Step Into Tomorrow

By Rayne Forrest and KC Kendricks

Rhys St. Clair is the best of a select group of highly trained time specialists. When events in the layers of time run amok, it's his job to step through the Matrix and fix the problem. A mistake in his calculations sends him back to the year 1996 and nets him more than he ever bargained for – Sophia Townsend.

 

Sophia Townsend needs a life makeover. When a confused stranger shows up inside her home, with no idea of where he is, or even what year it is, it doesn't take Sophia long to figure out the man in her living room is the most interesting guy she's ever met, and the sexiest, too.

 

When Rhys whisks her away, Sophia isn't sure if she's been kidnapped, or if the handsome stranger is taking her on the greatest adventure of her life. When the truth catches up to them, Rhys has only one thing left to offer her – but only if she's brave enough to step into tomorrow with him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: White Deer Enterprises/White Deer Books
• Release date: Jan 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215871560

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Sophia Townsend did not want to get married. Marriage, for her, would be a long, slow lingering death of the spirit. How wonderful could it possibly be to wake up every morning staring at the same slack-jawed, drooling, unshaven face?

She still didn’t know how she’d ended up engaged to Eddie Gardner. Well, she did, but that was neither here nor there. She needed to find a way to tell Eddie—nicely since she was a nice girl—that she didn’t want to get married because she didn’t love him.

Sophia’s head hurt, and not with the average garden-variety headache. This was a pounding, aching, sickening, just-as-soon-die-now headache. She needed to get over it—quick—because her mother was on the way to pick her up and take her trousseau shopping.

She’d tried to tell her mother that she didn’t want to marry Eddie, but the walls listened better. At least when she talked to the walls, they didn’t talk back.

It didn’t matter to her that Edward Millhouse Gardner the Fourth, thank you, was considered quite a catch. That fish could just go back in the lake for someone else to net.

She didn’t even know for sure how she’d caught his attention. Well, she did, and that was part of the problem. She hadn’t really caught his attention.

Her mother and his mother had worked a scam, and she and Eddie were the suckers. Those two women put their heads together and decided the family fortunes needed to be protected. What better way to do that than to offer up their only progenies to each other?

The country club staff was already braced for the wedding of the decade, and it was still nine months away.

Nine months. Good Lord! She’d already been engaged for nine months. Why hadn’t she found a way to end this farce?

Okay, she knew that answer, too. She didn’t want to hurt Eddie’s feelings. Eddie was a sweet guy—in a teddy-bearish sort of way. And that had been her downfall.

He was sweet.

Sure, he was a six-foot, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed Norse god with the best-aligned smile money could buy. He wore the best clothes, drove the best automobiles, and showered twice a day with the most expensive designer shower gels on the market. But he was still Eddie.

And there was nothing exciting about Eddie. Nothing.

He kissed her, and she barely noticed the lip contact. How could she ever enjoy going to bed with him? He’d not batted an eye when she told him she wanted to wait for their wedding night to consummate their relationship. If he’d protested, she could’ve called it off.  But, nooooo. Not Eddie.

Eddie nodded and agreed to eighteen months of celibacy, and Sophia didn’t buy it. He might be a nice guy, but he wasn’t a self-sacrificing hero. Eddie was the kind of fellow who thought sneaking some bootie on the side was his God-given right as a man. And Sophia knew he didn’t go out of his way to find it—it came looking for him. She heard the talk, and she simply didn’t care. 

If she didn’t care now, how likely was it she’d care in twenty years? It wasn’t a good way to start a marriage.

At the sound of a car horn, Sophia peeked out the window, although she knew it was her mother. Dolores refused to set foot in her little townhouse, and blowing the horn was one of the ways she made her point that, in her opinion, Sophia lived well below her breeding.

Sophia grabbed her purse and jacket and forced her lips to form a smile as she slipped into the Bentley Azure her mother had insisted on owning. Sophia had no idea what the car cost, except that it was a lot more than the older, classic American muscle car she drove, the one her mother wouldn’t ride in.

Excuse me all to hell for having gutter taste. Gutter taste or not, her car was one tiny spark of rebellion against her stifling life, and she loved it.

Hi, Mom. What’s shaking?

Sophia, really. Must you talk like that?

I talk like a normal person, Mother.

