Phantom Series Boxed Set (7 page)

“I assure you that this dreamworld, as you call it, can be very real if you so wish.”

She locked her feet in place, determined to remain unaffected by his proximity. And yet, anticipation thrilled through her, electrifying the space between them with a raw, natural magic that she understood very, very well—even if she hadn’t experienced it firsthand for a long time.

To cover her attraction, she eyed him with as much skepticism as she could muster. “A moment ago you told me you didn’t know how the magic worked here.”

“ ‘Tis true,” he said, “but I did not say I would not attempt to manipulate the magic to my advantage.”

His curve of a grin emphasized the sharp angles in his cheekbones and square jaw. His snug breeches, loose-fitted sleeves gathered at the wrist and finely embroidered waistcoat conjured images in her mind of Jason Isaacs in
The Patriot
—or better yet, from the richness and quality of his garments, of Richard Chamberlain in
The Slipper and the Rose
. She remembered swooning over that particular video during her incredibly romantic and tragically lonesome youth.

Well, she wasn’t a starry-eyed Cinderella wannabe anymore. This castle belonged to her. And she wasn’t going to let some superhandsome ghost or whatever he was trick her into believing this situation was anything less than real and, therefore, primed for her control. She was here. He was here. And he was not from this time.

Not. From. This. Time.

The realization struck her hard and she dropped onto the chaise, her brain spinning. With a tilt of his head and a practiced gesture with his hand, he asked permission to sit beside her—which she granted after scooting over to provide a safe distance.

“You have no reason to mistrust me, Miss Chandler.”

“Please, call me Alexa. I like to be on a first-name basis with all the…phantoms I free from cursed paintings.”

He chuckled again, the sound no less effective the second time around. “You have a sharp tongue.”

“You have no idea,” she quipped. “Look, I’m not afraid to admit that I’m feeling a little bit foggy. Maybe we need to take a deep breath and back up and try and figure this all out.”

He leaned across her to the table and retrieved the goblet and decanter. His linen sleeve brushed against her skin, injecting the air with a tantalizing scent that was decidedly male and inherently intoxicating. Before she could stop herself, she’d inhaled deeply.

He smelled exactly as she’d expect of a man of his time and station. Like leather and spices and pure maleness. No designer fragrances or masking colognes. Once he took a draft of the wine, his kiss would return the full-bodied flavor of the vintage, with nothing minty or artificial to impair the taste.

“Perhaps this will help,” he said, pouring the scarlet liquid into the goblet.

She eyed him skeptically. “I don’t think drinking magic wine is the answer to my problem. Water will suffice.”

He took a long sip from the pewter cup himself, humming with pleasure. Her mouth watered, then, with a swallow, quickly dried.

“You’ll not trust any water I conjure, true?”

“I have some in my bag. Just there.”

After a pause, he moved to retrieve her backpack. Clearly, this wasn’t a man accustomed to fetching items for anyone, much less a stranger. He placed the pack at her feet, and while he sipped his wine, she fished the bottle out and unscrewed the plastic cap.

The crisp flavor of the water refreshed her, but the continued cloudiness in her mind made her wonder if maybe she was trapped in some sort of dream. Certainly that would make playing along with him easier. She was used to seductive dreams, wasn’t she? She’d had little else in her love life lately. Of course, she couldn’t deny he was solid, at least in her imagination. She’d felt his pulse and the heat of his skin all at the same time—and muscles like his didn’t fill out pants the way his did unless there was something rock hard underneath.

But the bump on the back of her head was the size of a Ping-Pong ball. She knew as well as anyone that head trauma could cause all manner of problems.

Including powerful hallucinations.

“Tell me why you’re here,” she said.

“My best guess?” he asked casually, as if sitting on a chaise lounge with a woman from his future and sipping wine was something he did on a daily basis. “I was trapped by a sorcerer’s curse, and somehow you freed me. What do you know about this castle?”

“That I own it,” she replied.

His eyes widened. “Truthfully?”

“I never lie about real estate.”

He sat forward, clearly intrigued. “Do you know its history?”

