by Jill Cooper
Copyright 2017, Jill Cooper All Right’s Reserved.
Cover: Deranged Doctor Design
Edited by: Krissy Smith & Brenda Deliantoni
Dedication
This book exists thanks to the fans, through their emails and conversations have expressed their love for Lara Crane Montgomery and the journey she has gone through. So many expressed interest in seeing what she would be like a little older helped to give birth to this new series.
Thanks to my husband for reading and supporting my work and giving me the most valuable feedback of all!
Contents
Cast of Characters:
What about time? A quick catchup
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty- Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Epilogue
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Cast of Characters:
Lara Crane Montgomery: 24 year old former time traveler, Lara turned the world on its head when she used time travel to alter the time line and save her mother’s life. She’s spunky, always tries to do the right thing, and loves her family dearly.
Donovan James: A rich businessman who trades in currency and the stock market, he’s been with Lara since high school and loves her dearly. They’re dedicated to each other and he’ll do anything to keep her safe.
Molly and Mike: Lara’s half siblings. Twins, they’re thirteen years old.
Miranda Montgomery: Lara’s twice divorced mother who was a chief scientist at the Rewind Agency. She’s made mistakes but trying to make up for them.
John Crane: Miranda’s high school sweetheart, ex-husband, and Lara’s dad. He was falsely imprisoned for the attempted murder of Miranda for ten years.
Jax Montgomery: Lara’s ex-stepdad who she still loves dearly. He hid the fact that Lara’s dad was framed for Miranda’s attempted murder to protect her family and to keep Miranda for himself.
Rex Montgomery: Jax’s twin brother and Miranda’s would-be assassin. Trying to harness the secrets of time travel, he kept Lara imprisoned in a virtual reality system for years. Once Lara escaped she killed him over six years ago.
Marcus O’Reily: Former US Senator who helped Lara put away Patricia James, former leader of the Rewind Agency.
Patricia James: US senator, founder of the Rewind Agency and Donovan’s mother, Patricia loves power and all that goes with it. She abused her position and mob ties to try to snuff out Lara, Miranda, and silence John Crane.
Rick Miller: Lara’s high school boyfriend before she changed the timeline.
What about time? A quick catch up
Hello, gentle reader!
If this is your first time with us thank you for choosing this book! The world of Lara Crane is high intensity and even higher in insane plot twists that’ll keep you guessing. Please, try to keep up.
In the first Lara Crane novel, 15 Minutes, Lara goes back in time to save her mother’s life. When she returns to the present everything is different. She has a fancy new house, new siblings, and worst of all, a new step-father! Her real father has been falsely imprisoned for her mother’s attempted murder!
Lara races against the clock to prove her innocence while fighting off time travel sickness. Basically, her brain is bleeding as the two timelines merge together in her mind. Gasp! The horror!
Turns out, it is the Rewind Agency, the time travel agency, that is behind her mother’s attempted murder. Her mother is now married to her assassins twin brother (can you keep that straight? Lara sure can’t) and they are desperate to unlock the secrets of the mind.
Cue up some virtual reality and the deletion of memories and inserting of others. Fast forward and Lara is betrayed by her former boyfriend and is apprehended by the Rewind Agency. Just when she thinks she’s escaped and saved her sister, Molly’s life, Lara discovers she hasn’t left the lab. She’s stuck in a virtual reality inside her own mind. A twisted game that Rex, her uncle and mother’s would be an assassin, has devised to study her mind.
In the book Plugged Lara struggles to separate fact from fiction as she’s trapped in a virtual world to be controlled. Half the book exists only in her mind until finally she escapes, rewinds time, and manages to go back to before she was kidnapped.
After murdering her uncle Rex for everything he does to her, Lara plans an elaborate plan to hand over all the evidence she has gathered. The founder of Rewind, Patricia James, is arrested and Lara believes she can finally move on with her life.
As her father is released from prison. This is where the screen fades to black and everyone is allowed to live happily ever after.
I don’t think so.
In Detached, Lara struggles to come to grasp with the fact the world knows time she can travel in time by will. The US government always struggles with it and they attempt to patent her! After being kidnapped and fastened with a tracker, Lara comes to realize her life will never really be hers.
After a time travel assassin tries to kill her, Lara accidentally time travels 60 years into the future where time travel is wielded like a weapon by the government. No one is ever really free and criminals are arrested before they actually commit crimes. Together with her future great niece, Cassidy Winters, they must stop Xavier Daniels from controlling the world and the time travel stream.
Living on the run, they escape death more than once and Lara hears about how her family moved on without her.
They assault Xavier Daniels stronghold and Lara destroys his time travel corridor. Inside, dozens and dozens of boxes, all with their own Lara Crane from an infinite stream of timelines. It is she who is powering the corridor and Lara destroys it to set them free from the same prison she thought she escaped years ago.
