a clarification, he said, “I’m with the FBI.”
“Even more impressive.”
Working for the FBI wasn’t impressive as far as he was concerned. It was a job, something that allowed him to move about, to keep from being tempted to put down roots in any one place for long. And it allowed him to keep the rest of the world at bay. For that, he had her to thank. After she had broken his heart, telling him that she had never loved him, he’d decided that he would never subject himself to that kind of pain again. The only way to do that was not to allow anyone in. Not to form any attachments.
Ever.
So what was he doing, standing here, feeling as if he’d just walked through a portal and gone back in time again? What the hell was he doing feeling again? It seemed that no matter what his resolve, all it took to undo everything he’d built up in the last decade or so was to be in Carly’s presence again for a few minutes.
It just didn’t seem right, but there it was, anyway.
“It’s a job,” he told her, shrugging off her compliment.
She heard the indifference, the callousness, even if he wasn’t aware of expressing them. A wave of concern came over her. Maybe she shouldn’t have turned him away. Not if it had turned out all wrong.
“Then you’re disappointed?” she asked.
The thought that he was disillusioned sliced away at her heart. She had made what to her was the ultimate sacrifice, sending Hawk away so that he could follow his dream. If his dream had turned out not to be what he really wanted, then all these lost years had been for nothing.
“Yes,” he answered coldly as his eyes skimmed over her again.
He wasn’t talking about his job, she realized. Hawk was talking about how he felt about her. More than anything in the world, she would have loved to have set him straight, to tell him what she was really still doing here, but if she did that, she would wind up instantly throwing away everything she’d done up until now. It would mean sacrificing all the work she’d put into making Samuel believe that she was one of the faithful. One of the “devotees” he took such relish in collecting and adding to his number.
“Why are you dressed like that?” Hawk demanded, frowning. He looked around as he asked the question, adding, “Why are all the women out here dressed like that?”
“Not all,” Carly pointed out, doing her best not to let her relief over that little fact show through. “There are still holdouts.”
Thank God, she added silently.
“‘Holdouts,’“ he echoed her words. “As in, not having found the ‘right path’?”
She widened the forced smile on her lips, hating this charade that circumstances had forced her to play. “I see you do understand.”
He felt contempt. Had she always been this weak and he hadn’t noticed, blinded by the so-called sacrifices she’d made to keep her father’s farm running?
“Not by a long shot,” he answered, disgusted. Again, he looked around. From all indications, they were standing in the center of town. And yet, it was all wrong, conflicting with his memories. The town he had left behind had been a rough-and-tumble place, a place where people existed without the promise of a future. A place where grizzled, weathered men came in to wash the taste of stagnation and failure from their parched throats at the local bar.
The bar was conspicuously missing as were other establishments that he remembered having once occupied the streets of Cold Plains.
“Where’s the hardware store?” he asked. There was a health club—a damn health club of all things!—standing where he could have sworn the hardware store had once been.
Since when did the people who lived here have time to idle away, lifting weights and sitting in saunas? Health clubs were for the pampered with time on their hands. Nobody he knew in Cold Plains was like that. They had livings to scratch out from an unforgiving earth.
Or, at least, nobody had been like that when he’d left all those years ago.
Obviously things had changed.
“The owner had to relocate to Bryson,” she told him, mentioning the name of a neighboring town. “He couldn’t afford the rent here anymore.” She saw confusion in Hawk’s sharp eyes as he cocked his head. It took everything she had not to raise her hand and run her fingers along his cheek, the way she used to when he would look at her like that.
With effort, she blocked the memory. “New people came in and started buying up the land—investing in Cold Plains,” she explained, quoting the official story that had been given out about the changes. Changes, everyone had been told over and over, that were all “for the better.”
“And the diner?” Hawk asked, nodding toward a place down the block. The diner was clearly gone, replaced by another, far more modern-looking restaurant with a pretentious name. “Exactly what the hell is a ‘Vegetarian Café’?”
“Just what the name suggests it is,” she replied, then added, “They serve much healthier food than the diner ever did.”
The name indicated that no meat was served on the premises. From where he stood, that just didn’t compute. “This is cattle country,” Hawk protested. “Men like their steaks, their meat, not some funny-looking, wilted green things.” As he spoke, it struck him that the people who continued to walk by him all seemed to have the same eerie, neat and tidy and completely-devoid-of-any-character appearance as the new buildings did. “Speaking of which, where the hell are all the men?” he asked.
She knew what he meant, but of necessity, she pretended to be confused by his question. “They’re all around you,” she answered, indicating the ones who were out with their families or just briskly walking from one destination to another.
“No, they’re not,” he bit off. He’d grown up here, had lived among them. The men who had lived in Cold Plains when he was a teenager spent their days wrestling with the elements, fighting the land as they struggled to make a living, to provide for their families and themselves. The men he saw now looked too soft for that. Too fake. “These guys look like they’re all about to audition for a remake of The Stepford Wives.’’
“Lower your voice,” Carly said, using a more forceful tone than he’d heard coming from her up until now. That was the Carly he remembered, he thought.
But it bothered him that she was looking around, appearing concerned. As if she was afraid that someone would overhear them.
What the hell had happened to Cold Plains?
To her?
“Or what?” he challenged. “Whatever great power turned all these guys into drones will strike me dead for blaspheming?” he demanded angrily. “Who did all this?” he asked. “Who made everyone so damn fake?” But before Carly had a chance to answer him, Hawk shot another question at her. “You can’t tell me that you actually like living this way, like some mindless preprogrammed robot.”
Though his tone was angry, he was all but pleading with her to contradict his initial impression, to let him know somehow that she was here looking like some 1950s housewife against
