Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (15 page)

“Wait a minute. If I can make fists...” She balled them up and twisted. That time, there was no pain, only rotation in the cuffs. “Okay, if I squeeze my thumb, here, then...”

Remembering a trick that Derik taught her as a little girl about how to fish jewelry out of grates, she flattened her hand, thumbs against palms, and fanned out her fingers.

She tugged. At first her hands turned freely and slipped rotated in the cuffs.

After another slight adjustment, she was able to move them just a little more.

“Alright, now if I can just-” She gritted her teeth hard and twisted.

“Ah!” Her knuckles caught against the rough metal. Adria slipped her lip between her teeth, bit down and pulled as hard as she could.

“Unnng!” A strain, a grunt, and five skinned knuckles later, she had managed to pull herself free. She stood, wrung her hands, and stumbled over her own feet, hitting the ground with a thump.
Legs more asleep than I thought? Or just the last of the poison running its course?

Slowly, then, she pushed to her feet and leaned against the wall. Almost on cue, the single torch, that she didn’t realize was so close to flickering out, flickered out, and Adria found herself in utter, complete darkness. 

“Of course it goes out.” Adria kicked the wall. “Of course it does.”

She paced the cell for a moment, tracing out her enclosure with one hand on the wall.

“It’s square. There’s that.” She said. “Fifteen paces on the long sides, five across. But where’s the door? How did I get in here?”

Off in the distance, somewhere beyond the walls, she heard the same scratching sound from before. Adria’s mind immediately returned to the horrific figure holding aloft the dead hero from the vault. Outside, that ominous scraping noise continued. Up and down, back and forth. She strained, but it took quite a while before she was able to orientate herself enough in the pitch blackness to figure out from which direction the sound came.

“If the sound – whatever it is – comes from here the loudest, this must be...” Knocking around the entire cell, the difference in tone was almost imperceptible, but finally she found a place where the sound was less thick, maybe even hollow on the other side. “Well, what can it hurt to try?”

Putting her back against the stone and digging her heels in hard, she pushed. It may as well have been a cave wall for how much it moved. She dug in and shoved again, gritting her teeth and pushing with all her might.

“Woops!” Adria yelped as her feet shot out from under her, and she crashed down hard on her tailbone.

She pushed herself off the dirt and gritted her teeth. “One more try Adria, one more try. This thing’s gonna move, it just has to.”

Adria gasped when her second shove worked far better than she thought. The stone practically flew backwards, out of the wall and away from her back. Through empty space, she fell. Tumbling through the gaping hole in her little chamber, and into a hallway, Adria blinked as a cloud of dust stung her eyes.

She stood, stumbled, and tripped again, falling forward this time.

That time though, something caught her - something very large, and very, very strong.

***

N
o flames, but plenty of hot, sultry breath slipped across Adria’s bare neck. Inhumanly large hands supporter her, one under each arm. Fingers squeezed her and hauled the princess back to her feet whereupon she immediately collapsed backwards, against the stone.

“What is this? Where am I?” She cried out and started to open her eyes, but changed her mind and clamped them shut, tears squeezing out of each and down her filthy cheeks.

“Mmmf.”

Snort
.

Trembling, she reached out to touch whatever had caught her. She thought that a better idea than opening her eyes. When her shaking hands met solid muscle, Adria quailed and began to fall again, but again, he caught her. And snorted.

She heard a hiss, and then felt cool descend on her cheek where a moment earlier, the torch had warmed. Another jet of breath caressed her, and one of the powerful hands under her arms moved around to her back, trailing over her tunic down her spine until it settled just above her waist. His fingers, broad and thick, curled against her and made Adria draw a quick breath.

Her fingers bounced up the man’s muscle-bound chest, and she noticed that his hair began to get stiffer and coarser the further she went. What felt like stiff, hard, fur-like hair rasped under her fingers, Adria began to remember her ridiculous nightmare and those awful frescoes from the labyrinth’s entry hall.

I just have to know. I just have to see whatever he is. There’s no way – just no way – it’s as bad as I’m imagining. Probably just a beard.

