Sherwood, Special Preview: The First 7 Chapters (A Robin Hood Time-Travel Romance)

“You’ll be swept back in time with the author’s vivid descriptions of the era, while being immersed in the magic of legend itself. A must read!” ~ParaNormalRomance

  “When the final secrets are revealed (and there is more than one!) this story of love, romance and fantasy will have you smiling incessantly.” ~A Romance Review

  “Magical mayhem, irresistible characters and a surprising conclusion make this a story that will stay in the reader’s memory long after the book is finished.” ~Romance Junkies

  “It captures your attention from the beginning. Twists and turns keep you hanging on until the last word. Ms. Riser sends you on a thrilling mind vacation that you will not soon forget.” ~Coffee Time Romance

  SHERWOOD

  A Robin Hood Time-Travel Romance

  Special Preview:

  The First 7 Chapters

  MIMI RISER

  www.mimiriser.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Mimi Riser

  All rights reserved.

  (Disclaimer: This novel is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.)

  Note: This novel was originally published under the title Sherwood Charade.

  Chapter 1

  “Hey, man, how ’bout this one? Gotta cool lookin’ castle on the cover.”

  “Castle? No way. Sounds like them hysterical romance stories my sister reads.”

  “Not ‘hysterical,’ Nelson. Historical.”

  “Yeah, well they’re pretty hysterical, too. All that love stuff’s a buncha crap.”

  “How the hell would you know? You ain’t never been in love.”

  “Huh. And you have?”

  “Know more ’bout it than you do.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just bet. So what you got there anyway? If it ain’t a love story, what is that castle book, huh?”

  “If you’d shut up for two seconds, I could read the back and tell you. Some kind of adventure, I think… Yeah. Says here it’s ’bout this dude who goes way back in time to…”

  Camelot. Hey, why not? It sounded okay to Marian Allanson. Not as good as Sherwood Forest, which would have been her first choice, but not bad. More interesting than Philadelphia’s North Broad Street where she currently sat—in general locale. In specific locale she sat behind the back counter of Mueller’s Used Books. Even more specifically she sat behind Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—original Middle English version, of course—or, rather, she hid behind it. Being one of those big doorstopper editions with lots of pictures and maps and stuff, it made a great hiding book. She used it a lot.

  Peeking over the top she watched the duo in the front of the store. Their arms buried to the elbows in the overflowing paperback bin near the entrance, the two boys looked like a couple of pint-sized pirates eagerly sorting their booty. Last week they’d shoplifted Treasure Island and The Time Machine. Today it looked like they were after Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

  Good choice. Marian approved. She’d read that novel herself when she was about their age. Her copy had been pilfered from Frank Mueller, too.

  “The kids ’round here been stealing me blind for years,” he’d confessed her first day on the job. “It’s a sport, a right-of-passage for ’em. But it gets ’em reading, too. I figure it’s better they snitch books from me than smoke dope in the alleys.” His main business was in the back room anyway, where the antique manuscripts were stored in fireproof safes. “That’s where the real money is. Buy low, sell high. Too high, if possible. But my big clients can afford a little rip-off,” he’d said between puffs on his ever-present pipe. “I’m like Robin Hood. I rob from the rich to give to the poor.”

  Robin Hood?

  Now there was an image for you: gray haired Frank Mueller—all five-foot, two and a half inches of him—romping through Sherwood in green tights and feathered cap. Would his pipe get tangled in the bowstring when he shot an arrow?

  He must have known how the reference would grab her attention. He would have remembered how Robin Hood had always been her favorite character, how she used to scour the store looking for books about him. And how disappointed she’d been to read that her hero was just a myth, a fanciful folktale with no proven historical basis.

  “Marian?” Mueller’s gravelly voice broke into the reverie, pulling her back to the business at hand. Right. Mustn’t make this too easy for the kids. That would spoil their fun.

  “Forbidden fruit is always the sweetest,” he whispered, his eyes blinking like an owl’s as he peered at her from behind coke-bottle spectacles. “That’s why I hired you, remember?”

  Marian nodded. They went through this every day. She never believed him, but she’d given up arguing. This was Mueller’s story and he was sticking to it. The job offer had nothing to do with the fact that he’d known her since she was shorter than he, that his store had been the one solid constant in her life, her home away from all those homes she never had. And it certainly wasn’t because fresh out of college now, with no family and a ton of loans to pay off, she needed the work. Heck no. What did she think he was anyway? Some old softy? Him? Tiger Mueller?

  Not a chance. It was just that the old tiger had been spending so much time recently in his back lair, theft in the front of the store had tapered off to a trickle. It had become too easy, no challenge to it anymore—or so Mueller said. Thus he’d hired a clerk, a watchdog. Marian Allanson. Her job was to sit up here looking stern and menacing. That would keep these young hoodlums reading!

  “I wanna take a closer look at that manuscript I bought yesterday,” the old man declared loudly. With a scraping of wood and creaking of arthritic joints he slid out from behind his end of the long, cluttered counter. “You keep an eye on things out here, and mind you look sharp!” He shot her a conspiratorial wink, then shuffled out of view, wheezing like a bronchial pipe-organ with bad bellows.

  Rising to the occasion as best she could Marian dropped Chaucer with a nice noticeable thud and put on her sternest expression for the benefit of the two young pirates at the paperback bin.

  -------

  Mueller peeked back through the door of his office before closing it, shook his head at the sight of her glowering over the counter. She did try, bless her heart, but small, pale and delicate, with riotous ruddy curls hanging halfway to her waist, and big soulful blue eyes, she looked about as menacing as a piece of Dresden china. And as transparent as glass. He heaved a raspy sigh as the door clicked shut behind him. He couldn’t help it. Neither could Marian, of course; he knew that.

