Phantom Series Boxed Set

by Julie Leto

  “What kind of power?”

  “The kind of power you conjure in your movies, although you have to use computer-generated effects.”

  In the span of the next ten minutes, Farrow Pryce wove a tale straight from a high-budget B movie. A wicked sorcerer named Rogan. A Gypsy curse. A missing source of unimaginable power that had been sought for centuries by people like him who believed Rogan’s legacy would bestow the means to world domination. When he was through explaining how the sword could very well be the hidden magical source of unimaginable power, Ross applauded.

  “I have to say, Pryce, this goes down in history as the most innovative pitch I’ve ever heard. You had me going there for awhile,” he said, pouring himself another measure of scotch. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen this coming. “But as fascinating as your story is, and as resourceful as you’ve been in setting up this meeting, the idea’s not right for me. I already have the Athena franchise for fantasy films. But if you want to type up a treatment, I’ll keep it on file.”

  Farrow glared at him. “I’m not an aspiring screen-writer, you idiot!” He shot to his feet. “I know all about your sour deals and the fact that if this next Athena film loses a single penny, you’ll likely see that ocean at a much closer range after being fitted with cement loafers. I need that sword. I’ve waited my entire life to inherit the power of my forefathers, and I’m not waiting any longer. You’re going to get that sword for me, do you understand?”

  The sound of a throat clearing alerted Ross to Nigel’s appearance. The butler didn’t say a word, but the way he stared at Pryce spoke volumes.

  The man was for real—and he was dangerous. “You’re serious?” Ross asked.

  Farrow calmly returned to his chair. “Deadly serious. Now”—he gestured to Nigel, calling him closer with the wave of his hand—”we have some planning to do, you and I. Nigel, is it? Do ensure that Mr. Marchand and I are not interrupted. And perhaps you can call around and discover the location of his former wife? I believe she and I have business to execute, and Mr. Marchand will be our intermediary.”

  Ross cursed under his breath. He hadn’t meant to drag Lauren into his mess. He’d gone to great lengths to protect her so far, if for no other reason than because he’d invested so much in the Athena franchise—money he couldn’t afford to lose.

  But she’d made a serious mistake in stealing that sword. Now it looked like there was nothing Ross could do to keep her out of trouble—in fact, it looked like he would be a pawn in dragging her down unless he could figure out how to double-cross this K’vr wacko. without getting himself killed in the process.

  Six

  Helen Talbot strode onto the soundstage, clutching the file that contained what might be her last chance to salvage this film. Plucking off her Roberto Cavalli sunglasses and sliding them like a headband into her seriously-in-need-of-new-highlights hair, she opened the folder and scanned the head shots one more time.

  Production on Wrath of Athena was set to start in a few days, and as of last night the film was without a leading man. Again. The role was clearly cursed, though she wasn’t ready to let anyone in on that secret yet. She was working her way into becoming one of the most sought-after casting agents in the industry, and one cursed role could ruin her career.

  Helen had already presented dozens of perfectly sculpted paragons of male perfection to the director and the production team. Though the character amounted to little more than eye candy for the film’s leading lady, no one had been good enough. And even though Helen was excellent at her job, she wasn’t the cause of the hiring glitch.

  Lauren Cole, the star, was being a big pain in the ass.

  Which Helen considered both telling and ironic, since the woman had been nothing but easygoing and cooperative in the past.

  “Hey, Marco,” she called out to the security guard who stood, arms folded across his chest, watching a gaggle of grips adjusting the lighting equipment overhead.

  The pudgy man turned and eyed her suspiciously.

  “Helen Talbot, remember?”

  His expression didn’t change.

  “The casting director on our sweet little project here?”

  Finally recognition dawned in his eyes. She wouldn’t have bothered except that Lauren insisted everyone in management on her films play nice with the crew. And today she needed Lauren in a good mood. A very good mood.

  “Sorry, Ms. Talbot,” the security guard said with an apologetic smile. “It’s been a long night. I’m just about to clock out, but I wanted to, er, wait around and see if everything was all right.”

