Carly sounded almost a little defensive. After what she’d just been through, did she think he was going to give her a hard time? He wasn’t completely heartless.
“You don’t have to explain anything to me, Carly,” he told her.
She would beg to differ, Carly thought. “The expression on your face when you came up behind me just now said that I do. You looked damn angry that I was late getting home.”
He shrugged, his shoulder vaguely moving up and down. “I was worried about you.”
Carly relaxed a little. I was worried about you. That had a nice ring to it.
Carly knew that it didn’t really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, because life had taken them in different directions—since you sent him away, her mind taunted—and even though their paths had crossed one another temporarily, life would soon be back on its rightful track, and he would have his life and she hers.
But his voiced concern still sounded nice, and just for the slightest moment, Carly indulged herself by letting her mind go to the land of what-if?
What if she hadn’t sent him away? What if he’d stayed by choice? Or she had been able to leave without her conscience bleeding, anchoring her here?
What if…?
Snapping out of it, Carly said, “It’s been a long while since anyone was worried about me.”
He knew how independent she’d always been and, thank God, apparently still was, despite her pretense to the contrary for Grayson’s benefit. Truth of it was, he wasn’t all that certain what he would have ultimately done if she really had turned out to be one of Grayson’s followers.
Probably tried to kidnap her the way she was trying to find a way of kidnapping Mia as a last resort, he thought.
Out loud he said, “Sorry, didn’t mean to crowd you or infer that you weren’t perfectly capable of taking care of yourself.” The words were automatic rather than straight from the heart—the way his flash of anger had been. “No offense intended.”
He was backing away. Why? Did he think she wanted him to? Or was it that he didn’t want her thinking that there was something still between them when there clearly wasn’t?
“None taken,” she murmured.
Coming to, he picked up both steaming mugs and crossed back to the table. He placed one in front of her, then placed the second one on the table where he was sitting. He slipped back onto his chair.
Carly looked down at Hawk’s masterpiece and then grinned. The man had forgotten one key ingredient.
“You know,” she began gently, “it might help to put the tea bags in.”
His attention had been completely focused on her, and he’d been grappling with surges of anger and the very strong desire to strangle the man he had under surveillance. Case or no case, when he thought of the man possibly forcing himself on Carly, all bets were off. In that tiny space of time, he was a man first and an FBI special agent second.
Not something his superiors would be thrilled about hearing.
He glanced down at the two mugs. Each was filled to the brim with water. Tea bags, however, were nowhere in sight. He’d forgotten to put them in. He would obviously never make it as a waiter, he thought ruefully.
“Sorry,” Hawk muttered under his breath as he started to get up again.
Carly stopped him by putting her hand on top of his. When he eyed her quizzically, she nodded at his chair and indicated that he should sit down again.
“You sit, I’ll get the tea bags,” she told him. “I know where they are,” she added. “You’ll only wind up having to go searching through the pantry,” she told him with a soft laugh.
They were right where she’d left them. But when Carly turned away from the pantry, the tin with tea bags in her hand, she found that Hawk wasn’t where she had left him.
He was right behind her, so close that when she’d turned around, her body had brushed against his. She felt the electric tingle immediately. It blotted out the revulsion she’d been battling with.
“Are you that impatient for tea?” she asked, trying to suppress a grin.
Her eyes were dancing, he noted. And all he wanted to do right at this moment was make her his again.
“The hell with the tea,” he answered. His emotions were still all in a jumble, and he was at a loss how to sort everything all out. “I thought that Grayson—I was afraid that you—”
None of this was coming out right. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling this confused, as if he was being pulled in two directions at the same time, one labeled duty, the other labeled conscience. And him stuck in the middle.
“Damn it, Carly,” he all but exploded, thinking of what might have happened to her had Grayson an inkling that she was playing him, “I don’t like you taking these kinds of chances.”
She knew that, but she still found it oddly comforting to hear him admit it.
“You don’t have the right to tell me not to do this, you know,” she reminded him, even though she couldn’t suppress the hint of a smile curving her lips.
“I know,” he answered, “but just thinking that something could have happened to you—”
Hawk couldn’t bring himself to finish his sentence. Instead, he abruptly pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Kissed her hard, with all the feeling pulsing through his body.
It took Carly a full thirty seconds to find her breath. “The water’s going to get cold,” she whispered, not trusting her voice to keep from cracking if she spoke any louder.
He didn’t care about the damn tea. “It can be reheated.”
His words brought a wide smile to her lips. “Apparently,” Carly said with a soft laugh as she pressed her body against his, “so can you.”
He brought his mouth down on hers again, this time with even more force than before. Kissing her as if there was no tomorrow because, for all he knew, there wasn’t one.
Not for him, not for her and especially not for them.
Chapter 12
Hawk had long ago decided that law enforcement work was a combination of danger and boredom with very little in between. On rare occasions, there was also a glimmer of the satisfaction associated with closing a case. But for the most part, it was the former set of circumstances that prevailed.
