Free Urban Prey by S. J. Lewis

thirty chapters, there was a lot of talking, some sword fights, and not much else.” She sighed. “I kept on reading it, though. The only time I’d ever seen the ocean was during a class trip to Galveston once, so sailing the seas sounded kind of romantic to me. And I kept hoping that the pirate would do something besides moon over his beautiful captive whenever he wasn’t taking a merchant ship or running away from a warship. Instead, he let her go and made sure she returned to her home safely. He didn’t even try to ransom her! I remember thinking that he wasn’t very good at being a pirate.”
    “What would you rather have read?” the psych asked.
    “Well, she was beautiful, and he was supposed to be a daring buccaneer. I was hoping that he’d try to seduce her at least. Instead, all he did was kiss her once. She slapped him for that, and afterwards he let her live in his cabin while he slept someplace else. I think the author intended that to show that he’d fallen in love with her, but it seemed kind of wimpy to me. She kept expecting him to try something, and she always seemed a little disappointed when he didn’t.”
“How did the story end?”
    “Oh,” Elizabeth Anne waved a hand…her left hand, Ron noticed, “In the end, she finds out that the navy set a trap for him, so she steals a little sailing boat to go and find him and warn him. Then a storm comes up and her boat is damaged and she’s left adrift out in the middle of nowhere. She even had sharks circling her boat. I’ve seen buzzards do that, but I don’t think that sharks do. Anyway, the same storm let the pirate escape from the trap, and his ship just happens to come across her while she’s about to die of thirst. He saves her, they kiss again, he swears to give up piracy for her, and they sail off into the sunset. All the story needed at that point was to finish with: ‘and they all lived happily ever after’.”
    “So you were disappointed?”
    “Very,” Elizabeth Anne nodded vigorously. “But at the same time, I was intrigued. I read the second book, thinking that it might be better. It wasn’t. It was practically unreadable, and I gave up about a third of the way through.”
    “What did you do then?”
    Elizabeth Anne smiled. “I started thinking what the pirate should have done differently, but there were so many of those things that after a while I gave up on him and started writing little stories of my own. I kept them hidden from everybody.”
    “What were your stories like?”
    “I never finished any of them. I’d always get to a point, and then shy away from going any further.”
“Why do you think you did that?”
    A shrug and a rueful glance down and to the left, Ron noted.
    “I didn’t really know that much. I grew up on a ranch, so I knew all about sex, at least as far as horses and cattle…and the cats…but aside from some kissing and a little petting I didn’t have any real personal experience. I really started to feel as if I’d been missing something then.”
    “What did you do about that?”
    Ron leaned forward to hear her answer.
    “Nothing. I was going to be going away to college soon, and the last thing I wanted was to start something in my little hometown that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish. So I went out riding a lot, just to get some privacy and think. There was a lot of open space for that. I’d imagine some rugged outlaw, or a fierce warrior captured me. He’d tie my hands behind me and maybe put a rope around my neck and lead me back to his camp behind his horse. Just thinking about that always got me very excited. There was just the two of us, usually. Once he got me to his camp, he’d strip me naked. I fantasized a lot at first about being staked out on the ground, stark naked, unable to move or fight him off.” She shivered and stopped talking.
    “Sometimes you imagined more than one man?”
    “Yes, but while my captor might show me naked in front of those other men,