by Julie Leto
In her teen years, the setting had become more private. More sensual. Ripe for a young girl’s fantasies. Only she’d never wanted a knight or prince to rescue her. From what? A life of wealth and privilege? No, she’d simply wanted a sweet-voiced young man who could satisfy the torturous, mysterious aches that haunted her in the middle of the night. A man who could steal her away with pleasure and, perhaps, a forever love.
Luckily for her, college had pretty much knocked those delusions right out of her head. Sex, while enjoyable, was no longer a mystifying secret. And as far as Alexa had experienced, men who could weave prince-worthy magic with their bodies were few and far between. No, Alexa had now turned her princess fantasy into something much more practical.
Profit.
“I’m not talking about my sexual fantasies,” Alexa said, “until you’re ready to spill a few of your own.”
“You want the ones I’ve actually lived out or the ones I’m still working on?” Cat replied quickly, a sculpted eyebrow arched over a sparkling eye.
Alexa steeled herself against a shudder. “Forget I said anything. I don’t play games I can’t win, and God knows your love life has always been more exciting than mine. Let’s talk about something important, like how you’ll help me with this project.”
Cat stepped back. “God, that hungry look is scary.”
Alexa chuckled. “So I’ve been told.”
“You do realize that you already have more money than God, right? I mean, in case you’re wondering where your next meal is coming from, I’d say from the nearest five-star restaurant that delivers. Hell, who cares if they deliver? You can buy the place and have the chef come over to make you a peanut butter sandwich. With truffle sauce.”
Alexa blanched at the combination of flavors, imaginary or not. “It’s not about the money.”
Cat laughed out loud. “Come on, Alexa. With you, it’s always about the money.”
Alexa turned back to the sliver of land on the horizon, shaking her head as she gazed. She couldn’t blame Cat for making that assumption. She presented that picture to everyone, even to her best friend. Her father had left her millions—millions he’d made with his own ingenuity and backbreaking determination.
He’d worked his way up from a doorman to become a competitor to the likes of Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott. Crown Chandler hotels exemplified excellent service, meticulous decor and premium prices. Since Richard’s death six years before, Alexa had kept the business running with keen precision, as she hadn’t been raised to whittle away her legacy without first adding to the pot. She’d worked twenty-four/seven to ensure that everyone from the maintenance man to the top executives knew that Alexa Chandler put the solvency and growth of her business above all else.
When she discovered that in addition to his all-consuming work ethic, her father had also left her this perplexing piece of land off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida, uncharacteristic whimsy had shot through her. What could be more perfect for her than an abandoned island and a castle? Though Richard Chandler had died in the same car accident that had also nearly killed Alexa, no mention of the property had been made in his will, and the deed had only recently been discovered by her stepbrother, who found the paperwork among his mother’s belongings—along with a note that had “For Alexa” jotted on the corner. None of his attorneys knew a thing about it, though they’d verified the authenticity of the document and Richard’s signature.
The discovery had spawned a series of events that had led her here, to St. Augustine, with her best friend, the occult expert, opening her briefcase in preparation for a meeting Alexa had been anticipating for hours. Initial research revealed that the island—and the castle—were reportedly haunted, which put them right up Cat’s alley. A well-known paranormal researcher with a list of degrees as long as her waist-length hair, Cat was the perfect person to delve into the history of the land Alexa had inherited. And if the rumors of ectoplasmic activity were true, Alexa knew she had a real discovery on her hands.
In more ways than one.
“The only reference I could find to Valoren was in a database run by a Gypsy genealogy site,” Cat informed her after placing pointy-cornered glasses on her regal nose.
At the news, a thrill shot into Alexa’s veins, and she spun, excited and terrified at the same time. The word “Valoren” had been scribbled on the bottom of the deed, with no explanation.