The boredom also included more than a little frustration. There was no doubt in Hawk’s mind that this particular case, involving dead women and a rampant display of mind control, was the classic example of both of those elements.
It was clearly dangerous because if Samuel Grayson decided that he had become a threat to his utopia, Grayson would have him eliminated without a thought. The frustration in this case was multifaceted, like a Hydra monster straight out of Greek mythology. Hawk found himself frustrated at almost every turn he took. There was the matter of the second victim’s, currently Jane Doe’s, true identity. She matched no missing persons report or any of the fingerprints that were on file in the various databases.
And as of this moment, the facial recognition program, which Jeffers had been running non-stop for the past day and a half, hadn’t found a match, either.
If this woman was an undercover operative, it had to be deep cover because, to date, no agency had attempted to claim her.
Maybe the woman had been a private detective, hired to track down and bring back someone Grayson had attracted to his community and subsequently brainwashed. It was a possibility. Hawk had suggested it to Jeffers the instant he thought of it.
“If she was a private investigator,” Jeffers had pointed out, “then she’d have to have a license and her prints would be on file somewhere—which they’re not,” he concluded with a deep sigh.
The only other possibility, Hawk had gone on to speculate, was that the woman hadn’t been a professional investigator and had undertaken this “going undercover” mission on her own because someone she cared about had been absorbed into Grayson’s society.
Their Jane Doe could have very well acted on the same instincts that Carly had, Hawk realized the next moment.
The thought was far from comforting.
Damn but he wished he could get Carly to listen to him and give up this charade. He didn’t want her turning up in some shallow grave just because her sister was one of the mindless and addle brained who was so hopelessly devoted to Grayson.
Driving through the town like a man strictly out to enjoy the afternoon, Hawk observed the town’s citizens, looking for evidence he could work with.
He wasn’t sure just how much longer he could keep his mouth shut around Carly about the role she was playing. He made a right at the next corner with the intentions of doing one last round. He’d made his initial protest to her, then had intended to let the matter go because Carly wouldn’t be browbeaten or bullied into backing away. When pushed, she had a tendency to dig in, not flee or relent. He’d learned that a long time ago when her father had taunted her that she would never amount to anything. She became the only reason they didn’t lose the farm years ago.
But knowing the way she reacted didn’t keep him from voicing his opinion rather loudly the other night when he’d thought something had happened to her.
In a way, it had, he reminded himself. She’d been tattooed—branded—by that sick S.O.B. Hawk was now more worried than ever about her safety. Grayson was paying too much attention to her. Whether it was because he was suspicious that she wasn’t on the level or because he had singled her out as one of his particular “favorites,” Hawk didn’t know, and it really made no difference to him. The end result was the same. It placed Carly in danger.
And he didn’t like it.
One way or the other, he had to get her to leave town for her own good. Even if, by getting her to leave, he would be getting rid of the one bright spot in his life—not just here but in general.
For the past ten years, Hawk had been all about the job, all about his duty and whatever case he was working on. Nothing distracted him, nothing divided his focus. He’d had no real personal life, moreover, no desire to open up that part of himself where his feelings had once resided.
But being with Carly this short space of time, whether he liked it or not, had abruptly changed all that. It made him remember that there was another side to life, a side that didn’t involve guns, dead bodies and covert operations.
A side that involved a reason to smile.
Don’t get used to this, Hawk silently ordered himself. All of this—the good part—would be in his past in what amounted to less than the blink of an eye. And the less he invested himself in it now, the easier it would be for him to regroup and move on later. He needed to remember that.
“Words to live by,” he said sarcastically, under his breath.
The other source of his frustration, currently at the top of his list, was trying to reach Micah. For three weeks now he’d had the same kind of luck: none.
It was as if the man had just disappeared off the face of the earth after that initial communication.
Or, Hawk thought grimly, Micah’s brother had had him killed, just like, he was certain, Grayson’d had everyone else who had incurred his displeasure killed.
If that did turn out to be the case, he had no idea where to begin looking for Micah Grayson’s body—other than perhaps in or around the town where Micah had arranged to meet him, he supposed. Still, that was a large area to cover.
Could Grayson have learned about the proposed meeting, seen it as a threat to what he was doing and sent one of his henchmen to eliminate his twin brother? He might have even done it himself, Hawk speculated. Grayson might have taken a certain pleasure in ridding the world of his double, so that there was and would continue to be only one person with his face.
Who knew what went through that psychopath’s mind, Hawk thought, his frustration mounting as he felt that he was facing yet another brick wall.
There just had to be some faster way to get answers, but for the life of him, Hawk didn’t know how.
Carly struggled to keep her smile pasted to her lips. It was far from easy. Not when she was standing in the doorway of the community center’s all-purpose room, looking at the ongoing preparations for Mia’s upcoming wedding.
