Hidden Time Read online

  Just In Time

  Primetime of Life

  Book 3

  L.A. Boruff

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  Copyright © 2021 by L.A. Boruff All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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

  Cover Design Copyright © 2021 Avery Hope

  Book Design by Gina Writes Words: Author Services Printed in the United States of America

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  First Printing, 2021

  Dedicated to Josh. You’re a rockstar. I’ll miss your amazing creativity.

  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

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  More Paranormal Women’s Fiction by L.A. Boruff

  About L.A. Boruff

  Chapter One

  Rowena Hembree, Time Traveling Assassin Witch. Time Traveling Assassin Witch, Rowena Hembree. A mouthful no matter how I said it. And it was never going to have the ring of Rowena Hembree, Billionairess. Unfortunately, my powers of knowing the final scores of every past football and basketball game in recorded history while I was qualified and allowed to travel back to said times meant nothing. I couldn’t alter the fabric of time. Couldn’t change my own destiny. It was forbidden. And if I could figure out how to write down an eye roll, I would’ve put one on every report I had to fill out for Artie and his paper-pushing Dixon line.

  TIME, the agency responsible for my travels to decades gone by, used genetic enhancements to make these choices for us. I was but a pawn. And a witch. The designated assassin. But definitely, a pawn, one on her way to a trippy trip through the 1970s, if my new file was to be believed. And I had no reason to think it wasn’t.

  This was all the information we’d collected on the Rogue line who’d killed my mother—at my father’s direction. There was vengeance to be enacted. Atonement to be paid. And I was more than ready to do it.

  I walked the hallway at TIME, between the training room and the assignment center. This whole place was a series of long hallways that connected rooms all painted a stark white, each of which I might or might not have had the clearance to go into and out of. But because Artie was recently injured and out of commission, the level of my security clearance had been increased. Score.

  TIME was the magical agency that used me to clean up the past to save the present and the future. It all sounded very noble, and it was, but also sometimes I was more about the trip than the job. And the 1970s, like the 1980s, were my jam. Elvis, Pong, bell bottoms, Star Wars, and disco. What wasn’t to love?

  Maybe because I was picturing my time warp trip thanks to the file, or maybe it was my Steven Tyler fetish, but the opening bars of Dream On whistled through my mind. Literally. Whistled.

  When it abruptly came to an end with a “Yo, Ro!” I stopped humming along, shrieked as if I’d just run across a congregation of dead people armed and ready to strike, then tossed my file, so about fifty pages of top-secret info fluttered through the newly carpeted hallway. Damn it.

  I recognized the voice because I’d heard him go on and on and on before, but never inside my head. Such a thing would’ve startled the most seasoned assassin. But seasoned or not, this had to be cleaned up before anyone without proper clearance saw it. I knee-dropped to pick up the pages and tried to figure out their correct order.

  “Fred!” I shouted at him, waving my arms in case he was flapping around my head, and I couldn’t see him.

  Agents up and down the hall stared at me. Dixons and Fergusons—trainers and analysts—the ones I answered to, gawked like I was losing my ever-loving marbles. And maybe I was, but not today. And not here.

  In front of me now, Fred flapped near enough my face that he disrupted my new fringe bangs.

  “Damn it, Fred!”

  He flew to my shoulder and perched. Belched. Farted. Then, chuckled. “Excusez moi.”

  I waited for the smell, then grimaced as I slapped the papers into the folder. “I was unaware”—blissfully, but I didn’t add that—“that you could talk inside my head.” Had I known, I might’ve declined his services.

  “Oh, sweet Rowena, my summer child. There are many things you have yet to learn about the wonders of our association.” He pulled a bottle of beer out of his dimensional pocket and snarfled the drink down his bobbing gullet.

  “Holy canapes, Fred. How much random crap can you fit in your extra-dimensional pocket?” I eyed the space under his wing. How he managed to keep anything as large as a beer bottle there was beyond me. He was barely five inches tall.

  Like the pervy dragon he’d become over his many years as a familiar, he wagged his eyebrows. “Ro, if you want to know what I have in my pants, no need to be coy. I’ll happily show you.” My eye roll was exaggerated and ignored. “And for your information, sweetheart, beer is not now, nor has it ever been random or crap. It is a delightful mixture of barley, hops, and yeast.”

  I sighed. “All I heard in that pathetic diatribe was blah blah blah.” Just so we weren’t confused by the importance of the monologues he shared with the world whether we wanted them or not.

  He laid one wing over his chest. “You wound me.” Then he rolled backward off my shoulder, only saving himself when he was at knee height.

  Some days, his antics endeared him to me. This wasn’t one of those days. Tomorrow wasn’t He flitted back to his shoulder perch. “So long as it’s an inanimate object, I can store something as big as a car or a bank safe.” He waggled his brows again. “So, if you want to chuck all this and go master thief, I’m your dragon.”