Alexa had tried to research the island—called Isla de Fantasmas by the locals—on her own and had come up with little more than rumors and speculation. She’d learned that the island’s reputation as a gathering place for ghosts had been recorded as far back as the Spanish occupation of Florida in the fifteen hundreds. Tales of hostile spirits, coupled with the inhospitable terrain made up mostly of prickly palmettos and thick walls of bamboo, had kept anyone from inhabiting the land. Even sea birds and turtles stayed away. Locals speculated that the tales of spectral activity had been planted by pirates protecting their stronghold, but the tales had remained long after the privateers vanished from the Florida coast.
Then, sixty years ago, according to a local historian, a mysterious speculator had bought an abandoned castle in Germany and began moving it to Florida to rebuild on Isla de Fantasmas.
Piece by piece.
Quietly, almost secretly, the medieval-style stronghold had been rebuilt by a foreign architect and workers housed exclusively on a ship anchored off the island. Armed men in fast boats had kept curious onlookers away. Even the press had been thwarted in their quest to find out more about the project.
And then, in 1950, two years after the work began, the project stopped.
The architect, the workers, the ships, disappeared. The castle remained, but the local fishermen claimed that even if a visitor did find a place to go ashore on the craggy island, the castle was surrounded by a completely impenetrable twenty-foot stone wall. If anyone had made it over the wall, he or she hadn’t returned to tell about it. The sheriff had reported that thrill seekers often claimed to have breeched the island’s natural defenses, but no one cared enough about an empty scrap of land to provide proof.
Interestingly, the county courthouse contained no record of the land being bought by Alexa’s father, though the quitclaim deed had been declared genuine by a local judge. Yet when she’d asked for a guide to take her to her property, the local sailors had scattered faster than a school of grouper startled by a hungry shark.
That’s when she’d called Cat.
“So, the rumors…are they true?”
Cat shook her head, her ironed-straight hair brushing along bared shoulders. “That the island is haunted? I’ll need to see that for myself,” Cat said, her tone, as usual, brimming with skepticism. Though Cat’s genetic makeup included a potent mix of New Orleans Creole and Santería-worshipping Caribbean stock, her friend didn’t believe in any magic she couldn’t prove. So far, Cat had built a reputation for proving more paranormal phenomena than any other researcher in her field—and disproving even more.
“The only other reference I found to Valoren was in a book written twenty years ago by a Gypsy Chovihano whose family dated back to the seventeen hundreds,” Cat said.
Alexa slid onto the sleek leather couch beside her friend. “And?”
“That book was useless.”
“Then why—”
“The writer is dead, the mention to Valoren the equivalent of your father’s note on the deed, though it does lead me to believe that Valoren is a place, not a person or a Romani word. The Chovihano left no relatives. His publisher was no help. Small press. Out of business. But,” she said triumphantly, “in the acknowledgments, the author made reference to an anthropology professor in Texas. A Gypsy expert. I called him.”
“And he’s heard of Valoren?”
Cat nodded. “And not just an oral history, either. He’d read about the place, though his memory was sketchy. He remembered something about it being a Gypsy enclave. A sort of safe haven.”
�
�I thought Gypsies never stayed in one place.”
Cat shrugged. “They don’t, ordinarily, which makes the place all the more interesting, doesn’t it?”
“Could he remember his source?”
“No, but he seems to think it was a dissertation or an academic paper of some sort. Maybe a diary. Unfortunately, he has hundreds of professional journals and personal memoirs in his private collection and he can’t remember which one has the reference.”
Alexa cursed. Why she felt so compelled to figure out the answer to this puzzle perplexed her, except…she missed her father desperately. This gift seemed so personal, as if he’d searched for a castle for his little princess, remembering how fierce she’d been about her room, about her mother’s legacy. And her father had been just the type—loving and whimsical one minute, serious and driven the next—to try to turn her childhood dream into a moneymaking reality. In all practicality, a reputedly haunted, five-star hotel on an exclusive, hard-to-reach island could become the crown jewel for Crown Chandler. If Alexa made this project happen and filled the rooms with celebrities, dignitaries and nouveau riche entrepreneurs who appreciated privacy with their pampering, she might finally be accepted as the shrewd, creative new leader of Crown Chandler Enterprises and not just the spoiled little rich girl who’d inherited her legacy because she’d lived and her father had died.
