Chapter 1 - Chapter One

Downtown LA flashed past the windows of Lara’s black stretch limousine.  She had never felt entirely comfortable here.  In other parts of California, it was a different story.  But for whatever reason, LA just didn’t seem to agree with the English aristocrat.  Maybe there was something in the air.  Maybe it was something else: bad associations.  Something had happened here once, to her, a couple of years ago.  Something awful.  She didn’t like to go into it.

A black and white checkered police car hurtled past, sirens blaring above the din and beat of neon dance clubs, subterranean fetish bars, and their sequinned, blow-dried, leather-clad patrons.  The banked sky overhead glowed midnight blue between scrapers and office blocks. It looked fake, painted on.  Its turquoise full moon and panoply of glittering stars were too perfect.  A story board rendition.  Comic strip panels.  Lara smiled: so LA.

She was here to complete a journey, though not her own.  The journey of the Delphi Stone.  Unfolding the black coral lid of her compact she popped the cap off a tube of glossy red lipstick.  She twisted it up and applied a thick crimson coat to her pouting lips.  Around her throat, reflected in the mirror, the flawlessly cut ruby had never looked so good.  It shimmered with a low-key brilliance, rendered opaque by its own sparkling facets, inset in a solid gold necklace.  It dangled just above the English woman’s sun-bronzed cleavage.

The first time Lara had seen the gem had been on the news, after a violent smash and grab theft en-route from Athens to the Getty Museum.  She shuddered to think how many armed guards had died in the heist.  But it was among the gondoliered waterways and white Baroque architecture of Venice that the tomb raider had acquired the centre-stone of her brooch tonight – second hand.  During a sight-seeing weekend there last month she had happened across the nest of thieves responsible for its disappearance.  A brief, hard-argued debate over ownership rights had ensued.

Lara walked away.  They didn’t.

After some negotiations, the museum’s owners requested she deliver the gem back to them in person.  Of course, Lara being Lara, and LA being LA, they had insisted on a huge gala reception to greet her, with her name heading the guest list.  Lara had requested that it be kept relatively low key.  But then again, the English woman reflected, as her stretch limo swooped majestically around the last corner leading onto Beverley Park Drive and began its slow glide uphill to the museum’s main entrance – and she heard the murmuring crowds, and saw the bright yellow searchlights strafing through the night sky fifty stories high – strictly speaking, all things are relative.

Especially in LA.

The limousine slinked to a halt.  The door swung open on slow pneumatic hinges, and a constellation of camera flashes strobed over Lara’s long legs as she unfolded them from the back seat, and stepped out.  Her ankle length dress parted to reveal swathes of smooth, lightly tan skin almost up to her hip.  The paparazzi had a feeding frenzy.  Lara rolled her eyes: she had never been one for the public eye.  Though she had to admit, her outfit did show off her figure rather nicely.  Like a layer of black liquid silk it flowed over the contours of her breasts, hips, buttocks, and slim belly, adhering skin-tight to every inch of her sleekly muscled curves.  Two tiny shoulder straps were all that kept its plunging neck line from sliding down over Lara’s bra-less tits.  Her heels were modest three-inchers tonight, with thin strips of shiny patent leather hooping over her ankles and toes: Christian Louboutin originals, with his trademark deep red soles.  Gathered back behind her head her chestnut brown hair was tied in its trademark French braid.  It bounced off Lara’s tight ass and swung from side to side like a pendulum as she strode through the crowd, tickling the base of her spine.  Its prisms refulged the camera flashes with a glossy sheen.

Lara couldn’t help but blush a little though, as the night air played over her chest, and she felt her nipples harden involuntarily in front of all the cameras.  She became aware of the two perts bumps pressing up, clearly visible beneath the thin black satin of her expensive evening dress, and started fidgeting, a little embarrassed.  Without her guns, she felt so...

“Ms. Croft! There you are!”.  Lara turned.  A tall, white haired gent in a dapper tux strode up with his hand extended.  “I’m Lawrence Nash, the curator.  Welcome.  And is that...?”

It took her a moment to realise he wasn’t staring at her tits.