  “How do you keep the beer cold and the food warm?” Last week, he’d had an endless supply of steaming hot turkey legs. And while I generally tried not to partake in anything not factory sealed that he pulled out of his interdimensional pocket, they had smelled divine.

  “Once I put something in the pocket dimension, it isn’t affected by time.” He grinned, leaned in, and used his wing to stroke my hair. “I can store a dead body and it won’t age or decay. It’s like a vacuum seal.”

  There was a lot to unpack there, and I didn’t dare ask how he had come by such knowledge. Instead, I huffed out a breath and slapped the pages toward my shoulder. “Good to know. Now stop screwing around and help me clean up this mess.” It was like the papers had multiplied since they’d gone careening in ten directions. And it was still his fault.

  I glanced at him and his purple scales, red eyes, and snake-like little body.

  This mission made me nervous enough. Since the kidnapping, I’d been tense, and so far, nobody—not analyst or trainer—had been able to figure out how it had happened. And no one had officially given me permission to go after the rogue witches
in the 1970s. That bit of the mission hadn’t been sanctioned because they hadn’t “figured out the details” yet. And an operative—Artie, my handler, my friend, my partner—had been injured. Something like that always came with a certain amount of blame and reprisals. I didn’t even want to think about those. Instead, I concentrated on the fact that I was going on a mission—a bullshit mission—without a partner.

  Fred gurgled out another belch and the scent of old beer wafted from his mouth straight to my nose. The jerk. “Can I talk in your head, Fred?” If so, maybe I would tell him he was a disgusting little dragon with bad hygiene and worse manners. Not that he didn’t know it already. It was a source of pride for him.

  He chuckled. “Of course, you can, Ro-Ro.” He spoke like he was in training to voice the next Scooby Doo cartoon. “We’re bonded.” Bonded? Meant nothing to me. “All familiars and their witches can.” His scoff was almost insulting. “Did they not tell you anything?”

  I was sitting in the middle of a floor in the hallway of an agency I would’ve never believed existed a few months ago, after ’d been shoved through a portal by the younger version of Artie because I accidentally stepped through it, got myself into a bind and needed to get away. I’d passed go without the usual training because TIME and the fact I’d been hidden away from this aspect of my life dictated a need for me to fill a vacant position—the one left by my biological mother’s death.

  I shook my head and wished for a second that I was a wiggle my nose kind of witch, the kind who looked cute working her magic. More often than not, my magic involved sweat and messy bun hair. But today, I worked a little spell to straighten the papers and reorder them, so they made sense—why I hadn’t thought of using magic to gather them was a gaffe I pretended not to care about.

  This time, as I walked, I picked up my feet and moved carefully as I read the pages. This had been a government-sanctioned hit. And it wasn’t the one I wanted—the 1970s rogues. It was a trip back to a year ago. Woo-hoo. I glanced at the picture, flipped the page, then the details registered, and I turned it back. This hit was a woman who resembled—and by resembled, I meant could’ve been a twin to—my biological mother before she died. Same age. Same shocking red hair.

  This was a what the hell moment. I had them from time to time, and they usually amounted to not much more than a few seconds of ranting until I read the details. This time, I hardcore checked and did more than my usual scan of the details since Artie wasn’t here to fill me in and because of the oddity of this woman’s appearance.

  She was a whistleblower. And there was no familial relationship between her and my mother or me. Although, I wouldn’t have put it past TIME to send me back to “handle” something like my own damn mother.

  My mother was a touchy subject with me. Because she’d lied. My mom had lied. My entire existence was built on a foundation of bullshit. It rankled. If I was honest, and I would be because I was in my own head, ever since my mother died, and I stepped into her role as an assassin for TIME and discovered I could open a portal to any year I wanted, I’d spent hours racking my brain, trying to figure out how I could save her and do it without causing a time paradox.

  Not that I had much time to think about it. TIME made sure I was always busy, planning a mission, carrying one out. Dealing with the rogue and their leader who appeared to be none other than my biological father. Of course, that, like my intentions to save my mother, was information I had to keep to myself.

  Chapter Two

  Once I had the file committed to memory and in my travel bag as assurance I wouldn’t be forgetting any of the details Artie usually drilled into me, Fred and I headed down to the TIME portal room. It was just another stark white room in a building full of them, but this one was a big deal. It was the room where the sanctioned portal openings happened. Therefore, it was protected by fingerprint and retinal scanning. To get in, I practically had to swear allegiance, give the Girl Scout pledge, and pinky-swear that I was there only for purposes that had been endorsed and authorized by the higher-ups.

  I pushed the door open and stopped so that it swung back and slammed into my shoulder. Fred squeaked. “Hey! Ro! A little care, please!” He spoke like Danny Zuko denying he liked Sandy—fake Brooklyn accent and the little tuft of hair on his head twisted into a greasy pompadour.

