ROMANCE: Lion Protector (Paranormal Shifter BBW Military Romance) (Shapeshifter Alpha Male Short Stories Book 2) (126 page)

Chapter Five

The royal wedding was quite the success, though it took three months to plan. Still, the part Lilith was looking forward to was the honeymoon. After the celebration, she excitedly followed Draci back to their bedroom, jumping on the bed as she waited for her now husband to take her virginity.

              Draci was no less excited by the prospect, and followed his wife to their bed. The traditional royal dress was a pain in his eyes at this point, but he took his time to undo all the buttons, ribbons, zippers, and clasps so he didn't damage the dress. After all, he knew how much his bride loved it, it being undoubtedly the most intricate and expensive thing she had ever owned.

              Once Draci had everything undone, he helped Lilith out of the godforsaken thing, and hastily began stripping off his own restrictive formalwear.

              "Hold on," Lilith said, gently taking his hands in hers, before he could remove any clothing. He was so much bigger than she was that his hands were nearly twice the size of her little paws, but he let her stop him, despite his haste. Then he followed her lead as she gently pushed him down to the mattress. His big purple eyes stared at her with a mix of curiosity and impatience, but Lilith merely responded with a giggle.

              "Be good. It's my first time," Lilith said, and Draci responded with a huff. He wanted to get on with it. He'd waited three months for this, and that seemed to him to be patient enough, but he didn't voice those complaints.

              "Thank you, honey," Lilith said softly, running her fingers down his broad, lean chest and down to his waist, where her fingers teasingly tantalized every spot down there besides the one he wanted most.

              At least he wasn't denied for too long, as his bride began to straddle him, wearing nothing but a pristine white bra, thong, garter belt, and sheer white stockings. She could feel him shiver in anticipation under her, but she didn't rush herself as she began removing his clothing. First was the jacket, which he had unbuttoned already. Then she began removing his waistcoat, undoing the buttons with her teeth, and gently gyrating her hips while she did so.

              As she continued this, she felt Draci start to get hard, but she didn't move on to the next part just yet. Instead she continued undoing every button on the waistcoat, then tossing that off to the side as well. When she paused to do this, she caught Draci's eyes, which were glazed over with longing and lust, but love was there too.

              "Please, Lil," he whispered.

              "We'll get there in good time, my love," Lilith replied with a smile, and continued to unbutton every button on his dress shirt, a total of about fifteen buttons, using nothing but her teeth, and tantalizing his shaft through the multiple layers of cloth all the while.

              Once she got his shirt off, she was soaking wet, and Draci was rock hard. A good way to start, for sure.

              "Lil, now?" Draci asked, almost breathless from the moans he'd been letting escape his lips, ever so softly.

              "Yes," Lilith replied, throwing the shirt off to the side and then undoing Draci's pants and taking his boxers down. He was rather large, which only made sense proportionately, but it did make Lilith worry how everything was going to fit.

              "Don't worry. I'll make sure you're ready before I do anything," Draci promised, as if reading Lilith's mind. She looked up at her new husband innocently, but she had faith in him. So, she let him take the reins, becoming pliant in his arms as he led her to lie down. He quite liked having her in her bra and garter belt, so he simply took the thong and ripped it, then pushed it out of his way, as easy as if it were wet paper.

              That done, he began to eagerly lick at the lips of her entrance, using his fingers to stimulate her clit as he pushed his tongue inside of her, and let his wet muscle explore her tight pussy. He felt like a kid in the candy store, so he kept going while Lilith began screaming in ecstasy the feeling.

              "A-ah, Dr…Draci! Draci, I feel weird…my stomach…It feels…ah!" Lilith screamed out as she experienced her first orgasm. Still, Draci didn't let that stop him, as he pushed his fingers inside and began pumping them, Lilith moaning all the while, playing with her own nipples to increase the pleasure. As soon as Draci felt that he could, he pushed himself inside of her, just going a little bit at a time, rubbing her clit all the while until they both came.

