Scandal

“Nick?” she whispered, terrified and thrilled at the same time

Jordan reached out one finger to touch his soft bottom lip. Yep. He was still there, tangible and 3-D. “Wow.”

“Do I know you?” he asked.

He narrowed his eyes, boldly surveying her from top to bottom, making her feel warm under his intent gaze. And more turned on than ever. She didn’t feel free and saucy anymore in her miniskirt and camisole. Instead with her skirt scrunched up and covering almost nothing, Jordan felt indecent, naked, exposed.

“I thought—” He broke off and then started again, pulling his eyes away from her body to focus on her face. “You seem very familiar to me. But surely I’d remember if we’d met before.”

“Only in my dreams,” she said without thinking. The vivid memory of the lovemaking in those dreams was making her heart beat fast. She smiled. “You don’t know how glad I am to finally meet you, Nick.”

Closing her eyes, she tangled her arms around his neck. She held on tight, enjoying the feel of his arousal, so amazingly right . She’d been with him many times in her fantasies. All the things she associated with Nick came flooding back. Comfort, belonging, destiny…

And sex. Oh, yeah.

Dear Reader,

When I was asked to be part of the PERFECT TIMING miniseries for the Harlequin Blaze line, I was eager to jump in. I have always loved time travel. There’s something romantic and exciting about characters leaving their old world behind and leaping into somewhere dangerous and different.

It didn’t take me long to choose turn-of-the-century Chicago, with the lovely White City of the 1893 Columbian Exposition and World’s Fair as a backdrop.

Like my heroine Jordan, I studied history, with “Scandalous Women” such as Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette showing up in my favorite classes. I love the idea of someone like Jordan—perfectly normal in her own time, longing to rock a few more boats than she really does—hitting Victorian times with a bang!

I tossed Jordan into the White City alongside Nick Tempest, who is himself chafing to break free of the restrictions of wealth and privilege of his time, and upped the ante by sticking them both under a shockingly beautiful marble arch carved with sexually charged images. For Nick and Jordan, the arch’s erotic powers are impossible to resist.

Scandal, sex, art and romance…Sounds like the stuff history is made of!

Happy reading!

Julie Kistler

Scandal

Julie Kistler

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Kistler is well-known for her fast-paced romantic comedies for the Harlequin Temptation and Harlequin Duets lines. Now she’s excited to be writing for Harlequin Blaze—and flirting with the past in Scandal , part of the PERFECT TIMING time-travel miniseries. “I love a challenge,” this former RITA® Award nominee exclaims with a grin. Julie and her husband live in Illinois. Check out Julie’s Web site at www.juliekistler.com.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

1

How to Be a Scandalous Woman, Rule 1:

Throw out the rules.

J ORDAN A LBRIGHT’S OFFICE DOOR creaked open. “Professor Albright? Can I ask you something?”

Without even looking up from her laptop, Jordan said automatically, “No, Catherine the Great did not have sex with a horse. And, no, Marie Antoinette was not a ‘major ho-bag,’ as somebody put it last week.” She smiled as she glanced at the young woman hovering in the doorway. “Anything else you want to know, you’ll have to come to class. And I’m not Professor Albright. Just Jordan, okay?”

But the student lingered, shifting her weight to her other platform sandal. “How did you know what I was going to ask?”

Jordan tried to be patient. “It’s not hard. I’m only teaching one class this semester. Scandalous Women 101. Everybody wants to know the same thing.”

“And you’re sure Catherine the Great never, you know, did it with a horse?” the girl persisted.

“Yes, I’m sure.” With that, Jordan turned her attention back to the display on her computer screen, trying not to be frustrated by this latest in a series of interruptions.

“Thanks, Professor Albright.” The student ducked into the hallway, already moving on.

“Come to class, okay?” Jordan called out after her. This time she didn’t bother to correct the “professor” thing. At twenty-six she was only a few years older than some of her students, so she kind of enjoyed being called “professor” every now and again, even if she hadn’t really achieved that status yet. Nope. Just a lowly grad student. A lowly grad student working desperately to get her PhD sooner rather than later.

