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  Escape With Me

  Ruby Duvall

  Being shot is bad enough, but waking up in eighteenth-century London is even worse. Samantha must follow the clues in her magic locket to find out why she’s here and how to get home, and a tempting offer of shelter is too good to be true when she learns her patroness is actually a procuress. Even more startling than her overpowering attraction to her first client is the fact that submitting to her desires may lead to the answers she needs.

  The beautiful redhead is a distraction that naval officer Ryder cannot afford. His father is dying and his fugitive brother has bankrupted the family business. But he cannot deny himself, and Samantha turns out to be just what he needed—both in bed and out—yet the more passion they share, the more embroiled she becomes in his dangerous dealings, including the dark secret between Ryder and the obsessed revenue officer who wants to see him hang.

  A Romantica® paranormal erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave

  Escape With Me

  Ruby Duvall

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank Sheila for her feedback and research assistance. I certainly asked her a lot of questions! Thanks also to Linda and Tassa for beta reading. My EC editor Grace has been a pleasure to work with, so big kudos to her. Lastly, I’d like to thank my spouse for his earnest support of my writing.

  Chapter One

  Samantha woke with a powerful, burst-from-the-water gasp.

  The air was relieving at first. Then it caught in her throat. Coughs stabbed through her abdomen and what little breath she could take ended in more painful coughing. Tears sprang to her eyes. Once she could draw a full breath, she wailed in agony and writhed where she lay. God damn, did it hurt.

  He had shot her. Actually shot her.

  She wouldn’t have said anything—or at least, she would’ve lied about not saying anything and then would’ve narced on him, but he hadn’t even given her the chance to speak. The look on his face…

  The burning in her gut spread. She lifted her hand and found that she couldn’t see more than an outline, but she could smell something sweet and metallic. She was dying. Cupping her hands against the wet wound in her stomach, she moaned again as tears rolled down to her ears. She looked around for the telephone.

  Wait, where was she? This wasn’t the storeroom. It smelled too terrible—dusty and dank. In the dim light, she saw rafters overhead. Was it an attic? Had he moved her?

  She tried not to cry. Just breathing hurt terribly. Moving would hurt even more. Could she get up? She tried to roll to her side and nearly puked.

  Her face felt hot. Her vision shimmered. She was going to pass out.

  * * * * *

  She breathed in and opened her eyes. The room was brighter, illuminated from somewhere behind her. The muffled din outside was an array of discordant noises—voices, footsteps and other sounds she didn’t recognize. She must’ve been unconscious for a while. Recalling the wound, she pressed her hands to her stomach, but the pain was gone. She lifted her head and looked down at herself. Her black trench coat was open and her white blouse was unblemished, her hands free of blood.

  Had the wound been a dream? It couldn’t have been. He had reached into his coat, sighing as he always did when he was disappointed. “Goodbye, Sam.”

  She laid her head on the floor. “Son of a bitch,” she breathed. She’d forgive herself for being surprised that he shot her, but not that he was doing something illegal. She should’ve known. None of their pieces were worth nearly as much as what he had sold them for. Why did she always turn a blind eye when it came to him?

  And where had he brought her? She found her feet and stood slowly. The room was indeed an attic, lit by a shuttered window that was closed against a gray day. Sheets were tossed about haphazardly across trunks and discarded furniture. Dust was everywhere.

  She walked to a large sheet-covered lump and tossed the covering aside. Beneath was a chair, mid-eighteenth century by the look of it. Sam had learned a lot at the shop over the past few years and could tell how remarkably preserved it was. They would’ve made a nice profit off its sale.

  Now curious, she walked to another cloth boulder and revealed it. This one was a mahogany secretaire and the wood was still in beautiful condition. The desktop had a squeaky hinge and a few ink stains, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.

  Thump.

  She froze. From somewhere beneath her came a scraping noise. Was it Brian? The person in the room below called out, but the voice was too high to belong to a man and too muffled to understand. Another person walked briskly through the downstairs hall and entered the room beneath. The two voices, both female, spoke in low tones for a minute. The first sounded almost panicked, and the second exasperated. More scraping and thumping. Eventually the two people left and their footsteps quickly faded.

  Where the hell was she?

  She walked to the window with the floorboards creaking beneath her feet and lifted it open. The noises grew louder. She pushed open the shutters. Her jaw dropped.

  The street below was full of people. A couple men walking up the street were dressed as if straight out of that colonial-era musical—the one with Congress singing about the Declaration. The two men wore long coats with dozens of buttons, knee-length hose and shoes with buckles. One tipped his tri-cornered hat to another man passing by. A couple of older women plainly dressed were hauling a covered basket to the side door of a house across the street.

  Directly below her, a coach drawn by two matching horses came to a stop at the curb. A man dressed in pale-blue-and-gray livery approached the coach. He opened the door, drew out a small step ladder from a compartment beneath, and did his best to help a woman with an enormous skirt out of the vehicle. The skirt was so wide that the woman was forced to exit sideways. Amazingly, a second woman also stepped out of the vehicle, which didn’t seem large enough to accommodate both of their dresses. The second woman lifted her head and looked up at the house. Her wide eyes found Sam leaning out the window.

