Free The Lone Warrior by Denise Rossetti

the soft night air, and the faintest ripple of response traveled over the sensitive skin of his scrotum, like the slow, gelid swirl of water trapped under ice. Walker blinked, genuinely astonished.
    Still human after all. Father’s balls, who’d have thought it? He hadn’t been with a woman in . . . How long? He frowned, trying to recall. More than a year.
    That part of him, the sexual part, the lonely youth who craved warmth and connection, had closed down, slowly but inexorably, over the years of his vengeance. He gave a wry smile in the dark. Too fastidious for his own good, because quick fumbles in the dark left him cold. On the other hand, lengthy entanglements were something he couldn’t afford.
    It was easier—cleaner—to remain his own contained, enigmatic self. If it got too bad, he had his own hand.
    Another few moments of communing with nature and the assassin rose with a sigh, closing the door in the dog’s hopeful face.
    Walker stretched, feeling joints pop and muscles sing. Thanks be to the Ancestors for the discipline of the nea-kata that kept him supple and balanced, mentally and physically. Every morning at dawn, he practiced, flowing from one movement to the next, making each element as close to perfect as possible for a mere mortal, his homage to the Ancestors.
    Stripped to a loin pouch, he’d offer all that he was, the morning breeze off the water caressing his sweaty skin, the lush, short grass cool under his bare soles, the only spectators the small hopping birds. These last few days, of course, he could add the assassin to his audience, peering from behind the kitchen door, where she thought he couldn’t see her.
    Idly, he wondered what she made of it and whether she’d be there again on the morrow. She hadn’t missed a day in a week so far. Then he decided he didn’t care and went in to bed.

    Though her bones ached with tiredness, Mehcredi slept badly, so anxious she’d miss him it seemed she woke every hour. It was still dark when she dragged herself down to the kitchen, but that didn’t matter, she’d come to know the place like the back of her hand. Deftly, she raked over the coals in the big wood-fired stove that was Serafina’s pride and joy, and put on a kettle for a tisane.
    Walker arrived early. How she knew he was there, she wasn’t sure, only that a ghostly sensation prickled over her skin and gave her goose bumps. Her grip tightened on the stoneware cup, warm and rough against her palms. Creeping to the door, she eased it open a crack.
    Bathed in the cool gray light of dawn, the swordmaster had his back to her, removing his shirt. Soundlessly, Mehcredi let out a long breath. Light and shadow flirted with the hollows and planes of his body, pooling in the smooth indents that paralleled the groove of his spine, gleaming across the strong horizontal bone structure that gave his shoulders their width. The male body wasn’t new to her—the baron’s men had no use for modesty. When they bathed, which wasn’t an especially frequent occurrence, they did so in the deep tarn above the keep. There they splashed and wrestled in the freezing water like frisky warhounds, obscenities echoing back and forth in the chill mountain air.
    She’d seen plenty of male flesh, but by the Sister, she’d never seen skin like Walker’s, bronze satin sliding sweetly over long strong bones and shapely swells of muscle. The keep guards were hairy, some of them as thickly rugged on the back as the front. But though she stared at the swordmaster until her eyes ached, all she could see was a mouthwatering expanse of smooth skin, his only blemishes four wicked scars—she’d counted. For some insane reason, they made her want to weep. The worst of them was a set of five parallel gouges curving over his left hip, disappearing under the waistband of his trews. They looked like claw marks.
    Mehcredi’s fingers tightened on the cup. What had hurt him so badly? A direwolf? A tygre? Had he cried out in