A Thief in Time (Thief in Time Series Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

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

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  Cover art © by Nathalia Suellen.

  Cidney Swanson

  Summary: Halley’s world is full of handouts and hand-me-downs. Even her apartment bedroom is shared with her distant and self-centered mother. Halley has only a battered blue truck to call her own—until she meets Edmund, Second Earl of Shaftesbury. Edmund has a manor, employs dozens of servants, and has never been close to falling in love—until Halley crashes into his life during an accidental trip to 1598. Now a spiraling series of encounters with a dangerous time-traveling thief will bring their worlds together with heartbreaking ramifications.

  Also by Cidney Swanson

  The Ripple Series

  Rippler

  Chameleon

  Unfurl

  Visible

  Immutable

  Knavery

  Perilous

  The Saving Mars Series

  Saving Mars

  Defying Mars

  Losing Mars

  Mars Burning

  Striking Mars

  Mars Rising

  The Thief in Time Series

  A Thief in Time

  A Flight in Time

  Other Books

  Siren Spell

  for Monique

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

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  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  Acknowledgments

  Sneak Peak: A Flight in Time

  1

  • HALLEY •

  Halley’s biggest problem was her bikini top, the elastic of which was shot to hell. It was Fiesta Week in Santa Barbara, California, and the August heat had finally chased away the coastal fogs of June and July. In four days Halley’s best friend Jillian Applegate would be helping host the fabulous Applegate Post-Fiesta Pool Party, where Halley, Jillian, and the third in their trio of best friends, DaVinci, might catch glimpses of Hollywood royalty.

  More important for Halley, she might get to talk to the great Ms. Ethyl Meier, multiple-Oscar-winning costume designer. Which meant that the worn-out bikini was now threatening to stand between Halley and a coveted internship with Ms. Meier. How could anyone expect Ms. Meier to take seriously a costume-internship candidate who was wearing a bikini top with the elastic shot to hell? It was the worst possible time for Halley’s bikini to give up the ghost. Wealthy glitterati at Jillian’s party might assume Halley’s top had merely been distressed to look worn, but Ms. Meier would recognize the truth.

  The real problem was that a new top would set Halley back forty-five dollars—dollars she didn’t have to spare. She knew DaVinci would loan her a bikini. She knew Jillian would give her one. Or three or four. But thanks to her mom’s line of work, Halley’s life was an endless stream of things that had belonged to somebody else, and for highly personal reasons, Halley had developed an antipathy to taking things from others.

  She’d already asked her mom for the money. It hadn’t gone well. “Forty-five dollars? Are you trying to give me a migraine?”

  Halley’s mother was always getting migraines. Especially when Halley needed shoes or a haircut or tires or a bikini top that didn’t have the elastic shot to hell.

  Consequently, on this sunny Friday of Fiesta week, Halley was up early, helping her two best friends set up a sidewalk sales booth at the Santa Barbara Arts and Crafts Show, and hoping like anything she’d sell a painting or two.

  Back in April, DaVinci had begged and schemed and connived to obtain a student-staffed sales booth at the famous art show. Students of Santa Barbara High School’s Visual Arts and Design Academy being well respected (and DaVinci being DaVinci), they’d received permission and an allocated space on the sidewalk, sandwiched between East Beach and Cabrillo Boulevard, where tourists and the occasional idle rich showed up with money to burn.

  Although DaVinci had secured a booth for the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Fiesta week, by June, the girls had scaled back to Friday only, because DaVinci’s tapestries were being shown at a gallery, with the friends hanging them on Saturday for an opening on Sunday. So Halley really only had one day—one shot at making cash at the Arts and Crafts Show.

  Jillian, a born organizer, had ordered signs reading “Friday Only!” and was hanging one now, under DaVinci’s direction. DaVinci was the true artist of the three girls. The one who had insisted they all apply to attend the Visual Arts and Design Academy, or VADA. Halley and Jillian had gone along with it because, well, DaVinci. She was a primal force.

  Halley wasn’t a painter. Not really. She studied painting and drawing as a means to an end. Her passion was costume history and design, and to work in costuming, she needed to know how to draw. But for the art show she had p
ulled five large painted canvases from storage, pricing them from $45 to $150, which meant she only needed one sale to cover the bikini, although four sales would provide enough for a haircut, shoes, and tires for her truck. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck as she secured the last of the paintings to the back of the booth.

  She’d chosen the five paintings her senior project adviser had praised most. Her best friends had approved them, too; Jillian had called Halley’s paintings “bold,” and DaVinci had nodded and added comments about movement, line, and color.

