Special Agent's Perfect Cover. Marie Ferrarella

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