Phantom Series Boxed Set

by Julie Leto

  Aiden made himself visible just as a twinkle of a smile danced across Lauren’s face.

  “You saved my life,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He gestured at his now-solid body. “You did the same for me, my lady. I wonder, however, why your life is in such constant jeopardy.”

  “Never was before yesterday,” she muttered. “He said he wanted the sword.”

  Aiden frowned. “So did your former husband. Perhaps he—”

  “—hired someone to rough me up?” Lauren asked. “Doesn’t seem like his style.”

  Aiden’s chest filled with a rage that might have exploded had Ross Marchand been in the room. His veins sizzled with a bloodlust he hadn’t experienced since the battlefields of Scotland, and which he had hoped he’d never feel again. “Perhaps his style has changed.”

  Fifteen

  The moment the goon he’d sent into Lauren Cole’s room slid, breathless and sweating, into the limousine parked a block away from the hospital, Farrow knew the idiot had failed.

  “What happened?”

  The man clutched at his chest, trying to pull enough oxygen into his lungs to speak. Farrow grabbed the collar of the man’s stolen white coat and tugged him forward. Though he’d come with a reputation for being ruthless and wiry, the man’s intense shaking made Farrow wonder if he’d been misled. Seriously misled.

  “Breathe later,” Farrow said evenly. “Talk now.”

  “Attacked. Appeared. Out of nowhere.”

  Farrow released the man and sat back into the plush leather seat and considered this odd turn of events. Could this be possible? Had Ross Marchand told him the truth when he claimed to have been accosted by an unseen force when in his ex-wife’s hospital room?

  Farrow had assumed the film producer had simply spent too much time sniffing coke with his A-list stars, or that he was concocting a wild tale to buy his ex-wife more time with the sword. Now Farrow had what appeared to be unbiased corroboration of a magical force at play.

  “You didn’t see the sword?”

  The man shook his head furiously. “Looked everywhere. Nothing there. No one there. Then—”

  Farrow held up his hand, instructed the driver to proceed, and then poured the man a finger of scotch, which he offered with a calm smile. The man was not a follower, so Farrow had no sway over him except that he’d promised him a generous payment for an hour’s work. The K’vr had few contacts in Los Angeles, and with Lauren Cole being such a high-profile patient, he hadn’t wanted any of his own men to risk breaking into a hospital they hadn’t been able to reconnoiter. This man, at the very least, claimed to know the lay of the land.

  “It was fucking messed up,” he went on. “I’ve dealt with dudes who were fast, but this guy…he was a goddamned ghost. I checked the room before I grabbed her, man. Every inch. She was alone. But the minute I touched her he was there. Strong as a fucking bear. Could have thrown me through a wall. Would have snapped my neck, but she stopped him.”

  Farrow forced his expression to remain cool. “Tell me what you saw. Precisely.”

  For a man of less than average intelligence, he recounted the story with adequate detail. A forged security badge had given him access to Lauren’s floor, and he’d quickly found her room. Luckily the security guard had been more interested in flirting with chatty nurses than standing vigil. When Farrow’s man had finally slipped inside, Lauren Cole had been unconscious and drugged.

  “I looked all over, but I couldn’t find no sword. Decided I had no choice. Had to wake the bitch up. She was just coming to when this son of a bitch attacked. Came out of nowhere.”

  “When you say, ‘out of nowhere,’ do you mean—”

  “I mean he fucking appeared where no one was before, got it? She started talking. Distracted him. I was almost out the door; then he just…appeared right in front of me. Black hair. Fucked-up gray eyes. Like ice, man. Like ice.”

  Farrow could feel his own dyes widening to saucers. All these years, all these generations, he’d heard tales of magic, but had never seen any evidence to make him a true believer. Former leaders of the K’vr, like Gemma’s father, had often exhibited psychic talent that could not be explained—but he’d always considered the tricks mental sleight of hand.

