Barbarian's Touch

Lila wakes up on Not-Hoth with her cochlear implants gone, unable to hear, surrounded by blue-skinned, horned aliens she's sure are monsters. When one of them decides she's his and drags her off, she escapes — only to find herself more lost and more vulnerable than before, alone in a hostile ice-planet wilderness.

Rokan, a fierce and unusually patient hunter, finds her and takes her under his protection. Unable to speak her language, he learns to sign to her instead, and as they survive the cold and the danger together, Lila starts to trust him — and to want him. What she can't work out is whether that pull is real feeling or just her body answering an alien mating resonance neither of them asked for.

Book seven of Ruby Dixon's long-running Ice Planet Barbarians series, Barbarian's Touch pairs a disabled heroine with a devoted alien hero in a fast-moving, explicit sci-fi romance built on rescue, trust, and touch as its own kind of language.