Something brushed against her shoulder where the cloth fell away. It was a little wet, and a bit cool. Like a dog’s nose, but far larger.

Adria grimaced when he sniffed. Slow and deep, he inhaled her scent, touched his nose to her neck, and smelled again. The fingers on her spine moved around her waist and a thick, hard forearm pulled her forward a few inches.

Her hands slipped over the tops of his shoulders. As soon as her fingertips brushed against the massive slope of his trapezius, she stopped cold.

“What are you?”

If this thing wanted me dead, I’d already be a stain on the wall. There must be something else.

Up the sides of the creature’s mighty face and then along what seemed to be a snout, she moved her hands. He shifted, tugging her against his sweat-covered chest. She opened her eyes half-way, but saw only darkness. It was broken by the vaguest of orange flickers from a fire too far away to do much good.

“Where am I? I can’t see anyth-”

“N-no.” The creature said. His voice was deep, but crackled, like his speech was out of practice. “Do... do not look. Only dark.” Massive thumbs brushed across her eyelids.”

“You can speak,” she said, “so you must be a man. Right? Right?”

No answer. Just breathing, ragged and labored.

She ran her hands down the ridged muscles along the sides of his body and to his hips where she felt the same sort of odd hair from his shoulders and neck.

Warmth that Adria didn’t understand crept down her chest and she felt her flesh prickle to life as, again, the beast exhaled. He allowed her, for a few moments longer, to feel his body, to explore him with her hands.

“I- I don’t understand,” Adria stammered, “I’ve never seen anyone like you. Why won’t you talk?”

He just breathed.

“What is it? Why won’t you talk? Why aren’t you moving? Where am I and what did I do to be put in some tiny stone box in the back end of some weird cave? What are you? Why why why why?” Adria first tried to pull the monster’s hair, but when her fingers just slipped off she balled up her fists and battered his chest.

She pounded and pounded, her blows bouncing off the monster’s barrel-like chest. As her fists impotently the monster snorted again and her punches slowed, finally stopping altogether. Adria collapsed against the beast, not sure what else to do but to weep.

For a moment he allowed the tiny, shaking creature to quiver against him. Soundlessly, he shifted his weight and tried to make sense of everything happening. Even though he could see in the dimmest light, back this far in the labyrinth, even his eyes had trouble. Scent though, was something with which the ancient abomination had no problem.

He sniffed the air and moved his hands to the back of the tiny creature huddled against him. His embrace calmed her, somewhat, and caused her to stop trembling, and even better, caused her noise to cease.

“Ka... Kathos.”

“What?” She sniffed and wiped her nose across the sleeve of her tunic. “What did you say?”

Kathos’s nose twitched. Something about the tiny human’s voice irritated him. But she had a sweet face, and her scent was pleasant. It had been, he thought, a very long time since anyone came into his labyrinth and did much of anything but scream and run.

“Kathos. Me – ah I am.” He snorted and shook his head, although she only knew that by the shaking of his mane against her face. “Kathos is I. Am.” Every word burned his throat.

“It... I have not spoken. In, ah, a time. Very long.”

Adria’s mouth dropped open.

“I wish I could see. Being in the dark like this, I can’t really... What is this place?”

“All. I know – home.”

“You’ve never been out of this dungeon? How do you know where you are? It’s just a big maze, isn’t it?”

Adria’s hands moved back up Kathos’s chest, to the beginning of that bizarre, stiff hair on his shoulders and neck.

“How long have you been down here?”

“Long?” He snorted and shook his head, throwing her hands off his face.

It had not occurred to her that there was not much way of telling time in a place where there was no sun. No sun, no moon, no weather.

“Have you always been here? Or did someone put you here?”

“Always. Born. I was born here. Can’t remember being born, but here.”

Adria giggled a little. Kathos’s hand shot up and grabbed one of her arms. He flexed his fingers, almost crushing Adria’s arm.

“Ow! Stop! Stop!” She kicked at him, but missed and slipped.

