Special Agent's Perfect Cover (19 page)

But for her, there was no repeat performance of a magic moment, no chemistry suddenly pulsating through her. Not even the desire to be held and kissed by whoever was taking her out that night.

And so she eventually came to the inevitable conclusion that Hawk would forever be the one and only man she would ever care about, ever love.

And he was out of her life by her own doing.

She had to resign herself to that. So she did.

Until he’d shown up, Carly thought now, letting herself into the darkened house. He had instantly turned her whole world upside down by coming back into town, looking better than any man had a right to after ten years had gone by.

This time, she didn’t know how she would survive having him walk away. Because he would. He’d carved out that life for himself that she’d pushed him toward.

A life that didn’t include her.

“Don’t think that far ahead,” she chided herself. “He’s still here for now, and all any of us have is now. Make the most of it,” she ordered herself as she went around the house, turning on lights and chasing away the gloom.

With the house now well lit, Carly made her way into the kitchen to prepare dinner. It seemed rather ironic because she hardly bothered with dinner when she was alone. Usually it meant just grabbing something out of the refrigerator and eating it over the sink while doing three other things at the same time.

But for Hawk, she prepared dinner. Looked forward to dinner. Even if they didn’t speak, she still loved to sit there beside him at the table, watching him eat what she’d made for him. Doing so gave her a warm feeling of normalcy she’d been lacking for longer than she could actually remember.

Maybe that was why Mia wanted to get married, Carly thought abruptly. Why her sister seemed to cleave to this sham of a life she saw being offered to her. Because she wanted what everyone wanted. A little piece of the normal life.

Except that marriage to Brice Carrington wouldn’t be normal. Not in the way Mia wanted in her heart. Mia would be nothing more than a baby machine.

After taking the roast she’d made yesterday out of the refrigerator, Carly glanced at her watch. What was keeping Hawk? Not that there was a specific time that had been agreed upon. It was just that Hawk was usually here by now.

Leaving the roast on the counter, Carly suddenly felt an uneasy need to watch for him through the large bay window that faced her private road. The road that led away from the heart of Cold Plains.

Carly picked up her pace and made her way to the living room.

She passed by the gun rack where she still kept her late father’s weapons primed and cleaned. They represented the only really good memory she had of the man. On the occasions that he’d been sober when she was a child, her father had tried to take her hunting. When she’d burst into tears the first time because he’d told her they were going to hunt for deer, he’d relented and taught her how to shoot at targets instead. She wound up shooting at pictures of snarling, vicious wolves.

She knew that her father had hoped to get her acclimated to shooting animals, wanting to make sure she would always be safe because animals could turn on her in a heartbeat, he’d explained, but she never did.

Eventually, her father began to drink more and more, and those Sunday afternoons in the woods, shooting at the pictures he’d posted for her, became a thing of the past. But she never forgot how to shoot and, on occasion, still went out to practice on her own. With Grayson and his cronies spreading their scourge here, who knew when that ability—to hit whatever she aimed for—might just come in handy?

Reaching the front window, she got there just in time to see Hawk pulling up.

The smile on her lips spread all through her. He was here!

She was about to hurry to the door to open it when a light in the distance caught her eye. It took her less than half a second to realize that it was actually two lights, not one. Two, like the headlights of an approaching vehicle.

Had Hawk brought someone with him?

But if he had, why weren’t they both traveling in his car? And why was he now getting out of his vehicle without so much as a backward glance at the other car? It was as if he had no idea that there
was
another car approaching in the distance.

Nerves stretched taut began to dance through her. She had come to realize that she had grown to be a great deal less trusting than she had once been.

Backing away from the front window, Carly hurried over to the gun rack, the phrase
better safe than sorry
drumming through her head.

The last thing she wanted was to be sorry.

She had just unlocked the chain that she kept threaded through the weapons when she heard it.

A sound pealing like the crack of thunder.

Except that it wasn’t thunder. She’d heard it often enough to know the difference between distant thunder and a gunshot.

There was no hesitation.

Grabbing the rifle closest to her, Carly hurried back to the front door. With no children in the house to worry about, she knew the weapon in her hand was fully loaded and ready to be discharged.

Carly threw open the door, then got her weapon ready, just in time to fire at whoever was firing a second shot at Hawk. Carly returned fire even before she realized that Hawk was down, obviously hit by that first shot she’d heard.

Rushing out to him, her heart pounding madly, Carly kept firing in the general direction of her quarry. She was intent on providing cover for herself and, more importantly, for Hawk, who she now realized was bleeding profusely from his left arm.

“Can you walk?” she cried, her eyes trained on the now-retreating back of the man who had followed Hawk here and tried to kill him. “Hawk, can you hear me?” she all but shouted when he didn’t answer her. She didn’t allow herself even to contemplate the reason why he wouldn’t answer her.

“Yeah,” Hawk managed to bite off, swallowing most of a string of curses. His arm felt as if it was on fire.

He should have seen that coming, Hawk angrily upbraided himself. But he’d been so preoccupied with the thought of seeing Carly, the thought of
being
with Carly, that he had let his guard slip. He hadn’t been as careful as he should have been. And worst of all, he hadn’t realized that he had a tail following him.

What a damn stupid rookie mistake, he thought angrily. He should have never allowed this to happen.

Carly was suddenly beside him, down on one knee as she kept shooting, providing their cover fire.

