Mr. Mysterious: A Mister Standalone (The Mister Series Book 4) (5 page)

“Yet.”

“Not
yet
, princess. I’m not going to know you
ever
. In fact, I know too much about you already. Don’t tell me any more details because I’m not interested.”

“You sure about that?” she says, looking over her shoulder at an incoming wave. “And don’t call me princess.” She frowns for a moment before turning it back into a smile. “My oldest sister claimed that nickname.”

“Aurora?” I laugh, trying to decide if I should take this wave just to get away from her. But party guy number one looks like he’s getting ready, and it’s cutting away from me, so I don’t.

“You remembered!” Sugar says. “
Yes
. See, we’re gonna get along so well, you and I. So, so well.”

“Look, Cinderella.” I have to shake my head at her name. I can’t even take this conversation seriously calling her that. “I’m a private kind of guy, as you
know
.” I stress that last word, just to make sure she understands I’m pissed off about this bullshit. “So you’re gonna go your way and I’m gonna go my way, and we’re both gonna forget any of this ever happened. I’m not interested.”

But just as the last of my words are coming out of my mouth, she starts furiously paddling, her attention on an incoming wave. The swell lifts me, carries me forward a little, and then I bob back down. But Cinderella is already up, weaving back and forth, riding it out.

She’s good. Better than I thought she’d be. I kinda figured she was just playing out here. Trying to get my attention, but no. The girl surfs.

And owns a sandwich shop. And a house. In Malibu.

I don’t know. Something about this is all kinds of wrong. All the little red flags are waving at me. All the little alarm bells are going off.

Hmmm.

She ditches the wave near the beach, and she’s getting ready to paddle back when the party-house guy who wants to make a move surfs right up next to her and falls into the water. When he comes up, they are both laughing. Talking. Smiling.

Oh, is that how she’s gonna play this? Get me jealous?

I don’t do jealous.

They paddle back together and she hangs out with all three party guys after that, completely ignoring me.

I catch a few waves, then head back to the house.

Games, man.

I can play with the best of them. But I just don’t do it anymore.

Chapter Five - Cindy

Paxton Vance was born Paxton Nathaniel Vance to Mariel Hawthorne and Charles Vance thirty-one years ago. His parents never married, but his mother did give him his father’s last name—against his father’s wishes.

After all the snooping I’ve done on him over the years, that one little tidbit says more about Paxton’s family life than anything else. More than the non-existent child support payments, more than the lack of summer vacations with the paternal side of the family, more than the occasional visits Charles Vance took back to Kentucky every few years.

Why did his father even bother, I wonder? It was clear from the beginning he was never interested in his unexpected progeny. Charles Vance has a huge family. Seven brothers and sisters, although four of them are only half-siblings. His own father was a known serial philanderer. So it’s almost fate that he had the same inclination.

But unlike Paxton’s father, his grandfather could afford the bastard children he spawned. A hit movie in the late Seventies secured his place in Hollywood history. He had several greater roles after that, until the early two thousands, when he was just too old to pull off that bad-boy leading man character anymore.

Since then he’s been quiet, out of the public eye, and from what I can gather, a full-fledged alcoholic. Just like his son, Charles.

Mariel Hawthorne, on the other hand, has never been a casual relationship kind of woman. Which is why it never made sense that she allowed known deadbeat playboy Charles to seduce her in her early twenties.

I got her school records—Mariel was an overachiever at the very best all-girls’ boarding school in New England—and every teacher made remarks on her private nature, standoffish attitude, and serious goal-setting.

Her
family comes from a long line of Kentucky thoroughbred breeders. They don’t train them, they just buy and breed them. And Mariel seemed determined to keep her father’s legacy as a producer of some of the most famous racehorses in American history alive.

Limitless Farms, under the management of Mariel, has produced eleven Breeders’ Cup winners and nine Kentucky Derby winners, just to name a few. Last year at the spring sale, she bought four mares and six yearling colts with purer bloodlines than the Queen of England. She spent eleven million dollars at that sale.

But she also sold ten pregnant brood mares and six fillies and she came out ahead more than ten million.

Her net worth places her among the very richest and powerful women in the world, if not history.

And ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of the population of people on this planet has no idea who she is. She is not a one-percenter. She is so much richer than any hipster label can describe.

And she got it all from horses.

I checked. That woman is as clean as Charles Vance is dirty. Limitless Farms prides itself on its one-hundred-percent transparency policy. Publishing her yearly earnings even though it is not a publicly traded firm.

I’m not sure what to make of that, honestly. Why would such a private woman publish her net worth so openly? Every sale and purchase is public. She goes to the spring and fall auctions at Keeneland as herself. She does not hire someone to appraise the horses and bid for her via internet or phone. She sits her ass in that pavilion and raises her numbered paddle like everyone else. And she meets with prospective buyers in person. I know, I got a meeting with her at the on-site stables at Belmont last year, feigning interest in a breeding contract.

She’s quick though. She took one look at me—I was using a false name of course—and deduced I was a nobody not worth her time. And although she was pleasant and smiled the entire time, she was very clear that her services were out of my budget.

