Phantom Series Boxed Set

by Julie Leto

  “Research for a new part?” Cinda asked.

  Lauren didn’t bother to lie. Cinda read just about every script that crossed Lauren’s desk. It was part of her job to weed out any film opportunity where Lauren’s role would be nothing more than a cheap imitation of Athena, or that contained gratuitous sex, or where her character would be nothing more than arm candy to some superalpha male. Lauren had amassed a tidy sum playing Athena, and now that she was nearly free of Ross, she could afford to be choosy.

  “No, this is personal. I wondered if there was any way to track down the descendants of a British nobleman.”

  “Is this about that sword?”

  Lauren sat forward. She hadn’t told Cinda anything about the sword. At least, not recently. She supposed she might have mentioned the weapon back when Ross still held it over her head, literally and figuratively, but she’d remained mum since she’d first decided to steal it.

  “How do you know about the sword?”

  “Ross.”

  “He called you?”

  Her assistant snorted. “Right after the accident on the set. By the way, did you know the set electrician ruled it an accident? Said something about a loose wire making contact with the shower door?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Lauren replied, though after the attack in the hospital, she wasn’t entirely sure she believed the studio’s determination. “Tell me what Ross said about the sword.”

  “He wanted me to keep an eye out, let him know if you had it. I guess it’s gone missing from his house or something.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Well,” Cinda said guiltily, “I told him I would, but that’s just because I don’t want him ruining my reputation or making it so I can’t get a job someday down the road, you know? I wouldn’t betray you, Lauren. You know that.”

  In the background, Lauren heard the tap-tapping of Cinda’s fingers on her keyboard. A few seconds later Lauren’s screen popped to a search engine. As she’d done in the past, Cinda had used the network connection between her computer and Lauren’s to control what happened on both machines. Lauren motioned to Aiden to pull up a chair and prepared to tell Cinda what little she knew about the man she’d been sleeping with since he’d first materialized out of a strangely glowing sword.

  “The name is Forsyth,” Lauren announced, “from a place called Valoren.”

  Even as Cinda typed the name into a search engine, Aiden’s frown deepened into a scowl.

  “There’s nothing,” Cinda said.

  “Nothing about Forsyth or nothing about Valoren?”

  “Valoren is coming up empty. Is that in England?”

  Aiden shook his head.

  “No, skip Valoren,” she said, remembering that Aiden told her it was the name of a Gypsy colony somewhere outside the country where he’d been born.

  “There’s a gazillion Forsyth hits,” Cinda said. “Tell me more.”

  Aiden pressed his hand over the place on the phone where Cinda’s voice echoed, but Lauren pressed the mute button instead.

  “Can you trust her?”

  Lauren took a deep breath. “She’s been with me a long time. She’s paid very well to be discreet, and she’s never been anything but.”

  Aiden’s expression told her he didn’t share her optimism, but they really had no choice. Lauren was only barely computer literate. She had never had the time nor the reason to explore the information superhighway, but her assistant was a pro. If they needed information—and they needed it quickly—she had to go to Cinda.

  “Sorry,” she said, releasing the mute button. “I have someone with me. His name is Aiden Forsyth. He’s doing research into his family tree.”

  “Isn’t that the guy who’s going to play—”

  “Yes,” Lauren interrupted. “We were running lines and started talking about our family histories, and he told me he always wanted to know what happened to this British duke—”

  “Earl,” he corrected.

  “Right, earl, whom he’s distantly related to. Think you can help him?”

  Cinch didn’t miss a beat. “Sure! I love this stuff. Aiden, tell me what you know.”

  Aiden scooted his seat closer to the phone and proceeded to give Cinda the dates and names and locations that were his history. His family. His lineage. His legacy. Lauren listened intently, amazed at the fact that he knew so much about his history in comparison to the scant information she had about her own family. But her envy was short-lived. He might have blue blood and pedigrees, but in the big picture he was just as alone as she was.

