HerOutlandishStranger

  Her Outlandish Stranger

  Summer Devon

  Blush sensuality level: This is a sensual romance (may have explicit love scenes, but not erotic in frequency or type).

  In 2310, Jazz White is one of few surviving soldiers of a hated regime. Now “reprogrammed”, stripped of many of his memories and killing skills, Jazz is an outcast until he’s summoned by the government’s elite time-travel agency and told he must journey to the 1800s. His mission—to protect Eliza Wickman, an English woman trapped in war-torn Spain. Once he arrives in the dreadful place, it becomes clear he’s been tricked. His real mission—Jazz must father her child, who will prove important to the future of civilization.

  Guilt-ridden by his deception, Jazz must keep Eliza safe while he escorts her to England, all the while fighting his attraction to her innocent eroticism. But an agent from his time has other plans, and does his best to sabotage Jazz’s efforts. As the connection between him and Eliza grows, the agent could be the least of Jazz’s worries. His biggest fear is far more personal—what will happen once Eliza learns the truth?

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  Her Outlandish Stranger

  ISBN 9781419937682

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Her Outlandish Stranger Copyright © 2012 Summer Devon

  Edited by Grace Bradley

  Cover design by Dar Albert

  Photography: Fillip Fuxa, Photo Creative, Astra Potocki, Anetta/Shutterstock.com

  Electronic book publication March 2012

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

  With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  The publisher and author(s) acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks, service marks and word marks mentioned in this book.

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  Her Outlandish Stranger

  Summer Devon

  Chapter One

  2310, ten years after The Way of Truth war trials

  They showed up one autumn morning. Jazz worked inside, ignoring the soft, clear weather as he plowed through a stack of formulates for CRs, communication receptacles. The contractor wanted the CRs done yesterday.

  When he heard the shout of excitement outside, he glanced down at the screen of one of his own external CRs.

  The sleek white vehicle drew to a silent stop outside his door and two uniformed agents of the Department of Historical Undertakings stepped out. Real DHUies, right here on his block.

  Jazz managed to hold back his own excitement.

  He flipped the CR he’d finished onto the board and reached for another.

  This wasn’t the first time the DHU had contacted him, but so far he’d managed to ignore them. The government posed no threat to him—Jazz had paid his debt to society. He simply wanted to be left alone and was annoyed the authorities had bombarded him with messages marked “urgent”.

  Their messages pleaded that they had some information to pass along to him. No deal. He didn’t need any information from them and had nothing to say. He only wondered what he’d have to say or do to get rid of this pair.

  He flicked his CR a few times to watch the people who lived on his block crane their necks to stare, open-mouthed. They pointed at the DHUies, who ostentatiously ignored the attention.

  Though the Department tried to keep a low profile, any idiot could recognize a flashy Department of Historical Undertakings vehicle. A kid on a cyke, the same one who rode by Jazz’s house to gawk at him, stopped to watch the two people. Jazz heard the kid yell, “Eh, are you real DHUies? Can I have your autograph?”

  The uniformed duo, a man and a woman, sent a psunder message to Jazz announcing their arrival. The message echoed around his brain. Urgent. He pushed back his chair to watch them on the screen for a minute before dumping the CR and opening his door.

  “Jazz White?” the woman asked politely.

  Jazz didn’t bother to answer. He folded his arms, leaned against the doorway and waited. Since he was tall, he could stare down at her with the look that usually worked when he wanted to keep his less-tolerant neighbors at bay. His mouth tightened in surprise when he noticed the insignia on her uniform was of a high-ranking official. This was no plain message bearer.

  She looked up and their eyes met. The woman cleared her throat. “Mr. White, I’m afraid I have to insist that you participate in the DHU meeting we have arranged for you.”

  “Insist? Yeah?”

  “We’ve sent verbal, written and psunder messages to you, Mr. White. You must understand this is DHU business. It is also extremely sensitive. You must participate and your participation must be in person.”

  Jazz fished around in his pocket for another CR to work on. A tiny psunder brain unit. Huh. He’d have to find a much smaller instrument to use on it.

  “’Scuse me.” He reached back to yank a minute demagnetized needle from the sheet on the work bench.

  Without looking up from the CR, he said, “I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m a techno and I’ve got no connection to the Department of Historical Undertakings. There’s no possible way I’d be summoned. It’s not like I’m a trained DHUy or something.”

  “Yessir, I know. But you will be.”

  That got his attention. His hands froze and he looked over at her. She studied him with a wide-eyed expression Jazz could only interpret as veneration, or maybe physical attraction. That seemed unlikely. He chose to take antidotes against that sort of thing. Whatever had changed in her expression, it made his skin prickle with something—maybe even fear.

