Page 15 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

He set me down on something soft. A pallet, maybe, piled high with furs. The texture against my oversensitised skin was almost too much, every individual hair its own separate point of contact. I curled onto my side, pulling my knees up, trying to make myself smaller.

"Mara." His voice, low and close, reaching me through my skin as much as my ears. "I need to – the heat will get worse before it peaks. I can help, or I can leave you. The choice is yours."

I laughed. It came out ragged, breathless.

"Choice," I managed. "Right. Because I'm in a great position to make choices right now."

"You are always in a position to make choices." His hand touched my shoulder, just that, just the lightest brush of his fingers through the fabric of my coveralls, and I arched into it as if I'd been shocked. The heat flared, rolling through me in a wave that whited out the edges of my vision. "Tell me to go, and I will go. I will wait outside until it passes."

"How long?"

"Days. Perhaps longer. It varies."

Days. Days of this. Days of burning alive from the inside, my body screaming for something I couldn't name, my skin so sensitive that even the air moving across it felt like a caress.

"And if I don't tell you to go?"

His hand stilled on my shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was rougher than I'd heard it.

"Then I will tend to you. The heat is–" He paused, the word eluding him. "It is meant to be shared. Your body and mine, in alignment. I can give you what you need."

I should have said no. Should have told him to leave, suffered through this alone the way I'd suffered through everything else in my life. I was good at alone. I was built for alone.

But the heat was rising again, a slow and pulling tide, and somewhere in the middle of it my body had made its own decision.

"Stay," I said.

He undressed me without hurrying.

I'd expected urgency, from him, from myself, from the fire under my skin. But his hands moved with care, peeling back the layers of my station coveralls, exposing my skin to the warm air inch by inch. His fingers were huge against my body, rough-textured, impossibly gentle. When he reached my breasts, swollen and aching, straining against the fabric, he paused.

"They hurt," I said. It came out like an accusation.

"I know." His thumbs brushed the undersides, tracing the curve where they met my ribs. "Your body is preparing. The serum has–" He stopped. His pupils blew wide, those huge dark eyes turning almost completely black. "You smell ready."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means–" His hands cupped my breasts, lifting them slightly, testing their weight. The pressure sent a spike through me, pleasure and pain tangled together, impossible to separate. "It means your body knows what it wants. Even if you don't."

I opened my mouth to argue, and he lowered his head and put his mouth on me.

Stars.

His tongue was broader than a human's, rougher, and when he dragged it across my nipple the sensation was so intense I nearly came off the pallet. My hands flew up without my permission, grabbing at the thick fur across his shoulders, holding on. He made a sound low in his chest, that rumble I was learning to read as contentment, and did it again. And again. Licking, suckling, his mouth hot and wet against my oversensitised skin.

The heat crested.

I felt it happen, the moment my body stopped fighting and started demanding. The warmth in my belly became a pulse, an ache that centred between my legs and spread outward until I couldn't tell where the need ended and I began. I was making sounds, I knew distantly. Whimpering. Gasping. My hips were moving against nothing, seeking friction that wasn't there.

"Keth." His name in my mouth, desperate. "Keth, please–"

He lifted his head from my breast. His eyes were nearly all pupil now, dark and liquid in the low light of the dwelling. His tail lashed behind him in short, sharp arcs.

"Please what?"

I didn't have words. I had heat and need and a body screaming at me to get closer, to take whatever he would give. I pulled at his shoulders, trying to drag him down to me, and he came down, careful, bracing himself above me on arms thick with muscle and dense brown fur.

He was so big. Even now, even lost in the heat, I felt it. His chest was level with my face when he hovered over me, the barrel depth of his torso blocking the light. His horns curved black against the dim ceiling, and when he dipped his head his broad nostrils flared, drinking in the scent of me. Nothing about him was human – the blunt muzzle, the cattle-dark eyes gone almost fully black, the dense fur warm under my fingers where I clung to his shoulders. A month ago the sight of him would have stopped my heart with fear. Now my body strained towards him, and that frightened me more than he did.