Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (7 page)

His breath moved down my neck, warm now that I was so close to him, and from somewhere he produced a cloth sack, slipped it over my head and tightened the drawstring around my neck just enough to keep it in place. My hands were quickly bound with a tightly tied rope that bit my flesh, burning sweetly.

“Wh – what are you?” I said as his breath again caressed my prickling flesh and a sensation that I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, admit, washed down my belly, over my shoulders and down my back.

His response was another short laugh, and then a snort. I felt his face – or his snout – draw near me, the cool damp of his nose on my cheek. At first I thought he must just be a giant, as tall as he stood, but when I felt his bovine nose, I knew all the terrible stories I’d heard as a young girl and as a vestal virgin in training were true. I was in the clutches of the awful beast who made these underground tunnels his home.

He yanked me backwards again, against his muscled stomach that rumbled with another laugh. Through the clinging fabric, I felt something else, something hard and long and thick and sinful, stretching from near my knee to where my legs met.

“Mmm,” the beast groaned. He slid one of his fingers across my trembling lips that rubbed against the rough hood he’d thrown over me. I fought and lost a battle to keep my jaw from shaking in terror, and then I lost another one to keep my nipples from straining and aching when his hand brushed between them and his fingers curled on my belly.

Whatever this creature was, he had muscles so large and so powerful that I knew I’d never seen their equal. And if that weren’t enough to chill me to the bone, there was also the swelling thickness that I felt on the inside of my legs, moving between them as he pushed my thighs apart.

“Why are you doing this?” I said, somehow, through my chattering teeth.

He only stroked his sinful girth harder between my legs. As ashamed as I was, and as much as I hated to admit my feelings, the way he held me against his body and how his...cock...was hardening against my untouched sex made a terrible, pleasing heat bubble up from inside.

“Shh,” he whispered gently as he ran his hand down my leg to the knee and then back up underneath my clinging tunic.

The tips of his fingers slid along his warm length and along my gentlest, softest parts. He sniffed my hair again, and withdrew, leaving me with a sinful desire to push myself on him and urge him to continue. Shaking my head cleared the thoughts, though somewhere deep down, I wanted nothing more than for him to touch me again.

A moment later, the strange, bizarrely wonderful moment that passed between us ended with his hoisting me off my feet. With a grunt, the beast slammed me down onto his rounded, muscular shoulder and on my side I felt something that couldn’t be real. Hard, stiff hair poked through my tunic.

As he walked, or rather clomped along the hall, every step drove more air out of my lungs and pushed me a step closer to unconsciousness. Stone on the ceiling and on the walls scraped my back, scratched my heels, as we went. The passage seemed to narrow until finally I felt myself rolling off him.

“What’s happening?” I said. “What are you doing with me?”

He grunted again as he settled me on the floor and something creaked into place. A door, I thought, that he was using to close me into some kind of a cell.

“Wait...here.” His voice was deep, hard and cold. At first I thought that I must have dreamed the words, but then he let another of his soft, taunting chuckles slip out before he snorted and slid a bar into place. Hearing a heavy clunk, and the sound of a chain being pulled through a latch, I went limp, fell into a heap and gave myself up to a fit of panic that lasted until I’d tired myself so thoroughly that my consciousness gave out.

Overwhelmed with terror, I scooted backwards along the floor, my torn clothes getting caught underneath me and tearing more and more the further I went until my back hit the wall. Outside there was a vague scraping sound, as though my captor was preparing something, and I hoped against hope I wasn’t about to be shackled to the wall and killed.

Drawing my knees to my chest, I clutched myself and waited for whatever awful fate beheld me. I sat there, shaking and weeping for so long that I thought the monster – for I was sure that whatever he was, he must be terrible – had forgotten me.

In the utter darkness, lost in my own thoughts, and completely helpless, when I first heard those scraping sounds coming toward my little cell, I once again thought it was my imagination. More than that, I somehow convinced myself that the whole ordeal was an awful dream. When the iron bar slid through the door and the beast took a deep breath as he stepped in, there was no mistaking reality.