Jordan heard footsteps patter down the wood floor of the hallway as the student departed.

Thank goodness. Now if only she could concentrate long enough to figure out a decent ending to the damn dissertation that had been plaguing her for the better part of four years.

Ending. Right. She wiggled in her wooden chair, twisted her long, dark hair into a loose knot, stared down into her laptop screen, and tried to focus. Focus.

Methodically, she scanned the outline that formed the spine of her project, which centered on one particular scandalous woman. She’d begun with her subject’s childhood and family life, moved on to her education and an important trip to Europe, and then dealt with her artistic influences and the effects of wealth and privilege on her development.

She had everything in order, everything perfect, step by step, up to the point that Isabella Tempest, notorious sculptress and the subject of this blasted, never-ending dissertation, had vanished from the pages of history. It was what made Isabella so fascinating and yet so frustrating, all at the same time.

Jordan frowned. The story of a talented artist who’d created the work of a lifetime—a magnificent marble arch brimming with erotic nudes—and then up and disappeared should’ve been the perfect topic for someone involved in the study of scandalous women. It should’ve been a piece of cake. But how could she fully analyze Isabella’s place in history without knowing what had happened to her after the big whoop-de-doo that ended her career in June of 1893?

There had to be something she’d overlooked. Jordan tried to put herself in the right frame of mind to puzzle it out. “Okay, so it’s June 1893,” she mused. She pulled up a picture on her laptop, a wide shot of the Columbian Exposition and World’s Fair in Chicago. “The White City is open for business.”

It was called the White City because of the magnificent, bright white buildings built just for the fair, all gleaming under a dazzling display of electric lights. Famous politicians, dukes and princesses, the cream of society, artists, writers and inventors, citizens from far-off lands including belly dancers, gondoliers and a tribe of alleged cannibals, as well as regular Joes off Chicago’s mean streets, had all come together to see the wonders of the new age and celebrate the 200th anniversary of Columbus “discovering” America. Buffalo Bill, Susan B. Anthony, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison…Anybody who was anybody was there. With Isabella Tempest right in the middle of it, kicking up a huge scandal.

Jordan stared into space, imagining herself in the middle of the White City. It wasn’t hard. It had happened practically on her doorstep, and the Midway Plaisance, the long, grassy area where the Ferris wheel and hot-air balloon and other popular attractions had sat, was still part of the University of Chicago campus.

Besides, the Chicago World’s Fair had been the event of the century, so there were thousands of photographs and souvenirs of the place. Jordan had plowed her way through stacks of them since she’d started this dissertation. She’d even bought herself a coin on eBay, a commemorative half-dollar sold at the fair with Columbus’s face on one side and one of his ships on the other, and she’d kept it on her desk for good luck ever since.

“I could use a little luck right now,” she murmured, pushing papers aside to get to the cup where she kept it. Quickly, she found her lucky coin, held it tight and closed her eyes, picturing in her mind what it must’ve been like at Chicago’s turn-of-the-century World’s Fair.

The shining White City. Blue skies. A breeze off Lake Michigan. The world’s first Ferris wheel twirling in the background. Art and treasures from around the world. And Isabella’s outrageous arch.

Jordan opened her eyes. Ah, yes. The cool white marble arch, etched with figures of Greek gods and goddesses in flagrante delicto . Once displayed at the exposition, the piece had created a huge triumph and an even huger scandal. And then both of them—Isabella and her fabulous, scandalous arch—had simply vanished. Not one more word about their whereabouts, not in newspapers, magazines, books, journals, diaries…It was one thing for a woman to go missing. But how did a six-foot marble arch evaporate into thin air?

It was infuriating. And it had kept Jordan stuck for months. If only she could think of some new way to look at the facts.

“So Isabella creates the most sensual, most beautiful thing she’s ever done,” Jordan said out loud, spinning around in her chair to glance at the wall behind her desk, where she’d taped up pictures of all things Isabella Tempest, including a poster-sized representation of the sculpture in question. “Her masterpiece.”

