Authors: Joely Sue Burkhart
“Hand me my cell. I’m lucky I didn’t fumble it when you tackled me.”
Blushing furiously, she handed him his phone. “I did not tackle you. I pushed you to get you off your knee. You’d already strained it enough.”
He leaned up on his right elbow and typed in a text message. “I’ll ask Léon to bring up some ice packs and bandages, if you’ll be so kind as to help me wrap it.”
“Of course.”
He set the phone aside and stretched back out on the bench. His eyes smoldered, but a faint smile played about his lips. “Now you have approximately five minutes to kiss me before we’re interrupted. This is your chance to taste me without me trying to bite a hunk out of you.”
Love, science, death. She is all three.
Bluebeard’s Machine
© 2010 Mari Fee
A
Silk, Steel and Steam
Story
Determined to discover what new experiment is stealing her husband’s attentions, Annette Parker ventures into forbidden territory—his study—only to discover a secret he would kill to keep. She is his fifth attempt to clone the original Annette and, according to his journal, he’s planning a sixth…after he dissects her dead body.
Unsure of who or
what
she is, she assumes a new identity and flees to the Orkney Islands and her last hope. The man she once rejected.
Isaac Ward’s first instinct is to get this mysterious “Miss Ada” out of his undersea laboratory—and out of his life—before he repeats the mistakes that drove him there in the first place. Her wild stories and stubborn insistence that they’re true wear his patience thin, but it doesn’t matter. She is as irresistible as the tide.
Then the truth appears right outside the portholes of his lab, stripping away her dubious disguise. Exposing a secret that could kill them both…unless Isaac abandons the science he knows for a second chance with the woman who broke his heart.
Warning: contains mad scientists, wanton murder, identity crises, and boiling hot underwater sex. Submersible instructions not included.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
Bluebeard’s Machine:
The top of the column was pushed open by a large male hand, followed by a white shirtsleeve stained with ink, and then by the head and shoulders of Isaac Ward himself. The naturalist’s long face was clean-shaven, and he had fiercely intelligent green eyes beneath a tangle of brown hair badly in need of a trim, or at least a bit of grease. The beginnings of crow’s feet radiated from the corners of his eyes, which grew wide when he spotted Ada.
“Mr. Ward?” Ada’s cheeks grew warm as he stared. Dragging her gaze from his was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but looking at the sea was so much easier than looking at Mr. Ward. He wore his years well. Too well.
She cleared her throat and started again. “Mr. Ward, I hate to intrude, but I’m Miss Ada Powell. I…”
“Miss Powell?” The sound of his voice doubled the butterflies in her stomach. “Have we met?”
“Only briefly. Many years ago.” She forced a smile. “I, uh… I have a request, but this isn’t the best place to discuss it.”
“A request.” When she glanced at him, he was staring at her intently enough to make her squirm. “I don’t often receive visitors, Miss Powell.”
“I hoped you would make an exception for me.” Ada resisted the urge to look away as he studied her. This was not the man she remembered. Time had ground the softness from him, and perhaps running to him for help wasn’t as good of an idea as she’d first thought. He was a man of science, after all. Like her husband.
“Fine. You and Mr…?” Ward pointed at the
Whitemaa
’s captain.
“I hired Mr. Marwick to bring me here. He will return when I send for him. You do have a way to contact the—surface?”
“I have a telegraph.” Ward ascended the rest of the way up the ladder inside the column and stepped onto the platform next to Ada. Her heart thumped painfully at his nearness, and she stepped back without thinking about it. He grabbed her elbow to steady her as her heels hit the edge of the platform. “Careful—you almost walked into the sea.”
“Thank you.” Ada put a hand to her throat and took a deep, calming breath as the ocean lapped at her feet. His hand radiated heat through the sleeve of her tweed jacket, and he waited another heartbeat before releasing her. He was taller than she remembered, and smelled faintly of brine and Indian tobacco.
“Perhaps you and I ought to talk aboard Mr. Marwick’s fine salvage vessel. I’m sure it will be much more comfortable for a lady. My observatory is quite cramped—”
Ada shook her head. “I wish to speak with you privately, Mr. Ward. If you fit down that hole, I am quite sure I will as well.”
