ROMANCE: Lion Protector (Paranormal Shifter BBW Military Romance) (Shapeshifter Alpha Male Short Stories Book 2) (58 page)

Chapter Two

              Scarlet's eyes fluttered open to an entirely new, vibrant scene.  Immediately above her, she could see a pink canopy draped around the bed she was lying on, and pulled over her a soft and warm purple blanket of sorts.  She shot upright in her seat, and in front of her saw nothing but a cold, blue, metallic floor leading up to a wall of the same material.  There was something analogous to veins, glowing with a faint blue glow, running through the metal.

              Immediately, Scarlet felt her heart beat quicken, and she tried to rub her temples to jog her memory of what had caused her to wake up to this place.  She remembered back to being on the beach.  A big wave came.  It pulled the pickets right from the ground as she was clinging on to them. Then she was washed away.  Before she got far, though, something cold and hard, like metal, seemed to wrap around her like a tentacle and pull her out towards the sea, against the current of the wave which were still going inland.  After that, she couldn't remember anything.  She probably had passed out from lack of air.

              Scarlet, though she felt a pain in her chest from taking in too much water, jumped to her feet from the bed, only to realize she wasn't wearing anything at all.  Her little red silk nightie that she'd been wearing when she went outside to sit, which wasn't much to begin with, and her slippers, had completely disappeared.

              It was hard to decide whether the embarrassment or the fact that she was freezing without these garments on was worse. She felt goosebumps on every single square centimeter of her body when her feet touched the cold metal floor, and she instinctively jumped back onto the bed she'd been on and pulled the warm and inviting blankets around her.

              "I see that you're finally up," a low but powerful voice said. Scarlet looked around frantically for the originator of the voice.  The canopy around the bed was made of a very thin muslin, or at least something like it, so she could see a silhouette of a figure off to the right side of the bed.

              "Who the hell are you?" Scarlet demanded, trying to sound tough.  She was scared beyond belief, of course, but she wouldn't let him know that.

              "I am called Nerol," the low voice answered. She could trace the shadow beyond the canopy as he began to walk around to its opening at the front of the bed.  Then he just stood there.

              Though the silence seemed to want Scarlet to contribute something, her jaw just dropped, and she was dumbfounded for a moment as she saw Nerol.  His body was definitely humanoid.  There was no questioning the fact that he was a bipedal creature with a rather human face. However, these similarities to humans were equally outweighed with the differences.  Insofar as his face went, the only difference between his and a normal human would be the eyes.  They were large and dark, with no white to speak of.  From what she could see of his ears, they seemed to be long and pointed, though she could only see the tips of them through his longish purple hair.

              Besides his face, though, most of his body was humanesque--and chiseled like a bodybuilder at that.  However, his human shape was where the cross species similarities ended yet again.  Nerol's skin was a light lavender hue, with bluish spots, somewhat like very thick stripes, going down the the sides of his arms and legs.  Looking at him, she saw he wore no shoes, but did have something akin to a loincloth around his waist, though it seemed to be made of a very fine metallic set of plates, rather than cloth.  This, along with a thin black collar, which looked rather like jewelry, were the only items of clothing that he wore.

              "Who . . . I mean, what are you?" Scarlet asked, just recoiling at the sight of Nerol, and backing up to the head of her bed to put some distance between herself and the creature before her.

              "What?  I do not understand the question, human," Nerol answered, frowning a bit.  His ears even seemed to droop, and he leaned forward slightly when he spoke.  Scarlet didn't understand the change of demeanor, but she was very disquieted nonetheless.

              "I mean what the hell are you! I've never seen anything like you!" Scarlet replied, leaning as far back as she possibly could, and pulling the blankets up so far that nothing beneath the bridge of her nose could be seen.