  “Done,” Halley said aloud, silently adding, Sell—please sell!

  “Sunscreen,” said Jillian, passing a bottle to DaVinci. Jillian had been passing sunscreen and other essentials to Halley and DaVinci since third grade.

  DaVinci, freckled and strawberry blonde, accepted the sunscreen.

  Halley didn’t use sunscreen much. According to her pale-skinned, Danish mother, Halley’s light brown skin protected her. And did she know how expensive hypoallergenic sunscreen was?

  Halley walked outside the booth to examine it from the perspective of the customers, who were already strolling the sidewalk. As she often did when nervous, she grasped for the pale jade ring that hung on a length of chain under her shirt. The ring had been a gift from her father on her seventh birthday. Her mother had once thrown it away to punish Halley for some unremembered transgression, but Halley had stolen it back from the trash. Eventually, her mother had noticed. “It won’t bring you a father,” she’d said. From then on, Halley had kept it on a chain, close to her heart and out of her mother’s view, a talisman to grasp when she needed luck or courage.

  Today, she needed both. Well, along with sales.

  “So?” asked DaVinci. “Does the booth say ‘Summer Harvest’ to you?” She had a blob of sunscreen on the bridge of her nose.

  “You missed a spot,” replied Halley. She tapped the bridge of her own nose before answering DaVinci’s question. “The booth looks more ‘Fruit Basket’ than ‘Harvest.’”

  “Close enough,” said DaVinci.

  “These Irina Trans are a half-size too tight,” murmured Jillian. Halley wasn’t sure if the “Irina Trans” were Jillian’s sporty new sandals or her shorts, but she was pretty sure each item had cost more than Halley’s own lifetime clothing budget.

  A flash of movement in the sky behind the booth caught Halley’s attention. Squinting, she watched as a hungry pelican dove into the ocean west of Stearn’s Wharf. Halley’s stomach tightened. She’d missed breakfast again. Or rather, she’d turned her nose up at the contents of the apartment’s refrigerator: wilted lettuce and a half-eaten bowl of salsa.

  Her mother’s latest house-sitting job came with full access to a pantry and freezer loaded with food. “Don’t expect me to buy groceries this week,” her mother had said. “You can come here to grab a bite to eat whenever, since I’m letting you have the truck all week.”

  It was Halley’s truck, a fact that her mother regularly, conveniently, forgot. Halley had bought it herself. The paint job was crap, and the tires were bald, but it ran, and the truck bed was huge. They’d crammed seven of DaVinci’s tapestries, Halley’s five canvases, and the entire booth setup plus a handcart into the truck bed this morning. Jillian had hauled her exquisitely detailed fruit sculptures herself, catching a ride with her mother’s driver.

  “It’s so hot already,” said DaVinci, swiping sticky curls up into a messy bun.

  “No breeze,” said Jillian, checking a weather app.

  “Earthquake weather,” murmured Halley.

  “Don’t say that,” snapped DaVinci. She knocked on the booth’s wooden stool and spit over her left shoulder.

  “Sorry,” murmured Halley. She knew better than to joke about earthquakes. DaVinci’s ramshackle house sat high atop East Mountain Drive, where the ocean views were unsurpassed but the soil shook like Jell-O during earthquakes. Jillian’s fine stone estate, on the other hand, would probably survive nuclear holocaust.

  When Halley had been young, she hadn’t understood why Jillian and DaVinci wanted to be her friends. Jillian had always had lunchbox treats to share, and DaVinci always had funny stories to share.

  Halley, on the other hand, never had treats or stories to share as the three pushed one another on swings beneath the swaying eucalyptus of Cold Springs Elementary. In all her life, she’d only had one golden memory, which she might have shared, but she preferred to keep it tucked safely away, as if it were something that might become lost if she brought it out.

  There had been spinning teacups, and a man who called her daughter, and frosty glasses of root beer float at a bar nestled secretively between the Haunted Mansion and the Pirates of the Caribbean. It was the only time she’d met her father. That singular memory had worked like an irritant, a grain of sand, forming the pearl of Halley’s ambition—a plan designed to bring her into contact with her father again. This was an ambition she disclosed to no one. Certainly not to her mother, who was determined to keep Halley from her father, and not even to Jillian and DaVinci.

