She should have taken it as a compliment, because it meant that she was playing her role well and was convincing. But instead, she felt insulted that he thought so little of her.
Isn’t that what you wanted? To come across as one of Grayson’s mindless minions?
The answer was that she both wanted it, and she didn’t. A part of her felt he should have known better than to think this of her.
Her feelings were getting in the way of her common sense and her plan.
She tossed her head, her eyes blazing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Carly began to turn her back on him, but he caught her by the wrist, holding her in place. “I think you do,” he told her.
“What you think really doesn’t matter to me,” she lied, doing her best to ignore the wild turmoil going on in the pit of her stomach. She attempted to pull free but only succeeded in having him tighten his hold on her. “You’re hurting me,” she accused.
“Am I?” he retorted angrily. “Am I hurting you?” Struggling with himself, he opened his hand and released her. Anger continued to flash in his eyes. “Well, it’s nothing compared to what you did to me.”
Carly raised her chin contentiously. “I didn’t hurt you, Hawk,” she informed him. “What I did was set you free.”
Had she lost her mind? Did living under Grayson’s thumb completely destroy her ability to think? “What are you talking about?”
After all this time, she would have thought it might have dawned on him. Apparently not. She spelled it out as much as she could.
“You left here to become something. To make something of yourself. To follow your dream. And from what I can see, you succeeded. So in the long run, you should actually be grateful to me. Because of me,” she concluded, “you got to be happy.”
How the hell had she come to that conclusion? “Wrong on both counts,” he told her, cynicism clinging to every syllable.
He was just saying that to get back at her for hurting his male pride by rejecting him all those years ago. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees, could he? Neither could he see what her sacrifice had ultimately cost her. Maybe he wasn’t as smart as she’d initially thought.
“But this is what you wanted, isn’t it?” she pressed, trying to get him to admit it. “Authority, adventure, moving from place to place, making a difference. Helping people.” She repeated to him everything he had once told her.
At the top of his list had been leaving Cold Plains. Well, she’d gotten him to do that. The rest, she’d assumed at the time, had followed and fallen into place. Finding out he was an FBI special agent just reinforced that for her.
“What I wanted,” he shouted hoarsely into Carly’s face, unable to hold himself in check any longer, “was you!”
She didn’t believe him. Because if that were true, she would have never been able to get him to leave, no matter what lie she told him. Or, if he’d left, he would have come back in a short time, saying something about being determined to get her to change her mind—or words to that effect.
But he
had
left and he
hadn’t
returned, not for ten years, and now it was a case that brought Hawk back, not her.
“Let’s see.” She raised her right hand as if she was cupping some invisible object, weighing it. “Me,” she announced, nodding at her hand. Then Carly raised her other hand for a moment. “Versus a lifetime of adventure and achievement.” She indicated that what her left hand was holding was heavier by letting it sink a lot lower than her right hand. “Doesn’t seem like much of a contest to me.”
Hawk took hold of her hand in his, pulling her in and eliminating the last tiny bit of space that was still left between them. His eyes, blazing fiercely now, were on hers.
“No,” he all but growled as he struggled to contain his temper and keep it from exploding. “It’s not.”
This time, she had a feeling that he wouldn’t release her.
“Let go of me, Hawk,” she ordered in a steely voice that gave no indication she was quaking on the inside. Her ability to hold him at bay, to resist her own mounting desires, quickly diminished. Any second now, it would all plummet to her feet.
Frustrated, worried, Carly made one last attempt to yank her wrist away from his grasp. She got nowhere. She might as well have been trying to pull it out of a bear trap. He had what amounted to a permanent hold on her.
“I said, let go!” she ground out between clenched teeth.
“Or what?” Hawk challenged. “You’ll call Grayson and have him and his henchmen stick me into one of those unmarked graves he seems to favor so much?”
How can you even think that, you idiot?
And then she thought of Mia and the very real danger her sister was in if this actually turned out to be true. Up until now, she’d thought of Grayson as a cold-blooded manipulator out for his own selfish interests. She hadn’t thought of him as a killer.
This put a whole different, chilling spin on things.
“How do you know that Samuel’s the one who is doing this?” she asked, wanting to hear his reasoning. She refrained from telling him her suspicions.
But Hawk noticed something else; something had caught his interest. She hadn’t protested, hadn’t cried out indignantly that Grayson would never be capable of such heinous actions.
Why?
Did she suspect that the former motivational speaker
was
behind it—or did she have information she wasn’t telling him?
Open up to me, Carly. Trust me. You used to, remember?
Out loud he told her, “Grayson’s the one who is obviously running the show here.” He continued to hold her hand, afraid if he released it, she’d run off. And he wanted to hear the truth about this two-bit creep who’d hypnotized her into being one of the faithful—if not more. “He’s a megalomaniac who’s not about to allow anyone else to have any authority or share the spotlight with him. It’s all about him, it always has been, always will be. And even though we haven’t found the direct connection yet, every one of those five dead women—including the one without a name—lived in Cold Plains at one time or another.”
With every passing second, her concern for Mia’s safety grew. “How do you know that the woman without a name lived here?” she asked.
“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” Hawk retorted tersely. He grew acutely aware that he was still holding her wrist, acutely aware of how close they were. Just standing here like this was filling his senses with her very essence. “And you don’t have a need to know,” he informed her.
