Christmas Past

By Susanna Fraser

Christmas Past by Susanna Fraser

Time-traveling PhD student Sydney Dahlquist's first mission sounded simple enough—spend two weeks in December 1810 collecting blood samples from the sick and wounded of Wellington's army, then go home to modern-day Seattle and Christmas with her family. But when her time machine breaks, stranding her in the past, she must decide whether to sacrifice herself to protect the timeline or to build a new life—and embrace a new love—two centuries before her time.

Rifle captain Miles Griffin has been fascinated by the tall, beautiful "Mrs. Sydney" from the day he met her caring for wounded soldiers. When he stumbles upon her time travel secret on Christmas Eve, he vows to do whatever it takes to seduce her into making her home in his present—by his side.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781622663880

Susanna Fraser

Susanna Fraser has been writing since the age of 9. Her youthful efforts featured talking horses, but she now writes Regency-set historicals with a focus on the soldiers who fought the Napoleonic Wars.A native of Alabama, she never lost her love for barbecue or stopped saying “y’all” as life took her to Philadelphia, England and Seattle, where she lives with her husband and daughter.For more information on Susanna and her books, visit susannafraser.com.

Book preview

Her life is in the present, but she’s fallen in love in the past...

Time-traveling PhD student Sydney Dahlquist’s first mission sounded simple enough--spend two weeks in December 1810 collecting blood samples from the sick and wounded of Wellington’s army, then go home to modern-day Seattle and Christmas with her family. But when her time machine breaks, stranding her in the past, she must decide whether to sacrifice herself to protect the timeline or to build a new life--and embrace a new love--two centuries before her time.

Rifle captain Miles Griffin has been fascinated by the tall, beautiful Mrs. Sydney from the day he met her caring for wounded soldiers. When he stumbles upon her time travel secret on Christmas Eve, he vows to do whatever it takes to seduce her into making her home in his present--by his side.

Christmas Past

Susanna Fraser

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Susanna Fraser. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 109

Fort Collins, CO 80525

Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

Scandalous is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

Edited by Kate Fall

Cover Design by Heather Howland

Cover Art by Period Images

ISBN 978-1-62266-388-0

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition November 2013

Table of Contents

Chapter One

About the Author

Don’t miss out on more Scandalous romance…

Letters at Christmas

The Twelve Days of Seduction

The Earl’s Christmas Colt

To all my day job colleagues down through the years in the world of academic research and administration. Your work makes the world a better place.

Chapter One

Lisbon, 24 December 1810

Sydney couldn’t deny the truth any longer. Her time machine was broken. She’d taken the temporal engine apart and put it back together a dozen times in the past two weeks. She’d checked every single connection—first methodically, then obsessively, at last frantically. Nothing worked, not even kicking it and screaming obscenities.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. All the newer-model time machines had an auto-recall function that brought the machines and their occupants back to their home time at the first hint of a serious timeline fracture. She’d helped to test the technology herself, going back a few days into her past and attempting to make changes. The auto-recall had always whisked her back before she could buy a lottery ticket with winning numbers for a major jackpot, let a friend set her up on a blind date, or even persuade her parents to go to Mexico instead of Hawaii for their winter vacation.

But here, now, that function had failed, and the temporal engine refused to turn over. The rest of her 2013 technology still worked—the interior lights, the mini-fridge where she kept the samples she’d collected, and the tablet computer where she stored her notes. All useless if she couldn’t go home.

She’d already stayed in 1810 a week beyond the maximum the National Institute for Temporal Research’s review board allowed. If by some miracle the time machine suddenly worked, they’d never let her time travel again. She’d be lucky not to be kicked out of her PhD program at the University of Washington altogether. Still, if she could only go home, she’d gladly work a cash register at Target or McDonald’s for the rest of her days.

But she didn’t believe in miracles. She was a scientist. She couldn’t even hope for rescue, not anymore. If her time machine’s failure was a simple mechanical issue and someone from her time could’ve helped her, they would have set their own time machine for some point before her two weeks were up. She tried not to dwell too much on why no one had come, since the most obvious explanation—that she or some other traveler had

Reviews for Christmas Past

[tldegray-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A time-traveling Ph.D. student gets stuck in the past when her time machine won't work. According to time travel protocol, she's supposed to kill herself so she doesn't change the timeline. But she doesn't want to, because she's in love, and she eventually decides that someone else has changed the timeline already--or created an alternate timeline or both--so she's off the hook and she stays in the past.

This novella just didn't work for me. I can't point out anything particularly wrong with it (aside from its abuse of timey-wimey theories).

(Provided by publisher)

[evampire-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This short and fast holiday read that is a fun and enchanting must read.Sydney is a time-traveling PhD student and on her first mission she has to spend two weeks in December 1810 collecting blood samples from the sick and wounded among Wellington’s army. When her time machine breaks she must protect the timeline by following the Protocol. Fascinated with Sydney from the first meeting, Captain Miles Griffin stumbles upon her and the time machine and decides to seduce her into staying.This enjoyable fast paced novella is an enjoyable read that puts an interesting spin on a happy holiday ending. The author gives the reader a great feel for the time period using vivid details and imagery. She conveys the emotions of the characters with an intensity that adds depth to the story. The only drawback I found with the story was that both characters were a little too accepting of the events taking place. But this doesn’t take away from the wonderful story and the heart-warming ever after.