Special Agent's Perfect Cover Read Online Free PDF Page A

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