Before I knew what was happening, a hard, callused hand closed around my biceps. The fingers were so big that just the one hand wrapped all the way around the top of my arm. He yanked me to my feet and pulled another deep breath into his lungs. A slow, trickling kind of exhale followed, and then he shuddered out loud, his voice rattling in his chest.

“You...are ready, aren’t you?” He said.

“Ready? I...”

“Quiet, girl. Just stay quiet. Don’t make a sound.”

His fingers slid down my side, his palm so warm against my flesh that it sent a little wave of energy creeping up my back. I held my breath tight in my chest, and though I wanted to reach out and feel the arm that was raising such awful desires in my belly, I fought myself to stop.

Along my spine, hot air crept from the monster’s nose and I smelled the monster’s aroma, hard and masculine and leathery.

With a quick motion, he moved his prying fingertips to my belly and then ran them lower and lower until he touched the top of the little mound of hair at the top of my cleft. I sucked a breath and then realized I was gasping not out of fear, but out of pleasure that I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel. The sin I was committing by not fighting the helpless battle gave me such a decadent thrill that I cursed myself.

“Why do you fight your nature so, girl? You were born for me. You were born for a powerful creature such as myself to take and protect. Why do you fight me?”

“I’m...I’m not fighting,” I whispered.

“You’ve squeezed your legs together and covered your breasts with your elbows.”

His voice was disarmingly soft, but I could hear the menace behind it, and anyway, he had just flung me over his shoulder and thrown me into a cage. Trusting this beast wasn’t the first thing in my mind. To my shame though, he
was
right. I couldn’t deny the way I felt heat creeping out of my belly and down my thighs in wet little droplets.

The beast shifted his stance and I felt the beginning of a tightly muscled thigh that was strangely covered in the same sort of hair I felt on his neck pushing first on the side of my leg and I unconsciously moved so that I was splayed on either side of his knee.

“She gives in,” he groaned. “She fights herself but still she gives in. What a wonderful and strange creature I’ve been given. And so beautiful.”

He brushed my hair back behind my ear with a flat-nailed fingertip and his rough, dry nose – or snout or whatever it was – stroked gently against my neck right behind my ear shooting a lick of flaming desire down my body.

Every time I’d ever felt such desires before, I had gotten a shameful red flush that showed anyone looking what sort of awful thing I was considering, and this time was certainly no different. The prickling heat that I’d gotten used to over the years cascaded down my collarbones, following the line between my breasts, all the way to the sweetly scented hair between my legs. The arch-Druid had insisted that I perfume myself there with rose oil, saying that it would do me well.

When my heat had crept all the way down, the beast let out a slow, deep, rumbling groan and I knew that something about me was pleasing to him.

“You intoxicate me,” he said under his breath. “From your scent to your hair to the way you shamelessly move your hips against my leg.”

That was the first time I realized I was doing such a naughty thing, but I couldn’t stop myself. Something about the tightness I felt in my belly was thrilling. The rough, slick, hard hair bit into me when I stroked myself up him and then was wonderfully smooth and silken on the way down. It sent forbidden chills up my chin, prickling my nipples and making the flesh at the base of my scalp tighten.

A hand slid up my belly and cupped one of my breasts, over top of my torn tunic, but so warm that the heat burned through and into my chest. I squeezed the muscles between my legs for some reason, probably trying to deny myself the pleasure I felt, or at least take my mind away from it so that maybe I’d stop. All it did was make the sensation even more intense.

Only moments later, his soft massaging at my breast stopped, and the beast pushed me against the wall with his knee, grinding it hard between my thighs as he sniffed the air and said how sweet and bewitching the smell of my ready sex was in the air. Just the mention of that word
sex
made me feel ashamed and crippled with guilt all over again.

I was told from the time I was very young that any amount of pleasuring myself, or lascivious giving of myself to a man or even to a woman would draw me further from nature, and from my purpose as a Vestal Virgin, so I had never chanced it. Often as a child I had stroked myself accidentally against something, or felt a hitch in my stomach when some rough-spun cloth rubbed me in a certain way, but always I stopped before anything happened after the initial surge of pleasure.

