couldn’t allow herself to forget what she was still doing here. She had to remember why she’d taken this job at the day care center and why she forced herself to smile at Samuel Grayson when she would rather just drive a stake through his heart, grab her sister’s hand and run.
“Carly?”
The second she heard his voice, a wave of heat, then cold, then heat again washed over her. For the tiniest split second, the world shrank down to a pinprick. Only sheer willpower on her part caused it to widen again, chasing away the blackness that threatened to swallow her up whole.
Taking another deep, calming breath, she responded, “Yes?”
“Carly,” Hawk repeated, his voice more somber this time, more forceful. His dark brown eyes all but bore into her. “It’s Hawk.”
She hadn’t wanted to run her tongue along her lips in order to moisten them, but if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to utter another sound.
“Yes,” she answered quietly, praying he wouldn’t hear her heart pounding. “I know.”
A sixth sense she’d developed these past five years warned her that she was being observed. Observed by someone whose loyalty was strictly to Samuel and who in all likelihood reported everything he saw directly to the man. She had to be careful. Everything was riding on making Samuel believe that she, like all the other women in the sect, was under his spell as well as firmly under his thumb. It went against everything she was, everything she had ever stood for, but to save Mia, she was willing to play this part.
That meant that she had to seem almost indifferent to the man she’d once loved above all else.
A man she still loved.
Carly swallowed as unobtrusively as she could and then forced a bright, mindless smile to her lips as she asked cheerfully, “So what brings you back to Cold Plains after all this time?”
Chapter 3
It looked like Carly. Even in that ridiculous, shapeless sack of a dress, it still looked like a slightly older, but definitely a heart-stoppingly beautiful version of Carly.
But it didn’t sound like Carly.
Oh, it was her voice all right. He would have recognized her voice anywhere, under any circumstances. There were times he still heard her voice in his dreams, dreams that had their roots in a different, far less complicated time. And then, when he’d wake up in the dark and alone, he would upbraid himself for being so weak as to yearn for her. An emptiness would come over him, hollowing out what had once been his heart.
Yes, it was her voice all right. But there was a decided lack of spirit evident in it, a lack of the feisty, independent essence that made Carly who she was. That made her Carly.
The bright, chipper, vapid question she’d just asked sounded as if it had come from a Carly who had been lobotomized.
Which was, he now realized, exactly the way he could have described the expressions on the faces of several of the men and women he’d just watched walk by. It really looked to him as if nothing was behind the smiles on their faces. Granted they were moving about with what appeared to be a sense of purpose, but they all came across as being only two-dimensional—as if they had been cut out of cardboard and mounted on sticks.
Damn it, talk, Hawk, Carly thought. Say something so I can go on with this charade. You will never, never know how much I’ve missed you, how many times I’d lie awake, wondering where you were and what you were doing. Wondering if you missed me even just a little.
Carly had never allowed herself to regret sending him away. It had been the right thing to do. The right thing for him. But oh, how she regretted not being with Hawk when he had left town.
And now he was here, standing before her, larger than life—and she couldn’t tell him anything. Not how she felt, not why she was going through the motions of being one of Samuel Grayson’s devoted followers.
“So?” Carly prodded, still keeping the same wide, vacant smile on her lips. Her facial muscles began to cramp up. Playing mindless was a lot harder than it looked. “What brings you back?” she asked him again.
Carly knew it couldn’t be a family matter that had caused him to return. His mother was dead—she had been the only thing keeping him here in the first place—and he never got along with his father who, although kinder in spirit than hers, had the very same romance going with any bottle of liquor he could find, just as her late father had had.
“You’re about the very last person I would have ever expected to see coming back to Cold Plains.” That much, at least, was truthful.
He laughed shortly as he shook his head. The sound had no humor in it. “Funny, and I figured you had enough sense to leave here,” he replied, his tone sounding edgier than he’d meant it to.
Carly shrugged, momentarily looking away. But the children were all playing nicely. No squabbles that needed refereeing on her part. She had no excuse to leave.
She tried to tell herself that Hawk’s words didn’t sting, but it was a lie. Even after all this time, his opinion still meant a great deal to her. It probably always would.
“Something came up,” she said by way of an excuse—and, again, she was being truthful. Something had come up to keep her here. Her sister’s marriage bombshell.
Hawk’s eyes skimmed over the dress she wore. He tried to do his best not to imagine the slender, firm body beneath the fabric or to remember that one night that she had been his. He hadn’t realized then that he was merely on borrowed time.
“Yeah,” he said curtly. “I can see that.”
She sincerely doubted that he hated the dress she had on as much as she did, but wearing it was necessary. It was all part of convincing that hideous megalomaniac that she was as brainwashed as everyone else who had joined his so-called “flock.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Carly prodded gently, her curiosity mounting. “Why are you back in Cold Plains?”
He minced no words. The days when he had wanted to shield her were gone. “I’m trying to find out who killed five young women and left their bodies to rot in five different, remote locations in Wyoming.”
She looked at him sharply. Had he struck a chord? Did she actually know something about these women who had been cut down so ruthlessly? But then the look vanished, and her expression became completely unreadable. He swore inwardly.
The next moment, a strange smile curved her lips. “So you did it,” she concluded, nodding her head with approval.
Hawk narrowed his eyes in annoyed confusion. “Did what?”
He’d told her that he wanted to do something adventurous, something that mattered. He wanted to leave the world a better place than when he found it. It was why she’d made him leave. Someone like that couldn’t be happy in a town the size of a shoe box.
“You became a law enforcement agent. A U.S. Marshal?” she asked, guessing which branch he had ultimately joined. It had to be something along those lines in order to give him the authority