              Once he finished inside of her, he pulled out and flopped down on the bed, giving her a kiss and holding her close to him.

              "Wanna go again?"

              Lilith looked at him after she took a minute to catch her breath, scrutinizing whether or not he was serious. Silly her. Draci was always serious.

              "Five minutes. Give me five minutes," she replied, breathing heavily.

THE END

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1

              My name is Mary Callahan. I’ve put down this short account of my life on account of how consarn flustered I am over everything that’s happened. I won’t waste any time giving you the details of my life’s history, my background, and suchlike. Suffice it to say that I was raised in the normal way, grew up in the normal way, was courted in the normal way, and lived through all the boring tedium of balls and dances and sitting in stuffy rooms with stuffy women who had nothing else on their mind but what their menfolk were doing. A life such as that did not agree with me. I refused every offer of marriage that came my way, for every man that I met was such a bore. Men threw presents at me, threw themselves at my feet, professed their undying love, told me that we would be together forever if I only I agreed.

There was one man by the name of Luke Kingston who had seriously courted me. He was a young man of twenty-one who stood to inherit his father’s textile factory. He had enough prospects to make me think about what a marriage to him would be like. It would be pleasant, as far as it went. Perhaps he would even allow me to express my own opinions, read my own books, act as though I had a mind of my own. Perhaps, if I was very lucky, he wouldn’t take the course that so many other husbands had taken of shutting their wives away once the novelty of marriage wore off. Marriage was always a risk for a woman, one that too many women around me dashed into at the first opportunity, never aware of what might await them in later years.

I don’t mean to say that he was a bad sort. He was well enough, I suppose. He had a kind face and a gentle disposition. He was drawn towards the excesses of consumption or of socializing. If he had vices, I’m sure they were trifles- at least in comparison to the stories I heard from other women who plainly expressed what they felt during the endless soirees which I had to attend. Rather,
he had used all the flowery romantic language that men use when they are trying to convince a woman to marry him. I found such talk hard to accept, for I saw it as what it was: a bribe.

              A man may bribe another man to get what he wants. A bribe, after all, is nothing more than a payment for services rendered or goods received. Society affects to name commerce payment when the transaction is legal and bribery when it is not. Though I might say that a man offering me flowers might be called an advance payment for future services rendered, those posturing men never felt as honest as the shopkeepers and store owners I knew in Boston. Instead, they were more like the slimy weasels who managed to get themselves elected to public office. They said one thing, and then turned right around and did another. Had I kept my wits about me when I met Matthew, I might have realized that he would do the same, just as any other man would- for once you give a person control over anything, be it a house or a country, the promises that he made in the best of faith are soon forgotten.

              Our marriage started off well enough, mind you. He made no bones about wanting to out west to the frontier to seek his fortune or, if a fortune could be found, a modicum of autonomy. Boston in 1858- the year in which he asked for my hand- was not the bustling metropolis that the world imagines it was. To be sure, there was money enough to be had if a man was willing to work hard enough for it. A man could live a comfortable lifestyle if he worked for years on end and saved up as much money as he possibly could. Yet that depended on whether a man knew the right people, whether he could discreetly put money into the right hands, and most of all whether he could tolerate being stepped on by those he considered his inferiors. Boston was a city where pull mattered more than anything.

It was precisely that sort of city that Matthew wished to leave. He longed for the frontier where, as he understood it, a man’s word was bond and where the tendrils of corruption had not yet made themselves known. He read stories of Indians riding bareback across the open plains. He talked to me at length of those free spirits, who went where they wanted and did what they wanted. He wanted that kind of freedom in his life. He wanted his personal effort, not his personal acquaintances, to reflect how his circumstances changed or didn’t change.