  Helen eyed the man narrowly. “Why? Did something happen?”

  She’d been on the lot for less than fifteen minutes. Definitely not long enough to pick up on any gossip. If ever the stars were aligned against a film production, it was this one. Not only was Mercury in retrograde again, meaning there were bound to be technical issues up the wazoo, but the fact that the divorce between the primary talent and the executive producer had become final only a few days before shooting did not bode well.

  Not that Helen wanted Lauren to stay married to the freakishly controlling Ross Marchand, but she was counting on this film’s making it to the big screen on time and under budget. The Athena movies were by far the biggest films Helen had ever worked on. With this, the last production, and the studio watching her with eagle eyes, she had to make all the right choices or she’d find herself back to casting small-budget indies, or worse…having to return to acting.

  Marco glanced sideways. Twice. Helen followed the direction of his stare to the workout room where Lauren spent inordinate amounts of time playing with her weapons and ensuring that her trainers, who hopefully had stock in prescription painkillers, earned every dime they were paid.

  “Marco,” she said, straightening to her full five-foot-seven-inch height. “Tell me what’s wrong this instant or I’ll have you tossed off this lot.”

  He slung his hands into his pockets and shifted nervously. “It’s Ms. Cole. She came in late last night.”

  “Came here? Why? What time?”

  “Just before midnight. Not sure why. I guess she wanted to work off some frustration, you know?”

  Helen nodded. Yes, she knew, and so did every other person who stood in the supermarket line and had the literacy level of a turnip. The divorce had been splashed on every tabloid headline for weeks.

  “Okay, so she came to the studio to work out late. What’s the problem?”

  Marco’s mouth twisted and his shoulders hunched upward, as if he were afraid to say.

  Helen patted his arm lightly and turned on her best smile. “It’s okay, Marco. You know Lauren and I are friends. If she needs something, I’m the woman to get it for her.” She gave the folder she now held against her chest a possessive squeeze. First and foremost, Lauren needed a new leading man. In more ways than one, in Helen’s opinion.

  Marco leaned forward. “She stayed all night.”

  “Really?”

  That was unusual behavior, even for Lauren. She had a top-notch workout space in her house. Why would she come here when filming hadn’t even started? It wasn’t like she had an early morning call.

  Marco’s eyes darted left and right. “She hasn’t come out. Her car is still in the parking lot.”

  Helen stepped close and gripped Marco’s arm a little tighter, her voice a whisper as her stomach cramped with worry. “Are you sure she’s okay?”

  Before he could respond, Helen moved past the man and headed straight to the workout room and banged on the door.

  “Lauren! Open up this instant. Lauren!”

  Without a full crew in the soundstage, Helen’s voice echoed and amplified up into the rafters. The sounds of hammers and table saws stopped dead. She winced. This was all she needed—more personal crap from the cast causing a disruption to the production.

  If Lauren was in trouble, Helen was bound and determined not only to fix the problem, but to do so with the minimum of intrus
ion from the press. She should have become a publicist, but thanks to her dubious first career as a “teen” star, she hated publicists.

  She turned to the crew. “Sorry, guys. Just yelling because all that hard work of yours is noisy. Nothing to gape at. Proceed.”

  After a moment of hesitation and muttering, someone in charge started barking orders and the noise returned. Helen, determined to gain entrance to the locked room, knocked louder. When she pressed her ear to the door, she heard what she thought was an annoyed, “Hold your horses.”

  Suddenly the door swung open. Lauren stood just inside the threshold, looking like she hadn’t brushed her hair in days, her expression clearly aggravated.

  “What? Oh,” Lauren said, glancing behind her quickly, then opening the door wider. “It’s you.”

  Helen slipped inside and immediately shut the door before someone on the crew snapped a picture with a cell phone camera of Lauren Cole looking like hell and sold it to the tabloids for a small fortune.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Question is, who are you, and what have you done with the drop-dead-gorgeous star of this film?”

  Lauren locked the door, schlepped over to a pile of workout mats in a corner and threw her obviously exhausted body on top.

