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Authors: Susan Kiernan-Lewis

Tags: #Romance, #New Adult & College, #Romantic Suspense, #Time Travel, #Mystery & Suspense, #Suspense

A Trespass in Time

BOOK: A Trespass in Time
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A TRESPASS IN TIME

 

Ella Steven’s stubborn independence is the keystone of her identity—unfettered by romantic involvements or family demands—until the day she takes an exciting new job in Heidelberg, Germany. There, she stumbles onto a hidden time portal that takes her to 1620 Heidelberg where all her modern-day techno toys and proud self-reliance can’t protect her from the brutal realities of every day life.

 

Befriended by a convent of seventeenth century nuns who stand on the executioner's block of the bloodiest warlord in all of Europe, Ella, struggles to survive in this primitive and brutal time. Soon, with the help of a sexy US Marshal, she tries to break out of her closed world of protected autonomy to help her new friends. When she does, she learns the hard way that when it comes to the things that
really
matter in life—love, trust and friendship—sometimes opening yourself up to others is the only true way home. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A

Trespass

in Time

 

Susan Kiernan-Lewis

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Journey to the Lost Tomb

 

Chapter 1

 

            Ella adjusted her earpiece and squinted at the screen on her iPod. If the software sales copy could be believed,
hearing
the German phrases spoken while reading them was
supposed
to increase her language retention by thirty percent.

            “
Abfahrt
,” she said, and instantly noticed the woman at the next table glance at her and frown.

            Ella took a sip of her
macchiato,
and looked around the crowded coffee shop. Maybe it was too noisy in here to hear properly? It all sounded like so much gobbledygook. She was supposed to have a good ear for languages. Why was this one so difficult?

            “Is this chair taken?”

            Ella instantly knocked over her drink then snatched up a paper napkin to protect her new Kate Moss A-line.

            “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” He smiled broadly at her, innocently. He used his cowboy hat to gesture toward the chair. He appeared remarkably unaffected by the damage he had just caused.

            “Take it,” Ella said, nodding at the chair and mopping up the worst of the river of coffee with the napkin. She glanced around the room in annoyance to see if it really were so crowded that her extra chair was needed.

            He pulled out the chair and sat down.  

            “Do I know you?” she said with irritation. Now the wire to her earphones was dragging through the puddle of coffee on the table.

            “Not yet anyway.”

            She stared at him.  
A pick up attempt? Really?

            “I was just wondering if you come here much,” he said.

             “Only when I want to be alone,” she said pointedly.

            “I saw you messing with your iPod. It looked like you were doing more than just sorting out your playlist.”

            Was this guy for real?

            “I’m using it to brush up on a language.”  

            “Which one?”

            “German.”

            “I took German in college.”

            “So you speak German?”

            “Not a word.”

            Ella wiped off her dripping iPod cord and turned to give her full attention to this cowboy. He was good-looking in a rumpled, afterthought kind of way. Brown shaggy hair, but combed. A grin that touched his eyes.  

            The silence stretched between them.

            “What I lack, however, in language proficiency,” he said, “I make up for in being able to take a hint.” He stood up.  

            “I have a boyfriend,” she said, which was a lie. 

            “I’m not surprised. Well, it was worth a try. I’m Rowan, by the way.”  

            “I’m Ella,” she said.

            When he continued to just stand there as if waiting for something, she pushed the pile of wet napkins from her and picked up her iPod again.  “It was nice meeting you, Rowan,” she said.

            “You, too. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

            “That’d be nice,” she said. “I do come here a good bit.”
He was definitely cute.

            He smiled and backed away from her, his cowboy hat in his hand.

            Ella watched him go. She still had another fifteen minutes left on her lunch hour and the last thing she wanted to do was get back to work early. Strike that, she thought, as she watched Rowan leave the coffee shop and walk toward his car in the parking lot. The last thing she wanted was to meet someone interesting mere days before she was set to move to Heidelberg, Germany and begin her new life.

            An hour later, after another relentlessly boring meeting had concluded and Ella returned to her desk, she saw that her father had called. A tinge of guilt crept into her otherwise placid mood at the realization that it had been weeks since she’d talked to him. With nothing else to do the rest of the workday but keep her chair seat warm until five o’clock, she punched in his number.

            “Dad?” 

            “Sweetie, I’m so glad you called.” His voice was warm and loving. The memory of so many hugs and special chuckles flitted through her mind as she heard his deep, rich tones. “Thought you went off the grid on me there,” he said.

            “Yeah, sorry about that,” she said. “I was doing some extra stuff at work. Kind of kept me busy.”

            “Really?”

            Ella could hear the tincture of worry that was usually in his voice replace the comforting warmth. “Was it after dark? You don’t approach these people alone, do you? And you still carry the Taser I got you?”

