Page 44 of A Witch and Her Minotaur
But that’s exactly what I want.
Take it slow, I tell myself as I accept the towel with a gracious smile.Don’t want to scare him off.
The thought makes me smile to myself. It’s a bit funny, considering he’s a minotaur yet I’m the one who has to be careful not to push him too far too fast.
Gentle giant, indeed.
Using the towel, I scrunch my curls until they’re no longer dripping, then dry off my arms and legs. My dress is getting uncomfortable now, still wet and sticking to me. I need to get this thing off—either by his hands or by mine.
“Do you have something more... comfortable I could put on?” I ask.
Cairn is in the process of scrubbing his face and beard dry, but he stops and looks at me over the edge of the fluffy towel.
I gesture to my dress and arch a brow.
He hesitates for so long that I wonder if he’s forgotten how to speak.
So, I say softly, “Maybe a sweater? I just need to get dry.”
Finally, he nods. “My room’s there.” He gestures with his head, his horns casting shadows on the walls. “Pick anything you like.”
“Perfect, thanks.”
As I walk past him, he steps out of my way—so far out of my way that I can tell for sure now he’s trying to avoid being too close to me, yet I feel his eyes on my back as I walk down the short hallway to his bedroom. And when I turn around to close the door, he’s too slow to glance away before I catch him staring.
Cairn’s bedroom is simple and minimal, while also being spacious enough for him to navigate around comfortably. A huge bed takes up one wall, and the candles burning atop his nightstand gently illuminate the armoire standing near the window. I pull open the drawers one at a time, allowing my fingers to drift over the fabrics, imagining all the while what it would feel like to touch Cairn’s naked skin, to know what he looks like from the neck down—seeing as he’s always in tunics and trousers, I don’t even know where the human part of him ends and the bull begins.
How big is he?I wonder as I pull a soft lightweight knit sweater from one of the drawers. It smells like him—like earth and flour with a hint of sweetness.
Stripping out of my dress, I let it flop into a wet heap upon the floor. Naked now, I glance back toward the closed door. Should I walk out there like this? Show him what I want him to do to me? The idea is tempting, for sure, but I don’t think he’d go for it. I can already hear his voice in my mind, telling me we shouldn’t, we can’t.
But we can. And weshould.
Abandoning the idea, I slip my arms into the sleeves of the sweater and pull it on over my head. It falls past my knees, and the sleeves very nearly drown me—I have to roll them up again and again, resulting in funny bulging cuffs, just to gain free access to my hands.
I look down at my legs. The sweater is longer than most of my dresses, so I opt to forego trying to find something for my lower half. It would probably be a fruitless endeavor anyway.
After scooping my wet dress up, I open another door off his bedroom and discover a washroom with a big wooden tub. A shelving unit nearby holds a large bar of soap, and the sink has a single toothbrush.
He’s so organized, it makes me want to cause a bit of chaos. But I’m pretty sure I do enough of that as is, so I instead opt to just drape my wet dress over the side of the tub, leaving it to drip dry.
Then I go to find my minotaur.
Chapter 23
Cairn
“HOW DO I LOOK?”
I turn at the sound of Lyra’s voice.
And the image of her in my old sweater, her pale freckled legs bare from ankle to mid-thigh, makes my heart skip a few beats. Her curls are still damp and hang around her face in dark red ringlets. Feet bare, she takes a few steps toward me, and I can’t decide whether I should scoop her into my arms or open the door and gallop outside into the still-falling rain in an effort to cool the heat building in my chest.
I don’t do either. Instead, I stand frozen in the kitchen, holding a tea kettle in one hand and two teacups in the other.
When I don’t say anything, Lyra plants her hands on her hips and tilts her head. A smile pulls on her mouth. “That good, huh?”
Snapping back to reality, I clear my throat and set the cups on the wooden table, then fetch a trivet to put the kettle on so it doesn’t burn the tabletop.
