By Contractual Obligation

Our depravity continues. Care of Laura, the second chapter in Dawny Bougainvillea's doubtless Booker-winner-to-be, "His Cowboy Heart, Her Ninja Breast."


HIS COWBOY HEART, HER NINJA BREAST
Chapter Two
By Dawny Bougainvillea

That night Polly's ninja reflexes were alerted to a disturbance in the barn. Her first impulse was to wake her father, but she shook it off with a stubborn shake of her shoulders. “This is something I must do alone,” she said, “though I may die in the attempt.”

Pausing only to slip on her two-toed slippers and arrange a bandolier of secret-filled ninja eggshells around her luscious curves, Polly dropped soundlessly from the third-floor window to creep briefly along the dew-heavy grass before leaping onto the roof of the barn where the animals were kept. She peered through the skylight to behold a sight most shocking!

People were in the barn – feasting on animals!

Their garb was strange and the utterances they made just as strange as their clothes. That didn't matter. Only one thing was important: that she avenge the lives of her beloved farm animals. Shrieking a special soundless ninja cry designed to confuse and terrify enemies, Polly snatched a egg filled with noxious toad-odors from her bandolier and drew her arm back to hurl it.

Someone grabbed her hand – someone she did not suspect! She drew a breath and crushed the egg, careful not to inhale the vapors, before turning to face her assailant.

Her already-drawn breath caught in her bosom. Holding her dainty wrist was A MAN: skin red as sunset on a mesa, cheekbones so sculpted they could have fetched a good price at a museum, black hair tied with feathers and beads and small animal bones. His eyes burned black, if fire were black. He was the most attractive man she'd ever seen. He had fangs.

He said, “Please don't hurt them. I'll do it.”

Still engulfed by toad fumes, and feeling oddly subservient to this overwhelmingly attractive stranger, Polly could only watch as the man jumped lightly to the barn doors, opened them, and said something in that awkward, haunting language.

As one, the feeding frenzy stopped. The strangely-clothed people peaceably left the barn, muttering.

The man jumped back onto the roof. “They say they're sorry. They will not trouble you again. They will replace the animals that are lost with their own.”

“Who are you?” Polly said. “Who are they?”

“I am Winner Longhorn. My father was a Cowboy, my mother was an Indian. Those are my mother's people.”

“They were eating our animals alive!”

“It is their way.” He looked at her through long lashes. “Their vampire way.”