“Oh, the Delphi Stone”,  she smiled politely.  “Yes.  I hope you don’t mind my wearing it.  It just went so well with my ensemble”.  

Nash smiled back, his wrinkled cheeks retreating upwards from his age-weakened jawline, lending his face an affable if ghoulish appearance.

“It’s truly dazzling”, Lara noticed the old man’s eyes lingering a moment too long.  “We all owe you a debt of gratitude which can never be repaid”.  His gaze dropped a couple of inches, down to her cleavage – typical, Lara sighed.  He clasped her un-offered hand in both of his and raised it to his lips, kissing the young woman’s smooth skin in a rather unsavoury manner.

“Tell you what, Lawrence”, Lara had to wrench her hand free, “call this whole thing off, and I’ll call it even”.  She surreptitiously wiped off Nash’s warm drool on the side of her dress.

“Hah!”, Lawrence Nash laughed, though his eyes missed none of Lara’s disdain.  “You have a fabulous sense of humour, Ms Croft!  Truly!”,    With mock humbleness he gestured at a helicopter pad beside the museum.  “The senator is due to arrive by helicopter at any minute.  Just as soon as she does, we’ll begin the ceremony”.

Lara nodded, eying the sun-varnished octogenarian suspiciously.  There was just something about his manner she didn’t trust.  Her intuition warned her: be careful.





Nash’s warm palm on her lower back guided Lara through the crowd of socialites and minor celebrities.  She bristled at the contact, but felt obliged to act the role of a compliant visiting dignitary – for the time being at least, until she found out what was really going on.  She even tolerated a little light groping as she and Nash stood side-by-side for some publicity shots a few minutes later.  Nash’s palm edged down sickeningly over her bare lower back.  He stroked the upper curvatures of her firm buttocks for a moment, feeling Lara’s warm flesh tense deliciously beneath his touch.  Then he slipped his fingers down the back of her dress.  Lara’s smile tightened and faltered; she gritted her teeth, but made no move to stop the curator, not even when he cupped the taut globe of her full left ass-cheek and gave it a good squeeze and fondle, then pushed his palm down between her buttocks and goosed Lara’s ass-crack with two wizened fingers.  Lara’s thighs trembled a little as the photographers snapped away and Nash beamed at her with amusement, teasing her pussy with his fingertips.  She was sorely tempted to wheel on the lecherous old man and knock him cold with a hard elbow to the base of his neck.  But she had learned to put up with much worse – an unfortunate consequence of being shaped like a wet dream when your chosen profession is populated largely by greedy, adolescently minded men.

Finally, with the photocall over, Lara disentangled herself from Nash’s busy hands.  She excused herself and made a beeline for the museum’s main entrance, muttering angrily under her breath.

“The sooner we get this over and done with, the sooner I can get the bloody hell out of... Hey!!”.  A tray of champagne flutes collided with the front of Lara’s dress.  Fizzy yellowish liquid spritzed her tits.

“Ohmygod, sorry lady, damn, I’m so sorry...”, the tray-bearer, a lanky male teenager in a loose-fitting white shirt and black slacks blurted out his apologies.  “Oh man, please don’t be mad, I-I really need this job...”

“There there dear”, Lara soothed him, accepting the offered towel – after a mud-bath on the banks of the river Amazon a little champagne down the front of her dress didn’t seem like such a big deal  “It’s quite alright.  No real harm done”.  She wiped off her hands on the cloth, then used it to dry up her forearms.  The sound of helicopter blades thumping through the air overhead distracted Lara as the red faced teen dropped to his knees and started dabbing at the front of her dress with another small white cloth.  The chopper circled around above the museum then came in to land on the helipad.

“Honestly, I don’t know where I’m even at sometimes.  Have you ever felt that way?  Well, I have”.  The teen dabbed and pawed at Lara’s belly, carefully soaking up the liquid that had seeped into her dress.  “I feel like I’m maybe coming down with a cold... Ah-chew! And I wasn’t even supposed to work tonight”.  Moving upwards as Lara narrowed her eyes at the approaching helicopter, he didn’t even seem to notice when he started groping the English woman’s DD-cup tits.  Diligently he patted away the liquid that had soaked into her bubbly tan cleavage, and bumbled on:  “But a bunch of people called in sick, so who do they pick on, yeah me, yours truly.  They even had to bring in some totally new people to help out...”, he trailed off, realising at last what he was doing: that he had both of this beautiful woman’s gorgeous breasts cupped in his palms and had free reign to grope them.  “Er... I’m really an actor...”, he faltered, amazed she wasn’t stopping him, “well, kind of anyway”.

