What he said made a lot of sense. Besides, some time away from Axel and all of his trappings would allow her the space to get her head together and figure out her next step. He wouldn’t be thrilled with her departure, especially since this wasn’t the first time today she’d run out on him. But she needed some solitude to process.
“All right.”
As Mystery allowed Heath to lead her to the back door, a voice inside her kept shouting that she was making a big mistake. Before she could question her decision again, the back door slammed shut behind her.
Mystery hesitated, fighting every instinct to pound on it until someone let her in, until she could see Axel again so they could work their differences out.
“Look forward, not back,” Heath encouraged, tugging her along.
No choice now . . . The door through which they’d just exited was locked.
Heath led her across the lot, then hustled her into the town car and pulled away. They sped into the inky night, and Mystery prayed that Axel would come for her. Otherwise, she worried that she’d not only be fending off bad guys but fighting a broken heart.
Chapter Thirteen
AXEL fidgeted in the seat of his rented sedan parked on a rise of the dirt road and behind the tree line, out of sight from Mystery’s aunt’s farm. For the hundredth time since Mystery had taken off—again—he wondered what the fuck had happened. One minute he’d been sharing mind-blowing sex and turtle cheesecake with the woman he felt himself falling hard and fast for. The next minute, he’d been preparing Sweet Pea to meet Stone before suddenly being plunged into darkness. Once he and Zeb discovered that someone had tampered with the electrical panel and the two of them had restored the lighting, Axel had gone on a frantic search for Mystery.
He’d known in less than sixty seconds that she was gone. Since her personal items and suitcase were absent, too, he didn’t think anyone had taken her from the club against her will. But Heath was missing, too. Axel had no doubt the Brit had planned their escape. The question was, had he dragged Mystery out or had she left with the other man of her own free will?
Axel felt as if someone had gutted his insides with a chainsaw. What if he never saw her again? What if he’d failed to protect her from a man she’d mistakenly trusted? Or, Axel wondered, what if she’d scratched her itch for him and simply moved on?
Apprehension brewed in his belly.
The minute he’d realized that Heath, Mystery, and her luggage had all escaped out the back door, he’d hopped on his bike and sped like a wild man down the streets, onto I-35. Mystery wanted to visit her aunt, and Axel suspected the pair would head to Marion, Kansas, about an hour west of Emporia, where the woman lived. But the duo’s head start had been too big, and Axel hadn’t been able to track them down.
Thanks to Javier and Xander Santiago’s plane, he’d instead jetted north and arranged a car so he could reach the middle-of-nowhere farm quickly. That left him plenty of time to worry that his hunch about Mystery’s destination wasn’t right and to call Joaquin to have him gather some essential facts about her aunt Gail—and her bodyguard, Heath.
The aunt’s story checked out. Gail Leedy was a spinster, born and raised in Marion. She’d worked as a nurse for a local doctor for the past twenty years. After a failed attempt at Hollywood fame with her sister, she’d returned to Kansas and taken up residence in the farmhouse that had once belonged to her parents, though she’d sold off the land more than a decade ago. Deeply involved in her church, she sang in the choir and organized the bake sale for their annual Sunday school fund-raiser. She sounded like a lovely lady, and Axel would have simply walked up to the woman’s door and introduced himself, then waited for her niece. But Mystery’s aunt hadn’t been home when he’d arrived. At that point, he’d tracked down Marshall Mullins and explained that his darling daughter had run off. The famous director had blown a gasket, then launched into a tirade about Mystery’s safety. They’d both tried to call her and come up empty, so Mullins had promised to ring Aunt Gail and let her know that she should make up another guest room.
Axel had been satisfied on that score but he still wanted dirt about Heath Powell, like, yesterday. Not knowing exactly who had Mystery at his mercy made Axel itchy.
Right on cue, his phone buzzed in the console of his rented sedan. Joaquin called, according to the display.
“What you got for me, man?” Axel asked, skipping the typical greeting as he continued to scan the dirt road for any sign of headlights in the dark.
“A lot, and none of it very good.”
“Fuck.” Why didn’t that surprise him? Axel sighed. “Lay it on me.”
“I’ll start with your buddy, Heath Powell. Naturally, most of the good information about him is classified. MI5 won’t confirm his employment, but I called Sean Mackenzie”—Joaquin spoke of the former FBI agent who had recently married Callie—“and Hunter Edgington. The intelligence community can be small. Lots of people know lots of others. It didn’t take long for them to tap into their individual sources and come back with similar stories.”
“After I hear this, am I going to want to kill him?”
“You might. But you might also want to give him a hardy slap on the back. Tough call.”
Axel had a hard time picturing that. At the moment, the murder scenario sounded far more plausible. “What did you find?”
“Heath Powell and a team he’d been assigned to warned of Islamic extremists planning something in the Underground system before the July 2005 attacks. Their theory was dismissed. After the incident materialized, the agency backtracked and offered him a promotion. He stayed a few more years, thwarted a few more terrorist plots, then someone shot his wife in broad daylight in a London market. The murder had the earmarks of a public retaliation for putting a douchebag—they’ve never proven exactly who—behind bars. After that Powell resigned, and a few key criminals wound up gruesomely dead over the next few months. No one pursued their deaths too hard, but whoever took them out was a real pro, so you do the math. Powell then took a few odd bodyguarding jobs, sometimes for the sort of lowlifes and thugs he’d once hunted down. Then Marshall Mullins jetted to London with his young, still-traumatized daughter and hired Powell almost immediately. By all accounts, the guy has been Mystery’s devoted shadow since.”
Axel gripped the phone, his thoughts racing. Yeah, he didn’t like what he heard. But he had to compartmentalize his worry and pray that son of a bitch was too devoted to Mystery to kill her. He understood why she trusted her bodyguard, but Axel would bet she had no idea the Brit had gotten in bed with the enemy for a paycheck and more than likely had committed cold-blooded murder.
“Thanks for the info,” Axel grumbled.
“Don’t thank me yet. Now we come to the worse news. I did some digging about Julia Mullins’s killing and talked to the detective originally assigned to her case. He’s retired now. Once we established that I wasn’t a pesky reporter looking for a scoop or a college student hoping to write a paper that would blow this whole Hollywood drama open again, he admitted that the sheriff’s department hid a few things from the media.”
That happened more often than not, so Axel wasn’t surprised. “And he was willing to tell you about it?”
“Not at first. But we shot the shit over the phone for a while. I had to stretch the truth a little and say that I was helping to protect Mystery while she’s on U.S. soil.”