              "I am one of the chiefs of the Narut tribe," Nerol responded.  "We are known as Uyubyards, from the Alpha Centuri system."  As he spoke, Nerol's cold, black eyes seemed to never falter once from looking into Scarlet's eyes.  For someone who had presumably kidnapped her and taken her clothes from her, he was a gentleman of sorts.  At the very least, wandering eyes was not his problem.

              "Okay, Nerol.  Why am I here?" Scarlet demanded.  That was really the thing she should have been most concerned with, as this whole situation was just inexplicable to her, and her involvement in it really should have been the first priority to clear up.  Too many other things crossed her mind to ask before that question could be addressed, though.

              "For breeding," Nerol replied rather robotically.  His response was much the same as Scarlet might expect hearing that stamps had gone up in price, or that the weather would be cloudy.  There was no emotion in his voice, at least not any that Scarlet could discern

              "What?!" she demanded, her voice sounding rather shrill.  She couldn't believe that she just heard those words come out of Nerol's lips.  Or rather, she didn't want to believe them.

              "Our species has recently lost our last female, and we have to breed to maintain the species," Nerol replied in the same sterile tone as before.

              "If you're a different species, then how exactly do you think that would even work?" Scarlet asked, hoping that somehow there would just be a magical resolution to this whole thing, where Nerol conceded that she was right, that there could be no inter-species breeding, and she could just be returned to her crappy job and her California beachfront property, without being victim to any weird population growth initiative forced by a being from another planet.

              "Because, my people initiated panspermia as soon as we had the technology for it, because we realized that our planet would at some point become inhospitable for my species' life.  However, the change wasn't as incremental as we may have hoped. A disease that only affected the females of our species soon decimated them, and those that remain are infertile.  But because we sent life to Earth, we are able to interbreed with the species which took root from the genetic material that we sent there."

              Scarlet certainly didn't follow most of that.  But, following the information that Nerol put before her clearly wasn't required of her.  She was just staring blankly as she tried to process and make sense of what had just been said to her.  However, she certainly wasn't given adequate time for that, as she felt the bed shift and then saw that Nerol was crawling on the bed, coming towards her.

              As Nerol advanced, his shoulders rolled as he crawled towards her like a jungle cat on the prowl, and Scarlet could see that thick blue stripes ran down his back just like on the sides of his arms and legs.  He was like a wild animal, and Scarlet just totally tensed up and froze as she realized that she had nowhere to go, and nowhere to run.

              When Nerol was finally upon her, Scarlet closed her eyes and held her breath, expecting the worst.  Instead, she just felt a weight on her pelvis and slowly opened her eyes to see Nerol putting his delicate, elf-like ears to her lower body, like an Indian might stereotypically do in the movies to a tree, to try to trace any movement in the forest.

              "You seem to be fertile," Nerol said in his trademark emotionless voice after the inspection. He then started to take the blanket away to reveal Scartlet, but she held fast to the fabric, having no intention on letting go of it without a fight.

              "What are you talking about, you creep?" Scarlet demanded, trying to swat at Nerol so he would get off of her.  When her hand connected with his cheek, she just gasped and closed her eyes again, partly because Nerol was colder than she had expected, and also because she was afraid of what his reaction to being struck would be.  Despite the fear she had, nothing happened for a few seconds after she hit Nerol, and so she tentatively opened her eyes, just to see Nerol looking up at her.

              "Why did you do that?" Nerol asked flatly.

              "Why?  Because you're . . . You're on me!" Scarlet replied.  She could just see Nerol's eyes stare at her with something that looked akin to total confusion, as if he didn't understand what the point of her bringing that up could have been.  To Scarlet, it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world, and that he was mocking her, but her mind quickly started to kick in to remind her that perhaps there was a major cultural difference here that she would have to explain.  After all, Nerol wasn't being violent with her, so perhaps calm reasoning would work to her advantage.

              "Look," Scarlet began.  "In my culture back at home, it's not permissible for a man to just crawl on a woman without her permission," she explained, just naive enough to think that a little simple reason might be able to sway Nerol, and make him take a step back.  Of course, it wasn't so easy.