  Sam darted back. The room wheeled sharply and that hot, shimmering feeling filled her head. She couldn’t get any air. She stumbled back and clung to the secretaire to stay standing. She concentrated on breathing in and out. Eventually, the dizziness receded.

  “Oh God. Oh my God.” She could say nothing else, but in her mind questions begat questions. Where became when and when became how and how became why. She couldn’t be sure of where, but the style of clothing suggested the latter half of the eighteenth century. As for how and why…she couldn’t fathom a single theory; at least, not a plausible one. Only ridiculous and outrageous ones came to mind. She had to be dreaming or maybe the victim of an elaborate prank. Was some D-list celebrity going to walk in and point out all the hidden cameras?

  Someone was coming upstairs.

  “Oh shit,” she whispered. She went to one of the trunks, thinking that she might hide herself in one. Inside was an enormous pile of old clothing, topped with a black tricorne.

  The attic door opened. Sam grabbed the hat and turned. At the door was another man in livery. His wrinkled, sagging features went from determination to shock to anger in mere seconds. He looked almost unreal standing there, as if he were in a Halloween costume. He even had the powdered wig.

  “You dare to enter this house,” he shouted in a British accent. “We’ll have no budges in here.”

  Budges? What the hell?

  He came inside the attic and she ran at him. She had to get out of there. The man predictably backed up. Sam gave him a hard shove and escaped past, running down the stairs as though someone were chasing her with a hot poker.

  At the second floor, she whipped around the balustrade, heading to the next staircase at the opposite end of the hall. Two maids, one young
and one old, screamed at the sight of her and scurried into the nearest room. Sam could hear the elderly male servant rushing after her, and at the next staircase, she hopped the handrail to land on the ground floor.

  The two ladies from the coach were peeking out of a salon. The first let out a shriek and retreated into the room. The second pointed at her with one trembling hand. “It w-was you. You were crying in the attic last night.”

  Sam looked around, trying to decide on which exit to take. The front door was right there, but the house surely had a back door. She was about to run to the kitchen in the rear when a woman in an apron emerged from the back. She had a large pan in her hands.

  “Shit!” Front exit then. Sam ran to the door and flung it open.

  “Get out of here!” The elderly servant was just now making his way down the last set of stairs.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” she yelled.

  Sam shot out of the house. A couple of pedestrians turned to look at her, mouths open. She ran down the street, dodging potholes, murky puddles and piles of horse manure. The stench was ever-changing but constantly and consistently awful—from the sweet smell of garbage to the rancid smell of unwashed bodies to the rotten smell of sewage.

  The streets angled this way and that, and she had absolutely no idea where she was going. She kept hoping that she’d reach the edge of this seemingly inescapable movie set, but no matter how many corners she turned, she was still running through a grim, unfamiliar city. When her lungs and legs couldn’t keep up anymore, she found a narrow, grimy alley and ran in far enough to be somewhat sheltered from a light mist floating down from the overcast sky.

  No one seemed to be following her, but she watched both ends of the alley while wiping away tears of fright and catching her breath. A couple of minutes passed without incident and she ran her hand over the top of her head to skim off rainwater. She realized then that she still had the hat in her hands and gratefully shoved it onto her head.

  “You still look like a lady,” a young voice said. Sam jumped. A boy no older than fifteen stood from where he had been crouching between boxes and barrels. He was filthy and far too skinny. “It’s your hair.” He pointed at his own head, which was covered with a mop of fine, stringy locks. “I don’t know a fellow with hair as long and fine as that.” He spoke with what sounded like a cockney accent, dropping the letter h and pronouncing th as f. “And I’ve seen sailors with gold rings in their ears, but nothing like those.”

  She touched one of her garnet earrings. Brian had given them to her after forgetting her last birthday. How many times had she let him buy her off with a rose, a present or a promise to do better next time? How many times did she forgive him and hold out for a spontaneous gesture of affection?

  The earrings went into her pocket and she took off the hat. After arranging her hair to hide its length, she used the hat to keep it in place and then popped the collar of her trench coat. She tied it shut.

  “Not so tight. I can see your shape,” the boy said. Sam loosened the belt. “What’s that?”

  He pointed at her chest and she looked down with a wide-eyed “whoa”. Her necklace had escaped from beneath her blouse, but it wasn’t the same one she had nipped earlier that day from the newly acquired Victorian jewelry. The one now dangling from her neck shone beautifully. It was an oval locket made of sterling silver, and a bird’s cage was delicately etched in gold on the front. The cage’s lock was highlighted with a single tiny diamond that hadn’t been there before.

  She opened the locket.

  A rising gust of wind pushed through the alley. Its deep whistle was loud and it sprayed cold mist against her face as it threatened to knock her hat off. She ducked her head down, holding her hat on with one hand and cradling her locket with the other.

  When the wind died, she wiped the moisture from her face and opened her hand to look inside the locket, too curious to help herself. She expected to find nothing inside since she hadn’t yet had a chance to insert any pictures, but there was a tiny piece of folded paper nestled within.