  “She doesn’t report to the set until day after tomorrow,” Lauren muttered.

  “You didn’t get the call, then?”

  Lauren removed the arm she’d slung across her eyes. “What call?”

  “The one that informed you we needed you on the set today to read lines with the prospective actors vying for the role of your booty boy?”

  “Booty boy? Where’s Joey?”

  Ah, Joey Villarosa. What a major-league hottie. Helen allowed herself a few wistful memories of the hunk’s first “audition” with her. And the second. And, ooh, the third. Yeah, the third one had been the charm. He hadn’t even wanted a part in the movie. He’d been brought in as a potential consultant and trainer for the action sequences.

  Well, he’d done a damned fine job consulting her on the sexual advantages of a good workout. Maybe he could do the same for Lauren. And fast.

  “Helen?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Where’s Joey?” Lauren repeated.

  Lauren spoke slowly, with exaggerated enunciation and suspicious eyes, as if Helen had been sampling her signature pomegranate martinis again with breakfast. She was about to shoot off a sassy comeback when she remembered that Lauren hadn’t heard.

  “Sweetheart, I’d tell you to sit down, but if you were reclining any further, I’d be picking out your casket.”

  “Rough night,” Lauren said. “Don’t tell me Joey got pummeled in another Ultimate Fighting competition. I keep telling him, he’s too pretty to slap down with those punks.”

  “He’s in the hospital.”

  “What?”

  Lauren shot up, then caught herself on an unsteady hand.

  “Must have been some workout,” Helen quipped, before picking her way gingerly across the leather mats, crinkling her nose at the smell of stale sweat. But suddenly, as if on an unseen breeze, another scent teased her nostrils. Sweaty, but sweet. Warm. Raw.

  Like sex.

  “What exactly did you do here all night?” she asked, suspicious. “I don’t see tequila bottles or lime rinds, so clearly the party started somewhere else.”

  “I wasn’t drinking,” Lauren said, giving herself a shake. Leaning on her elbows, she skewered Helen with a look that stopped her cold. “What happened to Joey? And why didn’t anyone call me?”

  “I did call you,” Helen snapped. “Funny little thing about cell phones. You have to turn them on before you can hear the ring.”

  “Is he all right?”

  Helen frowned. “He’ll live, and the scars will give him character, I’m sure.”

  “Scars?” Lauren swung off the pile of mats. “Helen, tell me what happened right now or those mats you’re trying to balance your Prada shoes on aren’t going to be enough cushion when I knock you on your bony ass.”

  Helen inhaled, delight overriding her adverse reaction to Lauren’s colorful but completely bogus attempt at intimidation. She swung around halfway, her hands framing her Pilates-shaped backside. “Do you really think my ass is bony? God, I love you.”

  “Helen…”

  This time the threat was real.

  “Some sort of accident. He’s going to be fine, but he’s off the film. His agent called me around midnight.”

  Joey had trained Lauren in the first four films. Their rapport, while not inherently sexual, was undeniable. Michael, the director, had agreed to take on an inexperienced actor because it meant Lauren was happy and Helen was off his back.

  Since Lauren’s breakup with Ross Marchand, she had closed herself off from men in a way that, frankly, Helen couldn’t imagine. Helen had quite a list of divorces to her name, and not one of them had stopped her from taking lovers. Of course, lovers had usually been the reason for her divorces. Either way, she couldn’t understand Lauren’s inability to put her hurt behind her and have some bedroom therapy with a costar. But no matter how many gorgeous, six-packed, hot-bodied actors Helen had brought in to read with Lauren for the part in the final Athena film, not one inspired any chemistry.

  Until Joey had been recruited, the writers had actually considered making Athena a lesbian. Or at the very least, pissed off at men, which, fortunately for them, was in keeping with the myth. Unfortunately, part of the success of the series so far had been the steamy love scenes between Lauren and her costar du jour. And since this was the last film, no one wanted to mess with the formula.

  So with Joey out of the boy-toy business, it was time to select another choice piece of meat for the powerful Athena to love—and, alas, lose.