  He dumped the needle, the CR, and the nonchalant act. “No. Not possible. You guys pick out DHUies from day one. I told you, I’m just a tech. I’m a normal person.”

  He knew he didn’t imagine the significant silence after that last stupid remark, but Jazz forced himself not to look away or attempt to hide his forearm and the scar. No point in trying to conceal that obvious bit of evidence. He’d already noticed both agents’ furtive glances at the spot inside his arm where the chip once lay. The chip and the tattoo were gone but his skin still bore the mark of shame he was forbidden to remove.

  Hey, the DHUy knew all about him before she showed up at his door. And maybe for once he was simply being paranoid when he read disapproval into the official’s silence. Maybe there was none, because when she answered she had no trace of judgment or irony in her voice.

  She even smiled. “Sir. I understand it’s extraordinary that a member of the general population was selected to be a DHUy. In fact, I believe no
ordinary citizen has had that honor.”

  He hissed with impatience. “Honor? No thanks, not interested. I’m thirty. Too da’ old.”

  The woman’s smile seemed sympathetic. “Sorry, Mr. White. It’s really out of your hands. Ours too, for that matter. This is straight from the director himself.”

  The man next to her shifted slightly. For the first time, Jazz noticed that this other agent was huge, even taller and broader than he was, and armed with a weapon. Jazz instantly understood the man had come along to take charge if Jazz didn’t cooperate.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded of the two DHUies. “You think you’re agents of the Way?”

  The woman grimaced at his tasteless reference to that old evil. The malevolence Jazz had helped rise to power. But when she answered, her voice was calm. “Of course not, sir. We are here in the middle of the day. We are not going to drag you off to a camp. Merely to a meeting…ah, and we’d rather not drag you.”

  Jazz rubbed the back of his neck. “Nah. Sorry. You’ll have to drag me. I’m not coming. Not even if Madame herself asked.”

  The woman glanced ’round at the other, lower-ranking DHUy. As if on some kind of signal, the man took a few steps away, pretending to check on the vehicle. The official slipped all the way into Jazz’s home, an entirely forbidden move.

  She leaned even closer and spoke quietly so the other DHUy could not hear her words. “Mr. White, odd that you should mention her name. The director hinted that if you were completely reluctant, he might involve Madame Blanro. Your involvement is so secret that even I don’t know the details, but you are being called upon to somehow save the only person who could bring us from under the Way of Truth. I do not exaggerate when I say that I believe our civilization depends on you, sir.”

  She delivered this ridiculous speech then looked up at him. Staring back, Jazz waited for someone to jump out and say “just fooling!” but he could see that she was entirely serious.

  At that instant, he understood he was about to become an agent of the Department of Historical Undertakings.

  *

  Ten other people sat at the large round table. All heads turned toward Jazz. So many stares fixed on him at once, so many people in the same room. Gah, it reminded him of the bleary half-awake nightmare time just after the war.

  He could almost hear the word as they looked at him. Truthie. That was the name for people like him, the ex-soldiers of the Way.

  He ran his hand over the table. It was wood, a substance he rarely encountered. When he concentrated on the feel of the warm, satin surface, he could control the urge to leap up and flee.

  He’d given up protesting to the Departmental upper rankers, after hearing a dozen patient explanations of the situation.

  “No, no one has made a mistake,” an agency bonks at the table told him. “We have much more refined instrumentation these days and developed a foolproof system for fossilized DNA checks.”

  Years earlier the director had discerned that at least one DHUy traveler would appear at a particular spot, among some rocks on a desolated plateau in Spain. They’d developed new systems, discovered it had to be a specific DHUy, not just any qualified agent. When they ran the DNA, it did not match any of their agents, so they had to look into the general bank. It turned up Jazz White.

  The formal meeting at the round table included the DHU Director of Transport himself, a ridiculously young man with a slight stammer.

  Jazz wondered if the director had staged the whole episode as some kind of elaborate joke on his DHU staff. The director wore the bright-eyed expression of a reckless, unreliable child. At least he looked like an intelligent brat.

  The director interrupted someone’s long, technical explanation of the detection process. “I da’ well wish we could have been able to give you the standard nine years of training. Of course there are some p-parts of training, self-protection, for instance, that you won’t need—”

  The director coughed to cover up the faux pas he’d almost made by mentioning Jazz’s past. Everyone made a point of not looking at Jazz’s arm.

  A uniformed man, an actual DHUy and not just an admin, spoke up. “I think, sir, you’ve stressed that this is an important assignment. Perhaps I should at least have one session with Mr. White?”

  The director nodded. “Right.” He waved a hand at the man. “That’s Steele, a top agent, and our trainer for self-defense. Yeah—some hours with Steele, then.”

  Steele, a big, stocky dark-haired man a few years older than Jazz, nodded and eyed him grimly. Oh she-yit. Steele wore the tattoo of a Way martyr. Part of his hand was missing. He’d been a prisoner in one of the worst camps and proudly advertised the fact.