Lara returns home but not before she wipes Xavier Daniels from the timeline, from all the timelines, and rolls them all back into one. She believes she has cured time of its problems and goes on with her life.
Meanwhile, she and Deliah Chase, a former assistant to her mother, from the Time Travel Protection Agency (or the TTPA) to make sure no one can use time travel for evil again.
Curious what happened right before this novel? Get the prequel story following Molly Montgomery, Shadow of Time, available now: https://instafreebie.com/free/xtmhs
Chapter One
“Fifteen more seconds, Ms. Montgomery.” On her knees, the seamstress smiles up at me with a pin clutched in her teeth. “I know how hard it is for the young to stand still.”
In the mirror, my reflection glows as I stand in my wedding dress with its yards of lace and the softest white fabric money can buy. After years of time travel scandal, my marriage to Donovan James is the societal talk of Boston, but for me, it’s
a dream come true. A fairy tale. One that we’ll pass down to our children.
If I can get through my college graduation first.
Still, I smile down at the kind seamstress. I hope to live long enough to one day look like her, with lines around my eyes and lips. It wasn’t too long ago that I thought a time travel adventure might rip the privilege of life right out from underneath me. “It’s like time itself has stopped.”
Her nose crinkles as she gazes up at me and I gaze back down at her. Eight short years ago, I changed the course of the world—used time travel to save my mother’s life. Captivity followed for me, as well a whirlwind adventure into the future—and the past. Nothing is as it should be since my final confrontation with my Uncle Rex, the one who systematically tried to destroy my life…
Well, let’s just say time travel has some advantages when it comes to an alibi, but now everything has been calm for six years. I finally got the chance to enroll in college. The Time Travel Protection Agency (TTPA) has made sure time travel can no longer be used to change the past or the future. Thanks to my unique brain scans, it’s a future that can be monitored and life is once again a beautiful, sacred thing.
For me, it meant college, life, love. Marriage after hardship. Donovan James and I have fought every step of the way to get where we are now.
“There you go.” As the seamstress struggles to her feet, I grip her hand to help. “I’ve never seen a more glowing bride.” She sweeps my long curls off my neck and stacks them on top of my head. It’s grown long, nearly to the center of my back. “What do you think up? Or down?”
My hand edges to the port still affixed to the base of my skull, directly into my brain. Some things change, but the technology remains the same. It can’t easily be removed, so it’s a scar I live with. A painful memory of the past and one, I hope, won’t give me wonky headaches someday.
“Down, I think. Or partially up. I guess I’ll leave it to the hairdresser.”
“We’re dying to see, Lara,” Mom’s voice rings out behind the curtain and I hear the shuffle of not so little feet.
“Come on, we want to see!” It’s my thirteen-year-old little sister, Molly, when she peeks her head past the curtain, her blue eyes widen. “Oh, you look like a princess! Mom, she looks like—.”
Mom pushes the curtain open and I pivot on the platform I stand upon. Our curls, the three Montgomery girls, are the mirror image of each other. Mom is just beginning to gray around her crown.
“You look like me—when I married your father.” She smiles but it’s bittersweet. Her face is youthful and tears fill her eyes as she covers her mouth. Her finger is free of a wedding band and engagement ring because…well…things are complicated when you’re a Montgomery.
Maybe even more so than when you’re a Crane.
“You look so beautiful. Donovan is going to flip his lid,” Mom whispers as she takes my hand.
My heart fills with gladness. It’s so full, I might float clear away. I hope when he sees me, time stops. Just as it does every time I see him.
****
Boston in the spring is simply beautiful. We take a walk down part of the Freedom Trail and then skip over to Faneuil Hall for a bite to eat. Sitting outside at a patio table, Mom talks, Molly sips her green smoothie, and I gaze at a butterfly landing on a daffodil. It’s the simplest of things, but it’s one of life’s finest pleasures.
You learn not to take things for granted after you’ve been stalked, kidnapped, and had time travel assassins lunge after you in the name of revenge. The things that happened have scarred me. Finding hundreds of versions of me trapped in tight little boxes? It gave me nightmares.
But seeing their smiling faces… Mom laughs at something Molly said and seeing my sister without her iPad is a great thing. An amazing thing. This moment is more precious than I can say, and they can never know what I saw. What I felt. It’s better for them, it’s even better for me.
Because one thing I learned, you can travel back and forth through time, but you can never remove the hurt. The pain. Somehow, that keeps spiraling on.
“What about you, Lara?” Mom asks. “How’s your school work going?”
“My last paper is coming due. I’m going to finish it before the wedding. At least, that’s the plan.”
“Aww,” Mom stirs her drink around. “Maybe you should’ve decided to get married in the summer instead.”
Molly gasps. “Mom, don’t give her any ideas! She can’t postpone. I need this to happen.”
“Don’t worry,” my mouth plays with a sly smile. “I’m not postponing. I’m ready to be a James.”
