The Obedient Wife (an erotic short story) Read Free Page B

from the bed.
    “Why do you leave me?” she asked, sitting up and wondering if now that he’d had her maidenhead he no longer wanted her.
    “I leave because I must. You will stay. You must keep away from me until morn. Promise me you will obey.”
    She promised, but as soon as she said the words, she wasn’t sure she could keep her vow. She was too curious. Still aroused.
    His footsteps hurrying down the stone case, he left her.
    The miller’s daughter sat in the darkness, wondering what she’d done, how she might have displeased him. But another niggling worry entered her mind. All the while he’d taken her, she hadn’t felt his coarse hair abrade her sensitive skin. Not anywhere. And his voice, while still a deep rumbling bass, hadn’t growled.
    Had she even been swived by the same creature?
    At that thought, she sat upright and wiped the sheet between her legs to dry his seed and snuck out of the room, pressing her naked back against the cold stone wall as she slipped downward.
    A light blazed in the hall he’d led her to when she first arrived. She took a deep breath and quickly peeked around the corner, but whoever was inside sat in a high-backed chair, facing a blazing fire. She couldn’t see his face.
    As silently as she could, she crept into the room until the profile of the being sitting in the chair was clear. She gasped because he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen—hair black as midnight, a heavy manly brow and strong jaw. His body was muscled, but lean, his cock large even though it lay flaccid against his solid leg. Her breath caught.
    A dark, angry gaze swiveled her way, and a loud growl reverberated through the room. “You disobeyed me!”
    The voice, although slightly thinner, was indeed her beast’s, but she stared gape-mouthed at the creature in front of her—wholly male and as naked as she. Her body burned remembering how the shaft lying close to his brawny thigh had filled her. “It is you? Truly you?”
    “Fool,” he bit out. “It was all for naught.”
    “What, sir?” she said, reacting to the despair in his voice. “Tell me.”
    With his expression hardening, he waved a hand toward his body. “You see this form that pleases you so? It was mine before I fucked a hag’s daughter. When I refused to wed her because she was not a virgin, her mother cursed me.” He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. When he opened his dark brown eyes again, he revealed a devastating sadness. “Now I spend my days as the beast, my nights as a man. If I’d found an obedient wife, a virgin wife, I would have broken the curse. Now I’m damned to live out my life as neither fully man nor beast.”
    The miller’s daughter’s eyes filled with tears caused by a foreign sense of empathy for this man she barely knew. Her heedless action had caused him despair. For the first time in her life, she felt a burning lump of regret lodge in her throat.
    She stepped closer, despite the anger tightening his features. “This curse. What does it cost you?”
    “I am a fearful sight,” he gritted out. “I frighten the villagers. They refuse to serve me. I fear they will one day revolt and murder me because I am not fully human. And worse, I cannot touch a woman in passion for fear my talons might tear her flesh.”
    For the first time in her young life, her thoughts were not for her own comfort or pleasure. Her chest tightened as she realized the damage her damnable curiosity had wrought.
    A pulse pounded in her neck. She licked her lips and crept closer still. “If another acts in your stead to acquire those services you miss, is not that problem solved?”
    His eyes narrowed, but he gave her a swift, sharp nod.
    “If another can acquire the staff and men-at-arms to properly see to your security, is not another problem solved?”
    After a moment, his chest rose and he nodded more softly this time.
    Beneath his glittering gaze, her resolve grew. “If you found yourself a wife willing to bed the