A Tangled #TeaserTuesday

I seem to be focusing on first meetings with my teasers this month. So please “meet” Tangled in Time and hope you’ll enjoy this look at Carey and Olivia’s first meet:

“For most females of her acquaintance, a parasol was the final touch in a proper ensemble, but Miss Olivia Carstairs never felt completely dressed without her derringer. According to her brother, she had a steady hand and excellent aim, though she hoped not to need either on the likely gentleman she was pointing it at. He was the only person she’d seen since the experiment went awry—something Mama had warned might happen when Olivia took the position as Professor Twitchet’s assistant, instead of accepting Mr. Lester Heplinger’s proposal of marriage.

The need to keep him covered required her to study him in way she normally considered rude, though she was uncertain about the etiquette involved in holding someone at gunpoint. If she read the dropped jaw correctly, he was surprised, though it wasn’t clear if it he was shocked by a lady with a gun or a lady being rude.

His attire was as puzzling as his reaction to her. His uniformly dark attire appeared to be neither in nor recently out of vogue. His shirt clung to a chest that was very fine, and the sleeves were short enough to leave improperly bare, from hand to above the elbow, his brown muscled arms. He wore no cravat and his vest was bulky in places, unfastened and ill-fitting, but not in a dreadful way. His trousers hung low on narrow hips and he wore a pack on his back. He was armed with a pistol in a holster like a Western gunslinger from a penny novel, had a knife strapped to his upper leg and an odd looking rifle hung from a strap under one arm.

A parasol and a derringer were hardly a match, but instead of being frightened, Olivia felt a need to loosen her tie, which had tightened around her neck as if she’d tugged it, though she knew she hadn’t. She could have also used her fan.

He had fine eyes in a shade of blue that was a particular favorite. His deeply tanned skin, and the fact that he was in need of a shave, should not have enhanced the impact of his eyes. Perhaps it was the combination of height and vigor or the generally pleasing arrangement of features and form that earned her instinctive approbation.

She very much hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to shoot him.”

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