“I’m not sure I agree. Climbing a ladder in skirts—”
Picking up her carpetbag, Ada thrust it at Ward. “I am perfectly able to climb down a ladder as long as my hands are free. Mr. Marwick, I will have Mr. Ward send for you when I wish to leave. Thank you for your services thus far.”
“Any day, Miss.” Marwick tipped his hat to her even as he rolled his eyes at Ward, who growled something inaudible in return. The masculine exchange clearly said
women!
and it raised Ada’s hackles, then depressed her.
If they only knew the truth of it,
she thought dismally, then hiked her tweed skirt over her knees, sat on the edge of the ladder column and swung her legs into the hole. A ladder was welded onto the side of the round column, and the air coming up the shaft smelled of tobacco and salt.
Ada looked at Ward, who sighed and stuck her carpetbag beneath his arm. “We still have time to go to the ship.”
“Good day, Mr. Marwick.” Ada gathered her skirts in one hand and threw the majority of the fabric over her arm, then slowly descended beneath the waves. Her shoes rang against the metal rungs of the ladder as the light filtering through the portholes in the column walls became dimmer and dyed blue-grey the deeper she went.
The hatch closed with a
clang
that made her wince. Ada gripped the rungs a little tighter. “I’m not at the bottom yet.”
“Then keep climbing.” Ward sounded annoyed, so she took a deep breath of stale air and resumed her descent. There were thirty-four rungs in total before Ada’s groping feet found the floor.
Ward’s undersea observatory was a living room, kitchen and study combined. A leather couch and a black wingback chair bisected the room, and behind the seating was an electric range with a huge black hood. Copper pans and iron skillets hung against the wood-paneled wall above a massive wooden chest—presumably a pantry—and two heavy bookshelves loomed to her right. To her left stood a lamp with a stained-glass shade on a desk overflowing with papers.
Most wondrous of all were the windows.
There were four, two on each side wall, and behind the wavy glass was the sea. Ada gasped and crossed the room to press her face to the window. The water was slightly murky and she couldn’t see more than twenty feet, but beds of green-grey kelp danced in the current. Darting silver fish with bulging eyes swam in the seaweed, and purple starfish splayed across the rocks. Above the observatory was the dark belly of the
Whitemaa
. The
Whitemaa
’s hull was pierced with rows of portholes, perhaps because of the salvage operation Ward had mentioned. The ship seemed like a fishing vessel to her, but what did she know?
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Ward spoke from just behind her, and Ada jumped. Her heart fluttered as he reached over her shoulder to tap the glass. “Most people never see past tide pools and the fish that grace their dinner plates, let alone
Ascophyllum nodosum
in its natural habitat.”
“What?”
“Kelp. The forests of the deep, and largely taken for granted.” He turned on his heel and strode across the room, depositing her carpetbag and umbrella on the couch as he passed. “Why are you here, Miss Powell?”
The plan: Kidnap H.G. Wells. Definitely not part of the plan: Falling in love.
Stealing Utopia
© 2010 Tilda Booth
A
Silk, Steel and Steam
Story
The year is 1897, the place, a Britain that could have been, but never was. H. George Wells is helping lead Britain into a new Golden Age, driven by technological advances and discoveries of the human brain. Then one night a beautiful woman abducts him at gunpoint, and she seems to despise everything he’s worked for. Despite his outrage, he can’t help but be intrigued by this adventuress and her passion for her cause.
Jane Robbins, agent provocateur, has reason to fear her country’s march towards a new world order. Using her wits and her arsenal of spy gadgets to infiltrate Wells’ house, she delivers him to her employer, who plans to use him as leverage to halt the coming Utopia. But when Wells’ life is threatened, she must choose between saving him or sacrificing him to the cause.
Scientist and spy, they are irresistibly drawn to each other even as the future pushes them apart.
Warning: This book contains gadgets, guns, death rays, dirigibles, sexy scientists and a smoking hot Victorian spy who’s as much steam as she is punk. Don’t blame us if it makes you want to slip a pistol into your garter and abduct the man of your dreams.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
Stealing Utopia:
Damn and blast. What to do? What to do?
