Page 65 of Protected Hearts

She was so screwed. The man she loved wouldneverfind her.

* * * * *

The phone buzzed on the nightstand. Before Oaks’s eyes were even open, or his brain fully engaged, he snaked out a hand to grab it. He brought the device to his face and read the text message.

From Shiloh.

She wasn’t in bed?

He whipped upright like a new recruit at bootcamp. A glance at the empty space on the mattress injected him with adrenaline.

“Shiloh?” He jumped out of bed and in three strides reached the bathroom. She wasn’t there either.

“What the hell?” His voice elevated to a near roar.

Insides shaking with a degree of panic he’d never experienced before, he rushed to throw on his clothes. With his fly still open, he stormed out of the room and through the house.

“Shiloh! Shiloh! Goddammit, where is she?” His voice thundered off the walls as he stomped to Carson’s office.

His brother wasn’t there, but the police scanner they kept on at all times crackled.

He jerked his head toward the equipment. A police call from the local diner, from a waitress who’d witnessed a possible kidnapping.

All the oxygen exploded from his lungs. In two steps, he reached the equipment and stared down at it as if it could give him the answer he needed.

The report transmitted more information, each word more ominous than the last.

A female, five feet nine or ten inches tall, with blonde hair and blue eyes, wearing all black. She was forced out the back door of the diner by another female.

At gunpoint.

On the way out, she mouthed the wordshelp me.

“Fuck!” He took off through the house, whipping open doors in search of Carson or Colt or hell, even Willow. Anyone who could help him get Shiloh back.

“Carson!”

The door of the master bedroom suite that Carson and Layne shared when they were staying here on the Black Heart and not at her family’s neighboring ranch whipped open, and his brother appeared in the opening, wearing only jeans. His brows formed a V. “What’s going on?”

Adrenaline hit a new high in Oaks’s system. “Shiloh’s gone. I just heard a police report over the scanner.Fuck, Carson! He’s got her. They kidnapped her.”

His brother’s eyes flew open wider. “Kidnapped her from theranch?”

“No. Read this.” He thrust the phone at his brother, who skimmed Shiloh’s text.

Their gazes met. “She left to get takeout? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Oaks gave his head a hard shake. “That’s because it’s bullshit. I think she went to meet William. She said something last night…”

“What? What did she say, Oaks?”

“I told her that I’ll do anything to save her. And she said she’d do anything to save me too.” Until now, his conscious mind hadn’t made the connection, but the minute the words burst out of his mouth, he knew them to be true.

An icy-cold dread ran down his spine. “She knows something. She found out something and didn’t tell me.”

“Just a minute.” Carson ducked into his room and came out with a shirt balled up in his fist. “Colt. He’s always on fire watch. He must have seen something.”

Oaks pushed past Carson and took off for the front door. As soon as he hit the front porch, he noticed one of the trucks was gone.

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