“Good to know,” Hawk quipped. Holding the files to his chest, he crossed to the door. “Thanks again for these.”
“My pleasure,” Keegan answered, adding, “so to speak.”
Closing the door behind him, Hawk blew out a breath. “Yeah,” he muttered to himself in a low voice. “So to speak,” he echoed.
He squared his shoulders and made his way out of the building and back to his car. He was all out of excuses and reasons to delay his departure. He’d already gotten in contact with his team and told them to temporarily set up a “satellite FBI office” in a cabin several miles out of town.
They were probably already there, he thought. Now it was his turn. Hawk turned his key in the ignition and listened to his car come to life.
Next up: Cold Plains.
Ready or not, here I come.
Carly was standing outside the school where she had so recently taken a position, supervising the children as they made the most of their afternoon recess.
That was where she was when she first saw him. First saw the ghost from her past.
That was what she initially thought she was seeing, a ghost, a figment of her wandering imagination. A momentary hallucination on her part, brought on by a combination of stress and anger and the overwhelming need to have someone to lean on—just for a little while.
For her, the only one she had ever had to lean on had been Hawk, but that had been a very long time ago. At least ten years in her past, she judged.
Maybe even more.
The bottom line was that there was absolutely no reason for her to see Hawk Bledsoe getting out of a relatively new, black sedan. The vehicle had just pulled up before the pristine edifice which housed The Grayson Community Center as well as the living quarters of several of Samuel Grayson’s top people.
Or, as she was wont to think of them in the privacy of her own mind, Grayson’s henchmen.
Her mind was playing tricks on her, Carly silently insisted. Any second now, this person she had conjured up would fade away or take on the features of someone else, someone who she knew from town. Someone she was accustomed to seeing day in, day out.
She waited, not daring to breathe.
He wasn’t fading. Wasn’t changing.
Suddenly feeling very light-headed, Carly sucked a huge breath into her lungs.
Ordinarily, fresh air helped clear her head. But it wasn’t her head that needed clearing, it was her eyes, because she was still seeing him.
Or at least a version of him.
The boyish look she’d known—and loved—was gone, replaced by a face that, aside from being incredibly handsome, was thinner and far more somber looking. Otherwise, it was still him, still Hawk. He was still tall, still muscular—the navy windbreaker he wore did nothing to hide that fact. And he still had sandy-blond hair, even though it was cut shorter now than it had been the last time she had laid eyes on him.
And when he made eye contact with her from across the street, she saw that the apparition with Hawk’s face had the same deep, warm, brown eyes that Hawk had had.
Eyes that could melt her soul.
She felt her pulse accelerating, her heart hammering as if it was recreating a refrain from The Anvil Chorus in double time.
Why wasn’t this image, this apparition, this ghost from the depths of her mind fading? Why was it coming toward her?
Carly’s breath caught in her throat, all but solidifying and threatening to choke her. Even so, for the life of her, Carly just couldn’t make herself look away.
She was still waiting for the image to break up—or for the world to end, whichever was more doable—as the distance between them continued to lessen.
When Hawk had first driven slowly through the town, heading for its center, its “heart,” Hawk had to admit that he was rather stunned. The town appeared to have gone through an incredible amount of changes.
When he had left, Cold Plains looked to be on the verge of simply drying up and blowing away, a dying town abandoned by all but the very hopeless. Those who were devoid of ambition and who couldn’t make a go of it anywhere else had chosen to remain here and die along with the town.
There was no sign of that town here.
This was more of a town that could take center stage in a children’s storybook. All around him, there were new buildings. The ones that looked remotely familiar had all been restored, revitalized, given not just a new coat of paint but a new purpose.
The streets were repaired and clean. Actually clean, he marveled, remembering how filthy everything had appeared to be when he was growing up here.
The smell of fertilizer was missing, he suddenly realized. Cold Plains now seemed like a town on its way to becoming a city rather than a hovel disintegrating into a ghost town.