She retrieved her special sal volatile, the one that had put the Scotland Yard man to sleep so effectively outside of Wells’ house, and took a deep breath and screamed, “A mouse! A mouse!”
In a flash, Mary was at her door, barging in without even knocking.
Jane stepped behind the maid and waved the vial under Mary’s nose, causing her to collapse backward straight into Jane’s arms.
“Oh Lord, help! Jack, come quick. Mary’s fainted.”
When Jack came into the room, he rushed to Mary’s prostrate form. With a silent plea for forgiveness, Jane whacked him on the back of his head with the bedwarmer. It wasn’t enough to render him unconscious, but a strong whiff of the ether from her doctored sal volatile was enough to finish the job. She searched through his pockets until she found his keys, then left, careful to lock her door behind her. On cat feet, she ran down the hall, unlocked Wells’ door and opened it.
For the second time that night, Jane walked in on a man in a dressing gown, but on this occasion she had no time for embarrassment. “Get dressed, quickly,” she hissed.
Wells looked up from the book in his lap and stared at her in astonishment. “I beg your pardon?”
She almost burst into nervous tears. “For God’s Sake, George, we have no time. Get dressed and come with me, if you want to live.”
Something in her voice must have made him understand that this was no trick, for he jumped up and grabbed his trousers, putting them on under his robe without even asking her to turn around. She looked behind her up and down the hall to make sure that no one was coming, and by the time she’d finished checking, he was already at her side, pulling on his shirt, jacket in one hand, feet stuffed haphazardly into his shoes.
She led him down the back stairs, to the entrance to the garden, but then she stopped, at a loss where to go next. There were guards all around the house, and she had no idea how she would get George past them.
George grabbed a raincoat off a peg by the door, a voluminous affair made to cover a much more massive man than him. He put it on, shrouding himself, then turned down the gaslight next to the door, leaving the entryway in darkness. “Now what?”
She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. Through the glass panel of the door she could see the shadowy outline of one of the guards, just yards from them, standing like a stone under one of the eaves, out of the rain. “I don’t know. Easton has men at all the exits.”
“Easton?”
“You know him as Mr. Smith.”
“Ah.” He pondered for a moment. “We’ll need a distraction.”
She nodded, hands clenched tight. “I’ll go to the front, call to the guards, and you can escape out the back.”
“What will they do to you when they realize that you’ve helped me escape?”
Images of Flewellyn as she’d last seen him, giving his wife a kiss before they’d all piled into the coach the night of the kidnapping, entered her head. “Nothing. I’ll be all right.”
“You’re lying.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but he put his finger on her lips. “We’ll leave together. Where’s Easton? Perhaps we can use him as a hostage for our escape.”
“Too dangerous. Last I saw, he was sleeping in his study, three sheets to the wind. Overpowering him should be easy, but in his state he’ll be a liability.”
George cocked his head. “Inebriated, eh? Can we get to his study without being seen?”
“I think so. But we don’t have much time.”
Twice on the way to Easton’s study they’d had to hide to avoid being seen by servants or guards. The first time they’d ducked into a dark alcove, and George, pressed against her, had said, “I know you carry a pistol. Do you have any bullets? Two or three of them? Yes, that will do very well.”
When at last they slipped into Easton’s study, Wells had loosened the casings on the three bullets she’d given him.
His actions made no sense to her. “What are you going to do?”
Ignoring her, Wells stared at Robert Easton, still snoring in his armchair. “I think I know him. But from where?”
“We don’t have time for this.”
George shook himself and grinned at her. She felt an unfamiliar flutter in her stomach at that grin. “Right, I just need… Ah, here it is.” To her astonishment, he pulled out a silver teaspoon from his pocket and walked over to the large brass clock on the mantelpiece.
“Where did you get that?”
“Stole it the second night I was here. Easton was kind enough to point out that Mary only watches the knives.” He turned the clock around and quickly opened it using the spoon to loosen the screws. “One never knows when a spoon might come in handy. Have you got a pound note?”
Jane couldn’t quite see what he did with the note but after no more than two minutes he announced, “Done. We’d best get out of here and hide. We have…” he turned the hands of the clock to read 11:55, “…five minutes.”