But Lara seemed too focused on the helicopter pad to pay him much mind – a fact that the breast-groping teen used to great advantage.  Sliding both his palms under her firm, heavy tits he used the wash cloth as an excuse to help himself to a good squeeze and fondle.  He bounced Lara’s ripe melons up and down in his hands a few times, surreptitiously testing their weight, then made a big show of patting her cleavage dry, even going so far as to push part of the wash cloth down between the English woman’s gorgeous tits so he could soak up any champagne residue that might have trickled down between them.

The teenager could quite happily have spent the rest of his evening doing this – if it hadn’t been for the loud sound of gun fire and hysterical screaming that erupted from the crowd behind him a moment later.

“Get down!”, Lara dived sideways, grabbing his arms and slamming the teen to the ground beneath her.  Bullets whizzed through the air inches above their heads.  A champagne bottle on a table nearby exploded in a geyser of fizzy green glass.  Lara landed heavily on top of the stunned teenager, her tits smooshed warmly in his face.  “Shh...”, she glanced around, pinning him to the ground with both hands, “don’t make a noise, kid, and stay down until the shooting’s over, ok”.

“Mmmph, mmph...”, was his only response.  He wasn’t planning on going anywhere, not with two of the most perfect breasts he had ever seen in his life pressed hard against his mouth and nose.  Looking up all he could see was Lara’s sun-bronzed cleavage, the elegant lines of her throat, the underside of her chin, and her full red-painted lips as she kept a wary lookout for any of the shooters.

“Ungh... stop it, you little bastard!”, Lara hissed, feeling the teenager’s palms slide up over the backs of her thighs.  He just grinned up at her, and grabbed her ass.  “Oh, bloody typical”, she sighed, “fine, fine... just stay quiet ok, or you’ll get us both killed!”.

For the next few minutes a prolonged fire-fight raged between the event’s security services and the invading gunmen – and Lara had to submit to the adolescent gropings of a horny teenager.  The boy sucked hard on a mouthful of her hot, bulging cleavage as shots ricocheted off the tables around them.  He couldn’t get enough of her skin.  It tasted so good.  The pampered secretions of her well-heeled flesh were a banquet for his senses.  He lapped at the champagne-flavoured cleft between Lara’s tits, then snuffled his nose deep down inside her dress’s décolletage and inhaled deeply.  Passion fruit, vanilla, sandalwood, a hint of bitter lime: the scent of her expensive perfume made his head swim.  His cock bulged under Lara’s thigh.  His hips bucked reflexively up, grinding his hard organ in-between the millionairess’s tightly closed legs.  Frustrated, he reached behind around her and slid a hand inside the slit of her dress.  Lara seethed.  She squirmed around on top of the teenager angrily as he palmed her ass and started squeezing and massaging her taut buttocks like she was an easy prom date.  All of her senses remained on high alert the whole time however; the situation was too dangerous for the tomb raider to let her guard down for a second; she expected to be confronted by a gun-toting maniac at any moment.

Finally the gun fire quieted down to sporadic bursts, then subsided completely.  Lara slapped a palm against the teenager’s forehead and pushed him away from her cleavage.  She grabbed his wrists, one at a time, and practically had to wrench his hands away from her ass.  She pinned them both to the floor above his head, then glared down at him.  The teenager’s face was red with excitement.  He leered up at her with an almost mindless expression of pure, juvenile unsated sexual need.  Lara shook her head in resignation: boys will be boys, she mused.  Always a handful.  She could do nothing about the teen’s insistently grinding hips however, and had to settle for riding his crotch with her legs spread on either side of his torso as he dry-humped her pussy.  The only thing separating them was the boy’s shorts, his slacks, and Lara’s black thong panties.  She could feel the heat of his blood pulsing against her sex as he rose up beneath her, again and again bumping and grinding against her covered pussy – clearly frustrated by the lack of penetration.

