Phantom Series Boxed Set (12 page)

Farrow Pryce tapped his fingers along the windowsill, the rhythmic drumming marking his impatience. Yet again, for the good of the cause, he’d operated with maximum stealth, never moving in for the kill, no matter how many opportunities he’d watched come and go. He waited until he could utilize the old man to ultimate effectiveness. And according to the spies he’d placed in the Crown Chandler organization, the time was now.

After a barely audible knock, the door behind him opened with a soft whoosh.

Farrow didn’t bother to turn around. “Is our guest tucked in for the evening?”

“He thinks so, yes,” was the reply, the male voice tremulous, a contrast to the man’s large size. He could break Farrow in two with his bare hands, and yet he followed his every order to the letter. Farrow’s jaw twitched into a smile. Power really was delicious.

“Good,” he replied. “Wait until the drugs have him nearly asleep, then wake him. Ice water ought to do the trick.”

With the appropriate affirmative response, his minion shot out of the room. Funny how none of the men he’d brought into his service ever dawdled. Farrow never blatantly asked for quick service and immediate obedience, but somehow they all knew his expectations. Subtlety could be a powerful motivator, when skillfully applied. But not for his guest. With Paschal Rousseau, he was done playing games.

“Rousseau is old,” Gemma said, her sultry tone creeping out from where she lounged on the leather chair behind his desk. She was, as always, the lone voice of constant contradiction.

“Why do you care?” he asked.

“Care? Hardly. But torturing him with traditional methods could result in his death. And then where will you be? He’s gone to a great deal of trouble to hide the diary. He’s not going to give it up just because you put bamboo shoots under his fingernails. At his age, he’s likely made peace with dying, don’t you think?”

Cold, hard and sapphire blue, Gemma’s eyes taunted him, challenged him. Though he supposed lesser men would find her endless opposition threatening, Farrow instead entertained a surging rush of lust. Loyal to the last, Gemma provided keen insight and clever council to his cause. Not to mention what her bloodline added to his bid to rule the followers of the sorcerer Lord Rogan. With a direct descendent of their master at his side, Farrow would rule the K’vr like none other before him. And under his leadership, the truest power—imaginable only to the followers of the great magician—would be his for the taking.

He reached out with both hands, curling her outstretched fingers in his. “What do you suggest, love? As you said, Rousseau is over ninety years old. I doubt he’d fall prey to your particular brand of persuasion.”

With sleek elegance, she slid off the chair and coiled into his arms, her breath teasing along the edge of his collar. Her short, cropped hair, highlighted in colors that ranged from white blond to inky black, hugged her sleek cheekbones and emphasized the luminous blue of her irises. “You think age makes a man immune to a woman’s charms?”

Farrow laughed, wondering how Gemma’s brother would react to witnessing this scene. Keith Von Roan fancied himself the true heir to the K’vr—which wasn’t exactly untrue. But what he possessed in bloodline, he lacked in vision. Over the centuries, many a coup had taken away the leadership from Rogan’s direct descendents, though they remained influential. So with Keith’s sibling at his side, Farrow would take the title of leader. Once he had Rogan’s magic in his possession.

He swiped his lips across Gemma’s, reveling in the feel of her sleek red mouth against his. “Is charm what they’re calling your talents these days?”

Her grin reflected her iniquitous sensuality. “No, but it’s what they called it in Rousseau’s day. I know all about a man like him. The chivalry. The denied passions. Allow me to work my magic on him and I’ll get you what you want. Perhaps more. And he’ll be in a condition to use him later on, if necessary, which he won’t be in if you keep turning him over to those goons of yours. If I fail, you can try your preferred approach with nothing but a few more days lost.”

She pressed her taut breasts fully against him and he enjoyed the thick feel of her feminine flesh, the hard tips of her nipples swiping across the silk of his shirt. He couldn’t resist leaning into her hair and inhaling the lingering scent of her bath. Her tongue grazed over his chin, igniting a simmering need for her that never truly abated—and, unfortunately, was never fully satisfied. And now that he was on the brink of taking over the leadership position he’d sought for more than a decade, his best interests were served by keeping her on his side.