For a moment he thought that he was in the wrong place, that he had somehow gotten turned around while coming here and had managed to drive to another town. A brighter, newer town.
But then he saw a few faces he recognized, people he’d known growing up. That told him that this was Cold Plains. At the same time, he began to take note of not just the newly constructed buildings but the people, as well. Briskly moving people. People who seemed to have a purpose.
He saw several parents holding on to their children’s hands, heading for what appeared to be a playground. He did a mental double take. A playground? Since when was that part of the landscape? Or an ice cream parlor, for that matter?
“Excuse me, young man, didn’t mean to almost walk into you.” An older man laughed, sidestepping around him at the last moment. Hawk couldn’t help staring at the white-haired man. He wore color-coordinated sweats, fancy, high-end sneakers—running shoes?—and he was holding navy-blue-colored weights in his hand that looked to be about a pound each.
He was power walking, Hawk realized.
Had everyone lost their minds?
He looked around again. All the people who were out and about appeared to be smiling. Every last one of them. It was almost eerie. And then he looked closer at the women who were passing him. Smiling, as well, they were all modestly dressed. No jeans, no scruffy cutoffs or overalls. Each and every one of them, young or old, children or adults, they were all wearing dresses.
Dresses that came down past the middle of their calves.
Hell, they all looked like extras from a movie about Amish life, Hawk thought. All that was missing were those hats or bonnets or whatever those things that all but hid their hair were called—
Hawk froze.
A second ago, he’d been busy scanning the immediate area, trying to reconcile what he was seeing with the Cold Plains citizens he remembered from his past. Lost in thought, he’d forgotten to get himself prepared, and so he wasn’t.
Wasn’t prepared to have the sight of her, wearing one of those ridiculous, sexless dresses, slam into him like a runaway freight train sliding down a steep embankment. Plowing straight into his gut.
He had to concentrate in order to draw in half a breath.
Carly.
Carly Finn.
The woman who had led him on, then skewered his insides and left him without so much as a backward glance. Left him to live or die, no matter to her.
Why the hell hadn’t he realized that she would probably still be here? Still be living on the outskirts of Cold Plains?
This was where that stupid farm was, the one that meant so much more to her than he did, so of course she was still going to be here.
Still here and, despite the unbecoming, shapeless brown sack she wore, still as beautiful as she’d ever been.
More, he amended.
Even at this distance, he could see that Carly, with her long, blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, was even more beautiful than he remembered. Maybe that was because he’d been trying so hard to bury her image, to scrape it from his mind.
His hands were clenched at his sides. Fury raged through him, but there was no outlet. He couldn’t afford to allow himself one.
Damn it, he wished he could just walk away. This minute. Wished he could get into his car and just drive until he ran out of gas or purged her image from his mind, whichever happened first.
But he couldn’t, and he knew it, so there was no sense in wishing. He owed it to the Bureau to see this through, and he owed it to those five dead women to find their killer or killers. He wasn’t a kid anymore who could just think of himself. He had responsibilities, even if he no longer possessed a viable heart.
Incensed, stunned, angry and a whole vanguard of other emotions he couldn’t even begin to catalog yet, Hawk found himself striding straight for the woman clad in the unflattering brown dress.
When she saw him heading for her, Carly’s very first reaction was to want to bolt and run.
But she didn’t.
She had never run away from anything in her life and she was not about to start now—no matter how much she wanted to and how much easier it would have been than to wait for him to reach her.
Leaning for support against the white picket fence, which ran along the length of the school yard, Carly raised her chin, said a silent prayer that she wasn’t losing her mind and waited for the approaching man to turn into someone else.
He didn’t.
So much for the power of positive thinking.
Her thoughts did a complete one-eighty. Okay, so it was Hawk. What was he doing here? Of all the times she’d yearned for him to return, this was the worst possible one.
She 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 d
o 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 and jurisdiction to investigate a crime like the one he had just mentioned.
Hawk shook his head. Then because she was obviously waiting for 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.
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