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The blood drained right out of my head as all logical thought disappeared. All I saw was red.

“It doesn’t matter how we missed her. Where is Ms. Quill now?”

“She’s at the Howard place with the whole damn book club. They’re all searching for you.”

“I don’t care. They’ll never find us out here.”

I had to laugh at that.

“Well, be that as it may,” my father continued, “there’s no getting her away from that group. You’ll have to come back another time. After all this has died down.”

“I’m not leaving without her,” the man growled. There was no doubt in my mind the second man was Cristobal. “You will get her out of there.”

The hell he would.

Travis put a hand on my shoulder, holding me where I was.

“And how do you plan on me doing that?” my father spat back.

“If you want your money, you’ll figure it out. Call in an emergency. Maybe that son of yours is hurt? Won’t she come running to his side?”

My father grumbled.

“Light the house on fire for all I care. Just get Ms. Quill out of that house. We’ll take care of the rest. Your money will be waiting once we have her in hand.” He ended the call with a sigh. “Pack up. We’ll scoop Ms. Quill up and leave town immediately.”

“Works for me. It doesn’t really matter where we do this as long as we have them both.”

I stopped my recording and stuffed my phone back in my vest pocket. “We’re not letting them leave.”

“Agreed.”

I was more thankful than ever for having a shorthand with my best friend. We worked out our plan in a few moments and without making a sound. The sheriff, understandably, didn’t want us getting involved, but the circumstances had changed. Besides, most of his crew was made up of locals who knew how to navigate the landscape reasonably well. They couldn’t be too far out.

We waited until they had everything packed. It was when they were the most loaded down and the least free with their movements. The moment they stepped into the open we took them from behind. The surprise was all we needed on top of our size and skills, of which these morons had none.

But they did have guns and were stupid enough to have them cocked and loaded. One went off as they fell to the ground.

“Y’all are a real special kind of stupid, aren’t you?” Travis huffed as he wrenched hands behind backs and zip-tied them on the ground.

The men howled and spit and acted like feral animals until they wore themselves out. Then one of them calmed way the fuck down and stared at me.

“You must be Cristobal,” I guessed.

“And you’re the asshole who took Ms. Quill from me.”

“I didn’t take anything from you. I don’t even know you.”

He babbled about Marley and books and the way she tricked him back in Tampa and how he discovered she was here. I didn’t respond to a single bit of it until he smiled. “Your father has been so helpful.”

I didn’t hit Cristobal. But Travis did. One clean punch to the jaw that had Cristobal moaning in the dirt. He spit out blood and grinned even wider. “Your father was the one who told me she was here. He responded to my request for information. Brought me here. Has been feeding me information for days.”

I wanted to vomit. Of all the things my father had done, nothing had ever hurt like this. It cut deeper than any punch or carefully placed insult. He could come at me over and over again. I’d deal with it.

But Marley?

That was the end of the line.

“Is this where you hope dropping information like that makes me go wild and you escape? I’m sorry to inform you that you picked the wrong guy for that.”