“Here!” she ordered, presenting her shoulder to him. “Lean on me.”

Before he realized what she was doing, Carly had her shoulder wedged under his. With one massive effort, she struggled to bring him up to his feet. He did what he could to make it easier, willing himself to be stronger.

Their shadows fused together to appear as one wide, awkward creature, Hawk and Carly made their way quickly into the house, never turning their back on the shooter, even though it looked as though he’d given up and was fleeing.

The moment she had Hawk inside the house, Carly quickly slammed the front door and bolted it. Only then, with her arm wrapped around his middle now, did she half walk, half drag Hawk over to the sofa.

“Here, lie down on the couch,” she ordered, all but dropping him there as she released the heavy weight of his frame from her aching shoulders. There was blood all over one side of her. “I’m checking the other windows and doors to make sure we don’t get any uninvited pests slithering in.”

As good as her word, Carly quickly and methodically checked each and every window, testing its integrity just to make sure it held. She also made sure that the back door was still secure.

“What was that all about?” she asked, raising her voice so that Hawk could hear her.

“Had to be one of Grayson’s men,” Hawk guessed. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his strength to him. The bullet was still lodged in his shoulder, and it had to come out. If they went to the nearest hospital in the next town, he might bleed out before they got there. And there was no way he could go to the Urgent Care Center in Cold Plains. He’d be dead before morning.

No, this was something that Carly was going to have to do. He wondered if she was up to it, or if, ultimately, she’d be too squeamish.

The woman who had come running to his rescue without a thought for her own safety had been magnificent—and not even remotely acquainted with the term
squeamish.

“I think he feels that I’m getting close to something, although damned if I know what,” he speculated. There was no other reason for the man to want to kill him, he thought. And he was sure that Grayson was behind this attack. As sure as he was that the sun was coming up tomorrow.

“He just doesn’t want you nosing around, asking questions. It undermines his authority and his hold on ‘his’ people,” Carly called back.

Satisfied that the windows were as secure as she could get them, Carly hurried back to the living room. It suddenly occurred to her, a second before she reached the living room, that by rushing to Hawk’s aid, she had blown her cover.

She couldn’t go back to the community center to try to see Mia. After she had just fired on one of his men, there was no doubt in her mind that Grayson would kill her if he saw her.

She didn’t regret it. In her heart, she knew that if she hadn’t been there, or if she’d hesitated and played it safe, Hawk would be lying dead in her front yard—instead of bleeding on her sofa.

Getting him patched up was all that mattered, she told herself as she hurried over to him.

“Did the bullet go through?” she asked even as she gently began to examine the wound herself. There was no through and through, which could only mean one thing, she thought, her stomach sinking as she heard Hawk answer her question.

“No,” he told her, “I think it’s still in there.” Looking up at her, he said, “You know what you have to do.”

Throw up comes to mind,
Carly thought, doing her best not to turn a very sickly shade of green.

Chapter 14

T
his was no time to think about herself, Carly silently chided. There were a number of different possibilities if the bullet was left where it was, none of them good. Besides, it wasn’t as if she’d never seen a wound up close before, or cleaned one for that matter. It had just never involved someone she loved the way she loved Hawk.

“You’re going to need some alcohol, bandages, a needle and thread—and your sharpest knife,” Hawk said from the kitchen chair she’d helped move him to, trying his best to focus on details and not the sharp pain. The amount of blood he’d lost was making him feel light-headed, and he needed to remain conscious so that he could help Carly. He really should go to a hospital but he didn’t trust anyone, and for this case, he had to fly under the radar.

She had already returned to the kitchen from the bathroom, her arms filled with the items he had just rattled off.

“I know,” she said, depositing them one by one on the kitchen table, lining them up in front of him. “I’ve done this before.”

He looked at her in surprise. “When?” he asked.

It wasn’t one of her fonder memories and up until now, she’d kept it to herself. “Dad and his friend used to go out hunting with enough alcohol in them to stock a small liquor store.”

That was after her father had decided that drinking and hunting with his buddies was a lot more fun than going out for target practice with a little girl, she remembered. There was a time when that realization had pinched her stomach and made a sadness descend over her. But that time had long since passed. Now whenever she thought of her late father or anything associated with him, she felt nothing. She was completely removed from that period of her life. It no longer mattered.

“One time his friends came back carrying Dad between them—not exactly an easy feat since they were all falling-down drunk. Seems that one of the guys had accidentally mistaken him for a deer when he was in the bushes, relieving himself, and shot Dad. There was no time to take him to the next town to see a doctor, so I was drafted.”

Hawk frowned. She couldn’t have been that old. “Why not one of the other men?” he asked.

That would have probably hastened her father’s demise. “Would you want someone trying to remove a bullet out of you when their hand was as steady as an earthquake?” To emphasize her point, she held out her hand and showed him how badly the men’s hands had shaken.

He saw the point. “Guess not.”

She went over to the sink and poured the rubbing alcohol liberally over the knife, disinfecting it. “Well, neither did my dad. He wasn’t
that
drunk. So I was elected.”

He wondered why she’d never told him about this before. What else hadn’t she told him about? At one point he would have sworn that they had told each other everything. Everything because they had so much in common and had come together, seeking solace and comfort in the fact that the other
knew
exactly what they were going through, having an irrational drunk as a father. Now he was no longer so sure.