Free Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) by Francis Ashe Page B

clothes that I don’t remember at all. And then here I am, in this tiny cage, and you’re what – I mean who you are. And then I –”
    “Enough,” he cut me off with that quiet, menace-filled voice. “I can only take so much. As for your clothes, you were...wet. Sweat and the water from the air. I changed you into something someone else left.”
    “Someone else?”
    He grunted.
    “I wanted you dry.”
    “You wanted me dry? Why is that? To keep me alive longer before you killed me? Before you ripped me in half or whatever it is you’re going to do?” My anger surprised even me. I put a hand to my chest to collect myself before I did something to enrage the great beast.
    “No,” he said. “Why do you keep talking about my eating you? You just looked...cold. Now, look on me.”
    I don’t know why but learning that he changed me out of some sort of kindness put me at ease, at least a bit. I decided not to dwell on where it had come from. But even as my nerves relaxed slightly, I sensed tension in the bull-man’s voice.
    “What are...you?” I asked again, with the hope that he had relaxed enough to answer, but he only grunted in response.
    “Sleep,” he said.
    His voice was so soft and gentle that without thinking about what I was doing, I lifted my eyes and saw the man speaking to me for the first time. His rock-solid, unclothed stomach was topped by a similarly powerful chest, and great sloping shoulders. The muscles on either side of his head were so large they seemed to go all the way to his ears – or what should have been ears. Instead, he had a thick black jaw, covered in hard hair.
    I looked away again when I saw that instead of a mouth he had a terrible snout, and that all of my nightmares were real. The stories the elders told us about the horror of the labyrinth, they were all true. His mighty bull’s head, the huge gold door-knocker sized ring through his nostrils, it was all so awful, almost too horrible to look upon without trembling.
    I have no clue why, but my first inclination was to stick my arm between the slats of my door and try to touch him as though that would either make the whole thing more real, or convince me that I was dreaming.
    He moved closer and put his head near my fingertips, letting me get a feel of his inhuman fur. The smell emanating from the beast was a sort of musk that filled me with warmth as I breathed it in and gave me the most peculiar feeling in my belly. I should have been terrified – moments before I was terrified – but something had made me relax enough that fear was only a distant thought rather than the most powerful of my emotions.
    “Do...do you have a name?” I asked him.
    The Minotaur’s musk filled my lungs and his hot breath caressed my neck and my shoulders, making goose prickles rise all over where it went. After drawing a deep breath, he simply said that no, he didn’t.
    “What should I call you?”
    “You don’t need to call me anything,” he said. “You are mine . I own you. You do not address me.”
    I gulped and shut my mouth, not wanting to irritate him. Though, I knew that irritated or not, I had absolutely no power at all to defend myself or get away, and that somehow made the whole thing more exciting to me.
    The monster turned his back to me again and went to fooling with something over a fire.
    “Are you hungry?”
    “I...me?”
    “There is no one else here that I know of.”
    “I suppose,” I said, more to relieve the pressure of silence more than anything. In truth I couldn’t have eaten if he’d produced the sweetest cakes I’d ever laid eyes upon, so strange and wild were my feelings.
    “Here,” he said, and a sound of metal grinding on metal filled my ears. A bowl slid through a slat at the bottom of my door.
    “Th – thank you,” I said.
    “You should eat, for you will need the strength.”
    “For what? Are we going somewhere?”
    A snort and a laugh came next. “No,” he said, “but you’ll need the