Kathos grabbed her, again under the arm when she lost her footing, and spun her around, bracing himself against a foot that scraped across the labyrinth’s floor.

Pinned and helpless between the monster and the wall, Adria filled her lungs with a breath. Something about the thing that had her crushed against the rough stone gave the virginal princess a feeling she thought only existed in dreams.

Adria’s thoughts began to drift, as they always did when she found herself in some sort of danger, or upset. When her father was gravely injured in a boar hunting accident, and when her mother died, and when her brother went off to war, never to return, that’s where she found her solace. In thoughts that drifted like clouds high above the trouble.

Her dreams, always strange and wild and colorful, were the way Adria encountered the world outside the castle. Her imagination was full of wild tales and stories that she read out of big, old books in the royal library, or that she heard from Derik, who had always been kind to her, no matter how horribly she treated him. She dreamed of dragons, of warriors, of fire and war and horse-riding. As she grew older, though, her dreams changed.

As a little girl, she dreamed of jousts and tourneys, but by the time she turned twenty, almost every night she had visitors who did... other things. The only men she ever saw were old ones, or royal ones, or young men who came to her father’s court to try and marry her. None of them interested Adria. The dream Derik woke her from the night before, about this very creature or another one like him, not some chunky princeling in purple silken stockings and a frock coat, that’s what interested her.

Before the beast even touched her anywhere untoward, his voice and his strange fascination with her made the innocent princess feel very, very funny.

His breath slowed, and Kathos finally released

You’re a strange thing. Such a long face, long and hard.

She stroked all the way down what seemed to be a snout and rubbed her hot little palms around his nose as the monster sniffed. That time, he allowed her curiosity. Back up, she felt his long eyelashes and tried to reach further for what she knew she was going to find.

The muscles running down the backs of Adria’s legs twitched, as though to push her to run. She felt tiny beads of sweat pop up on the sides of her head, and the few that managed to avoid soaking into her golden hair dripped off her chin.

Bigger around than her wrists, horns sprouted on either side of his skull. As her hands closed around them, one of those tiny droplets fell from her chin and slipped between Adria’s firm, round breasts before soaking into her tunic’s rough-spun linen. She stroked on as far down as she could and let her hand drop back to his shoulder, as she relaxed onto flat feet.

“Wh-what are you?” Her hands had begun to shake again without her realizing it.

His leg pulled away from hers, and scratched against the floor for the second time since she fell out of her cell into his clutches. A sound like stone on stone hit her ears.
That’s no foot.

Another snort.

He backed up a step, hands still firmly on Adria’s shoulders, to keep her in place. His strength – the way he held her motionless with no effort at all – made the girl feel at once afraid and excited. Adria touched one of his hands with hers, feeling out how large they were.

He grunted, grabbed her wrist and twisted her arm around behind her back.

“Oh! You’re hurting! Stop! What did I do this time?”

Her exasperation surprised both of them. He relaxed his grip enough to stop the awful stretch in Adria’s shoulder.

“I do not. Know.” The beast shuddered and loosened the fingers of his other hand.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. Shh...”

He drew a horrible, ragged, rough breath deep into his lungs and held it in, then cocked his head to one side, exhaled and sniffed the air.

Sweat and fear dripped out of Adria’s pores, down her face and hung in the air in the inches that separated her and the monster that refused to let go.

Kathos’s hand slipped off her shoulder and up the slope to the back of Adria’s head. His fingers tugged and pulled at her tangled hair as he dragged them through and then sniffed at one of her wavy locks.

One of the rare flickers of distant firelight made an orange glint in his big, black eyes, which Adria was lucky to catch. She squirmed a little when he tugged his fingers again through her hair. Tingles crept down her scalp and across her shoulders every time one of her hairs caught on his callused palms.

She hated to brush her hair, and hated even more to have it done by someone else. Adria couldn’t stand the feeling of her hair yanking against her scalp but for some reason, when this massive being did it, she had to admit it was a bit thrilling.

Kathos groaned and touched Adria’s face, brushing one fingertip over her nose, across her lips and down over her chin.

“Soft,” he said. “Soft and warm.”