Lynne Connolly (35 page)
“I don’t know. I’m simply chewing over theories here.”
She sighed. “We really do need information, don’t we?”
He glanced at her. “
We
?”
She lifted her chin challengingly. “Yes.
We
.”
“Just checking,” he flashed back with a grin. “And you’re right. We do need more information. With luck, now that we’ve sent out some requests, it’ll start coming in.”
“Agreed.”
The moon was rising now, casting a soft glow through the room. It was almost never dark when one had the ocean as one’s backyard, realized Minnie.
Pierce stirred and stood. “It’s been a long day. And tomorrow may well be even longer.” He held out his hand. “I’ll take you to your room.”
Minnie rose. “There’s no need.” But she placed her hand in his, something inside her eager for the touch of his skin.
“I have a suggestion.” He pulled her nearer.
“I’m sure you do.” She smiled at the shadow of his face.
“Listen before you assume,” he scolded her gently. “You and I—we’ve acknowledged something going on between us. Some very distinct attraction.”
“Yes.” She nodded.
“So my suggestion is in the nature of a small experiment.”
“Oh?”
“A kiss. A simple kiss. To see if that chemistry is truly present or if we’re imagining it.”
The moonlight danced off the brass railing beneath the window and ricocheted around the room. It was a tiny scattering of rainbows, barely visible yet casting a magical glow over her surroundings and the man still holding her hand.
Minnie caught her breath, knowing this was what she’d wanted the first minute she’d set eyes on him.
She wanted to see if they
fit
.
“I’m definitely in favor of experimentation.” She whispered the words as his grasp tightened and he drew her against his chest.
Her free hand slid up over the silk of his shirt to touch the warm skin of his neck even as she felt him tug the other one behind his back, locking her to his body.
His arm encircled her, his heat engulfed her and her brain acknowledged the result of this experiment.
They
fit
.
When his lips came down to claim hers, she forgot about theories, experiments, murders and mayhem. She forgot her own name.
She just fell into him.
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.”
They hurried back the way they came, waiting at the foot of the back stairs. They didn’t wait long. Just a couple of minutes after they reached their hiding place, a faint chime followed by a muffled boom and the sound of Robert Easton yelling in panic came to their ears.
Throwing open the back door, Jane called out, “Something’s happened in the study. Hurry, I think there’s trouble.”
The guard from the back came to life, running through the rain and into the house. He barely glanced at George, who looked like just another guard in his purloined rain slicker. “You stay here and watch the door.” The guard took off for the interior of the house.
As soon as the guard was out of sight, Jane and George ran out into the garden. They could see the other guard by the garden entrance drifting away from his post, trying to see what the commotion was at the front of the house. When his back was turned, the two of them slipped past, their sounds and movement masked by the fortuitous rain.
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