The Cowboy Who Strolled Into Town (31 page)

Lucius laughed at her remark: a cruel growl more like, resonating deep within his chest. He moved closer to her. There was something irritatingly sexy about Yuri at the moment. His hunting instincts told him she was cowering with fear, but also defiant, resistant to ultimate surrender.  The perfect prey, she was impossible to resist. He was upon her in one graceful step. Her liquid, questioning eyes looked up into his greenish gold jewels in askance: goading and foreboding all at once. She wanted him to own her, all of her. She could have followed him anywhere. She gasped, her breath cut short when he took hold of her chin. His touch warm against the cold, surrounding gloom on the top of the lonely hill. His kiss was warm, tender, but hungry. She could feel blocks of muscles she had only read of in text books rippling beneath his tank top as he held her tight. His arms like a locked cage, and she his helpless victim. She almost melted at his touch, waves of excitement rippling through her body like bolts of lightning, activating all her nerve endings, reaching nooks and corners within her long forgotten, and never before discovered.

Lucius growled, grabbing her at her waist, and hoisting her up with unbelievable ease to set her against the sturdy door. Formerly he had towered above her, coming down to bestow hungry, lustful kisses on her but now her head lay level with his, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, freeing his hands to explore her exquisite body. Yuri gasped, and then moaned as she climbed the ladders of pure excitement as his hands explored her defenseless body. His hands were adept at unfolding folds, and knots that scoured her body and Yuri wondered dreamily at the sheer strength, and skill of the man.

Lucius, was aware of the primal nature of the attraction he shared with this woman. Her rapid heartbeat beating within his hyperactive ears, created a savage backdrop to all the feral instincts bursting to be released and appeased. He forced the door open with his free hand, and carried her in to the darkness of the reception room inside. He set her down to the floor and switched on the lights, then carried her off to the nearest sofa, which lay across a huge arch, in one of several sitting rooms within the mansion.

For a mansion that had the look of having been abandoned for decades from outside, the house was surprisingly warm. Lucius pulled her clothes off slowly, but with the same confidence, and determination of a conqueror which Yuri found so enticing, and intoxicating. She gasped in naked, silent wonder, beside her herself in anticipation as she watched the tank top fall off to reveal the most amazingly sculpted set of muscles she had ever had the privilege of beholding. Yuri still harbored fear, and felt a rush of excitement as Lucius looked upon her with a hunger that she never thought possible. She felt enveloped in his desire, yielded to it as he descended on her left nipple. She grew hot, and shivered with desire in tandem with the deep, feral growls that emanated from his chest.

Her moans echoed across the empty house as he caressed the inside of her rounded thighs, gently spreading them apart. She lay now on the couch, while he knelt on the area of the carpeted floor between her legs. Her manicured fingers were wrapped around his orange head which worked away at her nipples. His free hands explored the narrow crevices where her torso transformed to the most exquisite hips, as well as the inside of her warm, moist thighs.

He was teasing her, building her up to a climax. Each moan that escaped her parted lips, amplified by his ears, drove him mad with desire. He kissed her belly slowly, but hungrily, he was a bundle of comparisons and contrasts. His head was soon between her thighs, exploring the warm, moist folds that lay hidden therein like treasure oases in a light-skinned dessert.

Yuri thought she would erupt with pleasure; she thought she would lose her mind just as she had lost her body, but her mind hung tantalizingly on the edge of sanity. She was never going to be the same after this. She lay spread-eagled before him, completely at his mercy; her hands squeezing the decorative wooden frame at the top of the sofa.

She let out a savage scream of her own as he penetrated her, his hardness breaking any resistance that it encountered down to nothing. He lay over her like a benevolent conqueror, giving pleasure as he took and conquered all that lay before him. His movement, even at this moment was graceful and rhythmic, and belied the feral nature of the attraction that pulsed and throbbed between them.

Their eyes met in one eternal instant as she reached a high, farther than she had ever managed to reach in her entire life. His eyes seemed to reflect the light that existed in hers at that moment or was it the light of the room? All she could muster was one final gasp as he relinquished his hold on her.

She still thought he was a mass of comparisons and contradictions, as at that moment lying beside her; he seemed so distant almost ethereal, but his grabbing her, and pulling her close suggested otherwise. It suggested to her that their union had been for him as intimate at least as intimate as it had been for her.

Despite her forebodings, she snuggled into his sculpted chest.

Chapter 6

They continued to see each other over the weeks, the attraction, and the bond between them growing stronger all the time. Lucius kept up his investigation with the senior citizens, but he stopped by Old man Jacob’s house more often, and would sometimes sit with his old friend on the porch, gazing into the dying day.

Yuri still could not understand the bond between Lucius and the elderly community, but she thought his association with them was very good naturedly, and it resonated well with her. She did not see him every day, but it was always with bated breath that she awaited their next meeting. Her heart would do back flips for joy whenever she saw him with her grandfather on the porch, knowing that the walk to see him off a while later would be as always, emotionally satisfying.

She also found it amusing that despite their weeks-old liaison, she still knew very little about him. He was still a mass of comparisons and contradictions. For example, his garage was always closed. Closed off by the modern addition of a retractable rail which could be pulled up to be opened, and pulled down to be closed. She could have sworn she saw tires as she drove off down the hill, on the one day it was just a little bit open. However, Lucius always walked. It was even stranger still when you took into consideration that he lived quite far away. She had no idea what he did for a living before he came back to Peri Heights, nor what he did now, but he always seemed dapper, his immense family home suggested huge wealth in the family hands, but what about him? He seemed to her the last person who would rest on another person’s achievements. There were so many things that she did not understand about him. Ordinarily, she would be bothered by these things, but she felt what they shared was anything but ordinary, and merited breaking some of the rules. She was not a teenage girl anymore, but she giggled with girlish delight as she admitted that the unknown aspects about Lucius added a certain girlish fantasy to the whole drama. She suspected her grandfather or one of the senior could help fill in some of the gaps. They had to have learned something in all their time chatting together, plus people reported an odd familial feeling existing between Lucius and these seniors whenever they met.

