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
I
t
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 I would have ever expected to see coming back to Cold Plains.” That much, at least, was truthful.
He laughed shortly as he shook his head. The sound had no humor in it. “Funny, and 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 funny-looking, wilted green things.” As he spoke, it struck him that the people who continued to walk by him all seemed to have the same eerie, neat and tidy and completely-devoid-of-any-character appearance as the new buildings did. “Speaking of which, where the hell
are
all the men?” he asked.
She knew what he meant, but of necessity, she pretended to be confused by his question. “They’re all around you,” she answered, indicating the ones who were out with their families or just briskly walking from one destination to another.
“No, they’re not,” he bit off. He’d grown up here, had lived among them. The men who had lived in Cold Plains when he was a teenager spent their days wrestling with the elements, fighting the land as they struggled to make a living, to provide for their families and themselves. The men he saw now looked too soft for that. Too fake. “These guys look like they’re all about to audition for a remake of
The Stepford Wives.
”
“Lower your voice,” Carly said, using a more forceful tone than he’d heard coming from her up until now.
That
was the Carly he remembered, he thought.
But it bothered him that she was looking around, appearing concerned. As if she was afraid that someone would overhear them.
What the hell had happened to Cold Plains?
To her?
“Or what?” he challenged. “Whatever great power turned all these guys into drones will strike me dead for blaspheming?” he demanded angrily. “Who
did
all this?” he asked. “Who made everyone so damn fake?” But before Carly had a chance to answer him, Hawk shot another question at her. “You can’t tell me that you actually
like
living this way, like some mindless preprogrammed robot.”
Though his tone was angry, he was all but pleading with her to contradict his initial impression, to let him know somehow that she was here looking like some 1950s housewife against her will. That she didn’t
want
to be like this.