Even in a poor re-creation like the sketch on her wall, the arch looked fantastic. And fantastically sexy, with all those nubile, naked marble bodies wrapped around each other, and all those women in the midst of ecstasy. Jordan couldn’t help getting a little flushed every time she gazed at it.

She moved closer. Yes, the arch was a stunner. No question. Her finger traced a figure of Apollo on the upper curve of the sketch, where his mighty, muscular thighs pinned Daphne against a laurel tree. In the myth, Daphne had turned into a tree to escape the god’s advances, but here, carved into Isabella Tempest’s risqué arch, Daphne was clearly enjoying herself, tree or no tree. Head back, mouth open, nails raking Apollo’s back, she looked as if she were in mid-climax, and a pretty steamy one at that.

“Isabella certainly knew how to heat things up,” Jordan said with a shiver, her gaze sliding around the arch. “Daphne and Apollo up against the tree, Psyche blindfolded with Eros behind her, Artemis on top of Orion…Whew. Each one is hotter than the last.”

Isabella had carved sixteen images like that, the extremes of pleasure and passion, up front and unashamed, into the pale, creamy stone. But all that flesh and all that ecstasy had apparently put Chicago society blood pressures in overdrive. And Isabella Tempest under arrest.

It was hard to pull herself away from the erotic power of the arch, but Jordan forced herself as she mentally went through the story one more time. Methodically. Dispassionately. Like a scholar.

“So Isabella gets a coveted spot in the Women’s Building at the Columbian Exposition,” she said out loud, looking for something, anything, she might’ve missed. “The World’s Fair officially opens on May 1, but Isabella and her arch aren’t there. Not finished, presumably. Sometime between then and June 16, she puts her arch in the Women’s Building. And then, on the sixteenth, suddenly there’s an uproar when society matron Mrs. Prentice Stanhope takes Susan B. Anthony on a tour of the building and one or the other catches sight of Isabella’s ‘indecent’ creation. Shame, horror, outcry, all that good stuff. Isabella is arrested and then she and the arch vanish, never to be heard from again.”

Jordan perched on the edge of her desk, gazing at the sketch, reflecting on what a shame it was that Isabella had only had time to make one masterpiece. Genius like that should never have been stifled.

“But where did it go?” she asked with an edge of frustration, tossing the Columbian half-dollar back into its cup with a loud, disappointed clink. “Where did Isabella go?”

She reached onto her desk, picked up and put down three large binders, crammed full of notes about Isabella’s life, and riffled through a stack of folders containing information she already knew. She chewed on the end of a pen. She went back through her outline.

But there was nothing. No spark of inspiration. Just like every other time she’d tried this exercise.

She’d already tried to leave it with an ambiguous “we’ll never know” ending and it just didn’t work. It was like admitting that she was a failure when it came to research and analysis.

“Maybe I am a failure. Maybe that is the answer,” she grumbled. She wanted to scream.

Finally, giving up, Jordan dumped the whole pile of folders back onto her desk and yanked open her desk drawer. She knew what she wanted, what she needed. It was getting to be a habit. She skirted away from words like addiction and obsession . It wasn’t so bad, was it? To feel better because she could look at the two small pictures?

His pictures.

“Nick,” she whispered, feeling a rush of relief just to look at him. “If you’re going to keep driving me crazy like this, the least you can do is send me a psychic message from the Great Beyond to tell me where Isabella and the arch went. C’mon, Nick, help a girl out, will you?”

If only he could. She’d already spent far too much time examining every grain of the two existing photos of Nicholas Tempest, and she hadn’t gotten any answers yet. But that didn’t stop her from trying. She’d even made one of the pictures her screensaver, which meant every time she was stuck long enough for her laptop to go dark, she ended up gazing at Nick, daydreaming about him and drifting even farther away from working.

