Special Agent's Perfect Cover. Marie Ferrarella

much as smart. Leaving Cold Plains had been the smartest thing he’d ever done. By the same token, returning might turn out to be the stupidest.

      Hawk looked at his watch again. When he’d gotten here—and found the room empty—he’d mentally promised himself to give Micah approximately ninety minutes to show up. But right now, he was feeling way too antsy to wait for sixty more minutes to slip beyond his reach.

      With a sigh, he crossed back to the hotel room door that had been deliberately left unlocked for him.

      Damn it, Micah, I hope you haven’t gotten yourself killed, he thought irritably. Because he was fairly certain that nothing short of death would have kept Micah Grayson from keeping an appointment that he himself had set up.

      He needed to see the county coroner before he made his way to Cold Plains, but a visit to Cold Plains was definitely in his immediate future.

      Biting off a curse, Hawk let himself out of the room and closed the door behind him.

      It seemed rather incredible to Carly Finn that the two times she made up her mind to finally, finally leave Cold Plains, something came up to stop her.

      And not some mild, inconsequential “something” but a major, pull-out-all-the-stops “something.”

      The first time she’d been ready to test her wings and fly, leaving this soul-draining speck of a town behind her and eagerly begin a fresh, new chapter of her life with the man she knew deep down in her soul she was meant to be with, her infinite sense of obligation as well as her never-ending sense of responsibility to her family had added lead to her wings and grounded her with a bone-jarring thud.

      The problem then was that her father had been a drunk, a dyed-in-the-wool, leave-no-drink-untouched, hopeless alcoholic, and while there were many men—and women—with that shortcoming who could be considered by the rest of the world to be functioning alcoholics, her father hadn’t fallen into that category. He hadn’t been even close to a functioning alcoholic, and she knew that if she left with Hawk, if she accompanied the man she loved so much that it hurt so he could follow his dreams, she would be abandoning not just her father but her baby sister to a very cruel, inevitable life of poverty and, eventually, to homelessness. The baby sister she had promised her dying mother to look after all those years ago.

      So she knew that in all good conscience, she had to remain. And remain she did. She remained in order to run the family farm and somehow juggle a job as a waitress, as well, the latter she undertook in order to bring in some extra, much-needed money into the household.

      She remained while sending Hawk Bledsoe on his way with a lie ringing in his ears.

      There was no other choice. She knew that the only way she could get Hawk to leave Cold Plains—and her—so that he could follow his dreams was to tell him that she didn’t love him anymore. That she had actually never loved him and had decided that she just couldn’t go on pretending anymore.

      Because she knew that if she didn’t, if she let him know how much she really loved him, Hawk would stay in Cold Plains with her. He would marry her, and eventually, he would become very bitter as he entertained thoughts of what “could have been but wasn’t.”

      She couldn’t do that to him. Couldn’t allow him to do that to himself.

      Loving someone meant making sacrifices. So she’d made the ultimate sacrifice: she’d lied to him and sent him on his way, while she had stayed behind to do what she had to do. And struggled not to die by inches with each passing day.

      But the day finally came when she had had enough. When she had silently declared her independence, not just from the farm but from the town, which had become downright frightening in a short period. Cold Plains had gone from a dead-end town to a sleek, picture-perfect one that had sold its soul to the devil.

      She’d reached the conclusion that she had a right to live her own life. That went for Mia, the baby sister she had always doted on, as well.

      She didn’t even want to pack, content to leave everything behind just so that she and Mia could get a brand-new start. But she was in for a startling surprise. Somehow, while she was doing all that juggling to keep the farm—and them—afloat, Mia had grown up and formed opinions of her own—or rather, as it turned out, had them formed for her.

      When she had told Mia that the day had finally come, that she’d had enough and that they were leaving Cold Plains for good, her beautiful, talented baby sister had knocked her for a loop by telling her flatly that she was staying.

      It got worse.

      Mia was not just staying, but she was “planning” on marrying Brice Carrington, a wealthy widower more than twice her age.

      “But you don’t love him,” Carly had protested when she had finally recovered from the shock.

      The expression on Mia’s face had turned nasty. “Yes, I do,” her sister had insisted. “Besides, how would you know if I did or didn’t? You’re always so busy working, you don’t have time to notice anything. You certainly don’t have any time for me. Not like Samuel does,” she’d added proudly, with the air of one who had been singled out and smiled down upon by some higher power.

      The accusation had stung, especially since the only reason she had been working so hard was to provide for Mia in the first place. But the sudden realization that while she’d been busy trying to make a life for them, trying to save money so that they could finally get away from here, her sister had been brainwashed.

      There was no other term for it. What Samuel Grayson did, with his silver tongue, his charm and his exceedingly handsome face was pull people into his growing circle of followers. Pull them in and mesmerize them with rhetoric. Make them believe that whatever he suggested they do was really their idea in the first place.

      Why else would Mia believe that she was actually in love with a man who was old enough to be her father. Older. Brice Carrington was as bland as a bowl of unsalted, white rice. He was also, in the hierarchy of things, currently very high up in Samuel Grayson’s social structure.

      Maybe Brice represented the father they’d never really had, Carly guessed. Or maybe, since their dad was dead, Mia was looking for someone to serve as a substitute?

      In any case, if Mia was supposed to marry Brice Carrington, it was because the match suited Grayson’s grand plan.

      The very thought of Grayson made her angry. But at the moment, it was an anger that had no suitable outlet. She couldn’t just go railing against the man as if she was some kind of a lunatic. For one thing, most of the people who still lived in town thought Samuel Grayson was nothing short of the Second Coming.

      Somehow, in the past five years, while no one was paying attention, Samuel Grayson and a few of his handpicked associates had managed to buy up all the property in Cold Plains. At first, moving stealthily but always steadily, he’d wound up arranging everything up to and possibly including the rising and setting of the sun to suit his own specifications and purposes.

      These days, it seemed as if nothing took place in Cold Plains without his say-so or close scrutiny. He had eyes and ears everywhere. Anyone who opposed him was either asked to leave or, and this seemed to be more and more the case, they just disappeared.

      At first glance, it appeared as if the man had done a great deal for the town. Old buildings had been renovated, and new buildings had gone up, as well. There was now a new town hall, a brand-new school, which he oversaw and for which he only hired teachers who were devoted to his ideology. And most important of all, he’d built a bright, spanking, brand-new church, one he professed was concerned strictly with the well-being of its parishioners’ souls—and that, he had not been shy about saying, was the purview of the leader of the flock: Grayson himself.

      To a stranger from the outside, it looked like a pretty little, idyllic town.

      To her, Cold Plains had become a town filled with puppets—and Samuel Grayson was the smiling, grand puppeteer. A puppeteer whose every dictate was slavishly followed. His call for modesty had all the women