Special Agent's Perfect Cover. Marie Ferrarella

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 do 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.

      “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