Yuri mulled over these things, while taking a walk, one weekend. It was a Saturday, too warm to be comfortable, and she decided a walk to the town square was what she needed to ease all the knots accumulated during the school week. It was evening already when she set out. The wind outside was a little cooler than the one inside, but still blew warm against her face, into and out of the loose gown, that ended just above her knees, which she had favored that evening. Old man Jacob’s house was not too far from the town square, and was located about two hundred meters away from a bend that started a four-hundred meter stretch to the beginnings of the heart of the city. At a leisurely pace, Yuri made the journey in just less than thirty minutes.

The feel and sounds of night life were just awakening, and several people were already milling about when she arrived. She nodded at a few familiar faces, as she milled about aimlessly. Hoping to spend an hour tops before going back. She wished Lucius was around. His presence could lighten up any scene; she thought-even a scene as boring as this town where nothing ever happened.

But something did happen that night, as she milled about hopping from one store to the next, nodding and smiling at a few familiar faces, somebody grabbed her from behind!

Somebody big and strong, maybe more than one person she thought as she was pulled into an alleyway. Yuri struggled, and tried to scream, but was silenced by a slap across the face before a cloth bag was thrown over her head, and darkness descended. She whimpered in fear, thrashed about as she felt herself tossed unto a shoulder. The hands gripping her felt unnaturally strong and difficult to fight against. She thought of biting, but the rough feel of the cloth bag against her flushed cheeks persuaded her otherwise. She could feel her left jaw swell even as it burned like ice to bare skin. She thought she felt the moisture of blood, but it was just her skin that had broken into a sweat caused by panic. She screamed again, but her scream was broken by the feeling of being roughly shoved into a car. Another set of hands, or maybe the same ones, she could not tell, but equally strong grabbed her hands behind her and bound them together with rough feeling rope. It was all rough, yet frightfully efficient, and Yuri broke tears as she broke into panic. She hung uncomfortably in the back, in the space between two sets of legs and the front seats. She did not fully understand what was happening, and much less why, but she knew she was in trouble and could see no way out. She could see nothing at all really with the bag over her head, and this only added to the feeling of blind terror that permeated every fiber of her being.

There was animated chatter in the vehicle which did not make any sense at all to Yuri. To her frightened, confused mind, they were obviously speaking in some sort of code. They might as well have been speaking in Arabic, because her mind was too confused to gather any meaning from the, nonetheless, English words they were using. She kept hearing strange, fantastic things like tiger-shifter, and bear-shifter, and protecting the young ones.

They did not drive for long before the noise of the square began to recede. The few minutes seemed like days to Yuri, and she soon passed out.

She was rudely jogged out of her sweet escape by a loud sound on the roof of the car she was in. It sounded like a tremendous weight had landed on the roof, causing the car to bounce along the highway. She screamed at the top of her voice as she heard the screeching of tires, the car swerving left and right to stay balanced. Another weight on the bonnet blew the head lights out and brought the car to an abrupt standstill. The engine rattled, growled and failed, the smoke escaping from the busted carburetor looked ghostly in the abrupt darkness.

The chatter in the car now was frantic, and doors were opened. The term tiger-shifter was thrown about a lot, as she was tossed aside in the rapidly emptying car. Yuri was tossed upon her hands, and winced at the pain. She desperately wished to know what was going on but could not. Damn this cloth bag!

In the darkness outside, Lucius stood twenty meters away, and watched the three bear-shifters file out of the truck they were driving. They were big. Bear shifters always were. At the age of sixteen, when they stated to fully communicate with their animal self, even the scrawny ones grew overnight.

“I hope for your sakes that the woman is okay.” He shouted out to them.

“You think you can take all three of us pussy cat? You better run on home back from where you came” The driver, who also happened to be the biggest, spat back.

Lucius stalked stealthily from left to right. They did not react by opening into a larger circle he smiled to himself in the darkness.

“You three are young. There is no need for us to fight. Just step aside and hand over the girl and we can separate in peace. You obviously have no fought a cat before. There has not been one of my kind here for decades.”

“And we want it to stay that way,” another one shot back. “First day you show up and one of us gets attacked by a tiger-right here in our woods! This girl is just the first; we are going to set an example so that any other shifter will know exactly what he is walking into when he comes our way.”

“We have been watching you for weeks now. You and your lady friend; we know what she means to you. Another one of your cat trophies no doubt,” the last one finished off the ramble. “Now step aside or you are going to die with her.”

“I find that event highly unlikely.” He said, straightening up to is full height. They were directly under the shade of several tall trees, which blocked out the light of the moon. Lucius had not picked this spot lightly, and now his eyes shone like clear glass set in the air. “Can any of you see in the dark?” he asked as the three bear-shifters charged towards him.

Ordinarily this would be an uneven fight largely to his disadvantage. Bears are phenomenally strong, even among shifters. To fight three angry shifters would have been suicide. But in taking out the headlights of the car in this carefully chosen spot, he had thrown them all into darkness. It was still an unfair fight, but it now lay largely in his favor. Something these bears were too young, and inexperienced to realize.

Lucius ducked underneath the blind swerve of the first to reach him, grabbed his shirt, and heaved upwards. The bear-shifter, the biggest of the bunch flew, screaming, high up in the air to land among the branches up above. And then there were two.