It was odd how attached to those photos she was. Nick Tempest, the man in the photos, who just happened to be Isabella’s older brother, was only peripheral to her dissertation. But for some reason, Jordan kept finding herself coming back to him, somehow convinced that this man was the answer to every question she had, if only she stared at his picture long enough.

It was bizarre. It was unlike her. She’d never been one to sigh over rock stars or movie idols or sports heroes, not even when she was twelve. When her high school friends had swooned over Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise, she’d just rolled her eyes. No attraction there. Not even a flutter. How strange that Nick Tempest was her first fantasy crush, and he’d been dead for 110 years.

She’d stumbled over his photos on eBay when she went searching for background on the Tempest family and their department store. Nick was one of the founders of Tempest & Trent, a stylish store that still sat, grand and imposing, in the exact same spot on State Street it’d occupied since 1894. In fact, Tempest & Trent had always been her favorite department store, and she and her grandmother had come to look at the Christmas windows every year when she was little. Funny she’d never wondered about its founder, not until she saw those pictures on eBay.

But once she saw them, she was determined to have them at any cost. Which meant she’d paid a small fortune and then agonized by the mailbox every day, waiting for the photos to arrive.

Even though she’d scanned them into her computer to use with her dissertation, she still kept the originals in her desk, safe inside small plastic sleeves. That made it easy to take them out and look at them if she needed to, which she’d found herself doing more and more often lately.

There was just something about Nick. Something that got under her skin, inside her brain, deep inside her fantasies.

“My dream lover,” she whispered.

The first picture was ordinary enough, a sepia tone wedding portrait, with the words “Mr. & Mrs. Nicholas Tempest, May 1894,” scrawled in spidery handwriting on the back. The other was a more candid shot, showing him standing next to an early version of an automobile. That one was marked simply “1895.” He was unsmiling, even a little grim, as he stood next to his new wife in the first photo, and grinning with health and happiness in the second, but hot as blazes in both.

“It’s not just the hotness factor,” she argued to his picture, feeling a shade defensive to be this gaga over a guy she knew only from a couple of old photos. But the hotness factor was hard to deny. She whispered, “Okay, so you are totally hot.”

Totally. Amazingly. Overwhelmingly.

Maybe it was just that she’d spent so much time looking at sketches of that damn arch, with all its salacious imagery, and in her mind, Nick Tempest had become part of those steamy couplings. She didn’t want to think about it or admit to herself just how deep this went. But it was deep.

Almost immediately after she’d found his pictures, she’d started to have dreams about him. Erotic dreams. Extremely erotic dreams. Like nothing she had ever known. They always involved the positions and stories from the arch, and they always involved Nick.

In the first one, Nick was playing Apollo and she was Daphne, and he was naked and hard and taking her up against a tree. She could remember how vivid the images were and how potent the clash between them. As he thrust into her, slamming her into the hard trunk again and again, as she wrapped her legs around him and took him deeper, she knew she hated him, she loved him, and mostly she wanted him so bad that it didn’t matter. It was plain, straight-ahead, no-frills, banging-up-against-the-wall sex, and it blew her mind.

She’d awoken in the morning, sweaty and exhausted, wondering if she was going to find splinters in her bottom from the tree. That’s how real it was. But there were no splinters, just rumpled sheets and a sleeping boyfriend. He’d been studying late and spent the night at her place, and she hoped she hadn’t thrashed or moaned too loudly, giving away just what kind of dream she was having. But he was oblivious.

And the dreams went on.

A few nights later, with Daniel, the boyfriend, safely in his own apartment, Jordan had dreamed that she was Artemis to Nick’s Orion. Since in that story she was the goddess and he was the mortal, this time she was in charge, riding him for hours, teasing him, denying him, and then taking what she wanted and demanding more. And when she woke up, she’d actually felt as thoroughly sated as if she had been romping all night with a warrior.

Uh-oh. Not good. Remembering the dreams, staring down at Nick’s picture, Jordan felt heat and moisture rush to her core. She squeezed her thighs together, willing the tingling to stop.

