Does It Hurt?

**Author:** H.D. Carlton

**Estimated Reading Time:** 38 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A woman who has spent six years running from an unbearable past collides with a man who has spent his entire life guarding himself against love. Together, on an island ruled by a monster, they discover that the only way out is through each other.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want their romance dark, their danger real, and their redemption hard-won. This is a story about two damaged people who find in each other the one thing they never expected: a reason to stop running.

Sawyer Bennett has not used her real name in six years. She has not slept in the same bed twice in six years. She has not allowed herself to be known by another human being in six years. What she has done is survive, and survival has required her to become someone she barely recognizes. She steals identities the way other people steal hotel soaps, moving through men's wallets and men's lives with practiced efficiency, leaving before dawn and never looking back. Then she meets Enzo Vitale. He is a great white shark researcher working off the coast of Australia, a man who has spent so long studying predators that he has become fluent in their language. He is also furious, guarded, and carrying wounds of his own that have never been allowed to heal. When Sawyer steals from him, she makes the worst mistake of her fugitive life. Enzo does not call the police. He does not cancel the card. He starts hunting her himself. What follows is a story that begins as a cat-and-mouse game and becomes something far more dangerous: a forced proximity on a remote island with a lighthouse keeper who is not what he seems, a captive who has been waiting to be found, and two people who must decide whether the walls they have built around themselves are worth keeping. H.D. Carlton writes dark romance the way other authors write psychological thrillers, with an unflinching eye for the places where desire and danger overlap. Her characters do not fall in love despite their damage. They fall in love through it, recognizing in each other the same fractures they have spent years trying to hide. The tone of this novel is suffocating in the best possible way. The atmosphere is salt spray and blood, moonlight on black water, the creak of old wood and the drag of chains. Carlton does not flinch from the darkness, and she does not offer easy redemption. What she offers instead is something rarer: the possibility that two people who have been told they are unlovable might prove everyone wrong. The…