Made For Loving You (Rescue My Heart Book 3) by Kait Nolan (i can read book club txt) 📕

way to hide his own involvement than to control the flow of information to authorities? “Thank you for your help.”

“If there’s anything else I can do, don’t hesitate to let me know.”

Hanging up, Ty relayed the conversation to Ivy.

“So, he meets her at the citizens police academy, falls for her charm, develops an attachment, and gets shot down. The next month she’s mugged, and who does she turn to? Fisher. But she still doesn’t take the hint. Doesn’t take it past the professional into the personal he wants. Then the packages start. Nothing major. Just enough to creep her out. Again, she turns to her buddy. She’s getting more and more agitated and worried as things progress. But then you come into the picture, and she turns to you instead of him. That’s when we see the big jump and escalation. Because she’s going off his script. Everything that he’s done since then has been to get her away from you.”

Ty’s hands curled to fists. “Yeah, well, it worked.”

Ivy waved that off, frowning as she continued to work the problem in her head. “But why take her now? If he wants to be the good guy, the one she turns to, how does this support that goal?”

“Why does that matter? He took her. End of story.”

“Because it tells us something about how much direct danger she’s in. Whether this is somehow a continuation of some elaborate hoax or if he’s fallen into the territory of ‘If I can’t have her, no one can.’ For the record, all the evidence points to the former.”

“It’s all a good theory, but we need evidence. Leads. Where the hell did he take her? The BOLO on his vehicle hasn’t turned up anything. We don’t know if he’s on his way back to Nashville or if he’s gone to ground here.”

“Metro PD is sending someone to his house,” Xander reported.

“We need copies of his financials and phone records,” Leanne added. “I’m working on getting a warrant for that.”

“So far, the property search isn’t turning up much. Other than his house in Nashville, nothing’s coming up,” Laurel reported. “If he’s got somewhere specific to take her, it’s either not his or the deed is in someone else’s name. You said he was divorced. Maybe there’s something under the ex-wife.”

Ty paced a restless circuit around the room. “This is all taking too much time.” He’d had her for nearly four hours. That was long enough to get back to Nashville or even leave the state entirely.

“It’s what we’ve got,” Xander said easily. “Everybody in town is keeping a lookout for Paisley and Duke. The phone tree and the town’s social media were updated. We’re doing the best we can.”

Before he could roar that it wasn’t good enough, Paisley’s cell phone began to ring. The number flashing on the screen wasn’t in her contacts and had a local prefix.

Ty snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Yes, uh, are you missin’ a dog?”

His hands tightened on the phone. “Yes. Who is this?”

“Mel Jackson. This friendly fella came running out of the woods by my house. Ran right on up to me. I saw he had a collar and corralled him so he couldn’t run off again.”

“Can you describe the dog?”

“Looks like some kind of shepherd lab mix. Mostly kind of tan with some white on his chest, black on his tail. This number was on his collar.”

An iota of relief trickled through. “That’s Duke. Is he injured?”

“Seems fine to me. Pretty agitated though.”

“I’m coming to get him. Where are you?” He took down the address and hung up. “Duke just showed up at Mel Jackson’s place out on Sweet Gum Road.”

Xander frowned. “That’s all the way on the other side of the county.”

“What’s near there?”

“Not much. Some farmland. Forest. The old Eary settlement.”

“What’s that?”

“It was a town back in the eighteen hundreds. Porter could tell you more about why it was abandoned than I could. He was always more into history than I was. But anyway, what passes for roads have been overgrown for decades. I haven’t been out there in years, but last time I was there, very little was still standing. Mostly a bunch of structures that collapsed years ago.”

“There’s a church.” Everybody turned to Laurel, who flipped her laptop around. “It’s on a couple of sites for abandoned places.”

“You think he could’ve taken her there?” Leanne asked.

“I don’t know. Duke wouldn’t have made it that far on foot. But as you’ve pointed out, it’d be hard to get in and out of with an unconscious or unwilling person. It’s just as possible Fisher dumped the dog over that way in hopes of distracting us while he gets the hell out of Dodge.” But Ty’s gut was screaming that this was the break they needed. He exchanged a look with Harrison and Sebastian. “I’m going to get him.”

Harrison pushed up. “I’ll drive you to pick him up.”

“I’ll follow you out and look him over, just to make sure he’s really fine,” Sebastian added.

Xander jerked his head toward the inn office. “All three of you.”

Despite the fact that he was itching to leave, Ty followed his boss inside.

Xander kept his voice low. “I wasn’t born yesterday. What the hell are you planning?”

“I’m going to get Paisley’s dog.”

“You think she’s up at Eary.”

“Maybe,” Ty allowed.

“I can talk to Chris about pulling the SAR team back. But it’ll take time to reconvene over there.”

Ty shook his head. “It’ll take time and might be a waste of it. There’s no need to pull them off the search where they are without more evidence. I want to check it out. I might just be chasing my own tail, but if he does have her up there, a small, highly trained team is much more likely to be able to get to her without being detected. SAR teams are trained to make noise so the lost will hear them. We’re trained to be ghosts.”

Dark eyes studied his. “I don’t like it. But I’m aware you’re gonna