Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (9 page)

Outside my chamber I heard the same sounds for hours and hours – the clanging of whatever the Minotaur was trying to make, his hooves scraping against the floor, and the manly grunts he gave whenever he lifted that massive hammer into the air to deliver another blow to his project.

After a while, the metallic pounding began to become part of the rhythm of my breathing and my heart beat, so much that when it finally stopped, and his hooves scraped off down the hall, I began to wish for it to come back. Or maybe it was just that when there was no hammering, there was no sound at all except me, alone, breathing, in a tiny cell deep under the ground.

As my eyes fell closed and I somehow dropped into a fitful sleep, my dreams were full of very strange images – of my childhood, of the other sisters at the Academy, that sort of thing. They were all so vivid and convincing that when I finally opened my eyes to a renewed pounding outside my door, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. I thought for a second that I was back at home, in my tiny little cloister, and the village blacksmith was pounding out horseshoes in the early morning mist.

Of course the blacksmith was a Minotaur when I opened my eyes, and the morning mist that always hung about the village was smoke and steam from the forge the beastman used to heat his implements. A shudder crept through me such that I’d never known. For some reason, now that I was no longer exhausted, I was able to think clearly enough to have a reasonably terrified response to what was happening to me.

“Aiden, you’re awake,” he said in his low, groaning, rumbling voice that resonated in my chest. “Are you hungry?”

“Hungry! Why are you always trying to feed me? Are you trying to fatten me up and eat me?” My stomach rumbled and I hoped that he didn’t notice.

He laughed again and said that it’d be quite a stunt to get fat off tiny bowls of oat gruel.

Laughing,
I thought.
What kind of a cruel beast keeps an innocent little girl locked up in a prison cell and then laughs at her?

His cruelty set me off. I shouted and he chuckled. I slammed my hands against the inside of my door and he laughed again, louder that time.

“You’re helpless, girl, why do you carry on?”

“Because I can’t do anything else!”

“Yes you can,” he said in his rumbling leather tone. “You can be quiet. You can accept what’s become of you. In time you may even enjoy what’s become of you. All the others have, once they tasted me.”

“Enjoy...you? How? What are you talking about?”

“Oh little Aiden. Why do you think you’re here? Why do you think the whole of your order exists? It’s to serve me, you know.”

“Serve you? I don’t...I don’t understand.”

The words I said only half-matched my thoughts. No matter how badly I wished I didn’t, I
did
understand what he meant, at least a little. Kept as virgins, not allowed to leave the academy grounds, not allowed to know a man, and then, in a shuddering moment, I remembered the words of the arch-Druid right before he pushed me into this awful beast’s lair. He said ‘he’ll be happy with you, Aiden. You’re ripe for the picking.’

I didn’t understand that at the time, but as I stumbled through the lair in the moments before this creature snapped me up, gave me that awful, forbidden pleasure with his fingers, and put such desire in me that I was ashamed before he threw me in that box...I understood then what he meant.

Just then, listening to him threaten me and knowing that he was right – I had no escape, I had no way to defend myself against his raw power and his incredible might and no doubt rage that dwelt just below the surface. All at once another rush of tingling and shame and desire and fear and lust crept up my belly. His burning eyes reappeared in front of my door and he drew a deep breath through his nostrils, lifted his head as though he was relishing my scent, and then scratched the door with hands that I’d only seen wrapped around a hammer’s haft.

“I’ve had...countless women, Aiden,” he said. “But none of them have satisfied me. None of them have given me what I need. Will you be different?”

“I...don’t know what you mean?” I said with trembling lips.

I drew nearer the door and put my palm flat against it, feeling the monster’s scratching go over the imperfections in the wood between us.

As he scratched and I winced, I felt something inexplicable and completely
wrong
well up inside me as the place between my legs began to get slick, just as it had when he snatched me up off the ground and threw me over his shoulder and dragged me to this horrible prison in the first place.

“What are you going to do to me?” I said with a tremble in my voice. “Are you going to kill me?”

“No. Not unless you fail.”

“Fail?”

“Don’t worry about that right now. I’ve been watching you while you slept. Watching the way you writhe around, and watching how your hands move when you don’t know they’re moving. I want you to touch yourself like you did in your dreams.”

