Page 126 of Waiting For A Girl Like You
Taylor was one of them. Zanmi. And she was as good as dead now. Ben would see to it. Her family. Her friends. No one connected to her would ever know peace. Once Jamison was found, Rowan wouldn’t be surprised if Ben himself didn’t murder the woman with his bare hands.
Assuming he didn’t take out a federal agent or two first.
“A visual on the van?” Ben snarled. “Then get my daughter the fuck out of it.”
Klausen glanced around at the other agents. “It’s not that simple.”
“Why the hell is it not that simple?”
Guns.
Bombs.
A hostage situation.
Klausen ran through the possibilities. Ben had already been forced both physically by agents and verbally by Simone to stay put at the hospital, but hearing how a rescue could go down had him heading for the door again.
This time, it was Bernie who blocked him from leaving. “Wait for Will. Let him go with you.”
No one would be able to keep Ben from going after his daughter. The fact that Simone had persuaded him to wait was a miracle, but with each passing minute, Ben’s need to find her ripped away at his rational thought. He wasn’t nearly as calm and collected as Liam.
“Rowan,” Liam shouted his name through the phone. “Did you fucking tell them about the airstrip?”
So maybe Liam wasn’t exactly calm. When he saw Jamison limp in Bruce’s arms, he lost his shit. Finding the first set of stairs, they stormed down to the ground floor and out into the parking lot just as the van carrying Jamison sped away.
Liam had already pulled his gun out to commandeer the first passing car, scaring the shit out of the woman who was now in the hall screaming at anyone she thought might have the authority to get her vehicle back.
“I told Klausen.”
While tracking Liam as he chased after Jamison, an abandoned landing strip on the Florida-Alabama line caught Rowan’s attention. Liam had been close to it when he’d lost visual on the van, and, for whatever reason, something told Rowan to guide Liam to the landing strip. The place had been empty, but the fresh tire tracks on the single dirt road leading to it hadn’t sat right with either of them.
“Eureka.”
Rowan frowned. “What?”
“Bruce said Eureka.” Liam paused for a handful of seconds. “In the cabin. Right before he winged me, he said Eureka.”
Turning around, Rowan faced the wall to focus, leaving the room's chaos at his back. “I’m not following.”
There was a sigh and a muttered curse from Liam. “I promised Killian I wouldn’t drag you deeper into this, so I didn’t tell anyone but my dad.”
“Still not following.”
“When Sinclair called, you tracked him to northern Arkansas.”
Rowan had been so close to finding the fucker, probably closer than he’d ever been, and was again cursing himself for not staying behind at the house to finish the job. “Okay?”
Liam let out a distorted laugh. “There’s a haunted hotel in northern Arkansas. Jamison’s wanted to go for years, but I always said that if she wanted to stay somewhere haunted, she should just pitch a tent in Haven’s woods.”
Oh, fuck. Liam was freaking out. Even when things were at their worst, Liam Cohen held his shit together. When Zanmi first tried to kidnap Jamison, and they thought she might be in some way connected to Sinclair, he kept calm. When those women charged into the house, he never allowed his emotions to get the better of him.
But now he was choking on them. Panic and strain clung to his words, and were the roles reversed, Rowan didn’t think he would be doing much better.
“The hotel is in a town called Eureka Springs. It’s crazy, but it makes fucking sense, doesn’t it?” Liam cleared his throat, trying to keep his voice steady. “Sinclair warned us about Evie, and if it really is CeCe that connects him to this, I think… I think Bruce was giving us a clue.”
It was a stretch. A massive Grand Canyon of a stretch. “Are you sure you’re thinking clearly? That theory is a gamble. If you’re not going after that van and heading north to follow a hunch, you could be putting Jamison at risk.”
“Anderson and Klausen already have a dozen agents on that van, and my dad will handle that.” Liam cursed as horns blared in the background. “I was distracted, Rowan. Madison distracted me when I entered Emmett’s shack, and Bruce could have easily dropped me, but he didn’t. He said Eureka and grazed my arm.”