  Lauren left them to their exploration, went into the kitchen and prepared a plate with fruit and cheese and crackers, suddenly overwhelmed by her isolation. So she’d help Aiden find out what happened to his family, maybe even discover he had a great-great-great-grandson or something. Maybe she’d figure out how to free him from the curse. Then what?

  He’d leave.

  Of course he would.

  And she couldn’t go with him.

  Not that I’d want to.

  Right?

  Lauren dug into her wine cooler, searching for a vintage Aiden might enjoy, then stopped. Was she doing it again? Letting a man rule her choices and preferences, even when he hadn’t made one demand of her she hadn’t wanted to comply with? Or was she using her past to keep her heart from connecting with Aiden’s in such a way that his inevitable departure would be too hard to bear?

  She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  After selecting a favorite Tuscan Sangiovese and downing a glassful herself before pouring a second for Aiden, she strolled back into the office in time to hear Cinda say, “Now, this is interesting.”

  A simple Web site filled the screen. It was nothing more than a listing of names and an e-mail link.

  “This is my family,” Aiden said, his voice hushed with awed surprise.

  Lauren slid the wineglass in front of him and read the names on the screen aloud. “ ‘Damon, Aiden, Colin, Paxton, Logan, Rafe and Sarina.’ Sarina!”

  The sister who’d started this mess. Lauren frowned, but then realized that without this young girl’s fickle flight of fancy, she would never have met this incredible, honorable, selfless man. She supposed this was what everyone meant when they talked about destiny. She’d always heard that things happened for a reason, but she’d never accepted such inevitability as a part of her life. She’d split her experiences into good luck and bad luck. How would she classify Aiden? She supposed she wouldn’t know until after he’d left.

  “Whose site is this?” Lauren asked, shrugging away the sudden uncomfortable clench in her stomach.

  Another window popped up in the corner. Lauren watched Cinda execute a remote “Whois” search. “The Web site is owned by a Gypsy Enterprises, LLC.”

  She and Aiden exchanged surprised looks. “Gypsy?”

  Then the screens started popping up faster and faster while Cinda worked her technical magic. The parade of shapes and colors stopped at a PDF file in a public records database that connected Gypsy Enterprises with the Chandler group.

  “Gypsy looks like a small subsidiary of the conglomerate that owns the Crown Chandler hotels,” Cinda explained. “Just formed a few months ago. No officers listed. Wait. Here’s one, Catalina Reyes. I’ll google her in a minute. But this Web site is so odd. Just a listing of names. No links, except for the e-mail. Aiden, do you know the Chandlers or this Reyes person?”

  Aiden shook his head, so Lauren provided the audible, “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Well, that’s just weird. Do you want me to e-mail them?”

  Perplexed, Aiden did not respond.

  “That’s okay,” Lauren provided. “We’ll take it from here. Thanks, Cinda. I didn’t mean to keep you up so late. You’re getting a bonus after all this crap you’ve been through lately on my behalf.”

  “I wasn’t the one who was nearly killed,” Cinda responded, a shiver in her voice. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
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  Lauren ran her hand across Aiden’s arm. He was still staring at the screen, a stern look mixed with surprise frozen on his face. “I’m feeling wonderful. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She disconnected the call. The computer screen remained static.

  “What do you think this means?” she asked.

  That he had some kind of connection to the present? That he’d soon be leaving her to explore his roots?

  “While you were in the kitchen, Cinda showed me how to do this.”

  Tentatively, he wrapped his hand around the mouse, pointed the arrow on the screen toward a box on the bottom of the window and clicked. Another screen popped up. “She found this listing first.”

  Lauren read quickly. On the Web site devoted to the history of the British House of Lords, they found the archival evidence of Aiden’s existence, a family tree of the last Earl of Hereford. “Your father…your mother?” she asked, tracing her hands over the slim line that connected the names.

  Aiden nodded.

