Mr. Romantic: A Mister Standalone (The Mister Series Book 2) (35 page)

I pull the pants up and forget the shirt, just hop down the steps to the back of the house. By the time I get to the family room, Pax is coming through the massive double glass doors.

“Thanks for picking up, you asshole,” Pax says. “I thought you were dead or something. I should’ve figured you were getting your dick sucked.”

“Hey.” I point at him. “Ivy is here, so shut the fuck up. And I left my phone in my pants.” Which I fish out right now to prove my point. Pax has called fifteen times, no voicemail.

“Yeah, well, about Ivy,” Pax says. “This is some fucked-up shit and I’m sorry I have to be the one to break it to you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Everything, man. Your sister—”

“What? What’s Claudette have to do with anything?”

Pax ignores me, just walks over to the bar, reaches under the counter, pulls out a tumbler, then finds the most expensive bottle of Scotch on the top shelf and pours himself at least four fingers. He gulps a healthy dose and then says, “Ahh. I really fucking like working out of this house. You rich assholes have everything here.”

“What? You’ve never even been here before.” But as soon as the words come out of my mouth, I know I’m wrong.

“I do business out of here all the time, dumbass.”

“This is not your house, Mysterious. Where do you get off doing business here?”

“Hey,” Pax says with a shrug. “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine. That goes for all the other Mister Assholes who dragged me down with them ten years ago. Just think of it as my way of getting even.”

“I didn’t drag you into anything.”

“The hell you didn’t. I know that bitch blew you that night. I saw it. I see everything, Nolan,” he says, tapping his head with his glass. “So fuck off. Your family never uses this house anyway.”

“That’s not the fucking point, Pax. You don’t just use other people’s shit.”

“When your name is Paxton Vance you do. Now, do you want to hear the total fucking shitstorm I just dug up about your sister? Or do you want me to slap down a Benjamin to pay for the drink and swim back to the mainland?”

Somehow when Pax says it, swimming from Martha’s Vineyard to the mainland doesn’t sound ridiculous. I have no doubt in my mind that if I told him to leave, he’d jump off the fucking dock and disappear. Not die, mind you. Just disappear. I have a feeling the Atlantic Ocean couldn’t kill Paxton Vance even if it was trying.

“Just get on with it,” I say, waving my hand in a rolling motion.

“Well…” he starts, then gulps the rest of his drink and slams the glass down on the bar as he breathes out the burn. “Your sister is psycho. Your girlfriend is her target. And I hate to be the one to tell you this, even though I think you’re a total dick. But your dad is dying.”

I just stare at him. “What?”

“Your sister—”

“Fuck my sister, Pax! My father?”

“Cancer, dude.” Pax shrugs and it even comes off as genuine. “And I got a hold of his will—”

“How?”

“Would you just shut the fuck up? I’m not telling you
how
. Trade secrets, asshole.” He scowls at me and then continues. “Anyway. That will you thought you were cut out of?”

“Yeah?” My heart is racing.

“Not so, my soon-to-be billionaire friend. Your sister was the one cut out. Turns out your old man was quite the cheater before you were born. Claudette isn’t your sister. Well, she is, I guess. At least half. She was cut out several years ago. You were added back the day your father was diagnosed. He’s not doing well. They expect him to die any day.”

I just stand there, stunned. Pax grabs another glass and pours me a drink. I take it and gulp. “What the fuck?” I ask him, grimacing from the whiskey.

“Well, I’ll try to piece it together as best I can. But bear with me, I just got all this tonight.”

I am suddenly disgusted at the thought of Paxton digging through my family history.

“Listen, I know you don’t like me, but I’m straight with you, right? I’ve always been straight with you guys. So what I’m gonna say needs to be taken at face value and then we gotta get your girlfriend out of here so—”

He’s interrupted by the doorbell. “Who the fuck is that?” I ask.

Pax has a huge gun out and he’s pointing it in every direction at once, morphing into some Navy SEAL clearing a building on the spot. “Here,” he says, whipping another gun out of his jacket. He tosses it to me. I catch it, because it’s a fucking gun and no sane person throws one at you. “Keep it close. This shit is going down now.” And then he waves the gun at the hallway and says, “Answer the door.”

Chapter Forty-Two - Ivy

The mattress sinks down as Nolan gets back in bed. “What was that all about?” I ask sleepily.

He grabs my hands and is wrapping them in rope before I can even open my eyes. “What are you doing?” I smile, try to turn, and take a punch to the head.

My vision blurs and then everything goes black as a hood is placed over my head and a cord of rope ties it around my neck. “Nolan!” I scream. “What the fuck? Stop!
Stop!”

He doesn’t stop. He hits me again, and again. I am shocked beyond belief. And then the words I was so successful in keeping at bay tonight as we had our fantasy pop into my head.

He really
is
a rapist. And I’m the dumbest girl on earth.