  The director went on, “The point is, we gotta work fast, White.” He glanced down at the report. “It appears f-from that hand print, you will be aged thirty-one years, one month and two days at the time. So, Agent J. White, it seems that you will be traveling in only…four months from now. And unfortunately it is an extended assignment and we can’t exactly tell when you return. But I gotta say I have confidence in you. You’ll do the trick.” He gave a broad smile, but everyone else in the room looked uneasy.

  He stopped Jazz as the others trooped out of the room and pulled him aside.

  “To keep you safe, only three of us know the nature of your assignment. So keep your mouth shut, okay?”

  “Keep me safe from what?”

  The director opened his mouth but the official guide had joined them.

  Without looking at Jazz, the director only gave one of his sly smiles and said, “If you run into situations you do not understand, use your instincts. Get me? Hey?”

  Jazz nodded. Less than a day after he had been summoned, Jazz was shoved into the bowels of the DHU.

  He spent the next four grueling months being turned into a trained time-traveler, one of those heroic and—usually—well-trained members of the most famous, most elite corps in the world.

  Almost before he had chance to draw breath, he ended up on some godforsaken hill in some old country called Spain.

  Chapter Two

  Somewhere in the Castilla La Mancha Province of Spain. After the Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo and before the start of the siege of Badajoz, 1812.

  The mist grew heavy and turned to drizzle. Jazz pulled the itchy wool cloak over his head and murmured to the CR he’d illegally sneaked into the assignment.

  The Department was strict and thorough. They’d removed his internal psunder CR. No agent wore those brainwave units in the field—no point, anyway, there was no connection to the web. But Jazz was a pretty good tech and could tune his favorite external CR unit to give off the vibrations of a bit of wood, an acceptable substance for any DHUy.

  He’d also managed to sneak along a few other supplies such as a lighter, a real warming cloak, vials of medicinal goop his mother had given him—in real glass, just in case they were detected—and a cap to fend off the cold. During his too-brief training, he’d heard about dreadful privations in the past and was determined to avoid at least a few of them.

  He kept the forbidden objects packed away in the bag they gave him, a peculiar shapeless dull brown object that, empty, weighed far more than any full satchel he usually carried.

  They said it was an imitation of leather, a substance made from actual dead animal skins. Disgusting, he’d thought at the time. If he’d only known. During the hours he’d been in this devastated wilderness, he’d seen far worse things than leather.

  “CR, how much longer for the father-and-daughter team?”

  “They will appear in approximately one half hour.”

  “CR, what do I do when—”

  “Wait. When they appear, hide.” Jazz wondered if it were possible the CR had a note of exaggerated patience in its toneless voice. “The man will leave, returning in the same direction. Approximately two hours later, the progenitor will enter the cave, father the child, and disappear from record. Your recorded assignment is the second stranger, t
he protector.”

  “I know the da’ assignment. I don’t want those details, CR. What’ll I protect her from besides the war? Find anything new in your files?”

  “I am no longer connected to a network. I barely manage to remain informed of local time. According to accessible data, I do not exist. I therefore can answer only basic questions.”

  Jazz despised machines that sounded human, so he’d set his CR to plain-speak, the old-fashioned voice that did not express emotion. But he could swear the machine sounded annoyed.

  Jazz flicked the CR off, shoved it into his pocket, and settled on the damp ground. He listened to the unfamiliar quiet. No music, no human voices. Just the occasional shriek of some far-off bird and the drip, drip of water from the scrubby trees around him.

  The silence didn’t unnerve him nearly as much as the smells. Almost at once when he started DHUy training they made him stop taking his meds, including the Klorfyll, so his body soon filled with wretched microorganisms.

  For the first time in his memory, when he sweated, he reeked. When he awoke in the morning, his mouth was filled with an unfamiliar metallic flavor. Very disagreeable. His old wild-state sensations came flooding back, including the once enjoyable sexual sensations that now made him nervous. He felt like an animal.

  “You’ll probably want to clean yourself more often,” the trainers told him. No joke. If he had a choice, he’d wash every few hours. They wouldn’t let him, though, telling him he’d get used to it.

  True enough, on this hillside he barely noticed his own stench—probably because the damp wool cloak stank even more. He’d already placed the clue that would lead the DHU to him in another couple hundred years. Now he stared off into space and felt like a fool waiting for nothing.

  Suddenly, with a jolt that set his heart pounding, he recognized the rhythmic thud of a horse’s hooves.

  Jazz squatted down low behind the rock. He listened to the soft snort of the horse, then the creak and jingle and the grunt of the man as he slid the unconscious woman off the animal’s back.

  A surge of dizzying dread swamped Jazz.