  “Then Damon and you…” she stopped reading out loud when she realized that each brother’s name was followed by the date of his birth…and the date of his death. Aiden had bean born on March the twenty-fifth. An Aries. Not exactly the perfect match for her classic Taurus tendencies.

  “It says here that you all died in 1747. On the same day?”

  “The day of the attack at Valoren.”

  “But your father lived thirty years longer.”

  Again, nothing but a nod.

  Oh, God.

  “Do you think…” She swallowed the dread lumped in her throat. “Do you think you’re dead?”

  She could not believe it. Now that she’d become accustomed to the magic that allowed Aiden to pop into her life with the sunset, she had a hard time thinking of him as a ghost. She didn’t know much about spirits trapped on earth, but she’d certainly never heard even the vaguest claims that ghosts could attain corporeal form.

  Except in the movies.

  But that wasn’t real.

  “I still do not believe that I am dead,” he said finally, slipping his fingers around the stem of the wineglass she’d brought and sliding it nearer, though he did not drink. “History, however, claims otherwise.”

  “Well, they had to write something,” she said. “They couldn’t very well just say you up and disappeared one night while messing with a magical sword. You should trace your father’s line in another source. See if he had any more children, or if your brothers left any sons.”

  “Cinda already did so. She could not find anything. The earldom died with my father, and the monarchy reclaimed his lands.”

  Lauren pressed her hand to her chest, trying to quell the sudden ache there on Aiden’s behalf. “There’s nothing left?”

  “One estate is now a museum, but otherwise, no.”

  Lauren dropped into a chair and cursed under her breath. She’d acted without thinking in calling Cinda, dragging Aiden into exploring his past without first knowing what they’d find. To her, the deaths and loss of his lands happened hundreds of years ago, in a culture she didn’t understand. But she wasn’t so self-centered that she couldn’t read the fresh pain in his eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have suggested we research your family until you were free of the curse and could check things out for yourself. We should concentrate on that. I’ll bet Helen knows someone—a psychic or something. They’re a dime a dozen in Hollywood, though I don’t know how good any of them are. Maybe she can make some discreet inquiries…”

  Her enthusiasm did nothing to smooth out the lines of disappointment etched into his face. In fact, he’d hardly seemed to hear her at all.

  He clicked back to the other Web page, the one that listed all of his family’s names. “This one is different!”

  Lauren read through the names on the rudimentary Web site, then reached across to the mouse and clicked back to the official family tree. “Wait a minute. The family tree doesn’t mention Rafe or Sarina. This one does.”

  Aiden’s mouth tightened. “Yes, I noticed this as well. Rafe and Sarina were born of my father’s second wife. His secret wife. Alyse was Romani—one of the banished. Such a union between her and my father would have been unacceptable at court, and the scandal would have been quite ugly. I always thought that was why he never considered leaving his governorship, not even after the king recalled his garrison of soldiers or after Rogan moved in and took over the Gypsies’ enterprises. I’m quite certain that my father never told anyone in England about his marriage to Alyse or about the children he had with her. So why are their names here?”

  “Someone knows about them,” she replied. “Someone survived the attack that supposedly killed you, and told someone about your Gypsy brother and sister. And another someone connected to Chandler Enterprises—this Catalina Reyes, perhaps—put this information up on the Web, though I can’t imagine why.”

  “To find us.”

  Standing, he clasped his hands behind his back and stalked away from the computer. After he’d paced the room a half dozen times without speaking, Lauren snagged his hand and pulled him back.

  “Who would even know to look for you?”

  His eyes turned such a stormy gray, she gasped as if the air had just been sucked from the room. “My brothers.”

  Lauren’s head swam. “Do you really think someone in your family is alive?”

  “I am here, am I not? Could it not be possible then that one of my siblings suffered the same fate as I while in the village, but is now free and searching for the rest of us using this technology your world so relies upon?”