  Not that he didn’t believe in the source of Rogan’s magic—it was, after all, what had driven him to the leadership in the first place. History was littered with tales of talismans and charms that had increased the power and wealth of men cunning enough to exploit their magical properties. But he’d never imagined any magic that could allow a man to appear and disappear at will.

  The possibilities made him dizzy.

  “You’ve done very well,” Farrow said with a grin. “Pull over behind that warehouse,” he instructed his driver. Then he addressed the man again. “We’ll let you off here.”

  He waited until the car was hidden on all sides before he nodded to his driver to let the man out. His useful envoy was now a loose end. But the problem was easily solved with a pistol and a silencer and one bullet.

  Farrow instructed the driver to depart immediately as he mulled over the possibilities.

  Magic.

  Real magic.

  Rogan’s magic.

  He slipped his cell phone out of his pocket and pressed a speed dial number.

  “We need to get close to Lauren Cole,” he said into the mouthpiece. “And when I say close, I mean intimately close.”

  ***

  “ ‘Tis not my sword,” Aiden countered, incensed. He wanted nothing more to do with the weapon, and had so far enjoyed the fact that it had been hidden from sight. “The blade was forged by Gypsies and cursed by evil.”

  Lauren rubbed at her neck. “He couldn’t have taken it, right? Because you’re still here. But that’s what he wanted. He wanted your sword.”

  Aiden swallowed a second denial of ownership and decided to allow the matter to rest. While she was under the influence of pain numbing drugs, sleep deprived and frightened, she was also in no state to be literal or rational. In the aftermath of the assault on her person, the guard around her would undoubtedly be doubled. And until sunrise, at least, Aiden would not leave her side.

  For now, she was safe.

  And so was the sword.

  He retrieved the sword from beneath the bed. “Helen brought the sword from your trailer.”

  Lauren looked at him quizzically. “Why?”

  “She struck me from the start as a very intelligent woman, but now I see her as crafty as a queen.”

  “She is that,” Lauren agreed, though her voice drifted distractedly, her gaze snared by the dark canvas bag. “May I?”

  After locking the door with a silent flick of his fingers, Aiden took the sword out of the bag and placed it gingerly in Lauren’s hands. Even in the sparse light streaming in from beneath the door, the blade glowed cool and blue. The tiny rubies on the handle, however, sparkled with red flames.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said with a sigh.

  Aiden scowled. “ ‘Tis evil.”

  She looked up, her expression confused. “But you aren’t.”

  Even in the strange light, he could tell she had not yet regained her color. Her eyelids were heavy on her face, accentuated by dark circles around her sapphire irises and a thin white line around her lips.

  And yet she was beautiful. Her tiny smile alleviated the sting of knowing how tightly bound he was to Rogan’s magic—and to her.

  “Thank you for coming back,” she said.

  “I never left,” he replied.

  “I know, but thanks for not disappearing entirely on me.”

  He nearly said, “I had no choice,” but he kept the honest admission to himself. In another time, another place, another circumstance, Aiden would have pursued Lauren relentlessly. She was beautiful, smart and strong. But he’d learned his first night with her that seducing a woman of this century went beyond achieving sexual surrender. She’d made love with him, but had given up nothing.


  The hours he’d spent invisible and ineffective as the world raged on around him convinced him more than ever that he needed to be free. Completely free. Free to pursue her as the man he once was. At least, the man he was before war shredded his soul.

  With a soft grunt, Lauren pulled herself into a sitting position, the sword nestled beside her. “What’s wrong?”

  Aiden, with more effort this time, pushed unbidden, bloody images out of his mind.

  “Besides the fact that you nearly died, twice, in my presence?”

  “ ‘Nearly’ being the operative word,” she replied, running her hands down a thin wire and then pressing the mechanism at the end, which caused the back of the bed to rise perpendicular to the base.

  As the bed moved, he swallowed a gasp of amazement. He had already seen more amazing wonders during his brief stay in this modern hospital than he had in a lifetime with the Gypsies of Valoren. Their magic, their healing skills, bore no equal to what he’d seen today. How many of his regiment might not have died on the bloody battlefield if doctors had had such magic at their disposal?