“Do what you must,” he instructed.

With a feline-like growl, she tugged free of him and proceeded to the door.

“Try not to give him a heart attack,” he reminded her.

She glanced over her shoulder, her eyes glittering with lusty expectation. “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m an awful lot of woman for just one old man.”

“You’re an awful lot of woman for any man.”

Even after she swung out of the room, Farrow could hear her laughter echoing down the long hallway.

Ten

Cat peered around the darkened corner inside the university’s humanities building and involuntarily drew her hand to her nose. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate the smell of old books every once in a while, but in the last twenty-four hours she’d achieved maximum overload. For the entire afternoon and evening yesterday, she’d pawed through the extensive collection of professional journals and diaries owned by Professor Morton Gilmore. Her hands still needed a few more coats of moisturizer to counteract the dryness caused by constant contact with old paper and fading ink. To top off the experience, she’d come up entirely empty in her search for the dissertation or memoir that supposedly contained the reference to Valoren. After a hot shower in her hotel room, she’d finally cleared the scent of old books out of her nostrils. But now she was about to charge headfirst into another professor’s dusty office in search of documentation she wasn’t entirely sure existed—and if it did, might not help her on her quest.

Ordinarily, she wasn’t this wimpy. Dealing with musty scents was chicken feed compared to the things she’d done to hunt down evidence in her search to either prove or disprove paranormal phenomena. She’d rappelled into the hidden chambers built beneath ancient adobe structures in the Southwest during a heat wave. She’d slept alone, tucked in a three-foot-by-three-foot closet, in an abandoned New Orleans plantation house for seven nights straight in search of an elusive ghost. She’d even armed herself with a self-whittled wooden stake and several atomizers’ worth of holy water to confront a coven of self-proclaimed vampires in a back alley in urban Detroit.

She didn’t scare easily.

And yet, yesterday, she’d been overwhelmed by such a powerful feeling of dread, she’d nearly flown back in the middle of the night to Florida to check on Alexa and break the news that her expedition had, so far, been a bust.

Shortly before she’d zipped up her suitcase, however, Professor Gilmore had called her hotel, finally remembering that the diary he’d read with the reference to Valoren had never been in his possession after all. He’d read it while conferring with a colleague at a nearby university. A colleague named Paschal Rousseau, who’d written the academic paper about Valoren years before. The same Paschal Rousseau who apparently didn’t rate high on his university’s relevance list since his office had been tucked in the farthest, darkest corner of the school’s humanities building with little to no ventilation. And while Cat was no expert in Romani academia, she’d never heard of the guy. His name had not come up in any of her research. No articles like the one Gilmore claimed to have seen. No dissertations. Only one listing as a secondary resource that might have been regarding the paper he’d supposedly written, but which no longer existed. She had found a Ben Rousseau listed as a fellow of the same university, but not a word about Paschal.

Still, he’d been important enough for a tenured expert in Romani culture like Morton Gilmore to confer with. And if the mysterious professor had the diary that explained the significance of Valoren to Alexa’s castle, Cat had to push her antsiness about Alexa out of her mind for a few hours more.

Alexa.

The dreadful feeling overwhelmed her again, pressing in on her like a vise, weighting her shoulders, chest and stomach. Shrugging her briefcase to the floor, she yanked her cell phone out of her pocket and tried calling Alexa again.

“I’m sorry, but the subscriber you are calling is unavailable at this time. Please call again or press the star key to leave a message.”

Damn.

Cat disconnected. She’d already filled Alexa’s mailbox with multiple messages both last night and again after receiving Gilmore’s lead. She’d contacted Alexa’s hotel manager and was told that Ms. Chandler had not returned to her suite for the night, but that her brother had. Frustrated, Cat decided she had to break down and call Jacob. Much as her fingers ached with each punch of his cell phone number, she had to make sure her friend was safe.

“If you’re calling to tempt me back into your bed, you’re wasting your time,” Jacob said by way of greeting.

Cat blanched. God, she hated caller ID.

“In your dreams, Goth boy. Where’s Alexa?”

“Would you like to know the content of my dreams, Catalina? You might be very interested to find out exactly how you play a role nowadays.”