  Lauren, lost in thought, had wandered to where a sword lay on one of the filthy, sweaty mats. When she picked up the weapon, a strange light flickered off the blade. Helen looked around, but couldn’t see where the spot was coming from.

  “What’s that light?”

  Lauren had dropped to her knees and was running her fingers along the rather wicked-looking blade. Stepping closer, Helen realized the weapon didn’t look at all like a prop, and remembered her friend bemoaning the fact that her ex-husband had withheld some sword from her in the divorce settlement—a fact that hadn’t been sitting well with Lauren for quite some time.

  “Lauren, is that… ?”

  But Lauren didn’t respond.

  “Lauren!”

  Lauren’s hands jerked back from the blade. “What?”

  “Is that Ross’s sword?”

  “No,” Lauren snapped. “This was never Ross’s sword.”

  Holy shit. Lauren had done it now. If the lack of a costar hadn’t blown up production, the lead actress’s stealing from the producer certainly would do the trick. Helen rushed forward to remove the sword before someone saw it, but the moment her hand shot out, she was caught in a crushing grip.

  “No! Don’t touch him.”

  Helen jerked her hand free. “What do you mean, him?”

  “I mean it. Don’t touch it. It’s very sharp. You could cut yourself.”

  “Maybe then I’ll bleed out and won’t have to deal with the fact that my entire career is over if you don’t get that sword out of here.”

  Lauren looked confused.

  Helen grunted. Clearly Lauren hadn’t gotten much sleep. She was usually quicker on the uptake.

  “I’ve got a movie scheduled to start filming in forty-eight hours, and the costar we had lined up for you is out of commission. Now, imagine if you, the star of the film, were thrown in jail for grand theft or whatever it’s called…”

  “Ross would never have me arrested. The sword is technically mine, and he knows it. Besides, he’d lose a bundle if this film shut down.”

  “Would he?” Helen asked. The rumors had been insidious this time. Not like the typical gossip-culture whisperings that surrounded each and every production in town. Ross Mar
chand, people claimed, had some kind of money problems. Since disparaging remarks about moneymen like Ross were floated around this town more often than balloons at a kid’s birthday party, she hadn’t paid too much attention at first. But then the innuendos and scandalous blather hadn’t died away. That usually meant truth was anchoring the rumors inside the mill.

  Helen hadn’t wanted to say anything to Lauren, who’d fortunately divorced herself from the Hollywood glitterati the minute she chucked Marchand. She needed to have her head in the movie, not on worrying whether her paycheck was going to bounce—or worse, if creditors were coming after her for debts incurred before the end of the marriage.

  “If the movie doesn’t get filmed, he’ll lose millions. You know that,” Lauren. insisted, turning, her mind momentarily off the sword still gleaming so oddly on the ground. “Wait a minute. What aren’t you telling me?”

  Sounds from outside the rehearsal room reminded Helen that this wasn’t the time or the place to discuss Ross’s dicey financial situation. Grabbing Lauren’s wrist, she glanced at the door, making the reason for her reticence perfectly clear.

  “Get rid of the sword, Lauren. Go to your trailer, clean up, and meet me back here in a half hour. I have five actors coming in to do a read-through at ten, but there’s time for us to grab a cup of coffee beforehand. Off the lot, if you know what I mean.”

  Lauren’s brow furrowed. She clearly wanted to know more, but a loud bang just on the other side of the door spurred her to action. She grabbed a blanket, wrapped up the sword, gave Helen a hug and then promised to return in twenty.

  Once the door was closed, the tension in Helen’s shoulders relaxed somewhat, but not enough for her to cancel the masseuse who was coming at two. She tossed the folder she’d been carrying onto a trunk, then looked around, wondering, first, what the hell her friend had been doing in the rehearsal room alone all night long, and second, how she was going to weasel a confession out of her before their lattes got cold. She and Lauren were close, but since Ross had strong-armed Lauren into making this last film, she’d been edgy and sullen. The last thing Helen wanted to do was set her off right before production started in earnest.