Her eyes met his. Though she didn’t say a word, she pleaded with him silently, praying with all her heart that there was still a tiny trace of the connection that had once been so strong between them. The connection that allowed them to finish each other’s sentences, to finish each other’s thoughts.
Oh, but I do,
Carly thought frantically.
I really do. I have a need to know
everything
that’s involved in this case. Because Mia’s life might just depend on it.
Chapter 7
H
awk’s deeply hypnotic eyes continued to hold her prisoner. Her nerves rose close to the surface and the very ground beneath her feet seemed to sink.
“I just can’t figure out what you’re still doing here,” Hawk finally said. “Why you didn’t leave when Grayson started buying up everything, changing everything? Turning people into grinning puppets?”
“Where would I go?” she asked. “This is
home.
”
“Where would you go?” Hawk echoed incredulously. “Anywhere is better than this.” She had to see that. The Carly he knew was too smart to be taken in by the gingerbread, by the pretense. The Carly he remembered would be able to see that Grayson was not out for the greater good, but the greater haul—
for him.
“First of all, I would
never
leave without Mia.” He had to know that. “And she wants to stay here, and second, I can’t just abandon Cold Plains because some silver-tongued Pied Piper decided to lay claim to it and would be changing things around.”
Her description of Grayson was far from flattering, which immediately told him that unlike so many of the other town residents, she hadn’t elevated the man to the level of a god. And the fiercely protective tone in her voice when she’d mentioned her sister gave him the hope that Mia was the real reason Carly was still here.
Which in turn meant that she hadn’t fallen under the charlatan’s spell, unlike Mia. This version of Carly at least bore some resemblance to the bright-eyed girl who had taken up so much space in his young life.
Hawk suppressed a sigh. He’d really thought that they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, grow old together. Funny how things turned out.
“So what’s your plan?” he finally asked her. “Are you going to somehow covertly confront and then fight Grayson? Winner gets to keep Cold Plains, loser has to leave town, that kind of thing?”
Carly took offense at both the question and his tone. “You’re making fun of me,” she accused.
He thought of the way she’d been in the school yard that first day he returned to Cold Plains.
“No, I’m trying to understand why the spirited, feisty woman I once knew would allow herself to be ordered around like some mindless lackey. You can’t possibly be taken in by Grayson’s act. You’re way too smart for that,” Hawk insisted.
Despite the fact that she felt a very real desire to tell him what she was doing, maybe to ask for his help, she couldn’t risk it. If this came to light, her chance of rescuing Mia would go down the drain.
So instead, she challenged, “Did you ever think that maybe you’re being too cynical? That just maybe Samuel’s on the level?”
A look of contempt came over his features. Whether it was directed at Grayson—or her—was difficult to tell from where she was standing.
“Yeah, and maybe the moon’s made out of green cheese.” His eyes narrowed to sharp green slits. “Look, I don’t know what your so-called plan is, but I want you to stay away from Grayson, understand?” It wasn’t a request, it was an order. “The man’s dangerous.”
She had
never
liked being ordered around, and now was no exception. “You have no right to waltz into town ten years after you left and think you can start telling me what to do.”
The sharpness of her own reaction surprised her. Why was there this wealth of anger, of hurt, bubbling up within her? She had no right to resent him. After all, she had been the one to send him away. She’d been completely aware of what she was sacrificing, and she’d done it, anyway. Done it because she loved him. She couldn’t resent him for doing exactly what she’d orchestrated for him to do—
And yet—
And yet, there was a part of her, a small, selfish, lost part of her, that had wanted him not to leave back then, no matter what she’d done to get him to go. Or, if he did go, she’d wanted him to dramatically return and announce that he wasn’t going anywhere, not unless she came with him.
You can’t fault him,
she told herself sternly.
He’d tried. God knows, he’d tried. He even told you that he was willing to take Mia along when the two of you left town. It was your choice to stay, your choice because you thought that you and Mia were going to be like an anchor for him and his dreams, dragging him down.
Besides, hadn’t Hawk just admitted that what he’d wanted most in the world was her? What more did she want from the man? She was being irrational. But then, she’d heard that love did that to a person, made them entirely crazy and irrational. Made them want things that weren’t possible.
Like living happily ever after.
“I’m a special agent with the FBI. I have every right to tell you what to do,” he corrected, all but shouting into her face.
She felt no such need for restraint. “Go to hell,” Carly shouted defiantly.
That tore it for him. The last fragile hold on his temper snapped like a dried twig underfoot after a long draught. “Not without you!”
The few seconds that followed were all a blur. What happened next was certainly not something he’d foreseen himself doing, even though, if he was being honest, it had taken place a thousand times in the half dreams that littered his mind, occurring just before dawn each morning.
One moment they were shouting at one another, their emotions completely exposed, raw and bleeding. The next, instead of shouting, he was kissing Carly with all the passion, the feelings that had just been uncovered and had spilled out.
And she was kissing him back with the same amount of verve.
The eruption was inevitable.
The magnitude of their emotions could only be contained for so long. The moment his lips touched hers, the second they came together, they both knew that there was no turning back. That whatever stories they had told themselves, saying their relationship had long been over, were all lies, pretenses to get them through the day, the week, the month. They’d all been very useful at the time, but still lies.