“I’m not interested in any of your sick fantasies, Jacob. Remember? That’s why I dumped your freak ass. Now, tell me where your sister is.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll clue your beloved sister in on the real reasons I sent you packing. Do you think she’d still be so keen to let you run even that tiny, insignificant division if she knew what a wannabe you were?”

Silence ensued, tension crackling over their connection like electrical interference. For the millionth time, Cat wondered why she hadn’t already confessed to her best friend all she knew about Jacob and his tastes for the macabre, and again remembered her reasoning. Jacob dabbled in the black arts, true, but he had no true power. He couldn’t hurt anyone. At least, as far as she knew, he hadn’t hurt anyone who hadn’t been anxious to enjoy the experience. And since he was Alexa’s last remaining family member, Cat had decided it was in Alexa’s best interests for Cat to keep her mouth shut regarding Jacob’s sadomasochistic tendencies. As an orphan raised by a grandmother who had never valued her progeny above her religion and a grandfather who saw Cat simply as an extension of himself, she knew that family wasn’t something to be thrown away simply because they didn’t measure up to classical standards. Not when you had no one else.

“Alexa isn’t here,” Jacob finally answered. “She’s on that new island of hers.”

“Again? What’s so interesting that she had to go back?”

“She never left the first time.”

Despite the dank, uncirculated air of the hallway, Cat shivered. “What are you talking about? You left her there all night long?”

“She insisted,” he replied, his voice brimming with boredom. “We had a crisis at our Boston property and she ordered me back to the mainland to handle the mess. I did, but when I was ready to go back and retrieve her, a storm popped up out of nowhere.”

“How convenient,” Cat said, doubtful.

“Check the local news, Catalina. It was freakish. Just your speed, actually. No captain in his right mind would have taken a boat out in that weather, but I’m on my way to fetch her now. She had supplies and a sound roof over her head. Stop worrying.”

“Maybe you should start worrying,” Cat snapped back. She knew that if the castle had survived hurricanes over the last sixty years, one weird storm wasn’t going to knock it down now. And yet, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Alexa was in trouble. Problem was, Cat didn’t know if the danger came from the island or from someone closer to home. “By the way, who gets the Chandler billions if Alexa meets with some freak accident?”

She knew the answer. The hotels would go to the shareholders and the fortune to a charitable foundation. Jacob’s take was minuscule in comparison. He was richer with Alexa alive than dead—one of the few facts that kept Cat off his case.

“Only you would think something so disgusting,” Jacob replied, sounding genuinely insulted.

Good. Catalina didn’t much care about Jacob’s feelings as long as he remained loyal to his sister.

“Even if you reveal my proclivities to Alexa,” he said with an audible sneer, “she’ll forgive me for indulging in less-than-traditional extracurricular activities. Will she forgive you for trying to drive a wedge between her and the last blood tie she has?”

“You’re not tied by blood,” Cat pointed out.

“I’d like to get you tied up one time,” Jacob said, his leer palpable in his voice.

“You’re a pig.”

“And you are entirely too loud!”

That voice didn’t come from the phone, but from a tall, lean, rather snotty gentleman glaring at her from the doorway to Paschal Rousseau’s office.

Cat pressed the phone to her chest to respond until she felt the vibration of Jacob’s voice on her skin. Creeped out, she disconnected the call.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Please take your lovers’ quarrel to the other end of the hall,” the man said, his tone dripping with disdain. “Some people have work to do.”

With a self-satisfied smirk, he slammed the door shut.

Cat gaped. If this guy was Paschal Rousseau, her quest to find the diary with a minimum of fuss just went down the drain. If he wasn’t Paschal Rousseau, then he was about to learn a very hard lesson about pissing her off.

Cat shoved her cell phone back into her pocket, grabbed her briefcase, stalked down the hall and banged on the professor’s office door, hoping Mr. Tight Ass who’d just had the nerve to complain about her volume jumped in surprise and banged his head on a low shelf.

She heard a crash and a curse.

She knocked again. Harder.

When he swung the door open this time, he was pressing his palm tightly to the top of his head.

“Office hours aren’t until Monday,” he ground out through clenched teeth.