Lion Man's Captive by Kaitlyn O'Connor (read full novel .txt) 📕

Not that he thought itwould be easy to convince them that she was an intelligentlife-form, but she was clearlya higher life-form!

Grasping her arm at the elbow, hestudied the map and turned until he was lined up with thedirectional finder on his screen and then tugged at her arm to gether going.

Dismay flickered throughAnya, but she’d told herself she needed to cooperate until he lethis guard down if she was going to have any hope of escaping, andshe didn’t resist his urging. The problem was, even when she’d toldherself that she hadn’t been completely convinced that she was hiscaptive. She didn’t know what she had been thinking, but he hadn’treally been threatening beyond refusing to let her go.

She supposed she hadn’t been thinkingbeyond the moment.

Maybe he was just worried that she’dsound the alarm if she got away?

That didn’t actually make much sense,though. She was pretty sure the obelisks had alerted everybody tothe invasion already.

* * * *

As focused as Aidan was on trying toreach the satellite and gather the evidence he needed, anddistracted, although he hated to admit it, by Anya, it dawned onhim after they’d gone only a short distance that he needed toanalyze the native language and see if he could pick up enough totruly communicate.

Actually, it wasprobably mostly because of his preoccupation with Anya that he thought aboutthe necessity of communications.

She was afraid and rightfully so giventhe fact that he was not only a stranger to her but an alienspecies. She seemed fairly intelligent, though, and that meant shehad reasoning capabilities … that he couldn’t actually tap intowithout some means of communication. He might be able to convinceher he didn’t have evil intentions if he could actually talk toher. He didn’t think he’d made much headway with thegestures.

Her continued attempts to escape seemeda pretty good indication that he’d failed in that respect, hethought wryly.

Releasing his grip on herarm, he warned her, “Don’t move!”and then focused on his wrist computer,programming it to record and analyze the sounds so that it couldbegin breaking down speech patterns. He looked at her again whenhe’d finished programming it and discovered she’d been watchinghim. “Computer.”

She stared at him blankly.

Impatience flickeredthrough him. “Aidan,” he said, pointing to himself then to her and finally to thewrist computer. “Anya.Computer.”

He saw something flicker in her eyesand the suspicion arose that she understood exactly what he wastrying to do, but she didn’t say anything. Deciding not to allowher to see how annoyed he was that she refused to cooperate, heurged her to walk again and continued to point at things and assignthe names of them in his own language.

“Fucktard,” Anya mutteredafter a little while.

Aidan frowned, moreconvinced than before that that word, whatever it was, wassomething insulting. He glanced down at his wrist computer to makesure it had recorded the word. Satisfied when he saw it had, hewent back to pointing things out, trying to convince himself thatshe just hadn’t grasped the ‘game’ yet and would jump in after awhile and give him what he needed. “Grass,shrub, cloud … oh my fucking gods! Run!”

* * * *

Anya didn’t know why thestupid bastard was trying to teach her his language, but she had nointerest in trying to learn it. She didn’t mean to hang around longenough to learn it or use it. The sound of alarm in his voice was, apparently,universal, however. She didn’t need to know his language tounderstand they were in deep shit. She glanced up instinctively atthe sound of warning and froze.

Through the tops of the trees, shecould see the shadow of the biggest damned bird she’d ever seen inher life and it was diving!

Uttering a scream, Anya jerked free ofAidan’s hold and tore off through the trees.

Aidan caught up to her, grabbed her armand kept going, pulling her behind him so that she had to takegreat leaps to keep up. She landed wrong on one leap and sprawledout.

Aidan whipped a look back at her,flicked a glance upward that made the hair on the back of her neckstand on end, hesitated, and then bent down, grabbed her arm andyanked her to her feet again. Grabbing her, he leapt behind thetrunk of a tree.

The thing wasn’t a bird, Anyadiscovered as it swept past the tree they were hiding behind. Itlooked … well, it looked an awful lot like the pictures she’d seenof pterodactyls. Either the pictures weren’t entirely accurate,though, or this was something else—far more colorful than thepictures she’d seen—a bright, sky blue rather than the dull brownshe remembered.

She could see it bank to land as itswept past and her heart fell to her toes.

Aidan jerked her into motion again,whipping around the tree they’d been hiding behind and tearing offin the other direction. The bird-thing screamed its frustration atthem and she heard thrashing as it struggled to chase them on theground. She didn’t dare spare the time to look back to see if itwas gaining. Aidan seemed to have the right idea, run andzigzag.

She heard a clapping sound behind themand felt a cold chill run up and down her spine as it instantlyleapt to mind that the damned thing was close enough it was tryingto catch them with its long, pointed beak. It spurred her to morespeed.

They broke from the forest so abruptlythat Anya was halfway across the field before it dawned on her thatthey’d left their cover behind. Aidan apparently realized it aboutthe same time she did. He slowed, looked behind them and then tookoff again, heading for the nearest cove of trees.

He began gaining on her. If shecould’ve spared the breath she would’ve screamed at him to wait forher, but she had a bad feeling he was putting on more speed for areason.

Abruptly, she took a flying leap tocatch up and when she came down she kept going.

Chapter Four

The world went dark. Anya hit bottomjust about the time her brain managed to process the fact that shewas falling and communicated the urge to scream. She managed to getout a beginning note before