              "How else would we mate if I wasn't on top of you?" Nerol asked, honestly engaging with what Scarlet was saying.  He didn't just brush away her comments, but his goal was still the primary focus in his mind.

              "We're not mating!" Scarlet screeched, trying once again to slap Nerol away.  However, if any damage was done, it was to her hand, considering Nerol was as cold and hard as a marble statue.

              Nerol this time took her hand, which made Scarlet gasp and try to take her hand back from him, but she couldn't break out of his cold grasp however hard she tried.  "Stop doing that," he ordered flatly.

              "Let me go!" she screeched, and tried harder to get away from Nerol.  Still, it was to no avail, and he just stared at her flatly.

              "Stop," he repeated again, in a more authoritative and forceful tone.  This stopped Scarlet's struggling, because in all honesty, she was very afraid of what Nerol would do to her.  The only thing that gave Scarlet pause was thinking of which fate would be worse.  To be raped by this alien, or brutalized by him.  The choice was clear to her, as the scenario was as black and white as it could be.  So, slowly, and by degrees, her mind worked through the minefield of possibilities before she calmed down, and decided to just accept her fate.

              Nerol seemed pleased that she stopped her struggling and her screaming, and so he just proceeded, peeling away the purple blanket to reveal Scarlet's body.  He only got as far as exposing the two peaks of her breasts before she couldn't contain herself and snatched at the blanket to stop him, holding the blanket as if she were holding onto something for dear life.

              "It's so cold," Scarlet said softly, feeling much safer with the blanket around her.  She could tell by Nerol's initial expression that he was annoyed, but that didn't last.  He slipped under the blanket instead, and ran his fingers over her curves.  The blanket was warm enough that it mitigated how cold Nerol was, but regardless Scarlet still shivered as she felt the unwanted touch on her body.  She would have shivered if Nerol was warm or cold, honestly.  This was an odd experience for her, and she still didn't know exactly how she even should react to it.

              Nerol proceeded to carefully explore her body, taking his time and mapping out all of her curves with his hands, considering his eyes weren't able to see them as much.  She was quite the fine specimen, without much excess fat, and very bodacious.  Of course, Nerol didn't appreciate her form too much, but his biological urges knew what he did and did not like. And he liked this.

              As Nerol continued to explore Scarlet's body, he got progressively more adventurous with his advances, going from tracing her sides gently with his hands to kneading her breasts, then tweaking her nipples.  Despite her fear of this, Scarlet found herself letting out moans of pleasure.  She couldn't call Nerol particularly skilled with what he was doing, but regardless, his instincts and passion certainly came across in his actions, and she started to feel herself getting into it. At least a part of her was trying to.  After all, she realized that there was no way out here.  She would have to do this, probably again and again if this was part of some population growth initiative. 

              As Scarlet made this resolution to let herself enjoy what Nerol was doing, small moans were trickling out of her mouth while Nerol had his way with her body, which in turn encouraged him to keep going.  His fingers tweaked and pinched her erect nipples gently, just to give her the sensations that she seemed to respond to best, while his other hand began to go on a downwards creep towards her crotch.  At first, Scarlet kept her legs firmly clenched together, but even then Nerol had no problems squeezing his fingers inside.

              When his fingers touched her clitoris, Scarlet sharply inhaled and recoiled from his touch.  Even though he wasn't as cold under the warm blankets, he was still certainly colder than Scarlet was--especially when he touched one of the warmest parts of her body.  The sensation wasn't exactly something that she was prepared for or used to.

              "Did that . . . Did it hurt?" Nerol asked, seemingly confused.  He was taught how to go about having sex along with his natural biological urges, so he didn't think that stroking that sensitive part of Scarlet would be at all painful.  If anything, it should have been pleasurable for her, but her reaction did give Nerol pause.