  “How do you feel?” Aiden asked, focusing his entire attention on her.

  “Like I was hit by a Mack truck,” Lauren replied. She noticed his perplexed look and added, “It’s a horseless carriage about the size of a small house.”

  “Horseless?”

  After adjusting the pillows behind her, she relaxed against the starkly white sheets and closed her eyes until she stopped panting from the exertion.

  “I have a lot to catch you up on,” she said with a sigh.

  Unable to resist, he eased as much of his body as he could beside hers on her bed, the sword nestled between them. Sometime before the attack, the nurses had removed her tubes and wires. IVs, they called them. And monitors. Except for a single transparent tube that pumped oxygen into her nostrils, she was free of the doctor’s healing instruments, and while he wished to do nothing that would compromise her recovery, he could not fight the need to lie beside her, to feel her warmth. To have her feel his.

  “You may fill me in on the details of modern life at another time,” he told her, focusing on the exotic scent lingering in her hair, such a contrast to the alcohol essence so pungent around them. “The nurse insists you need rest.”

  Lauren turned so that her nose brushed against his. “Suddenly, rest is the last thing on my mind.”

  Though the light was deceiving, he imagined a flush of red in her cheeks. His sex stiffened at the deep, innuendo-laced huskiness in her voice, but while Aiden was a man of strong appetites, he’d also learned long ago how to control his desires.

  “You need to sleep,” he told her.

  She opened her mouth to argue, but a yawn commandeered her face, and she shook her head, momentarily defeated. “Will you stay?”

  He slid off the mattress, retrieved the sword and placed it into the crisscross metal frame beneath her bed. He then rejoined her in the crisp, stiff sheets and laid his hand possessively across her middle. “Of course.”

  After a moment of settling closer to each other, she asked, “You can’t leave me, can you?”

  “No,” he answered honestly.

  “Good,” she said, then closed her eyes and fell almost instantly asleep.

  After watching her for nearly an hour, Aiden wandered to the window and glanced out at the eerie, odd lights of the city. He’d never seen anything so confounding and strange. Red and white lights streaked by at alarming speeds. Lights of blue, gold and green sparked at him from signs that hawked services he did not understand. Tall, thin trees with tufts of spiked leaves stood sentinel beside lamps that threw a pinkish glow over roads that appeared smooth and slick in the night.

  A crowd gathered below had burgeoned since the accident this afternoon. He’d heard Helen warn the hospital staff that her friend’s celebrity was cause for concern. Though he could not see the faces of the people milling just beyond the building, he sensed their eyes, all trained on this window.

  They wanted Lauren. They craved her. They needed her to fill some empty space in their souls they did not understand.

  He knew the feeling.

  Sixteen

  “No, Cinda. They haven’t found him yet, but the studio sent in an army of security specialists and they’ve been camped out by her room since the attack. No one will get anywhere near her again. Besides, the doctors are releasing her in a day, or two at the most,” Helen said, standing by the emergency room entrance eyeing the paparazzi still staking out the front of the hospital, just behind the lights and cameras of the so-called “legitimate” media. Since the incident in Lauren’s hospital room, which had been attributed to a crazed fan, the news trucks and cameras had multiplied sevenfold. Helen imagined the stench of morbid curiosity settling in around her, and she couldn’t help but crinkle her nose in disgust. “Don’t even try to come down here. The vultures are everywhere.”

  Lauren’s assistant argued and cried on the other end of the phone, but Helen didn’t budge. She’d checked on Lauren an hour ago and got the distinct impression that the star wanted to be alone, with no more hovering than absolutely necessary from either hospital staff or her friends.

  “Just take care of the dog. Beast like that can tear the place apart if he’s alone too long, and the helicopters hovering over her house must be driving him crazy. I’ll call you tomorrow once I know what the doctor’s orders are. And don’t forget that confidentiality agreement you signed, either, got me?”