Or was she simply so hard up for a decent lover that she was pinning all her hopes on some Sleeping Beauty fantasy?
“What’s our next step?” Alexa asked, shaking off her apprehension.
“I’m flying to Texas,” Cat informed her. “The professor said I could search his collection. I’ll check out the island when I get back. That is, if you’re still interested in the history of the castle before you move forward with your plans.”
“Oh, she’s interested.”
Alexa sat up straighter, her spine rigid. Ordinarily, she didn’t react so icily to her stepbrother walking into a room unannounced. However, she ordinarily didn’t allow Jacob anywhere near Cat, either—at least, not since their messy breakup.
“My, my,” Jacob said, his nose crinkled as if Catalina’s exotic scent offended his delicate sensibility. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
Cat skewered him with a sharp glare, tore off her glasses and snapped her briefcase closed. “God, Jacob. You’re such a drama queen. You could at least make an attempt at being original.”
Alexa jumped to her feet. Blood would be drawn if she didn’t act quickly. “Okay, now that we’ve had our warm reunion, can I talk to you, Jacob, in the other room?”
With a sneer, her stepbrother begrudgingly headed toward the suite’s bedroom. Just to be on the safe side, Alexa shut the door behind them.
“Why are you still hanging out with that freak?” he asked.
Alexa bit the inside of her mouth. Black pot? Meet kettle.
“Just because the two of you broke up—four years ago, I should remind you—doesn’t mean I can’t be friends with her.”
Clearly, time hadn’t lessened the bitterness between her brother and her friend. Catalina had kicked Jacob to the curb once she realized he’d been using her to meet the self-proclaimed witches and vampires who flocked to Catalina unbidden, sometimes because of her research into the occult, most times because of her legacy as the granddaughter of a Santería priest and a voodoo priestess.
From the moment Jacob Sharpe’s mother had married into the Chandler family, Alexa had realized that her new brother had interests that were more than a little weird. While Alexa herself had always been interested in ghosts, her reasons leaned toward the capitalistic and had nothing to do with Cat. Long before Alexa had met her friend, her interests in the paranormal had always stemmed from how a rumor of ghostly hauntings in the hotel world nearly always equaled financial gain. Travelers often paid big money to have a cold, otherworldly breeze blow across their cheeks in the dead of night.
Jacob, on the other hand, had proclaimed himself Wiccan, Goth and anything else that would drive his parents crazy. After college, he’d stopped trying to shock everyone. Alexa had figured he’d finally grown out of his rebellious stage. Cunningly, he’d let the inky dye fade out of his brown hair, gave up lining his icy blue eyes with black kohl, and traded his favorite black duster jacket and Nazi storm trooper boots for Armani suits and Bruno Magli shoes just long enough to land himself in her daddy’s will. Which was why she had to deal with him on a regular basis.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “I told you I could handle this situation on my own.”
He had an unnerving habit since the accident of following her around like a guard dog, despite the fact that she’d given him an entire division of established, top-performing hotels to supervise. She’d survived the car wreck, even if his mother and her father had not. Therapy for her concussion, punctured lung and broken thighbone had been a bitch, but she’d recovered with even more strength—and determination—than she’d had before.
Jacob shrugged in that boyish way that made her forget he was nearly thirty years old. “Things are running like clockwork as usual. But I’m bored. I need a challenge.”
“You can always look into that ski lodge in Utah.”
He scrunched his nose. “Too many Mormons in Utah.”
She blew out a frustrated breath. “Yes, they do tend to gravitate there.” And the good Lord knew that Mormons weren’t her stepbrother’s speed.