  I gave him a glance then ignored him in favor of an open-mouthed gawk. And it was worth every second. Craig Ferguson—interdimensional hottie and TIME analyst—stood in the portal room wearing a pair of jeans that made his legs look longer and his ass drool-worthy. Looking at him gave a woman thoughts, and I was thinking all. the. thoughts. My stomach fluttered along with some of the more interesting parts of my body. Well, parts I wanted him to find interesting, anyway.

  “Get lost,” I hissed, and Fred, to my amazement, didn’t argue. He just poofed out.

  Resisting the urge to push my boobs up and fluff my hair, I smiled and stepped into the room. Time to show my stuff. To shake my money-maker, so to speak. To wow him with my mystical life’s purpose and how well I’d caught on.

  But as I was about to open my portal to yesteryear—literally, it was yesteryear—he held up a hand and dropped it on my shoulder. On my shoulder. I almost swooned.

  “Rowena.” He said my name in the sultriest tone, the huskiest, the sexiest. I closed my eyes for a few seconds to savor it—a few too long to be disguised as a blink and when I popped them open, he was standing in front of me, smiling. Smiling. Smiling. Smiling. I sighed.

  “Yes?” We’d had a few dates and they’d gone well, but I wanted more. So much more. I tilted my head and flipped my hair, pulling it forward so it hung over the front of my shoulder. And this time, since I’d cut fringe bangs into my style, nothing hung in my face. It was glorious, and I was almost glamorous.

  “I was hoping to go over the mission with you. There have been some suggestions.” As he spoke, I posed. Literally, vogued like I was Madonna.

  I wasn’t the smoothest surface in the land. As his words registered, I straightened one limb at a time, like I was some sort of un-bending robot woman in need of a good oiling. I chuckled. That part was accurate, at least.

  “Suggestions?” My voice, of its own volition, lowered to somewhere between phone-sex operator and two-pack-a-day smoker.

  “Some last-minute input. A couple of changes.” His tongue slid along his lower lip, and I almost moaned. A glistening sheen made his lips look redder, inviting, delicious.

  “I like change.” I also apparently liked trying and failing to make things that weren’t sexy sound as if I wanted them to be.

  He looked up from the dossier—a file also stamped confidential on the outside over top of a TIME logo. His eyebrow cocked while his brow pinched. He had a whole The Rock vibe for a second. “Good?”

  I cleared my throat. It took things like this to make me realize how bad a flirt I actually was. “Sorry. Go on.”

  “We need her body to disappear.”

  I hadn’t done that before. “Okay.” But I was confident. Totally confident.

  “It has to look as if she’s skipped out on the people she was supposed to deliver the information to. These are heavy hitters.” His voice was that low vibration I had come to love. “You’ll need to get rid of her body, a good portion of her clothes, her ID, Make it look like she left in a hurry.”

  I was the queen of frenzy and chaos. Well, if he wanted me to be anyway. “All right. Shouldn’t be too difficult. I just have to make a body disappear.” Sure. Poof. Be gone, biotch.

  He nodded. “Also…”

  I loved when there was an also.

  No. I didn’t. Also never meant anything good. It usually meant I was going to suffer in some unmistakably torturous way dreamed up by some higher-up who had it in for me. This was an all-my-life truth. So, I braced for it.

  “Also?”

  He nodded. “Since Artie is on temporary leave for his injury, Director Dixon asked me specifically to accompany you on this mission.
”

  As I tried not to hyperventilate picturing how supremely awkward I was sure to be, Cheesecake kept nodding and cleared his throat. “Strictly as an observer. I won’t be… interfering.” Maybe I imagined it, but interfering was the most seductive word I’d ever heard him say. Probably the most seductive in the English language.

  “Director Dixon?” She was well aware of my attraction to Craig. I’d had an entire conversation with her about it. Cynthia Dixon wasn’t the ice queen everyone made her out to be. I would’ve classified her as more frosty than icy. And maybe this was her way of making it up to me that she’d benched Artie.

  I didn’t care why she’d done it. On one hand, I was grateful. No mission was easy without backup. Even when I thought they were going to be a cakewalk, an inevitable screwup happened. Artie always helped me work out how to handle them. He was a sounding board. And the thought of completing a mission and—gulp—making a body disappear, which wasn’t normal procedure, worried me. But on the other hand, having Craig, the man I was sort of mostly dating, come with me on a mission, could make things between us uncomfortable.

  My lip curled as it sometimes did when I was thinking. My mother had called it thoughtful Elvis disease. But I smoothed my expression because he took my hand in his, stroked my palm with his middle finger then proved we were in sync. “I don’t want this to be awkward between us. If you would rather have someone else on the mission…” He blinked once, then his gaze searched my face. “I’ll make the arrangements for a different analyst.” Then, because I wasn’t quite far enough off-kilter, he lowered his voice and took a small step that seemed like a giant leap because now we were almost touching. I held my breath as he spoke. “Your safety is all I care about, and I don’t want what’s between us to be the distraction that puts you in danger. I would rather remove myself from the situation.”