  Chewing on the stem of his pipe he unlocked the nearest safe and removed a fragile bundle of thirteenth century parchment, a quirky old Latin text by some obscure scholar called Roland of Hunterdon. Very rare, very precious. Very odd. Sort of like his clerk. The girl didn’t belong in this kind of world. She was like someone from another era almost, like a character in a Jane Austen novel, or some princess out of a fairytale. How she’d survived this long was a mystery to him. Considering her background, it was a miracle.

  He shuddered to think what could have happened if they’d never met. It must have been Kismet that brought her into his store twelve years ago. Poor kid, looking so sad and alone. She’d been the first shoplifter he’d ever let escape. Instead of calling the cops on her that day, he’d called them for her. Pretty damn ironic to consider that stealing a book might have saved her life.

/>   Which one had she filched? A novel wasn’t it? Dickens? Stevenson? Twain! That was it. Mueller’s owl eyes crinkled as he paused a moment to fish the title out of his memory. Not Tom Sawyer, not Huckleberry Finn…

  -------

  “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Nelson read off the cover of the book he’d been handed. He sounded indignant, cheated. “Lando, you dumb-ass, I thought you said this was a time-travel story.”

  “Dumb-ass, yourself. It is a time-travel story.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, if it’s got a Yankee in it, it looks like a baseball story to me.”

  “It doesn’t mean that kind of Yankee. Man, Nelson, if buttheads had wings you’d be a jumbo jet.”

  So it went every time the pair entered Mueller’s Used Books—also known as “Mueller’s Reading Program for Underprivileged Youngsters” to those honored few in the old man’s confidence. Glaring sternly from her post behind the counter Marian fidgeted with a loose thread on her sweater and wished they’d settle the argument and make their getaway, because she doubted her glare would hold out much longer. Orlando Demitrios Konstantinos and his sidekick Nelson were like a ghetto version of Abbott and Costello.

  The street door banged opened and closed, bringing a blast of blaring horns, city dust and traffic fumes into the store. Booted steps thudded over the scarred wood floor. Swallowing back a sudden flutter of nerves Marian rose from her perch to greet the newcomer. “Can I help you?”

  Hmm, just an average looking man in leather jacket and jeans, but the way his eyes scanned the place he certainly seemed like he needed help. Unfortunately. Was he here for the antiques? Not that he looked wealthy enough—or academic enough—for the good stuff, but you couldn’t always go by looks. Maybe she’d better call ol’ Tiger.

  She started toward the closed office door, then hesitated when she heard mumbled Latin on the other side. Mr. Mueller must be reading to himself again; he did that a lot. What a pretty passage. It sounded like poetry. Darn, he’d probably hate an interruption. Her gaze wavered between the door and the newcomer, whose eyes met hers and then raked over her as though she were part of the merchandise.

  “Don’t mind me, sugar. Just browsing.” He flashed her a crooked grin.

  Or was that a leer? Whatever. Marian didn’t smile back.

  “Quite a place you got here,” he offered—pleasantly enough, she supposed, but he still gave her the willies. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen so many books before.”

  “We try to keep a good stock.” She kept her eyes on him as he worked his way toward her and the back counter, picking up a volume here, laying it down there. Just browsing, huh? Why didn’t she believe him? His manner seemed almost too casual for a simple browser. And those eyes. And that grin… Apprehension raised gooseflesh on her arms and she shivered, her pulse skipping, her breath suddenly short and shallow.

  No, not a panic attack, not now. This was ridiculous. There was no reason to be frightened. The poor guy was probably only killing time while he waited for a bus or an appointment or something.

  Mentally slapping herself she drew a deep breath and rubbed the goose bumps away. This had nothing to do with him. It was just her paranoia raising its ugly head again. Most males made her skin crawl, except for the very young or the very old, like Orlando and Mr. Mueller. And Robin Hood… But since he wasn’t real, and would be dead now even if he were, she supposed she shouldn’t count him. Too bad. Or maybe not. She should probably stop thinking of Robin Hood, period. It was stupid. An “unhealthy fixation,” her late uncle had once said, and if anyone knew about unhealthy fixations it was her uncle. She wished she hadn’t remembered.

  Damn, this was giving her a headache. Why didn’t the man just buy a book and leave?

  Glancing toward the front she noticed Orlando acting oddly. It didn’t help her mood. Crouched by the paperback bin he was elbowing Nelson and watching their browser the way a wary rodent watches something it’s unsure is a cat or not.

  “Hey, man, stick your head out the door and see if you can spot any cops,” the boy whispered. “You see one, tell him to get his ass in here quick.”

  “You nuts? What the hell you want a cop for?” Nelson obviously found the request a sick joke. “You hopin’ maybe a uniform’ll convince me this Yankee book’s ’bout time-travel? Huh?” He gave a disgusted grunt. “I know better, Lando. It ain’t got no time-machine in it. The cover just says this dude gets knocked in the head and when he wakes up he’s thousands of miles away, right?”

  “Thousands of miles away and hundreds of years in the past.” Orlando’s eyes never left the browser. “The knock on the head is what sends him back through time, okay?”

  “No. It don’t make no sense.”

  “Nelson, I ain’t got time to argue. Just shove your fool head out that door and do like I told you. Move!”

  “I’ll move, but it still don’t make no sense. How can a knock on the head send someone back through time?” Nelson grumbled.

  But his friend no longer listened. As the browser reached for something in his jacket Orlando launched forward, straight down the center aisle, and vaulted over the counter. He hit Marian with a flying tackle that sent her crashing down like a sacked quarterback on the line of scrimmage. Her head snapped back against the floor with a sickening thud, and that was the last thing she remembered… Until she awoke with a throbbing skull to find herself thousands of miles away.

  And hundreds of years in the past.