Page 5 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

"It is what your kind are called, beyond your own world. The name the intergalactic community uses for you." His head tilted, as if my not knowing were the strange part of all this. "You did not know you had a name?"

"We didn't know there was anyone out here to give us one," I said. "So there's more aliens? Not just your species?"

"Millions of species. Yet I am interested in only one of them." His eyes stayed on me. "What is your name, little Peritan?"

I wanted to protest at both being called little and a Peritan – why couldn't he just say human – but there were more important battles to fight.

"Mara."

"Mah-ra." He tasted my name on his lips. "Maaaaa-raaa."

"My scent signature." I said the first thing that came into my head, to stop him repeating it again. "You smelled me. From space."

"From the data." He said it as if there were a difference. "The survey ships sample as they pass – gas, dust, whatever a place leaks into the dark. I process it. Your scent–" His tail flicked, quick this time, agitated or eager, I couldn't tell. "I knew immediately. I have spent three rotations arranging a return mission."

“Rotations?”

“One rotation is the passing of all five seasons. A full cycle.”

Three years. He'd spent three years arranging to kidnap me because he'd smelled me in a dataset.

"You're insane," I said.

He considered this. "No."

"You took me from my home. You drugged me. You put me in a padded cell in what I'm assuming is a spaceship."

"Yes."

"That is insane behaviour."

"It is necessary behaviour." He shifted, his hooves clicking softly against the floor. "Among my kind, a scent match like this–" He paused, searching for words. The translator crackled faintly. "It is everything. It means we are–" Another pause. "Bonded. Meant. You are my mate."

I stared at him.

He'd just described every alien romance novel ever written. The fated-mates thing, the scent bonding, the earnest conviction that destiny had delivered him the woman of his dreams and all he had to do was take her.

Except those were fiction. Silly, harmless fiction. This was real. This was an eight-and-a-half-foot alien crouched in front of me, telling me I was his because he'd sniffed me out of a weather report three years ago.

"No," I said.

"No?"

"No. I'm not your mate. I'm a human woman who was working a night shift on a relay station, minding my own business, and you abducted me. That's not romance. That's kidnapping."

He went still, his eyes never leaving my face.

"I understand that this is difficult," he said. "That you did not choose this the way I did. But the bond exists. Your body will recognise it. The Claiming Serum–"

"The what?"

He reached for his belt again. This time he drew out a small cylindrical container, dark and smooth. He held it up so I could see it but didn't move to give it to me.

"The Claiming Serum," he said. "It will make you compatible. Your body will respond to me the way mine already responds to you. Heat cycles. Scent bonding. The ability to–" He paused. The translator crackled. "To produce."

"Produce what?"

His eyes, if anything, grew warmer.