Trapped in Time Read online

  The End?

  Of course not! As you can see, Emmeline’s story is next. I never intended to write more about the Multiverse Timeline that started with this book, but sometimes a secondary character jumps out at me and demands his or her own story, which is what happened here.

  Emmeline seems to me to be an incredibly strong girl—she’s been through a lot of adversity but now she needs help, both for her baby and herself. I think the warrior the Goddess will send her needs a little help of his own. Together they will navigate space and time through the Multiverse until they find what they are looking for. Be looking for Emmeline’s story, Time to Heal, coming out soon! And read on for the first chapter to get you excited. ; )

  Time to Heal

  Chapter One

  “So how’s it going? See anything interesting lately?”

  Caroline Vii looked up from her work, startled by the voice in her ear. It was Sophie, one of her new friends aboard the Kindred Mother Ship. The other girl gave her an apologetic smile.

  “Oh sorry—didn’t mean to startle you. I was just curious about what other universes you’d been watching lately.”

  It might have seemed a strange question to anyone else but Caroline was a scientist who had pioneered the study of the other layers of reality in what was known as the Multiverse. The idea that there might be more than one universe—that there might, in fact, be hundreds or thousands or even millions of universes and realities layered on top of each other like the rings of an onion had long been bandied around the scientific community. But Caroline had found a way to actually observe them.

  Using a machine she had invented called PORTAL—short for Positronic Orbital Rotating Time/Space Allocating Locator—Caroline was actually able to peel back the layers of reality and observe other universes. Some people—the ones with doubles in other universes—were also able to travel between them, using the window that PORTAL created. Caroline had found that out the hard way, when she was sucked into another universe and forced to live the life of her own double in what was essentially Victorian England.

  That had been a wild adventure and Caroline had barely escaped with her life several times over. She’d been drugged, shot at, attacked, and made to wear hoop-skirts and a corset laced so tightly she could barely breathe. But since she had also gotten her mate and husband, Richard, out of the deal, she considered the whole thing a success—not that she ever wanted to repeat it.

  Now there was a clearly marked black line on the floor of her lab, exactly three feet from the large brass frame of PORTAL’s window generation unit. This was considered the minimum safe distance and whenever a different universe was showing in the large, rectangular frame, Caroline made certain that she and anyone else who came into her lab observed it carefully from behind the safety line.

  She didn’t want anyone else getting sucked into another world and forced to live the life of their Multiverse doppelganger as she had. It was too damn dangers and crazy, trying to pass yourself off as a whole other person who might look exactly like you, but had a completely different personality and life. Having lived through that herself, Caroline wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Nor did she want to drag anyone from another universe through the PORTAL’s window into her own world…well, with one exception.

  She wished desperately that she could bring Richard’s cousin, Emmeline, through. In fact, that was who she was watching in PORTAL’s window right now.

  “Not really seeing anything new at the moment,” she told Sophie. “Mostly I’ve just been trying to keep an eye on Emmeline—though I don’t know what we could do if I saw something bad happening. Richard can’t go back to his old universe and I don’t think I can either.”

  “Poor thing!” Sophie looked at the large brass frame, which showed a gray, overcast day in the other universe. The sky was an ominous shade of purple-blue and storm clouds were massing, clearly threatening to spit more snow to match the grayish mush that lined the cobbled streets of the Victorian-looking city.

  It had been summer time when Caroline made her trip through the PORTAL but time had passed and it was winter now—a dull and dreary time in the other world. Not that it seemed to bother the girl they were watching.

  Walking along the street, her chin lifted high, was Emmeline. She was a lovely girl with long, golden-brown hair, caught up in a fashionable chignon and held in place by a jaunty little emerald green hat pinned at the crown of her head. The hat set off her large green eyes and the long, bustled green gown she wore accentuated her plus-sized curves, which were apparently all the rage in her universe.

  Caroline had to admit that was one thing she had liked about the strange world called Terra, which corresponded to Earth, though it appeared to be about two hundred to three hundred years behind Earth’s timeline. Plus-sized women were considered beautiful there, though they were still forced into corsets to accentuate their curves.

  “What’s she doing? Where is she going?” Sophie asked, breaking her train of thought.

  “I don’t know,” Caroline said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say she’s on her way to Hastings Hall to try and see her baby again.”

  “Oh, how is baby Jamie?” Sophie asked with interest. She and her sister, Liv and their friend, Kat, had been following Emmeline’s life with avid interest. Richard’s cousin had had a tumultuous existence ever since she’d been attacked by the only son of an Earl and had refused to marry him. Richard had called the man out and shot him dead in a duel, but Emmeline was still a ruined woman, according to her world’s standards. And when it became clear the rape had left her pregnant, her own mother, Lady Agatha Hastings, had turned her out of the house.

  Emmeline had disappeared for a while and eventually surfaced in a very peculiar type of brothel—a Flagellation Bordello called Mother Griffith’s on Graves Street. There she had given birth to a son she had named James—Jamie for short—but after only a short time, she had been forced to give the baby up to her judgmental parents.

  Lord and Lady Hastings had agreed to raise Jamie as their ward with the understanding that Emmeline would have only infrequent contact with the child and then only under approved circumstances. But it was clear the young mother longed to see her baby, who was weak and failing to thrive in the vast, stone mansion she herself had been raised in. Caroline had watched her go there over and over to see him, only to be turned away every time, sometimes with only a glimpse of her child through the open doorway.

  “Baby Jamie isn’t doing too well,” she was forced to report to Sophie. “He seems weaker every time Emmeline goes to see him, poor thing.” She sighed. “It breaks my heart to see her begging to hold him and being told no over and over again—although the last time she went, the old butler had mercy on her and let her cuddle him for just a minute.”

  “Did he? Oh, I wish I could have seen that!” Sophie exclaimed. “Did he finally stop crying?”

  Poor baby Jamie put up a constant, weak wailing that echoed through the grand marble archways of Hastings Hall and was never silenced—at least as far as the watching Caroline could tell.

  She nodded. “Yes—the minute they finally put him into her arms, he quieted for a little while. I swear, he knows she’s his mother and he doesn’t want anybody else. Especially that awful wet nurse they hired for him.”

  “Oh, you mean Nurse Higgins?” Sophie asked. “She has such a sour look on her face, her breast milk probably tastes like lemon juice! Poor baby—he just wants his mama.”

  “Well, maybe the butler will let her see him again this time,” Caroline said, as they watched Emmeline make her way down the street. There was a look of determination on her pretty face—a look that said she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  “I hope so,” Sophie said fervently. Though she had never met Emmeline, she and Liv and Kat all felt great sympathy for Richard’s younger cousin.

  They watched as Emmeline marched down a long, graveled driveway leading to the imposing mansion called Hastings Hall. She had grown up there