While toying with the cap on her bottled water, she decided there was no harm in telling him the truth. Whether he was a figment of her imagination or a real manifestation of a man who’d been trapped by a curse, the facts were the facts. “About sixty years ago, a mysterious and as yet unnamed entrepreneur bought the castle in Europe and had it moved, piece by piece, to this island off the Florida coast.”

“Florida? Isn’t Florida controlled by the Spanish?”

Luckily, researching the castle’s origins had allowed her to brush up on her history. “Not for about one hundred and fifty years, give or take.”

He swirled the wine in the goblet, then took a hearty swig. “This world is very different.”

“That’s an understatement,” she said, taking a long drink of water. “According to my sources, this man rebuilt this castle in as much secrecy as he could manage, hung your portrait and, apparently, disappeared. I don’t suppose he showed up in the painting with you?”

“I would have noticed,” he said ruefully. “I have a vague memory of a journey. Of darkness. Of being enclosed. But nothing I can hold on to.”

She frowned. When Jacob had first brought her the deed, she’d never envisioned that the land would bring with it such a perplexing puzzle. And in this case, she wasn’t even sure which pieces—if any—were entirely real.

“At some point,” she continued, “this man transferred the ownership of the island to my father, and I inherited the land and everything on it from him. Property I intend to use as soon as I can make it habitable.”

Damon looked scandalized, and Alexa couldn’t help grinning. She supposed if he really was from the seventeen hundreds, he wasn’t accustomed to dealing with a woman like her—one who owned property as opposed to one who
was
property. Well, he’d have to catch up to the twenty-first century sometime or another.

“So, do you want to be my resident ghost?”

It was so easy to fall back on her original plan, no matter how distant the scheme seemed now. But she couldn’t allow herself to fully accept that Damon Forsyth was now a real force in her life, or at least her castle. That would change everything.
He
would change everything.

“I told you previously, madam,” he said with a haughty sniff, “I am not a ghost.”

“Phantom, then,” she decided, with equal snobbery. “Here, but not here. Can you make yourself transparent?”

Alexa really should be careful what she wished for. In a split second, Damon disappeared. She dropped her water and threw herself off the chaise lounge, scooting away from where he’d vanished even as her lungs struggled for breath.

Slowly, like a ray of sunshine gleaming through a window, he rematerialized. He was staring at his hands, as if he were as surprised as she was.

Once he was completely solid again, he crossed his arms on his chest. “The answer to your question, my dear lady, is yes.”

Alexa squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again, all pretense gone. Damon still stood above her, his expression handsomely smug.

“Maybe this is a dream,” she muttered.

“Perhaps. There is also the distinct possibility that instead of you freeing me from the portrait, I sucked you in with me.”

“You’re just trying to scare me.”

His brow furrowed as he considered the possibility. “Frightening women for sport is not the measure of a true man.”

“What is?” she asked, annoyed at the unwelcome fear coursing through her.

His smile was pure sin.

She scowled to mask the sudden flare in her blood. “I can’t be in the portrait. Can I?”

“Can’t say for certain. I appear to be free of the portrait,” he said, nodding toward the painting of the room that no longer had a sexy, sardonic man in the center, “yet I cannot leave this castle.”

“How do you know?”

“While you were unconscious, I attempted an escape. I was not successful.”

“Can I leave?”

“I’ve no idea,” he admitted, then leveled his ocean gray stare at her. “Why don’t you try?”

A sudden wave of dizziness struck her. She braced her hands on either side of her, willing the sensation away. She’d experienced enough vertigo for a lifetime after the wreck. She didn’t need a reminder of the pain and discomfort now.

She was healthy. She was strong. She was a survivor.

She repeated the mantra silently in her head until the wooziness subsided. After blinking away the last of the fog, she shot a glance down the stairs and to the door, then back at Damon.

His hopeful expression vanished nearly as quickly as he had.

But not quickly enough.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

She arched a brow. “Not used to being contradicted?”

His glower was powerful. “Of course not, but I assumed you’d want to ensure that freedom was still yours to take.”

She smiled. “You let me worry about my freedom. You’ll soon discover that I’m very good at taking care of myself and getting precisely what I want, when I want it.”