            Ella remembered why she tended to let so much time go by between phone calls.

            “No, Dad, it wasn’t like that. All my investigative stuff is on the phone or the computer. You know that. I don’t do any fieldwork. I promise.”

            “Because, I’m telling you, Ella, you can’t trust anyone to be who they say they are. You know what I mean?”

            Ella did know. An ex-CIA asset like her mother, her father had aged into an insecure, nervous wreck in retirement.

            “Dad, trust me, okay? The stuff I do is tax shit and tracking down debts and car titles and like that. I might as well be in a call center in Sri Lanka, okay? No one knows me. I’m the epitome of anonymous in my job.”

            “I hope it is as you say it is.”

            “Trust me, it is, Dad.”

            “You know, darling, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, you can’t go through this life without back up, you know?”

            “I know, Dad. I know.”
God, not this again.

            “When you need help, you need to be able to ask for it. That was
not
something your mother could do and I have to believe she would be alive today if she could have.”

            Ella’s mother had died during a mysterious overseas operation that all and anyone could only later describe as a guaranteed suicide mission.

            “Dad, I know,” Ella said. “My job’s not like that. But if I ever do need help,” she said hurriedly, “I am always first in line to ask for it. Okay? But you know, I’ve got a meeting in like about thirty seconds so I need to sign off. Talk to you later? Give my love to Susie.” She wasn’t very close to her stepmother but she knew it made her father happy when she pretended she was.  

            “Alright, sweetie, I will,” her dad said, the warmth and ease back in his voice. “Don’t go so long between calls, okay? I worry.”

            “I know, Dad,” she said. “Love you.”

            After she disconnected, Ella found herself wondering, as she frequently did, how dowdy, middle-aged Susie could be so different from the exciting woman she had been told her mother was. Jane Stevens had died when Ella was five. Not for the first time, Ella wondered what the point of “
full honors from a grateful nation
” was if nobody knew about them.

           

            Rowan Pierce pulled in front of the Starbucks on Abernathy Road. He debated leaving his cellphone in the console but decided he better keep it on him in case one of his parents called and wanted him to pick something up at Kroger. He got out of the car and looked around. It was a habit he’d gotten into at Glynco which had served him well many times in the past. Besides, at thirty-two, he was too old to start learning new methods of behavior now. He naturally took in his tactical environment wherever he was, even if he was just on Abernathy Road planning to stake out a mocha
venti
.

            It occurred to him as he entered the coffee shop that these five weeks home with the folks were originally designed to help him recover from the gunshot wound without added stress. The combination of wanting to take care of his elderly parents together with meeting Ella was making his enforced vacation anything but relaxing.

            He couldn’t say he’d been stalking her, exactly. He
had
noticed her before he finally approached her. They shared the same neighborhood Starbucks after all. Every time he saw her in there, she was always focused on something—her iPod, a newspaper, her e-reader—and she rarely looked up. It wasn’t a surprise to him that she acted like she had never noticed him before. But because of his job, he always looked around at everyone and everything, which meant she had been on his radar for weeks.

            He took his
venti
outside, and looked for a place to sit and enjoy the pleasant October weather. He was briefly sorry that he hadn’t gone to his usual Starbucks, near his parents’ house, but he wanted to avoid making Ella uncomfortable again. Hell, could he help it that as a US Marshall, dating and stalking tended to take on the same hue?  He was just out of practice. Besides, who knows? He had two weeks left on his medical leave. Maybe they’d meet up again before he went back to Alabama.

            Rowan shifted on the stone bench outside the café and sipped his coffee. No wonder there was nobody else sitting out here. The exhaust fumes from the traffic on Abernathy—not to mention the noise—reminded him of why he had always been less than in love with Atlanta. Even the birds were annoying, he thought, as he watched a bold sparrow peck at his shoe.

            “No, biscotti this time, pal,” he said, waving the bird away. It was when he stood up and slapped his jeans pockets for his car keys that he saw her.

            She walked like she drank coffee—totally focused on the task before her—so she never noticed him sitting outside the café. She was a little shorter than he’d gauged before, but slim. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, which was warm, but in a short leather jacket and a tight skirt that fit her ass like a handmade glove. Without thinking too much about it—especially since he knew the whole reason he was at this Starbucks in the first place was to give her some space—he tossed his coffee in a nearby trash bin and started to follow her in.

           

            The first thing Ella thought when her mind was able to connect two thoughts together was that it was all happening like some terrible nightmare that she couldn’t stop.  When she marched up to the counter, she did note that it was odd for there to be no line at this time of day. Plus the cashier was looking at her strangely. It was when she saw the man standing
behind
the cashier that she began to realize things were not right.

BOOK: A Trespass in Time
9.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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