I kick and land it somewhere, his chest or his back. He goes flying and I scramble in what I think is the opposite direction. I fall off the bed, hit my head, but keep going. I’m crawling across the floor when he grabs my ankle and pulls. I twist my body, kick him once, and land it squarely on what I think is his jaw.

He roars in anger and pain and this is when I realize… I’m not being attacked by Nolan.

A heavy body rests on mine. I gasp for breath as a hand cups my mouth on the other side of the hood. I breathe in the foul-smelling chemical and everything just disappears…

Chapter Forty-Three - Nolan

“It’s the cops.” I can see them the second the glass-front doors come into view as I turn a corner. Pax is approaching from off to the left, so he can’t see them, but I can see him.

“Shit,” Pax says. “OK, play it cool. We don’t know why they’re here, so let’s figure that out first. Just…”

“I know what to do.”

And I do. We’ve been here before, right? I know all the loopholes. I know exactly what to say. And what not to say.

I walk up to the door and pull it open. “Is there a problem?” I ask. There is most definitely a problem. Six patrol cars are in my driveway with lights flashing. More sheriff deputies are on my doorstep than I can count offhand.

“Sorry to disturb you this late, Mr. Delaney. But we’re looking for Ivy Rockwell. Is she here with you?”

“How did you get through my gate?”

“Um…” The deputy looks nervous, but another officer is there to save him.

“The gate was open, sir.”

“The gate was not open. I didn’t come here tonight using a road, so the gate was not open.”

“Is Ivy Rockwell here, Mr. Delaney?” the first guy repeats. “We got an anonymous tip to check on her house tonight and found her door wide open. We went inside and found this letter signed by you.” The deputy holds up the letter I wrote Ivy and placed in the box I had her dress delivered in.

“Close the door, Nolan,” Pax says from off to my left. He’s got his gun ready, pointed up towards the ceiling, and he’s hidden from view by the hallway. My gun is in my hand, hidden behind my back. They will shoot me if they see it. I know this for a fact. They will fucking shoot me if they see it. “Close. The. Door.”

I tap the door and it swings closed with a smart
click
.

“You don’t want to do this, Delaney,” the deputy says through the glass. “You don’t want us to come back with a warrant.”

He’s wrong. I do want to do this. And if they have to leave and come back with a warrant I can get a hold of the situation. Because everything happening right now is a little bit too familiar.

“Step away,” Pax says. “Get out of their line of sight.”

I turn the lock on the door first. Not that it will stop them. But if they break the glass, there will be a fantastic alarm and security companies will be notified. They are all yelling at me from outside now, but I don’t care. I back away.

“What the fuck?” I ask Pax once I’m in the hallway with him. “Why the fuck are they here?”

“What are they going to find, Nolan? What kind of shit went down tonight?”

He’s not asking me if I killed her or anything. He’s asking what kind of kink I was up to. “Her shoes are in the pool. Her clothes are outside, panties are ripped down the middle, out there as well. There’s lube on the stairs, which we can’t retrieve without the cops seeing, since it’s a straight-line view. There’s rope in one of the bedrooms. She’s… got some marks on her wrists. Maybe her face, but I think those are gone by now. I didn’t come inside her.”

“I tell you what, Romantic. You sure as fuck don’t make life easy.”

“It was planned, Pax.”

“I figured that out, asshole. I’m not accusing you. But we should wake her up and get her to come down and talk to them. Outside,” he stresses. “They cannot come in the house without a warrant. Otherwise we’re gonna be on the news tomorrow.”

“But who knew she was here?”

“Your sister?”

“No,” I say, as we walk to the other end of the house so we can take the back stairs instead of the main ones in the foyer. “I haven’t told her shit.”

“She has people following you, Nolan. I’ve been on your case for one day and I know this.”

I say nothing. Fucking Claudette has gone off the deep end.

The path back to the bedroom Ivy and I were sleeping in is complicated. This whole fucking house is complicated. More than twenty thousand square feet and filled with bedrooms, storerooms, garages, offices, and even two separate guest houses outside. By the time we reach the right hallway, I’m relieved. “Ivy?” I say, walking into the bedroom. “Ivy?” I call again, looking in the bathroom. “Where the fuck are you—”

And that’s when I see what’s on the bed.

Pax crossed the room and snatches it up just as I’m about to.

“What the fuck?” I ask him. “How the hell did that get in here?”

But Pax is stunned silent. And I can’t blame him. I know this little piece of history he’s holding. I know because the cops showed it to me once when I was being questioned.

I just didn’t know it was
his
. His little part in the whole Mister Browns rape case.

“What the fuck is going on?” Pax asks. “Is your little girlfriend part of this?”

“No, fuck that. She’s here—” But my words trail off as I step around the other side of the bed and see blood on the floor.

“
Someone
is here,” Pax says. “Someone who knows very intimate things about what we did that night.”

“They took Ivy,” I say.

“Nolan, they can’t get off this island. They can’t even get over to the main part of the island. There’s cops out front. No one is getting past them. I didn’t see a boat at the dock when I flew in. So she’s still here. In this house somewhere. Where would she be?”