she breathed.He turned and she shuffled back from the violence she saw in his haunted gaze. He stopped, disoriented, and peered at her, as though trying to place her. “Mercy?”“Yes. It’s me, Hart.”“God.” He laughed and her heart pitched at the bitter sound. He lifted his hand, groping for the mantel and, once finding it, leaning heavily forward. She stared at his naked back licked by the firelight, so broad and masculine and oddly vulnerable.“Go away.” His voice was muffled, strained. He made no move to face her.She couldn’t. Nothing could have made her leave him, could make her abandon him to whatever tormented him.“Hart, why are those blankets on the floor?” There were some terrible things associated with those bolts of wool tangled in the shadows.“Go away!”“No,” she said, apprehension making her voice quiver. His dangerousness—so vaunted, so valuable, so prized by her father, by everyone who’d used him—had never been more apparent. Some horrible inner tension coiled his body into an unnatural rigidity.