When I, a young woman of twenty years, heard him expound such ideas to me, a sensation came over me that I had never felt before. I had met men who were to be tolerated. I had met men that were to be avoided. I had even met men who, after meeting them, I wished that I could forget having made their acquaintance. It had not happened to me until that point that I had met a man that I wanted to follow. Not only follow, of course, but follow to the ends of the world if he was of a mind to go there. He understood what it was like to live in a cage in which one could sing but never fly.

Our courtship lasted six months, and this only on account of my father insisting that we wait that long to be sure that we both had not flown into a passion that would soon cool down. It would not have mattered if he had asked to wait a full year, or even two years. There was no one else who could rescue me from the boredom of drawing room gossip and the polite stifling courtesy I found all around me. There were days when the frustration built inside me so much that I thought I must surely go mad, or else tear myself to pieces.

I write of these things now for, as the reader may have guessed, I did marry Matthew. He did move out to the frontier where he set himself up as a wheat farmer and a cow rancher. I’m told that in other frontier territories like Wyoming, it is rare to see a man be both. Yet Matthew found himself in possession of enough land to manage both. Of course, it goes without saying that it is next to impossible for a man to grow wheat and manage a herd of livestock all at once. For that reason, he set several persons up in gainful employment. Some shucked wheat, some transported hay, and still others punched his cows.

That is the local terminology out here, of course. A cowpuncher is not someone who literally punches cows. I suppose that is where the name came from. I suppose that at one time, some mean-spirited men roamed through the countryside, landing blows upon the cattle they were paid to look after. A man from the eastern United States would call a cowpuncher a cowboy. The meaning of these words is the same.

For several years- I reckon the number to be around twelve- I worked around the house and in the fields with men who stopped by our little part of the world on their way to somewhere else. We soon prospered. Our prosperity was such that we could sustain ourselves through the early frosts, the bad harvests, and the other various misfortunes that befalls anyone who sets himself up to make his living by working the land. I thought the day might come when Matthew would sell all his land to a wealthy investor and retire on a pile of cash so large that he wouldn’t be able to spend it all if he lived to be two hundred years old.

That had certainly seemed to be the case until Jacob Renmyer came to work for us. It was because of him that I found myself sleeping in a strange bed by myself for the first time in more than a decade. It was because of him that I to buy a revolver and figure out how to use it all on my own. At the time, I did not know even know whether I wanted to shoot anyone. The gun felt good in my hands. I enjoyed the feeling of the cold steel clasped between my palms. I even enjoyed the rocking fiery explosion the gun produced when I pulled the trigger.

2

The town of Sawtooth, Nevada is much like any other small town out on the frontier. There’s a wide strip of dirt that runs through the middle of the town. Along that strip, every shop and office a person might wish to find is located there. The houses- most of them under construction by the year 1874- sat in rows behind the businesses. There was a bawdy house, a saloon, an office for the sheriff, a doctor’s office, two general stores, a bank, and a small courthouse. Of much greater importance than any of these was the open field at the end of the town where people brought their wagons every Saturday to trade what they would with one another. People traded horse feed for seed, seed for tools, and tools for feed. As there happened to be a blacksmith in the area, the general store often lost business to a man who could forge rakes, hoes, shovels, and all manner of implements himself. Bartering of a Saturday allowed Matthew and I to be successful, for I had a better head for prices than he did. While he left town in search of supplies, as he often did every weekend, I remained to trade up whatever I could. Although my husband dealt in cows and wheat, I dealt in odds and ends of all sorts. It even happened that, one Saturday, I drove the wagon to the market with a rocking chair and wagon wheel in the back. Any object that a person could produce, I could get a good price for.

It was at the barter market that I met Mr. Renmyer. He was a man of average size with big hands and a wide chest. He wore a red flannel shirt and blue corduroy pants. He had worn leather gloves on his hands. That made him a man of some means, for most cowpunchers could not afford gloves. They let their hands get eaten alive by wood chips, brush burns, and calluses until their hands became rough as leather itself. A man who spent his life working in a printer’s shop could always be differentiated from a man who worked in the wild. The man who worked in the wild could prove his years of effort simply by turning over his hands.

