Special Agent's Perfect Cover Read Free Page A

didn’t? You’re always so busy working, you don’t have time to notice anything. You certainly don’t have any time for me. Not like Samuel does,” she’d added proudly, with the air of one who had been singled out and smiled down upon by some higher power.
    The accusation had stung, especially since the only reason she had been working so hard was to provide for Mia in the first place. But the sudden realization that while she’d been busy trying to make a life for them, trying to save money so that they could finally get away from here, her sister had been brainwashed.
    There was no other term for it. What Samuel Grayson did, with his silver tongue, his charm and his exceedingly handsome face was pull people into his growing circle of followers. Pull them in and mesmerize them with rhetoric. Make them believe that whatever he suggested they do was really their idea in the first place.
    Why else would Mia believe that she was actually in love with a man who was old enough to be her father. Older. Brice Carrington was as bland as a bowl of unsalted, white rice. He was also, in the hierarchy of things, currently very high up in Samuel Grayson’s social structure.
    Maybe Brice represented the father they’d never really had, Carly guessed. Or maybe, since their dad was dead, Mia was looking for someone to serve as a substitute?
    In any case, if Mia was supposed to marry Brice Carrington, it was because the match suited Grayson’s grand plan.
    The very thought of Grayson made her angry. But at the moment, it was an anger that had no suitable outlet. She couldn’t just go railing against the man as if she was some kind of a lunatic. For one thing, most of the people who still lived in town thought Samuel Grayson was nothing short of the Second Coming.
    Somehow, in the past five years, while no one was paying attention, Samuel Grayson and a few of his handpicked associates had managed to buy up all the property in Cold Plains. At first, moving stealthily but always steadily, he’d wound up arranging everything up to and possibly including the rising and setting of the sun to suit his own specifications and purposes.
    These days, it seemed as if nothing took place in Cold Plains without his say-so or close scrutiny. He had eyes and ears everywhere. Anyone who opposed him was either asked to leave or, and this seemed to be more and more the case, they just disappeared.
    At first glance, it appeared as if the man had done a great deal for the town. Old buildings had been renovated, and new buildings had gone up, as well. There was now a new town hall, a brand-new school, which he oversaw and for which he only hired teachers who were devoted to his ideology. And most important of all, he’d built a bright, spanking, brand-new church, one he professed was concerned strictly with the well-being of its parishioners’ souls—and that, he had not been shy about saying, was the purview of the leader of the flock: Grayson himself.
    To a stranger from the outside, it looked like a pretty little, idyllic town.
    To her, Cold Plains had become a town filled with puppets—and Samuel Grayson was the smiling, grand puppeteer. A puppeteer whose every dictate was slavishly followed. His call for modesty had all the women who belonged to his sect wearing dresses that would have been more at home on the bodies of performers reenacting the late 1950s.
    Maybe her skepticism was because she’d grown up listening to her late father’s promises, none of which he’d ever kept. Promises that, for the most part, he didn’t even recall making once a little time had gone by.
    Whatever the reason, she didn’t trust Samuel Grayson any further than she could throw him. And he was a large, powerful-looking man.
    Her sense of survival was urgently prompting her to leave before something went wrong—before she couldn’t leave.
    But no matter what she felt about Cold Plains’s transformation and no matter what her sense of survival dictated, she