Genre: Erotic Historical Time Travel Romance Heat Level: 3 Word Count: 32, 500 ISBN: 978-0-3695-1561-2 Editor: Clara Morgenstern Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

A Very Regency Romance by Deborah Dickey

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Love Throughout Time, 4

Dr. Susanna Worsely has spent her life studying history. She never expected to become part of it.

Magically hurled back to Regency London, Susanna finds herself among the glittering scandals and dangerous intrigues of the British royal court—and face-to-face with Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg.

Susanna knows what history has in store for him. His beloved wife, Princess Charlotte, is destined to die, leaving Leopold devastated and the future of the British monarchy forever changed.

Armed with knowledge no one else possesses, Susanna becomes determined to prevent the tragedy. But changing history proves far more dangerous than studying it, especially when the prince she came to save becomes the man she cannot resist.

Now Susanna faces an impossible choice: preserve the timeline that leads to her own future… or risk changing history forever for a chance at a future with the man she loves.

 

Excerpt:

The British Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire, October 2026 

The air in the subterranean strongroom of the modern-day British Royal Archives smelled of precisely three things: aged parchment, advanced climate control, and the faint, unsettling promise of discovery.

Dr. Susanna Worsely pressed the flat of her palm against the cool leather spine of an 1820 bound ledger belonging to the Privy Purse. As a historian, she was accustomed to losing herself in the intricacies of the Regency era, spending her days obsessing over the exact dates of Carlton House soirées and Prince Leopold's correspondence.

Born in 1996 in a quiet corner of Yorkshire, Susanna Worsely always possessed a mind that lived more comfortably in the past than in the present. From a young age, while other children were captivated by modern fictions, Susanna could be found in local parish archives, deciphering the spidery, iron-gall ink script of the 18th century. She possessed a natural, uncanny gift for historical empathy—an ability to read a diary entry from 1815 and feel the exact texture of the paper, the scratch of the quill, and the emotional heartbeat of the writer.

Susanna pursued her passion at the University of Oxford, where she read Modern History. Her undergraduate years were marked by a fierce dedication to the study of the Georgian and Regency eras. While many historians of the period were content to focus on the macroeconomic trends or the grand, sweeping geopolitical movements of the Napoleonic Wars, Susanna’s focus was profoundly, almost obsessively, human. She wanted to understand the psychological toll of strict court etiquette, the whispered scandals behind the fans at Almack’s, and the quiet tragedies of royal marriages that were determined by dynastic necessity rather than affection.

She remained at Oxford to complete her doctoral studies. Her dissertation, titled "Behind the Facade: The Emotional Economy of the Regency Court," was widely praised by the academic establishment for its groundbreaking approach to royal correspondence. Susanna did not merely look at the official, heavily edited dispatches of politicians and kings. Instead, she dug deep into private, uncatalogued family papers, secret correspondences, and coded diaries. By cross-referencing these varied sources, she began to piece together a truer, much more intimate history of the British royal family, one that often contradicted the official hagiographies sanctioned by the Crown.

Upon earning her doctorate, Susanna’s academic prowess and infectious enthusiasm caught the attention of the historical establishment. She was quickly snapped up as a junior curator for the Historic Royal Palaces charity. This role placed her at the very heart of British history, giving her unprecedented, daily access to the royal archives housed within the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, and Kensington Palace.

Susanna quickly rose through the ranks. Known for her charismatic presentation style, she became a prominent public historian, frequently appearing on television and radio to share the fascinating, often scandalous truths of British history with a massive audience. She distinguished herself as a brilliant Joint Chief Curator, specializing in the period from the Tudors to the present day.

Yet, as Susanna’s career flourished on the outside, a sense of professional frustration grew within her. As a historian, she was trained to be an objective observer, a scholar who could only speculate on the true motivations and feelings of the figures she studied. She spent many years carefully curating the dresses, the furniture, and the letters of the Georgian court, but she found herself longing for something that the academic record could never provide: absolute certainty.

She often found herself particularly fascinated by the life of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Leopold had married Princess Charlotte of Wales in 1816, a union of genuine love and great national hope. Tragically, Charlotte died in childbirth in 1817, shattering Leopold’s happiness and altering the course of British history. Susanna had spent years studying Leopold’s grieving letters, his quiet diplomacy, and his eventual ascent to the throne of Belgium. She felt a profound, inexplicable connection to him—a deep sense that she understood the man behind the historical portrait. She often joked with her colleagues that if she could build a time machine, she would go back to 1820, not to witness a grand battle or a political revolution, but simply to comfort a grieving widower in the early days of his loss.

She was a celebrated expert on the 18th and early 19th-century British monarchy. She had a reputation as an unapologetic romantic, spending her academic career obsessively researching the lost years of the Regency court and the tragic first marriage of Princess Charlotte.

Known for her sharp wit, modern sensibilities, and a penchant for wearing period-accurate petticoats to her lectures, Susanna had always felt she belonged to a different era. She was a no-nonsense, pragmatic woman who relied on logic.

 But tonight, the air had grown unusually heavy. The hum of the archive’s dehumidifiers didn't fade into the background—it gradually increased, turning from a mechanical drone into a low, thrumming vibration that rattled her spectacles on the bridge of her nose.

A sudden, jarring blue flash erupted from the floorboards, blooming outward from the center of the vault. Susanna gasped, lunging back, but her sensible brogues found no purchase on the solid concrete. The floor seemed to dissolve into a shifting, liquid mirror of azure light. With a weightless, dizzying sensation akin to a sudden drop in an elevator, the sterile modern glow of the archives was violently extinguished…

Carlton House, Regency London, 1820

 When Susanna dared to open her eyes, the familiar beige paint and steel shelving had vanished. In their place stood a vast, soaring chamber illuminated by the golden, flickering radiance of thousands of beeswax candles. The smell of cold, filtered air was replaced by a pungent, unmistakable Regency cocktail: sweet almond oil, expensive French perfume, woodsmoke, and a faint, stale trace of gin.

She was standing on a polished parquet floor that reflected the glorious, chaotic glitter of a ballroom overflowing with silks, satins, and gold braid. It was London. Or, rather, it was Carlton House, the decadent London residence of the Prince Regent, in the year of our Lord 1820.

Panic, cold and sharp, seized Susanna. As a leading historian of the period, she knew the exact parameters of the court of King George IV—she knew its treacherous politics, its vicious gossip, and its labyrinthine rules of etiquette. She was a scholar, not a time traveler. Yet, here she was, in a floor-length modern skirt, standing amidst the elite of the 19th century.

A buzz of conversation rippled through the room, and Susanna realized with a start that several lords and ladies were staring directly at her. She shrank back against a velvet-draped wall, desperately praying she could blend into the drapery. But it was far too late.

A gentleman of striking presence was making his way through the gossiping crowds toward her. Even without the historical portraits she had spent her life studying, Susanna would have recognized him. He was tall, with a soldier’s bearing, meticulously tailored in a dark green military coat with frogging that accentuated his broad shoulders. He had thick, wavy dark hair and side whiskers, and his steady, piercing gaze locked onto hers with a mixture of curiosity and sudden, undeniable alarm.

It was Prince Leopold Saxe-Coburg.

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