Samuel had put several of his more dedicated female followers to work, festively decorating the area. They went about their appointed tasks, fashioning roses out of construction paper and adding gaily-colored streamers to every square inch of the community room.
To Carly, it looked as if a colored paper mill had exploded. In addition to streamers, balloons would soon flood the room. Because of helium’s somewhat limited life span, the balloons would be brought in during the last leg of the preparations so that they would appear robust and full of promise on the big day.
Unlike the actual situation.
When one of the women looked up and saw her, Carly suddenly found herself being pressed into service, despite her protests. After all, she was the sister of the bride. Her sense of pride and loyalty should have had her insisting on helping right from the beginning, one of the volunteers, a woman named Janice told her in no uncertain terms.
Carly would have liked nothing more than to leave—for a number of reasons, most prominently her incredibly strong disapproval of this match. But she knew it would look suspicious if she flatly declined Bubblehead Lady’s tersely worded suggestion. And that in turn would only wind up calling for a closer scrutiny of her behavior.
So she forced herself to cheerfully say, “Of course,” in response to Janice’s urgings to “Come help us get ready for Mia’s wedding.”
She’d give them an hour, Carly decided, then beg off to run some imaginary errand. They couldn’t find fault with that, right?
Mentally she began the countdown.
And in the meantime, she worked to create paper wild roses—pink ones—and she listened. She didn’t have to listen for very long to hear something distasteful.
“Mia is so lucky that Brice Carrington chose her—and that Samuel approved,” one of the other women declared.
And still another agreed, saying, “Brice is quite a catch, you know.” She turned her brown eyes to look at Carly. “Any one of the unattached ladies would have been more than thrilled if they had caught his eye. But Samuel thinks that your sister is best suited for him. Samuel says that she is at a perfect age as well as being physically perfect,” the woman confided, leaning in toward Carly to “share” her information.
A third woman chimed in, “Samuel believes your sister will make beautiful, healthy devotees.”
“Perhaps six, if not more,” Janice spouted as if she was repeating the gospel of her lord. Her eyes swept over the others and, for a moment, lingered on Carly as if she was waiting to be contradicted or challenged.
A baby machine, Carly thought with contempt. Grayson doesn’t see Mia as a person, he sees her as some kind of a soulless baby machine for him to operate. I was right all along, she thought angrily, finding no solace in having guessed correctly.
With all her heart, she wished that Mia could hear this. Maybe then she would finally snap out of her trance, see things for what they really were. But this seemed a hopeless venture. Her sister clearly bought into Grayson’s vision of the world and was perfectly comfortable with the man’s plans for her future.
That only left kidnapping her sister as an option.
Since Mia remained in town each night, she would have to keep her eyes open for an available opportunity to abduct Mia without being noticed or arousing suspicion.
She hated thinking about it, but there was obviously no other way.
In addition to finding the right opportunity to get this all to snap into gear, Carly would probably have to bound and gag Mia in order to get her out of here. Otherwise, her sister was liable to scream her head off and get them both killed.
Or at least her, Carly thought cynically.
Sometime during working on this forced “labor of love,” it occurred to Carly that one of the faces she’d become accustomed to seeing around town, and especially around the community center, was missing tod
ay.
Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen the young woman in at least a couple of days. Maybe even longer. With her relationship with Hawk heating up so unexpectedly and so quickly, she’d wound up overlooking everything that wasn’t directly connected to Mia.
“Where’s Susannah?” she asked the women now, hoping one of them could fill her in. What she hadn’t expected was sarcasm.
“Ah, she speaks. I thought maybe you’d gone mute,” Janice told her coolly as she worked.
Carly deliberately kept her tone amiable. “I didn’t want to interrupt any of you ladies while you were talking,” Carly replied, hiding her resentment at the comment.
Besides, she’d found that listening to the people around her talk—if they were Grayson’s followers—was far more informative than talking herself.
The woman she was asking about wasn’t like any of these women she was working with. Or for that matter, she wasn’t like most of the women in town. Susannah Paul was a sweet, young woman with a rather lost, haunted look in her eyes. It was that look that had first drawn her to Susannah. Once they spoke, there was almost an instant bond. Carly had found herself befriending the brand-new mother who had confided to her just the other day that she was having second thoughts about living here under what felt like “Samuel’s watchful eye.” She’d whispered that it made her feel uneasy.
Carly had tried to be sympathetic without tipping her own hand. She remembered urging Susannah not to do anything hasty without letting her know first.
“I don’t want you feeling alone,” she had explained. “Or going off by yourself with your baby.” Squeezing the young woman’s hand, she’d said with all sincerity, “I want to help you if I can. I know it can’t be easy, being a single mother with a brand-new baby.”
She’d seen a little of herself in that scenario, because after their mother had died, she had all but raised Mia on her own, too. Certainly her drunken father hadn’t been of any actual help when it came to that. The only thing the man knew how to do was how to drink, not how to raise a very young girl.
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