Phantom Series Boxed Set Read Online Free PDF

enough.”
    “I thought the island was inaccessible,” Cat reminded her.
    “During our flyover, we found a small lagoon. All I need is a boat, and I’m on my way.”
    “Take someone with you,” Cat warned.
    Alexa glanced out the car window and spotted Jacob moving toward the limo. “Jacob’s with me.”
    “Take someone else.”
    Alexa rolled her eyes. Four years and these two still couldn’t shut off the antagonism. “Right now, he’s all I’ve got. Besides, I can take care of myself. And oddly enough, I’m not afraid.”
    “That’s what scares me most, mija . That’s what scares me most.”
    ***
    Cat disconnected the call, sat back in the plush seat of Alexa’s corporate jet and considered canceling her research trip to Texas. But by the time she landed in Florida again, Alexa would have already stormed willingly into a potentially dangerous situation. Though Cat didn’t trust Jacob as far as she could throw him, she had to admit that to date, he’d been very protective of his stepsister, as if his narcissistic brain somehow registered that Alexa was the only family he had left.
    And Alexa wasn’t exaggerating when she said she could take care of herself. Cat had sparred with her enough times at the dojang to know her friend could fight. Maybe not with a crazed serial killer, but Cat had learned long ago that despite her intrinsic abilities to catch visions of the future, she couldn’t alter the destiny of her friends, her family.
    Or, most especially, herself.
    Once fate cast its lot, nothing and no one could change the outcome, even when the outcome meant tragedy.

Three
    “There’s no one here, ma’am.”
    Alexa glanced over her shoulder, her lips pursed and her jaw tight, as the Coast Guard seaman shifted from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable with breaking the news. The discovery wasn’t unexpected. The minute she’d squeezed through a crack in the wall, broken through the sixty-year-old padlock on the front door and witnessed six decades’ worth of dust and sand on the cracked stone floors of the castle, Alexa had known no one had been inside.
    No one corporeal, at least.
    At Jacob’s insistence, she’d allowed the crew of the closest Coast Guard UTB to escort the boat they’d chartered to the island and search for possible trespassers. Now that they’d completed their mission, she wanted them gone. She had exploring of her own to do, starting with the lone furnishing—a painting hanging alone on the landing above the grand staircase.
    A painting that had captured her interest as if the man in the portrait had reached out from the canvas and was even now curling his fingers in a silent, rhythmic beckoning.
    She gave the seaman a curt nod and returned her gaze to the portrait. Despite the dust and the cobwebs, the man in the oil on canvas was nothing short of magnificent. Piercing eyes the color of a storm-tossed ocean—a swirling mix of green and gray—stared straight into her. His hair, long, deep chocolate brown, seemed to have caught an unexplainable wind in a drawing room decorated with candle and torchlight. As if wet, his stark white shirt and scarlet waistcoat molded to his skin. A single droplet of water slid down his square jaw, threatening to splash down at any moment.
    The artist’s realism stunned her. The plush face of the cat on his lap. The velvety folds of the cloak tossed carelessly across the back of an ornate chair. Even the fired tips of the candles in the sconces blurred as if photographed rather than painted. The fact that the portrait was the only furnishing in the castle further piqued her interest. Had the mysterious builder in the forties reconstructed the abandoned German castle simply to house a single piece of artwork that no one would see?
    “Time to go, Alexa,” Jacob announced after the rest of the Coast Guard contingent had congregated in the foyer.
    “No,” she said.
    “What?”
    He marched up the stairs. She could hear his loafers