“I...what?”

“You heard me. And now you’re going to show me why I want you.”

I had no idea what he meant. Not even the first clue. Being kept in a tiny cloister with a bunch of other virginal young women, we certainly talked about things like that, but as far as I know, none of us ever actually
did
any of it. The monks would have beaten us. The druids would have given us the lash if we’d dared do anything as salacious as...well, as what this monster demanded.

“You’ll do it now,” he growled low in his throat. “You’re in a cage, Aiden. This is your destiny. Everything you were ever born and raised to do is happening right now and you’ll make good on it. You’ll please me, or you’ll pay.”

Something snapped in my head.

“Pay? You’ll make me pay? What will you do? Hurt me? Hit me? Lock me in a closet to show me how naughty I’ve been? I’ll never be free again! What could you possibly do to me worse than that?”

I curled my fingers on the door where I’d been feeling in scratching fingernails and then punched it so hard I thought I bruised my knuckles.

“What can you do to me?”

His gentle scratching stopped. Bull hooves scraped harshly against the stone floor and right where I’d smacked my fist, he did the same except when I punched, it just made my hand hurt. When he did it the whole wall seemed to tremble under his might.

“You...will not...deny me!”

An incredibly loud banging sound which was probably the Bull’s shoulder slamming into the door sent me flying backwards, and almost made me fall, though I managed to grab ahold of a crack running down the inside of my cell and keep myself upright. Then again when I got my wits back, an incredibly strange and powerful feeling of forbidden desire crept between my legs and up my belly.

“Do what I say now, Aiden, or suffer!”

The bull man’s shouting set my heart, and my loins, into a burning, fiery spiral that started deep in my core and exploded outward. Tingles shot through every follicle, every nerve in my body whenever he slammed that massive shoulder against the door.

“Come and make me!” I said, not believing that I was taunting this monster even as I was doing it. “Come and take what you want, beast!”

Another indescribable thud made the stone walls of the underground prison shake.

“What did you say?” He roared, obviously enjoying the game.

I heard him back off and the slamming against my door stopped for a moment. A moment later an exploding, half-shout and half-roar, one of those grotesque hooves smashed in the door of my cell. His first kick dented it and bent the bolt lock so severely that several rivets came out of the wall. The next blow bashed the door in completely.

For a moment, it swung impotently, held up by only a part of a hinge, and then a moment before I finally saw the entire monster who would soon fill me, terrify me and thrill every shred of my body, he swung a meaty fist through the entrance, bashing the door off the hinges and sending it crashing to the floor like a limp, twisted, metal rag.

As he pulled himself through the open entry way, his two arms shot through the opening first, and then he seemed to crawl through, having to force his huge horns, thick neck, and tremendous shoulders into my tiny apartment with a great deal of effort. Once inside, he snorted heavily, sending a jet of hot air swirling around my throat and the intensely masculine smell he carried – of iron, leather, smoke, sweat and coal – stung my nostrils. His coal-eyes, black with a tiny prick of read in the very center, burned with lust that made my entire body yearn for his monstrous, un-godly, twisted touch.

The Bull stood three heads taller than myself, maybe more if he wasn’t stooped, and his arms were so wide apart at the shoulder that four or five of me would have fit in the space filled by his chest.

“You deny me? You question Theros?” He roared, shaking his head in the warm orange glow of the torches behind him.

“Theros? I thought you said you had no name.”

I’m not entirely sure why I thought impudence was the best idea at that exact moment, but it seemed to entertain Theros the Bull, if what I saw was a wry grin rather than a murderous snarl.

He stepped closer and clenched one of his enormous fists. It was enormous, easily big enough to wrap all the way around my throat, but it was human. In fact, the whole of him that wasn’t legs or head was human though so large in stature that he seemed to be less real and more of a living statue.

“She thinks she’s clever, this little one,” he said to himself and laughed. “She might be right. I like you Aiden. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to make you do exactly what I want you to do.”