  “I suppose…”

  He jabbed his finger at the monitor. “No one associated with my father would have known about Rafe and Sarina except for family. Even if some of the Gypsies survived, they would not have returned to England, and they certainly would not have reported on the earl’s family to anyone of consequence. Servants would have been well paid to keep the secret, and even if they told, who would have cared enough to record Rafe’s and Sarina’s names? My father was disgraced. The king sent mercenaries to reclaim his lands, but the mission went awry. The Gypsies had mysteriously disappeared. This could explain why there is no record of Valoren or the experiment to colonize the Gypsies outside of England. Only kings have the power to change history. And to erase it.”

  “What about his wife?” she asked. “She would have kept records of her children’s birth.”

  He rubbed his chin, thinking hard. “Alyse was a pragmatic woman, but illiterate. And Gypsies, for the most part, did not keep written records. If Alyse lived beyond that night and returned with my father to England, she would have insisted she take a place in my father’s household to keep their marriage a secret. He loved her. He would not have abandoned her. But this information shows that he never again served in the House of Lords once he returned from out of the country. The museum site says he lived a quiet, secluded life until the end of his days, meaning he shut himself away with his secret wife, mourning the loss of his children. Never knowing about the curse. Never knowing we lived, although, with us in a state so crude and cruel, knowing might have been more punishment than believing we were dead.”

  He looked up, and his eyes gleamed silver with both determination and regret. Lauren’s heart ached, thinking about how the earl had grieved for seven children—his entire legacy—without knowing that they’d never truly died.

  His voice snapped her back to the present.

  “I have to go to London,” he said decisively. “The answers must be there.”

  Lauren’s stomach dropped. “Yes, but you can’t. I mean, I can’t. And you can’t go without me.”

  He scowled, his hands balled into tight fists. “You told me about your modern means of travel. We could be there by tomorrow.”

  She covered her mouth, certain her sudden queasiness came from the fact that she could not give him what he so desperately wanted. “I can’t go now
. Rehearsals start tomorrow. We shoot the first scenes in a few days. I can’t just pick up and leave right before we start the movie. Making the arrangements to film your scenes only at night has already pushed my limits.”

  “Then call back that David Drake. Have him take the part. Send the sword with your assistant. You claim you trust her. Tell her my secret. Order her to help me find my family.”

  Lauren’s eyes widened. The thought of telling Cinda about Aiden tore at her insides like swallowed glass. It was one thing to believe in magic herself, because she’d seen it with her own eyes, but it was something else to share this insane tale with a girl who’d pinned her Hollywood ambitions on the stability of Lauren’s career. She’d asked Cinda to do so much already—wasn’t this above and beyond?

  Or was she just making an excuse?

  Was jealousy, perhaps, keeping her from acting as Aiden asked?

  She wanted to help him. She wanted to be there for him when he found the freedom he so desperately needed.

  For once, she wanted to be the one to help someone else, rather than the other way around. Wasn’t that what her karma required to undo the years of taking while she’d lived with Ross?

  “I can’t drag Cinda into this,” she decided. “It’s too much to ask of her. Someone has already attacked me trying to get your sword. I can’t put her in danger.”

  He continued to pace as she spoke, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Is that truly your reasoning, or do you simply not wish to help me? Perhaps I am just a means to an end for you. A reason not to confront David Drake or your past?”

  A lick of fury fired her belly. “This has nothing to do with David.”

  “Then call him,” Aiden insisted, pointing at the phone. “Tell him he can play your lover in your insignificant film. Or can you not, because he knows your secret? That you were once a child of the streets who lifted herself to greatness through the calculated lust of a man who never loved you, but wanted only to possess you? Does your greatness now embody that same cold selfishness?”

  Lauren’s eyes burned, and in her chest a sensation much like a crack bled icy resentment around her heart. He was right. She was being selfish. Selfishness had gotten her this far, hadn’t it? If she hadn’t been selfish, she would have ended up just like her mother—dead on a dirty L.A. street corner. Unwanted. Unloved.