He wanted her to try the door. Desperately. He was clever and commanding, this man, and he wasn’t as adept at hiding his emotions as she was at reading them. For all she knew, the wave of vertigo she’d just experienced was from him trying to exert his will on her with the same magic he’d used to disappear and to conjure the chaise lounge and the wine. But she’d fought him successfully. If she played her cards right, the game could be hers.

Bottom line, she wanted this man.

To be her personal phantom. This idea, so entrenched in her psyche for oh so long, blossomed into something tangible for the first time in her life. She’d turned quite a few of her more pragmatic fantasies into reality using her wealth and influence, but she’d never brought a fantasy to life with just her touch.

“What could possibly be more pressing than finding out if you are free of this curse or trapped by it?” he asked, incredulous.

“Finding out more about you.”

The atmosphere shifted. The power play ended and the blaze in his eyes kindled from a spark of frustration to a slow, steady sexual heat. He reseated himself on the chaise and held-out his hand to her.

“You say that with seduction in your voice, my lady.”

She accepted his hand. This time, when he drew her onto the chaise, he allowed no space between them. His thigh crushed against hers, igniting a wildfire of sensation through her.

She traced an invisible crazy eight on his knee. Crazy, as in completely insane, touching a man who, by all tenets of reason and logic, couldn’t possibly be real. “Wishful thinking, perhaps?”

He smiled with hooded eyes. “Simple observation. There’s no shame if you want me. In the most classical sense.”

She licked her lips, unwilling to deny his assertion. She did want him. She had wanted him—or, at least, a man like him—for all of her life. Gallant, powerful, intense. A master of magic.

And best of all, he wasn’t entirely real. By his description, he could not follow her out of this castle or disrupt the ordered life she’d built for herself on the mainland. He was a fantasy. A diversion. A sexy, sensual secret she’d discovered and, perhaps, only she could keep.

“I won’t deny that I find you incredibly attractive,” she responded.

“How can you? Even now, your body tightens for me.”

She swallowed a gasp. Even in her century, such talk pushed limits. And yet, as his gaze brushed over her breasts, her nipples responded instantly. Her thigh muscles clenched with anticipation.

Maybe he was simply like her. Honest. Insightful. Observant.

Hot for magical sex.

“Is this magic?”

He leaned closer so that his breath, wine scented just as she’d imagined, teased her cheek. “The most elemental magic of all.”

She tilted her chin to match his sensual stare. “You were a playboy in your former life, then?”

He ran his tongue over his lips, drawing her attention to the fullness of his mouth. “Circumstances of my youth dictated that my boyhood was rather brief and did not include much time for play,” he informed her, his words crisp and factual while his tone lazed with sensuality. “My pursuits of pleasure began when I was very much a man.”

“And you’ve been a man a very long time,” she said, her voice breathy with possibilities.

Their lips were mere centimeters apart.

“I’ve been a man trapped without a woman even longer,” he warned.

Their noses brushed. “Should I be afraid?”

“If you have to ask,” he said, sweeping the edge of his lips over hers, “the answer is decidedly no.”

Alexa couldn’t remember the last time she’d kissed a man, but the moment her mouth clashed with Damon’s, all thoughts of former lovers or the lack thereof flew out of her head. As she’d anticipated, he tasted of a fine claret—and so much more. Tobacco. Time. Experience. His tongue smoothed against hers with coaxing skill, but she didn’t need to be cajoled. She speared her hands into his hair, freeing the dark strands from the leather tie, and climbed onto her knees so she had to tilt his chin toward her to fully devour him.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her away. His eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“What manner of witch are you?”

She supposed she should be insulted, but instead she laughed. “Don’t try to convince me that all the women in your day were prim and proper maidens with no passion. I know things about history and I won’t believe you.”

He scowled slightly. “I would not attempt to perpetrate such a lie. Yet only moments ago, you doubted my good character.”

She balanced her hands on his shoulders, massaging the thick muscles with greedy hands, waylaying her need to rip the soft linen of his shirt away from his skin. “I still doubt your good character. All the better for what I want from you.”