On account of his wearing gloves, Mr. Renmyer had fewer calluses than most. He sometimes looked like a man who had been at his job for a short season, instead of the year and a half that he had been working for Matthew, and the additional amount of time that lay behind him, however long that might have been. When he led Matthew’s cattle out to the river to drink, he did so with an expertise that only came from experience. He knew how it was that a man could change the brand on any particular cattle to make the C with four diagonal slashes at each corner- Matthew’s brand- into an O with an X through it. Doing so was not difficult. Recognizing when such had been done required a man to kill one cow, then look at the other side of its pelt. No amount of cleverness could conceal the marks that were found there.

As often as not, Mr. Renmyer had no need to butcher any of my husband’s cattle to check whether anybody had rustled any part of the herd. The Pinkertons had come to Nevada right around the time when Matthew and I set ourselves up on the farm. In the twelve years that we worked there, the Pinks- for so the men who belonged to the organization were called- had showed up to proffer what advice they could. The previous year, a man named Jesse James had robbed a train in the town of Adair, Iowa. The newspapers all across the frontier came alive with the news that the Adams Express Company engaged the services of the Pinkertons to hunt down the James-Younger gang. They passed through Sawtooth now and then to ask around about the gang. The people who sheltered the gang members were former members of the confederate army. They still carried a great deal of antipathy for the union cause, even nine years removed from the defeat of the confederacy. If those folks could not take up arms against the union government, they could at least shelter those who disrupted the normal flow of commerce of several northern business concerns. As the Pinkertons had gained a great reputation in a short of amount of time, every time they came to Sawtooth, the town got quiet. A Pink might be shot in the wild, perhaps, but never in town, never with witnesses.

When I cast my mind back to the turbulent first few years during which the civil war raged in the eastern half of the continent, I remember those years as chaotic. There were always people up to no good. There were wild troublemakers who would just as soon drink themselves into a stupor as they would do an honest day’s work. They were men who lived from moment to moment, with never a care for the future. By the time the Pinkertons came to Sawtooth, the troublemakers had largely disappeared. Had they stayed in spite of everything, Mr. Renmyer might not have put the advertisement in the two newspapers that he did, and in consequence, Matthew would not have been inspired to follow his example.

I’ve spent the last week at a makeshift campsite five miles from town with nothing but several pieces of paper, pen, ink, and enough supplies to last me a month. During that whole time, I’ve done nothing other than trace back each incident to the final conclusion. We each build our own worlds, block by block, a little at a time. I built mine. I’ve been trying to understand how it all happened, for I never would have imagined anything of the sort occurring when I was twenty years old and pining for a life on the frontier.

3

Matthew had in his possession a newspaper from Boston. It didn’t matter to him that the paper was yellowed and on the point of falling apart. He found the newspaper’s mailing address. He sent his advertisement with a few coins inside. It took two months before an issue of the paper returned to Matthew with the advertisement in it. By then, the divorce papers had already been filed.

As far as I have been able to discover, there weren’t many laws in Nevada directing courts what to do when presented with a petition of marriage annulment. Even then, the individual towns don’t always follow the state law. The judge of Sawtooth, a man named Rupert Williams, did more or less what he wanted. He was an older man who had come to Nevada after Atlanta burned in the Civil War. His southern attitudes and mannerisms became more prominent as he grew older. By the time he turned the venerable age of seventy-one, he might have been mistaken for senator, or a prominent pastor. He walked with a dignity that came easily to him. Even when his legs started to fail him, the addition of a walking cane only made him appear more stately, more regal. He walked around town in any one of his twelve business suits, which only made him seem more deserving of the respect that was due him in his capacity as a judge. Few people owned more than two business suits. There was neither any call for them, nor money to spend on them. As a result, whenever he made an appearance in town, people noticed.