That time though I was out of control. I couldn’t stop the movement of my hips, though even if I had, the monster would certainly have just continued to force me up and down his massive thigh with the hands he then had on my hips, squeezing me and matching my motions with his own strength.

Soon I felt him lift me off my feet and effortlessly seat me upon his mighty leg. So high off the ground I was that only the barest tips of my toes touched the stone below, but I tried to push myself against him even still.

“She gives herself to pleasure,” he said in his leather voice. “She cannot stop herself, hm? In the air, her scent is so sultry, so seductive and delicious that I wish to take her, here and now but I must not. How does that make you feel, girl? Do you want me to deflower you? Force myself inside you?”

I felt myself nodding even though my mouth whispered ‘no’ as I grinded the sweet ache between my legs up and down him. So deeply did I burn for him that if he had turned me around then and slammed himself into my body...
into my sex...
that I knew I wouldn’t even try to stop him, as defenseless and helpless as I actually was.

“What was that? Do not strain to make me hear. You want me, don’t you? I feel your wet creeping down my leg. I know your body aches for me. I know that your womb hungers for me, for my seed.”

He squeezed my hips, so tight his hands felt like iron, bruising my soft skin, as he jerked my entire weight up and down his thigh. I finally gave into my curiosity and slid my hands along his muscled chest and wrapped my arms as far around his middle as I could, though he was so wide that I couldn’t loop them all the way. Anchoring myself like that, I was able to pump my hips harder and faster against him, as the forbidden thrill tightened my muscles and made my nipples so hard and sensitive that each stroke sent chills shooting around and through me as they bounced underneath my tunic.

“I can’t...no, no, no,” I cried out in a voice that I muffled by falling forward and closing my mouth on his powerful chest in a kiss that I couldn’t stop myself from sucking. “No, please, I’m a Vestal virgin! I’ll lose everything if you couple with me.”

A soft laugh caressed my ears as he held me tighter and drove his knee up between my legs, allowing me to force myself up and down on him at my pleasure. And oh the pleasure was sweet. I felt my chest tighten and the breath in me came in harder, shorter bursts.

“You’re beautiful in this light,” he said. “I can imagine what you look like under that hood, with your face drawn up and confused by what you feel. You’ve never done anything like this before have you? Your innocence shows with how eagerly you drag yourself upon me.”

I shook my head and couldn’t help but let a desperate moan escape my lips.

“I can’t...no, I want to stop but it feels so good, it’s like my body is moving on its own.”

“Even if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t let you stop,” he said.

Somehow, the assurance that I had no particular choice in the matter not only made me relax a little, it made the entire sensation between my legs burn ever hotter. Of all the things that I was, helpless and defenseless were never words that described me. Though ever since I could remember, I’d always had feelings in the back of my mind as though I wanted someone to take charge of me and make me do whatever they wanted of me.

My desire to be controlled and enthralled was one thing, but my desire to have it be done in just this way was another altogether. What was happening to my body, to my very spirit, was wrong in every way I’d ever learned. All of my traditions, all of my taboos and the things I’d been warned against, they were all dripping out of me and breaking against this beast’s muscled, delicious thigh.

“She cannot control herself anymore,” he whispered, clutching my body against him as I started to quake. “Let yourself lose control, girl. The next time this happens, you’ll be shaking and quivering with my cock inside you, with my seed soaking your womb and catching hold of you. The next time this happens, I’ll be forcing you into it, and making you scream out for me to keep fucking you, to keep driving my rod inside your aching sex and fill you with my juice. Nothing in the world, will you want, more than you will want to hold my baby in your belly.”

The words he spoke made very little sense as I gripped his muscled sides, digging my fingernails into his skin, and making him groan as my body convulsed against him. A gush of heat pushed out of my sex as I desperately bucked my hips against him, drew a quick breath and held it in my chest. My muscles all tensed at once, and then as he finally allowed me to stroke back down his thigh with the little button at the top of my sex throbbing and aching from the abuse I’d given it, I couldn’t help but cry out ‘please-yes-yes-yes-take me-please!’ behind my hood.