But those were some of the most interesting five minutes of my life.

That is Paxton’s mother.

Someone he cares very deeply for. In fact, I don’t think it would be presumptuous of me to say that Mariel Hawthorne is the most influential person in my Paxton’s life.

He’s a mama’s boy.

God, that is so damn cute. I want to squeeze him, it’s so cute.

It also explains a lot about his behavior over the past ten years. His demeanor, as well.

Imagine being twenty-one-year-old Paxton Vance. Senior year at Brown University. Majoring in business and at the top of his class. And having to make that phone call home to explain that he is one of the infamous Mister Browns.

I don’t like imagining that conversation actually. I don’t think it involved tears, or anything so dramatic as that. I don’t think it was filled with screaming or accusations. Or even apologies.

I think it involved the words, “I will fix this. I will make it right.”

Fix it.

The words are in my thoughts before I even realize their implication.

That’s what he does now. For money. He fixes things. He hides the dirt, sweeps it under the rug, and makes everything go away.

But his own problem has never been fixed. Never cleaned up. And he hates the fact that he has put that smudge on his mother’s pristine family name.

When people hire me to find things, the very first thing I do is find a motive for the contract. Why do they need me? What are they after?

Most of the time I get hired to spy on a spouse. One party thinks the other is cheating. They want answers, they want confirmation, they want proof.

So when I decided to spy on Paxton, I needed to assign myself a motivation. Why do I need to know about him? Why does he intrigue me?

It was my brother, Oliver, who got me interested in Pax. They weren’t friends when they were accused. Not even close. Oli was a first-year, fresh out of pledge week, and had only been living in the house for two weeks when the accusation happened.

He didn’t tell
me
, of course. No one told me anything. I’m the baby of the family. Five years younger than Oliver and fifteen years younger than my oldest sister Aurora—Rory, as we call her.

But I was the only one still living at home when it all happened. Oliver came back to the farm, called my parents into the office, and closed the door. I had that office wired for years by that time. My father and his secret life have always intrigued me. And even though I learned absolutely nothing about my father and his past with that wire-tap, I did learn the truth about Oliver and some of what happened that night at Brown.

I watched the news relentlessly over the next several months. People showed up—people like Ford Aston, and his son, Five. Ford ducked out of this little problem at Five’s insistence, but then Five and Oliver went away, came back, went away again. I snooped into every public record I could find about each of the Misters, and when I came up with Paxton Vance’s biography, well… color me obsessed.

My older sister Ariel is a computer genius. She and Oliver got interested in computer coding watching Five Aston develop apps when he was a teenager. Five made a ton of them, and a ton of money, before he left home in the middle of ninth grade to attend Oxford.

Five is the real genius in my family. Ariel and Oliver are just his protégées. I got lucky because I’m the baby. Everyone ignores the baby. So I watched what Ariel and Oliver were doing and did my best to keep up until I talked Ariel into teaching me more when I was thirteen.

And even though I wish I could’ve wire-tapped the Aston residence to get the full story behind Five and his infamous father, Ford, I never needed a wire-tap to understand the full extent of what Five does with his spare time. Because I grew up watching it with my own eyes.

Hacking.

Oliver and Ariel got into some trouble when they were teens. Ariel is just a few years older than Oli, so they were fast and tight all growing up. They had a match-making business when Ariel was in high school and one of their teenage clients was threatening to expose the whole scheme.

Until Ariel called in Five.

Then it all went away.

He’s kind of a fixer too. And I have wondered more than once if Mr. Mysterious is working for Five.

But I don’t think so. There is no evidence of that. Five is a work-alone kind of guy, unless he needs Oliver’s help.

So back when the Misters were accused of rape ten years ago, Five asked Ariel and Oliver to hack into all the Mister records to see what they were dealing with, and I found the files on Ariel’s computer that Christmas when she left her laptop open while she was taking a shower.

I saw everything, but it was Mr. Mysterious who captured my full attention.

Mysterious didn’t even cover how to describe him back then. It wouldn’t come out that he was the son of Charles Vance for another few weeks. And by that time I knew everything Ariel did about him.

His story was the stuff movies are made of. Fairy tales and conspiracy theories.

But I was only thirteen. I was ill-equipped to do my own snooping. And that’s part of the reason I went down this path of private investigator.

I needed more information than Ariel had. I needed to know everything about this man.

And now I do.

Almost.

I’m so close. I know all about his family. His mother and his father. Their wins and losses. I know about his business. I know what he does, who he does it for. I know so much more than anyone else in this world. Maybe even more than his own mother.

But I don’t know all of it. That one crucial piece of information is missing.

What happened that night?

What was Paxton’s role in that accusation?

I need this. I need it like I need water and air. Like I need
him
.

Five was quick to shut them all up. So their stories were all secret from day one. But I knew some of Oliver’s story and even though I found no proof, there has to be a connection between Oliver and Mr. Mysterious beyond the charge. Some how, some way, their stories conjoin and that’s why they have been tight friends ever since.