  The three had remained friends through middle school, even though Jillian’s diamond-encrusted mother had tried to interest her daughter in “better” society. They remained friends in high school, when DaVinci had insisted they follow her to VADA, a place where DaVinci clearly belonged, but where Halley and Jillian clearly belonged . . . a bit less. Now that they had graduated, they’d promised to remain friends even after they went off to separate colleges this fall, and except during her most pessimistic moments, Halley thought they probably would.

  “Swimming chez moi after we sell everything,” Jillian said, waving to indicate the items in the booth. “Branson’s restocking the gelato drawer.”

  “Gelato,” sighed Halley, fanning herself with a sheet of paper.

  “Branson,” sighed DaVinci, eyes closed.

  “Married,” said Jillian to DaVinci. “Very married.”

  “Customer,” whispered Halley.

  Casually, she strolled to the back corner of the booth, making room for two women who stepped in to admire Jillian’s Basket of Strawberries, No. 1.

  “They look so real,” cooed one.

  Halley wasn’t the only one who could use a sale today. Jillian’s marzipan-inspired sculptures were her attempt to satisfy her mother’s suggestion that she explore a career in fine art instead of fine cooking, which was Jillian’s passion. Of course, her mother meant fine art curating, not fine art making. Jillian’s parents had already refused to take their daughter’s interest in cooking seriously. “You want to own the bakery franchise, not decorate the cakes, darling,” was Mrs. Applegate’s admonishment.

  DaVinci, in fact, was the only one of the three girls who would probably still call today a good day even without a sale. Her family were all impoverished artists of one stripe or another and would have been baffled if she came home with cash.

  Jillian, about to make the first sale of the day, continued chatting up her customers.

  “I got the inspiration from this adorable candy shop in Paris,” she explained. “In the septième arrondissement. I thought they were selling rows of nearly identical apricots, but when I looked closely, I realized it was candy sculpted and painted to look like fruit. That one’s three hundred,” she said, pointing to the smaller of two baskets. “The larger one is six hundred. My mom uses one that size instead of having to replace fresh flowers in the upstairs loggia.”

  Jillian was a natural salesperson, from a long line of natural salespersons. Within five minutes Jillian had swiped an American Express and made a cool $600. Halley looked at her own price tags. Even if she sold all of her pieces, she wouldn’t make $600 today. But if she did sell everything . . . . She allowed herself a momentary daydream. She would buy the necessary swim top and probably stick the rest in the bank. Already she’d set aside $1,844 to someday pursue her dream.

  As the first hour passed, a few customers asked Halley about her largest piece: three bold stripes of differing
greens against a black background. What was it called? What was it supposed to represent?

  Asparagus in the Night, she’d told the first customer. Green Beans Lying on a Granite Counter, she told the next. Aliens, she told a third.

  DaVinci coughed into her hands when Halley said aliens, and the normally imperturbable Jillian raised an eyebrow. The potential customers just smiled and said maybe they’d come back later.

  “You have to take your customers seriously if you want the sale,” Jillian murmured to Halley as soon as the latest one departed.

  Halley felt her cheeks heating. “I take them seriously.”

  “But you don’t really take your art seriously,” said DaVinci.

  The flush spread to Halley’s throat.

  “Which is fine,” added DaVinci, apologetically. “God knows my family takes it seriously enough for the whole of Santa Barbara County.”

  Jillian laughed and Halley, her face cooling, managed a smile.

  “Can I make a suggestion?” asked Jillian.

  Halley shrugged.

  “It’s your prices. No one is going to take a thirty-six-inch canvas seriously at forty-five dollars. May I?” She plucked a sharpie from her bag.

  Halley shrugged again.

  With great care, Jillian added another zero, changing the price of Red Sunset, or Orange on a Bench, or whatever the hell it was, from $45 to$450.

  “And another thing,” said DaVinci to Halley. “You should pick titles and stick to them.”

  Halley stared at the new prices, feeling worried. Who was going to pay nearly $500 for that? The worry quickly shifted to a feeling of defeat. She wasn’t going to sell anything today. Maybe she should skip Jillian’s pool party this year. Ethyl Meier might not even come. She should probably save up for tires instead of a stupid bikini.

  Her phone vibrated in her back pocket. Probably her mother, needing something as usual. Her mother had the remarkable habit of becoming more demanding whenever Halley said she would be busy.

  “Two guesses.” she said to her friends, pulling her phone out of her pocket.

  DaVinci rolled her eyes, and Jillian bit her lip.

  Halley examined the text message. “Mom wants the truck.” Another two texts followed. Scanning them, Halley felt a small surge of hope. She looked up.