  Her attention was fixed as she retrieved the slip of paper. She could feel that she had found a big clue to the how and why of her predicament. When she unfolded the note, however, she found only lines of strange characters scrawled across the thin paper. The writing was like nothing she had ever seen.

  “What’s it say?” the boy asked. The characters began to shift, rolling over and around each other. She blinked, wondering for the tenth time today if she had lost her mind. The script slowed to a stop and the remaining characters turned as if they were rolling over to show their bellies. It was all English, sitting there as plain as day. She read it aloud.

  The dove doth dream of grand and lofty flight,

  She and the sly mistress will swing tonight.

  One is the cage and the other’s plight.

  Neither capitulates without a fight.

  The owl doth hunt ’neath the lanterns of red.

  The mouse doth hang by a single frayed thread.

  One is followed and the other is led.

  Now one must act in the other’s stead.

  “What does ‘capitulates’ mean?” the boy asked. Sam spouted off a dictionary definition, but so many other questions swarmed inside her mind. Who was the mistress? What was the owl hunting? The mouse? What did it mean? What did anything on the note have to do with her waking up in the eighteenth century?

  She looked at the cage etched onto the front of her locket but found no clues. Flipping it over, she found an inscription. Her eyebrows went up.

  “It says ‘Covent Garden’ on the back.”

  He lit up with recognition. “I know where that is.”

  “I’ve been there too,” Sam said. “I must be in London.” She put the paper back inside the locket and hid it beneath her shirt.

  The boy was surprised. “You don’t know where you are?”

  “Where in London are we now?” She buttoned her coat all the way up to her chin.

  “North side of Westminster, sir,” he said with a wink.

  Knowing that didn’t help though. She hadn’t visited London often enough to know which way to go. She remembered visiting Westminster though, and it hadn’t looked anything like this.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. He straightened up.

  “Name’s Peter Powlett.”

  “Would you be so kind, Peter, as to point me in the right direction?” She slid her hands into her pockets. “How do I look now?”

  “Your clothes are something strange, but it helps that you’re so tall, sir.” At six feet, she was tall for any woman, let alone one in Ye Olde England. Peter wiped at his nose and walked to the end of the alley. She followed. “You may want to keep quiet though. You don’t sound right. Where’re you from, sir?”

  “New York. I wish I was there right now.”

  He looked over his shoulder with big eyes. “A colonial?” He looked forward again. “My father hates the colonies, says the war ruined business. Mum don’t care so much. I’ve an aunt what lives there. She sends us money.”

  “Is that so?” she asked absently. She hadn’t thought of that. The War of Independence likely didn’t make Americans very popular in London. “Is the war over?”

  “I don’t know much about that, sir. On my birthday last year, we had a party and my mum’s friend said the politicians voted about something what happened at Yorktown.”

  Sam searched her brain to remember her American War of Independence history. College had been a few years ago and though she was certain he was talking about the Siege of Yorktown, she didn’t know much of the nitty-gritty. She had churned out a lot of papers for her history degree, but the only one on a nearby time period had been on the French Revolution.

  “Is the year 1783?”

  Peter gave her a quizzical look, not surprisingly. “Yes sir.”

  They emerged from the alley. Peter turned to follow the sidewalk and they passed a young man hurrying the other way.
Sam ducked into the upturned collar of her trench coat, but the man paid her no attention. They then passed a very sorry-looking building that seemed as though it would collapse at any moment. She peeked inside as they walked by the open front door and was surprised to see people living there, vagrants by the look of them.

  A couple of blocks later, they found a main thoroughfare. Dozens of coaches, carts and chaises clattered up and down the cobbled street. Men on horseback wove through traffic, and no one in the street seemed to pay much heed to pedestrians or each other. There were no traffic lanes besides what lines the horse-drawn traffic formed, and above the din of rolling wheels and stomping hoofbeats against the poorly paved street, hundreds of people were talking or calling out wares. The melodies of two different musicians warred with each other in the air, and the sounds of pounding, clunking and clanging rung out from shops all along the street.

  She was strangely reminded of New York.

  Peter turned to her. “This is the Strand, sir. Follow it east,” he said as he pointed, “until you reach Southampton. Then you turn north to Covent Garden. It’s not far.”

  “Is this as far as you go?” The boy nodded at her question and wiped his nose again. “How will I know Southampton when I see it?”

  “I think you’ll know it.” Sam looked past him up the Strand and swallowed. She was scared. Her disguise was flimsy at best and she didn’t know what she would do once she reached Covent Garden.

  “You’ve been very helpful, Peter.” He grinned, showing off slightly crooked teeth that needed lots of fluoride. “I can’t repay you now, but will you tell me where I can find you again?”

  “I live with my parents in Whitechapel. You can ask for me there.”

  Sam cocked her head. “Whitechapel is in the East End, isn’t it? What are you doing in Westminster?”

  He scratched his cheek and dropped his gaze. “Earning my keep.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re a pickpocket, aren’t you? That’ll get you into trouble, Peter.” He looked back at her and shrugged.