Genre: Erotic Historical Romance Heat Level: 3 Word Count: 31, 000 ISBN: 978-0-3695-1585-8 Editor: Clara Morgenstern Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Pages of the Past by Deborah Dickey

Heat Level 3
$3.99
$2.99
Be the first to leave a review
SKU 978-0-3695-1585-8
Stock
Read Description and Excerpt
Wishlist

Create Wishlist

Love Throughout Time, 5

Historian Chloe Petit knows Napoleon’s empire inside and out, but nothing prepares her for being mysteriously swept back to 1806. Thrust into the intrigue-filled imperial court, she finds herself falling for Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Napoleon’s fiercely loyal Chief of Staff. Their forbidden attraction quickly becomes an undeniable passion, but Chloe knows his tragic fate. Can she save the man she loves without changing history forever?

Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier has devoted his life to serving Napoleon, putting duty above all else. Until Chloe enters his world. Beautiful, outspoken, and possessing impossible knowledge of the future, she awakens desires he can no longer ignore. But as Napoleon’s empire marches toward disaster, Berthier must choose between loyalty to his emperor and a love powerful enough to defy destiny.

 

Excerpt: 

Restricted Archives, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, October 2026

The scent of centuries-old dust always made Chloe Petit feel alive, but tonight, it felt like a warning.

Chloe Petit is a 38-year-old Ph.D. candidate at the Sorbonne University in Paris. She specializes in Napoleonic military logistics. Her dissertation focuses on the exact supply lines of the 1805 Grande Armée campaign.

Chloe approaches history like a puzzle. She spends twelve hours a day breathing in dust in the National Archives. She is brilliant, hyper-focused, and chronically disorganized in her personal life. She routinely forgets to eat dinners. Her apartment is a labyrinth of color-coded research binders and half-empty coffee mugs.

Chloe’s academic obsession is Louis-Alexandre Berthier. He was Napoleon’s indispensable chief of staff. While history books romanticize Napoleon, Chloe has fallen in love with the man who actually made the empire function. She admires his precision, his tireless work ethic, and his ability to turn chaotic genius into orderly victory.

She feels a profound, irrational empathy for his burdens. She writes about him not as a historical figure, but as a deeply human administrator who worked himself to exhaustion. Her advisor calls her obsession unhealthy. Chloe calls it thorough research.

Among a newly unsealed crate of Berthier’s private papers, Chloe discovers a series of undated, unsigned letters. The handwriting belongs to Berthier, but the content is baffling. He writes to a woman he calls his guiding star. He describes modern concepts like canned rations and steam locomotives decades before their time.

High above the rain-slicked streets of modern Paris, inside the restricted archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Chloe brushed her fingers over the cracked leather spine of a forgotten ledger. As a thirty-eight-year-old doctoral candidate specializing in the military administration of the First French Empire, she was used to late nights and isolation. Her colleagues joked that she was more in love with the dead than the living. They weren’t entirely wrong. While others swooned over Napoleon Bonaparte’s grand maneuvers or Joachim Murat’s dashing cavalry charges, Chloe’s heart belonged to the man who made those victories possible: Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier.

Berthier was the indispensable shadow. As Napoleon’s Chief of Staff, he possessed a mind like a clockwork engine, translating the Emperor’s chaotic genius into precise military orders. History remembered him as a tireless bureaucrat, but Chloe had read his private letters. She knew the agonizing depth of his loyalty, his quiet loneliness, and the tragic mystery of his death in 1815—a fatal fall from a window in Bavaria just days before Waterloo.

"Let's see what you were hiding, Alexandre," Chloe whispered, using the name she only ever dared to speak in the dark.

She opened the ledger. It was an uncatalogued daybook from the autumn of 1805, the dawn of the spectacular Austerlitz campaign. As she turned the brittle pages, a loose scrap of heavy, gold-edged vellum slipped out. It wasn’t a standard military requisition. It was covered in dense, frantic handwriting, the ink faded to a ghostly sepia.

Chloe leaned closer, her breath hitching as she deciphered the elegant, looping script she knew better than her own.

“She arrives when the clock strikes midnight, a creature of denim and starlight, bearing secrets of a future I cannot grasp. I am a man of maps and logic, yet I am utterly undone by her eyes. If this be madness, let the Emperor command my execution, for I will not survive losing her twice.”

Chloe’s heart hammered against her ribs. A creature of denim and starlight? A future? It read like the fever dream of a romantic poet, completely uncharacteristic of the hyper-rational Marshal.

Suddenly, the air in the archives turned freezing cold. The ambient hum of the city outside vanished, replaced by an oppressive, ringing silence. Chloe gasped as the gold-edged vellum began to glow, emitting a faint, pulsing luminescence that warmed her fingertips. The ink on the page shimmered, liquefied, and began to crawl across the paper like a living thing.

Panic spiked through her veins. She tried to pull her hand away, but her fingers were glued to the parchment. The shadows in the corners of the room detached themselves from the walls, swirling inward toward the desk. The modern world began to blur. The fluorescent lights flickered violently and died, plunging her into pitch blackness.

The floor beneath her feet dissolved. Chloe felt herself falling, tumbling through a weightless vortex filled with the faint, terrifying echoes of phantom cannon fire, marching boots, and the distant, haunting melody of a waltz played on an out-of-tune harpsichord. The scent of old paper vanished, violently replaced by the sharp, suffocating stench of sulfur, wet wool, and burning wax…

Series:
/series-love-throughout-time/

Similar Items