Feeling limp and drained, Sloan rose slowly from the bed and carried his daughter to her cradle. After kissing her forehead, he turned and left the room. He made his way downstairs, through the darkness of the kitchen and out into the chill night, where the shadowed mountains stood sentinel.

Silence greeted him. Silence and healing.

Sloan took a shuddering breath. Something had eased inside him during his paroxysm of grief tonight. He’d felt a loosening, a melting. The black ice that had encased his heart since Doe’s death had cracked and fallen away.

He could let her go now. He could let his grief go. There was still—and would always be—a haunting sense of loss, but it was bearable now. Because of Heather.

He raised his gaze to the rugged mountains, as always feeling a sense of his own insignificance. The Rockies would always be there, strong and immutable. Unlike life. Life was so fleeting, over so suddenly….

Was that what Heather had pleaded with him to see? That he needed to accept the past and move on with his life? To make the most of what he had now, at this moment? With her?

A haunting memory, dark and sweet, swept over him, this time of Heather. Heather warming him, welcoming him into her body, filling the bleak void in his soul. Offering her love.

He hadn’t wanted her love. He’d been afraid to feel again, to let her too close. Afraid to care, to need too much, for fear of losing her like he had Doe. He’d tried to keep his heart safe from Heather by keeping his distance. But it hadn’t worked.

He had loved her for months and lied to himself about it. She’d made herself a vital part of his life, whether he’d wanted her to or not. After Doe’s murder, he had retreated deep inside himself to heal his wounds, indulging in an orgy of guilt and suffering. But Heather had slipped beneath his defenses, insinuated herself into his heart… making him breathe again, hurt again, feel again. Love again.

He loved her.

Sloan squeezed his eyes shut. Against his will, love had seeped into his heart and into his blood, into every nerve and pore of him. He hadn’t thought it possible for him to feel such emotion again. But Heather made him yearn for things he thought he’d lost forever.

An image of her cradling Janna in her arms, the golden woman and dark child, drifted into his mind. Heather. Warmth and light and healing.

Since she’d come into his life, the bleakness had lifted. Since her coming, he’d been alive.

But he’d driven her away.

She hadn’t deserved his cruelty. How could he have hurt her so? She was giving and caring, strong and brave, everything he’d tried to reject. Sloan bowed his head, his chest aching with a fresh pain.