“You’re sure you’re ready?” Mom asks and there’s a seed of doubt in her voice I don’t like. I know I’m her first born, her first baby, but I wish she wouldn’t ask me questions like that.
“I won’t waste any more time. I spent a year in that cage…” I reset the timeline. It wasn’t real to anyone…except for me. That year of torture and torment was as real as anything I’ve ever felt. Mom didn’t know, so I can’t hold it against her. Not really, but sometimes part of me wants to.
Mom reaches across the table and pats my hand. “I’m here for you. We all are. Now, how about we order dessert, or are you still existing on carrot sticks and celery to fit into that gorgeous dress?”
I shrug. “Carrot cake counts as a veggie, right?”
Molly snorts. “If it has wheat in it, I’m not eating it.”
Such a teenager. I want to tell her not to waste youth like I’m so old at the ripe old age of twenty-four, but my phone rings. It interrupts my thoughts as I pull it free. “Just a second, Mom…. Hello?”
There’s static on the other end. “Lara? It’s Delilah. Are you coming tonight, to the banquet?”
Delilah is head of the TTPA, and we go way back. So far back, that once upon a time she was my mother’s assistant at the now-defunct Rewind Agency. “Of course, I already RSVP’d back to you.”
“I need to talk to you.” Her voice is desperate and anxious. My stomach rolls at the sound of it because something about it reminds me of the past. “Meet me tonight in private suite 1001, would you? Before the banquet speech.”
“Can’t you just tell me now?”
“I can’t, darling. I’m sorry. It must be in person.” Her voice strains. Whatever she wants to tell me must be serious, but I try to calm my nerves. Time travel is illegal now. It can’t be done, not without the experts seeing it way before anything bad happens, so why is Delilah upset?
So why am I so upset?
“Just be early if you can, Lara.”
The line goes dead and I’m quick to end the call as a cold shudder races up my back. I’m done with time travel and the adventures that come with it. I’m done with saving the world.
But that wormhole, sometimes it beckons. Sometimes it wants me back.
Chapter Two
It happens at the strangest of times, that beckoning—that pull to travel through time. Maybe it’s just a spilled cup of coffee ruining an outfit, but sometimes it’s more serious. Sometimes it’s because I witnessed a car accident or I read in the paper about a little boy going missing. Sometimes the pull to time travel is so strong it blinds me with a headache.
Right or wrong, I haven’t tried to travel in time since the Rewind Agency was disbanded. Watching people suffer hurts, but I know messing around with time travel hurts more. Consequences can’t be predicted and even in those moments when I wanted to end suffering, I ended up causing more. The best thing I can do is turn a blind eye to it all. Even slowing things down or speeding them up effects things.
I’m not sure I even remember how to make it all happen again. I’m afraid to find out or even try.
Donovan makes life easier. His strong hands caress the small of my back as he slips my black dress up on my shoulders. Then, smooth as white chocolate, he zips me up. Standing in our penthouse suite that overlooks all of Boston, I gaze at my reflection. Our master bedroom is bigger than most apartmen
ts and the six-panel mirror reflects perfection back at me.
The dress fits like a glove as Donovan wraps his arms tight around my middle. My hair is long, but pinned back with diamond barrettes and my make-up is flawless. It’s every girl’s dream to live the life we do, but it is mostly Don’s, not mine. It’s given to me, borrowed. A few great investments along the way have treated him well. He’s on the cusp of amassing a small fortune and he’s not stingy with those he shares with.
His mouth hovers against my neck and I stroke my fingers through his blonde short locks. When he blows against me, I shiver. Part of me wishes we didn’t have to go to the banquet, but Delilah’s call plays in the back of my mind, keeping my anxiety high. Donovan’s strong hand touches my chin and edges my face close to his. As we kiss, Mr. Handsome in his tux caresses my waist. The heat between us knows no words—no bounds. My engagement ring sparkles in the mirror and across his face as he spins me around.
“Let’s skip,” Donovan whispers and his lips engulf mine.
I want to give into him so badly that I nod but then shake my head. “I can’t,” I’m breathless as I hug him and nuzzle his neck. Soon, we’ll have to go. Soon, he’ll look at me and I’ll see the displeasure on his face. There’re few things Don hates more than politicians and taxes; one of those is time travel.
“I have to speak to Delilah and I’m on the board.” I let out a long deep breath. “I have to show at the fundraisers or else everyone might realize…I’m not as involved as I should be.”
As I promised.
He nods, but with a faraway glint in his eye. Donovan takes my hand and squeezes it. “You do look gorgeous tonight, rock star. It’d be criminal to hog you all to myself.”
I’m still more comfortable in jeans and my converse running shoes. Donovan’s affection makes it easy as he takes my hand and leads me out of the bedroom. Out in the posh foyer, he drapes a black wrap around my shoulders and kisses my cheek. “When it’s time to go, the secret word is ‘fruit dip’.”
