to mind, “if I
were to suddenly take leave of my senses, I doubt very much I should
hallucinate something I’d never imagined existed before.”
Disguise had
failed, so she must distract and deflect. “I don’t see why not,” she said.
“After all, isn’t that how strange religions start?”
He shrugged.
“Perhaps. But you’re no angel, are you? Although,” he allowed, “you’re tall and
golden enough for one.”
She shook her
head. There had been concern among the review board that at 5’11” she was too tall
a woman to go more than a hundred years into the past. Time travelers were
supposed to blend in to their destinations. “No,” she said. “Anyway, I’m
shorter than you.”
He smiled. It
wasn’t fair how the expression made him look even hotter, with white teeth
straighter than anyone born before orthodontics had a right to in a soldier’s
sun-browned face. “Not by much. But stop trying to distract me. I know what I
saw.”
She crossed her
arms and tried to look lofty. “What if I told you it was none of your concern
and refused to say more?”
Now he grinned,
a wicked twinkle in his eye. “Then I should be obliged to found a strange
religion based on my suppositions. How do you think I would do as a mad
preacher, ma’am? On Christmas Eve, I saw the most celestial vision …”
He wouldn’t. He
couldn’t. “You’re far too rational a gentleman to do anything so mad,” she
said.
“True. But—hang
it all, Mrs. Sydney, you must tell me something!” Now his voice shook, and she
could hear the fear and amazement he’d been working to hide. “You cannot expect
a man to see a light that glows bright as sunlight without a flicker of flame
or a—a portrait frame that changes its contents with the touch of a fingertip,
and walk away and never think of it again.”
She bit her lip
and fought to control her shaking breath. Maybe she could’ve passed off the
electric light as some new and improved oil lamp, but he’d seen her iPad. What
could she do now? She couldn’t think of a single lie that wouldn’t make
everything worse. The Protocol made no allowances for this, but he’d already
seen too much to be distracted or deflected, and wasn’t it safer for such a
curious man to know the truth? Who knew how badly he’d destroy the timeline
with his guesses if she left him ignorant.
“It’s my time
machine,” she said in her own accent, “my broken time machine. I was—I will be
born in 1987. I came here from America in 2013.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
About
the Author:
Susanna Fraser wrote her first
novel in fourth grade. It starred a family of talking horses who ruled a
magical land. In high school she started, but never finished, a succession of
tales of girls who were just like her, only with long, naturally curly and
often unusually colored hair, who, perhaps because of the hair, had much
greater success with boys than she ever did.
Along the way she read her
hometown library’s entire collection of Regency romance, fell in love with the
works of Jane Austen, and discovered in Patrick O’Brian’s and Bernard
Cornwell’s novels another side of the opening decades of the 19th century. When
she started to write again as an adult, she knew exactly where she wanted to
set her books. Her writing has come a long way from her youthful efforts, but
she still gives her heroines great hair.
Susanna grew up in rural Alabama.
After high school she left home for the University of Pennsylvania and has been
a city girl ever since. She worked in England for a year after college, using
her days off to explore history from ancient stone circles to Jane Austen’s
Bath.
Susanna lives in the Pacific
Northwest with her husband and daughter. When not writing or reading, she goes
to baseball games, sings alto in a local choir and watches cooking competition
shows.
I'm looking forward to reading this novella!
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