The menace in his voice, the way his chest and his thickly-muscled biceps and forearms flexed and released each time he squeezed his fist, it all made my breath come just a little quicker, a little shorter. For a long moment he stood staring at me, those eyes burning holes into my soul and through my resolve, as though he was trying to figure out the next thing to do with naughty, petulant little Aiden.

His hand shot out like a demon from the mouth of Hell.

“Ah! You’re hurting me!” I cried as he clenched my golden hair in his giant hand and twisted it so that I fell to my knees. “It hurts, Theros! Why are you doing th – this to me?”

“To show you, little girl, that it is I who make demands. You are unimportant except for one thing. Just one thing. That’s all you are.”

His words told me I was meaningless, but the way his one hand twisted my head closer to his massive, chiseled stomach, and the way his other hand gently caressed the soft skin of my belly told me otherwise.

“What...mmm,” I groaned as he stroked me from my navel to my throat, “what is that one thing, mighty Theros?”

“You don’t know? You weren’t told?”

I shook my head and then took a gasp when one of his fingers curled around my most sensitive flesh and the slightly rough-hewn fabric of the gown he’d put me in slid across my nipple, sending a chill all the way up my chin.

Theros hooked his finger in the collar of my gown, and gave it a little tug that split the first seam and made me feel more than a little modest. I’d never been naked in front of...well, in front of anyone before, save my mother, and the urgency with which he yanked on me and all the excitement and everything else had me more than a little nervous already. When he gave it another pull and a split crept down to my waist, freeing my breasts to his groping hands, a mixture of utter terror, absolute shame, and the most guilty, delicious pleasure I could imagine welled up inside me.

“You really don’t know, little Aiden, why you’ve been brought here at just this time? You’ve not a clue?”

As he spoke, the warmth creeping out of my virgin sex and down the insides of my thighs reminded me that my moons were upon me, or would be within a few days. But then again though I’d always wanted to cradle a little baby and have a husband, I thought that would never happen, not with being a vestal virgin and all. Although, the arch-Druid did tend to spend a great deal of time with me apart from the other women, and he gave me a number of fine shawls.

The burning between my thighs, the wetness sliding out of my body and soaking through the underclothes he’d wrapped about me, I didn’t know what to make of it all except that whenever Theros twisted my hair, it had stopped
just
hurting and had begun to feel very, very, good.

“Mmm,” he groaned as he sniffed the air. “I smell your lust again, little Aiden. You’re ready for me, I can tell. You’re ready to feel what it’s like to have me inside you, to have me put my...my seed inside your belly.”

“Your seed? You mean to...”

“Yes...”

His hand slid around my waist underneath the shredded dress, and he cupped my aching breast in one of his tremendous, hot, callused palms, in a gentle squeeze that sent a shiver up my neck.

“Will...will it hurt?”

He threw his head back, seized with a fit of laughter, and then lifted me off the ground, and I began to kick, to thrash my legs back and forth, scraping my toes against the hard stone floor as he drove me backwards until I felt the wall behind me.

“Hurt?” He said, lowering his face to my neck and deeply inhaling my scent. “Oh will it ever hurt. That’s what you want though, isn’t it? I see the way you’re curling your fingers around mine, I can smell your sex in the air. You want me to hurt you, don’t you little Aiden? You’ve wanted a man to ravish you, to do this very thing to you for most of your life, haven’t you? Just been too afraid? You’ve got no choice now. That should make it easier.”

He had the right of it, though I’d never admit to such lascivious feelings, not in a million years. Still, as he squeezed and pulled on me, as his fingers curled around my stiff, sore, pink little nib, I felt my body ache for him in a way I’d never known before. The wetness between my legs making me acutely ashamed, but as he said, I had very little choice in the matter, and yes, it did make it all much easier to know it wasn’t my choice, no matter how badly I wanted it.

Curious, I stretched my hand down to see if Theros had the same thing I’d once seen twitching in the arch-Druid’s robes when he watched me braid sister Hechen’s hair after I’d just left a bath. The air that night was cold, and my nipples had stiffened against my sateen clothing, unbeknownst to me. He fixed his eyes on them, and when I looked over at him when I was surprised by his breathing, he quickly looked away and turned his body, but not before I noticed the hardness underneath his robe.