Now it didn’t even take the dreams, just the memory of the dreams, to push her to arousal. In the middle of the afternoon. In her office! And that just couldn’t be.

“Damn you, Nick,” she said out loud. “First you came around, haunting my dreams, boinking me silly, and then you don’t come into my dreams. I’m turning into a crazy person!”

This part had to be sheer frustration. While the visions were coming every night, she looked forward to going to sleep, just to meet and stoke the fire with her dream lover, eager to find out whose myth they’d be acting out tonight.

Until a week or so ago, when the dreams stopped. No nightmares, no fantasies, no Nick. Clearly, it was the disappointment over losing her dreams that was making her even nuttier than she was before, even more obsessed.

Jordan gulped and sat up straighter in her chair, deliberately putting the photos aside. “It’s not my fault. It’s just…stress. Stress over not finishing the dissertation.”

But she grabbed the photographs back before they’d even left her hands. She couldn’t not look.

So handsome. So mesmerizing.

In the first picture, the wedding portrait, he stood tall and starkly handsome, in an immaculate long, dark coat with a stiff white shirt and white tie, with a small flower pinned to his lapel. Nick’s posture—shoulders back, chin up, facing square into the camera—was comfortable, assured, maybe even arrogant. Next to him, his new wife looked remote and unremarkable.

Jordan chewed her lip. Who cared about the wife? She was doing her best to block out the fact that he’d even had a wife.

“That’s bizarre,” she chided herself. “Why should you care if a guy from 1893 was married? For all you know, they were the love story of the century. Or he was a jerk, or she was a saint, or…”

But she did care. Because, in her heart, she was having a love affair with him, and she didn’t want him to be married.

For whatever reason, she felt completely connected to Nick. She’d known from the moment she’d spotted those pictures on eBay that he was important to her. The overheated dreams only made that more obvious.

And that was why she continued to moon over his photos during the day, and then toss and turn at night, hoping she could reach the dreams where the two of them tangled together, naked and aroused, in the very positions depicted on the arch.

“The dreams have stopped. So let’s not even think about them anymore,” she said quickly. But she couldn’t stop thinking about them, not when she looked into his face in the pictures. It was that face that haunted her fantasies.

His features were beautiful, with high cheekbones, dark brows, a slightly crooked nose that gave him character, and perfectly shaped lips, a little fuller on the bottom. She really liked the look of those wide, sensual lips, with the hint of a dimple on one side. She remembered tasting and nibbling those lips in her dreams. She remembered those lips trailing fire up her thigh…

“Okay, not thinking about that,” she ordered herself, squirming a little in her hard wooden chair. “Not!”

But if she didn’t look at his lips, then there were his eyes. They were so intense and compelling, pinning her, pulling her in, hypnotizing her. They weren’t exactly safe, either.

The other photo was a little less sharp, but even more attractive, because he was smiling. Hatless, with his dark hair tousled by the wind, he looked carefree and adorable, as if his whole life were ahead of him and he couldn’t wait to jump right in.

It made it that much more affecting to realize he’d died just a few months after it was taken. The more attached she became to Nick, the more tragic that seemed.

“I feel like I know you inside and out, Nick,” she said softly, fingering the hard angle of his jaw in the small photo. “And you know me. Like it’s always been that way. But why?”

She’d felt guilty taking time away from her main research into Isabella and the arch, but she’d done it, anyway, to glean more details about Nick. Not that she’d managed to find much. She knew when he was born and married and when he died. She’d read about his travels to Europe with Isabella from reports in the society columns at that time, and it sounded as if the brother and sister were fairly close. But when he got married to Lydia Trent, and when he died just a year after that in, of all things, America’s first car race, his beloved sister wasn’t there. Not in the list of wedding guests, and not in the list of mourners at his funeral. She wasn’t even mentioned in his obituary.

“Do I keep staring at you because it seems weird your sister didn’t come to your wedding or your funeral?” Jordan questioned aloud. “Or because it’s so hard to think about you dying just a year after your wedding?”