  Through her sniffles, Lauren’s assistant withered under Helen’s threat and disconnected the call. It was cold and heartless to warn her, since the girl obviously worshiped the ground Lauren walked on, but trustworthiness was about as prevalent in this town as visible varicose veins.

  In this business practically since birth, Helen had learned to insulate herself against feeling anything deep or real or warm for the people she worked with. Loyalties changed too easily and too often—if they existed at all. But she’d let her guard down with Lauren. She knew her secrets. Lauren wouldn’t turn on her. If she did, Lauren would risk everything she’d accomplished in this dog-eat-dog industry that made people like Michael Vick look like Saint Francis of Assisi.

  Helen spun back into the hospital, plowing into a hunk in scrubs. Even though she nearly landed on her ass, her insides gave a little quiver as his hand wrapped around her arm and kept her from falling.

  Dr. Hard Body had a very nice grip.

  “So sorry,” the deliciously deep voice said. “I really should look where I’m going.”

  “Yes, you—” she snapped, but cut her tirade short when her gaze sliced into his.

  Doctor, my ass.

  “What are you, moonlighting on Grey’s?”

  David Drake’s grin was just shy of illegal as he pulled off a pair of glasses and did the best Clark Kent-to-Superman imitation she’d seen in a long time. A sensual squeeze inside her panties drove the power of this guy’s magnetism home.

  “I was only one audition away from playing Dr. McSteamy myself, you know,” he taunted.

  If he weren’t so clearly teasing, she might have written him off for making such an outrageous claim. When it came to her job, Helen didn’t screw around. No one got onto one of her sets without impeccable credentials. David Drake, while relatively new to the acting biz in LA., had already scored several minor roles in New York, and Helen had worked with his agent before. He might not be McSteamy yet, but he had potential.

  Definite potential.

  “lf you’re so sought after,” she asked, “what the hell are you doing sneaking around the hospital like a paparazzo?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Do you see a camera?”

  “Cameras can be very small these days,” she replied.

  He spread his arms out wide. “You can frisk me.”

  “You should be so lucky.”

  He snorted. “I was just trying to check on you. You were freaking out in my car after Lauren’s accident.”
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br />   “I don’t freak out,” she insisted.

  “Not like other women do, I’ll give you that. You’ve got a real good ice queen act going on. You pull it off very well.”

  “Word to the wise, hotshot,” Helen assured him, “it’s not an act.”

  He stepped closer and pressed his chest against hers. His impressive hardness extended from chest to thighs, including the best parts dead center.

  “You? Icy? I don’t think so.”

  His voice was liquid lava, hot and dangerous. She shouldn’t. Really. She should go up and check on Lauren one more time, even though watching her sleep was getting old. After the attack, the doctors had upped Lauren’s meds to ensure a restful night. Security had been tripled. No one would be bothering Lauren tonight. Helen knew she really should go home. Check e-mail. Take a bath. Grab a bite.

  Or two.

  She spied the hard sinews of David’s neck and shoulders and ran her tongue across the edge of her teeth.

  His piercing gaze dropped down, skimming over the swell of her breasts, his thoughts clearly as lascivious as hers. “Too bad the audition was canceled.”

  She pulled reluctantly out of his grasp. “Crying shame.”

  Judging by the arrogant curve of his grin, he hadn’t missed the breathless need lilting her voice. Damn, it had been a long, sucky couple of days. And David had suddenly given her a very naughty idea of how she could relieve her stress.

  “So why are you dressed like a doctor?” she asked. “You’re not stalking my star, are you?”

  “Right. That’s the best way to get a job. Stalk the star when she’s lying vulnerable in a hospital room. Anyway, you told me someone else already got the gig.”

  She gave a nod, but said nothing more. She doubted an actor would risk his career just to pump her for information, but you never knew. News on Lauren’s prognosis from a “source close to the star” could fetch a pretty chunk of change.

  Still, he seemed sincere. And technically, his quick and levelheaded action had saved Lauren’s life. As far as she knew he hadn’t sold his story yet to the rags, and probably wouldn’t if he wanted to work in Hollywood as anything other than a busboy.