She braced herself as her mother took a deep breath. She’d screwed up—again—and now she had to hear The Lecture.

"Sophia, the Townsends are not normal people. Your great-grandfather is descended from French nobility. Your great-grandmother is a member of the royal family, albeit quite far removed. Your grandfather, my father, co-founded one of the largest banks in the northeastern United States. You have a respectable pedigree. I do wish you’d take that into consideration when you make decisions in your day-to-day life."

It was just too much.

The heat, her headache, the full moon and only heaven knew what else—it was just too much. She wasn’t jumping through the marriage hoop. She wasn’t going to become a clone of her mother. She wasn’t doing anything she didn’t whole-heartedly want to do.

And she’d listened to her mother’s spiel about her pedigree for the last time.

The.

Last.

Time.

Stop the car, Mom.

Dolores pulled over, her lips pursed so tightly that Sophia clamped down on her tongue to keep from asking what tasted so sour.

Perhaps you’d like to explain yourself, Sophia.

Nope. I’m sorry, but I’m done, Mom. Finished. I’m not going shopping. I’m not marrying Eddie. I’m not living my life by anyone’s standards except my own.

Sophia hopped out of the Bentley. I’ll just walk home from here. She slammed the car door and started walking, ignoring her mother’s shouted pleas for reason.

Heck, it was only three miles. She could pace that off in a little under an hour. By then, Eddie would be on her front porch, duly summoned and willing to do his duty to calm her down and make her see the light.

It wasn’t going to happen. Not this time.

She lined up her arguments, one step at a time.

***

Rhys St. Clair stared moodily at his computer terminal and sipped his bourbon-laced fake java. Lord in heaven, what he’d give to be able to pour a shot of bourbon and sip it, neat, in plain view of God and all witnesses. Outlawing whiskey—again—was one of the most pathetic examples of government gone awry that he could think of.

Things had been different back in the Year of Our Lord 2179. Very different. Sagan Cromwell, the idiot who brought about the Liquor Reforms had been an undisciplined, illogical, tunnel-visioned fool with no clue how to maintain accurate data and methodology. He’d been too stupid to realize the matrix led to more than one timeline. And he’d invented the fucking thing!

There were infinitely more timelines, but no one had mastered the way into them, Rhys included.

When Cromwell discovered that Lorenzo d’Selle, the greatest peacemaker mankind had ever known, the man who’d united Earth, Proxima, and Centauri as brothers, had been killed by a drunken mob, well, it had been easy to outlaw anything alcoholic.

What the stupid fucker had missed was that d’Selle died in only one of the thirty-one possible existing timelines. Correction—the thirty-one layers of time they could reach into. Einstein was right.

That had been over a hundred years ago. What a waste, all the way around, except for the matrix, of course. Rhys had stepped through the matrix into timelines where he could walk right into a bar and order a drink without fear of arrest. A good enough reason to hope the computer would spit out a year prior to 2179 for his next assignment. He desperately craved a decent drink. His office door opened, and Hector Chen walked in.

Rhys, how’s it going?

Slowly, slowly. He gulped the rest of his pseudo-java and burned his throat. He didn’t want to drag his best friend down with him if he were unfortunate enough to be apprehended with bourbon in his drink.

Death was such a huge penalty for such a small infraction.

I’ve run through nineteen timelines. The lower eight were brutal, as you’d expect. The three Georgian layers were almost as bad. Rhys sighed. The lower eleven layers of time never yielded much.

Those timelines had diverged, splintered, so long ago and so many times that they barely resembled even cheap imitations of reality. No one had ever found an event in the lower eleven layers. Some even speculated they should be considered a separate reality and closed off. Rhys didn’t necessarily agree.

Just because they’d never found an event there didn’t mean one hadn’t happened. Sometime.

Well, it’s good you didn’t find anything then. Hector stared at him. You didn’t find anything, right?

No, no. I didn’t find anything until I hit seventeen.

Sweet. You’ll be past the event layer by twenty-three.

Rhys turned a serious gaze on his friend. I have to run all thirty-one. You know that.

Hector squeezed his shoulder. Don’t run the Genghis lines without help. Swear to me, man. Call me so I can run backup.

Hector’s offer to help was sincere, and Rhys knew it. He knew the validity of having his Guardian run backup for the top seven timelines, the ones they called the Genghis