The Missing

again. “That must have been awful for the two of you.”

    “Harder on Jillian than me,” he murmured. “I hate her growing up without her mother.”

    Deep inside, she felt something wrench, almost like some rope was tied around her gut, and it had been jerked, pulling on her until she had no choice but to follow. “We need to head west now,” she said, opening her eyes. They were on a long, empty stretch of the I-65, heading north. There were no major inter-states for a good while, but it didn’t matter. They needed to go west, and they needed to do it now. Up ahead, she caught sight of an exit ramp.

    Highway 940 wasn’t much more than a two-lane highway that would lead them to a town not really big enough to be called such. But that was where they needed to go. She pointed ahead. “Get off there.”

    “What are we looking for?”

    She shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

    A little bit of impatience edged into his voice as he asked, “Then how do you know we need to get off here?”

    Taige bit back the pithy response that came instinctively and kept her voice calm as she said, “I know what I’m doing, Cullen. I’ve been doing it a long time, and I’m good at it. That’s why you came looking for me, right?”

    Cullen blew out a sigh. He cut across the interstate, hitting the exit ramp and not slowing down until the very last second. It was midafternoon, but there wasn’t a car in sight on the highway as he turned left, punching the gas until the speedometer was edging up over seventy. He took the turns at a speed that would have made Taige nervous if she hadn’t been feeling the same uneasiness.

    “Can you—” His voice broke off, and he shoved a hand through his hair. Taige glanced at him and saw that his hair was standing completely up on end.

    Cocking a brow, she asked, “Can I what?”

    “Has he hurt her?”

    Sympathy and understanding flooded her. If Jillian had been hurt, Taige didn’t know what she’d say to him just then—he was already so tense. That calm mask he wore was just that, a mask. She’d dealt with distraught parents before, but Cullen—he was different. No matter how this ended, it was going to affect Taige in ways that no other case, no matter how heartbreaking, had done.

    Part of her wanted to run and hide from that fact. This man had caused her enough heartbreak. It might seem infantile to some, still mooning over a man who had dumped her twelve years ago, but Cullen was the only man who had ever been able to get close to her. She hadn’t been interested in having that again, but the few times she decided maybe it was time to get back to life, even time to start having a life, the man she thought she might want turned out to be like glass to her, so transparent she either had to keep her mental shields in place or her thoughts were swamped with memories and emotions that weren’t her own.

    None of those guys had been shallow. There had only been a few, and they’d all been pretty hot. All of them smart and decent guys. But one touch was all it had taken to shatter any hope of having a relationship. It just didn’t work trying to get with a man when she touched him and realized he was thinking about what kind of panties she wore.

    It made it that much harder to look at Cullen now because it drove home the reminder of just how fricking perfect he’d been for her—and how little he’d loved her.

    Even though she couldn’t read him, she could read his tension, and it was so thick and heavy in the car, it was choking her. Feeling his gaze on her, she closed her eyes and reached out.

    Taige found her quicker this time, and adrenaline started to pound as she realized how close they were. Through the gray, she saw Jillian, and the girl was as Taige had seen her last time, three hours earlier. Dirty, pale, and still. Taige tried briefly to make a connection, but Jillian was sleeping, lost in a deep, deep sleep. Still, the brief surface connection she made was enough to let Taige know that Jillian hadn’t been hurt.

    They would be in time—this time. Cautious, she expanded her search, looking for the man who had grabbed Jillian. The cabin was small, a couch that opened up into a bed, a kitchen with a minuscule, meticulously cleaned sink. Jillian lay behind the only door in the cabin, besides the main door at the front. That room disturbed Taige, way down deep.

    It was a bathroom, but it wasn’t the kind of bathroom Taige would have expected to