“Let me help you here,” he said, his tone vaguely whiny. “I am the one who brought you the deed. I didn’t have to, you know.”
She supposed he didn’t. He’d taken his mother’s death pretty hard—harder than she’d expected for all the tension that existed between the two of them. Apparently, he’d waited until recently to go through the last of her effects, and Alexa supposed that if he had wanted to be cruel, he could have kept the deed to himself. But while Jacob had nearly always been a pain in her ass, he’d never been underhanded or mean.
“Come on, sis,” he pleaded. “I can make myself more useful with your spooky castle than I can approving budgets for bed linens. With your knowledge of hotels and mine of all things mysterious, we can build a property that will make our competitors weep with envy.”
Jacob’s grin quirked up on the right side of his face and his eyes glittered. They might not have been related by blood, but Alexa couldn’t deny that they both suffered from a condition that caused hot flashes at the possibility of growing their portfolios.
“Yes, well, I can’t make any decisions until I see the place close-up,” Alexa said, wearing her most unengaged expression. She didn’t want anyone, even her stepbrother, to know how desperately she wanted this venture to work out. “But since you’re here, you can at least come with me. I hate flying.”
Alexa’s father had taught her everything he knew about hotels in particular, but also about business in general. He’d also insisted that a smart woman adhered to the old adage of keeping her friends close and her enemies closer. She wasn’t exactly sure where her stepbrother fell most of the time, but as she was on the brink of a spectacular opportunity, she’d rather not take any chances.
At least not until she arrived on the island.
Two
Air rushed into Damon’s lungs, nearly choking him. His eyes flew open and he was partially blinded by the sudden light. Had it happened? Had he finally crossed over from the plane of his punishment into hell, where he belonged?
A soft mewling at his ankles convinced him he still was not dead. At least not entirely. And he couldn’t suppress a wave of disappointment, an undercurrent against his natural instinct to survive.
He looked down, not surprised to see a long-haired black cat circling his ankles. He kicked out, but the animal merely burst into a cloud of smoke and seconds later reformed into the crafty feline he was.
“Away, beast.”
The cat stared at him with amber eyes flecked with gold, eyes that, perhaps, didn’t look so evil after all these centuries.
>
Damon bent down. The cat disappeared. A split second later he felt a warm, furry weight in his arms.
“You enjoy taunting me,” Damon said to the cat.
The creature replied by purring and rubbing its flattened face against his arm.
The cat’s rumbling vibrations brought Damon a peace he did not deserve. He preferred the state of dormancy he fell into every hundred years or so. Drowsy. Still. Forgetful. Dead, and yet…not. A phantom, unable to escape from a prison of his own making.
For long periods of time, he couldn’t remember exactly what or who he was, why he was trapped in a world that consisted of little more than a drawing room, a doorway that led to nowhere and a window that looked out on nothing. Somewhere in the far reaches of his mind, he remembered a time when he’d been whole. Virile. Strong. Solid.
And ultimately, cursed.
He remembered a sorcerer. A missing sister. Brothers dispersed into a storm in search of their wayward sibling. A storm. And magic most evil.
But beyond that, his brain felt too taxed to work out the details. How could the particulars matter after all this time?
And yet…
What was the smell suddenly invading his nostrils? He breathed in deeply. The cat meowed. Sea salt? He closed his eyes and focused on the sounds teasing the edge of his consciousness. Waves? How could that be? There was no ocean near Valoren. Had he transported back to his beloved England? Or was he somewhere new?
Another sound sent him bolt upright, and after a moment, his surroundings solidified. The brushstrokes faded and his sense of the furnishings in the room sharpened. He could feel the carpet beneath his boots, smell the smoke from the torch in the sconce and the melting wax from the candle above the unlit fireplace. The atmosphere became suddenly dank and cloying, causing his linen stock to chafe against his neck. He reached around and undid the ties, his hand brushing against his long hair, bound with a black strip of leather. Was it his imagination or was he still damp from his ride in the storm?