“Ungh! L-look”, she whispered, keeping her voice as low as possible, “just stop being such a bloody perv, ngh!, for one moment!  Let me focus, and I’ll... I’ll make it up to you later, okay...”.  She raised one eyebrow, looking down at the teen with stern expectancy.  Lara had no intention of keeping her word of course, but this seemed like the only way she could get even five seconds of peace to formulate a strategy – and save both their lives.  “Look”, she said softly, reassuringly. I promise... okay”.  Pouting her lips a little, she gave the teenager a look that smouldered warmly in the pit of his balls.

For a long moment he thought it over.  Lara could see the cogs turning behind the boy’s lust-fogged eyes, weighing immediate pleasure and almost certain death against long-term survival and the promise of sexual favours from possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on.  Finally, he nodded.  His dry-humping ceased, and Lara breathed a sigh of relief.  She climbed off his hips and found some proper cover nearby, ducking behind an upended table.



Two pairs of eyes appeared over the top of a white linen tablecloth.  Half-hidden behind some pink-frosted cupcakes with maraschino cherries on top, they scanned the room back and forth a couple of times.  The more intense, more intelligent, more beautiful, light hazel pair locked onto a target a few yards off.

“Mast”.

The less intelligent, more frightened pair of eyes swivelled sideways, then peered downwards, taking in some cleavage.

“Huh?”.

“I know that man”, Lara’s jaw muscles bulged.

“You mean, he’s like a friend of yours...?”.  The teenager inclined his head just so.  If he looked down the front of Lara’s dress, he realised, at just the right angle – when her neckline fell away from her breasts in just the right way, like it was doing now – he could see a faint half-crescent hint of one pert, perfectly formed, seashell pink ni...

“Unnph!”, Lara’s elbow digging into the boy’s ribcage drew his attention back to the present situation.  He followed her eyes, and saw what she was looking at: a man was stepping down from the copter parked on the helipad.

Lara eyed the newcomer coldly.  “Furthest thing from it”.

He was a tall, silver-haired old gent, not unlike the museum’s head curator in fact.  Dressed in a light grey business suit with a white shirt and black tie underneath, he gave off an air of malevolent authority.  The surviving mercenaries quickly jogged back and fell into formation around him.  With a military flourish they cocked their rifles, shotguns, pistols, uzis, and semiautomatics, and aimed them out over the crowd of tux-clad partygoers.  Someone handed Mast a bullhorn.

“*Ahem*”, the night air crackled with tinny feedback, “I apologise for dropping in uninvited like this”.  The old man held the bullhorn with his pinky finger extended, like he was taking tea in Hyde Park.  “I am Edgar Mast, and at this moment I hold all of your lives in the palm of my hand.  Anyone who isn’t lying face down on the ground in three seconds will be shot”.

He started an uncompromising countdown: “One...  Two...”.

The crowd flattened out like a bed of reeds, many of them kissing the tarmac with both hands clasped behind their heads.

“Three”, said Edgar Mast.  “A very promising start”.  His harsh grey eyes raked over the roomful of grovelling men and women, taking in their expensive designer suits, glamorous evening gowns and gym-toned bodies as they cowered before him.

“I don’t see her”, he said at length.  “Ah well, it makes no difference.  Men, find the bitch!  Bring me Lara Croft now!  I want to see that tight-assed aristocratic whore down on her knees, begging for her life.  We’re going to make her pay for what she stole from us in Venice!  And then...”, a lecherous grin spread over the old man’s already rather unpleasant features, “...after she has returned our property to us, we are, I think, going to have a little fun with Ms. Croft.  Yes, quite some fun, indeed...”

Lara watched the dozen or so heavily armed men spread out across the room.

“Army fatigues...”, she pondered, “AK-47s and 9 millimetre berettas.  They certainly look the part.  And here I am with nothing more than a pair of moderately sharp three inch designer heels... oh,  good show, old girl...”

“Ohmygod! You’re Lara Croft!”.  The teenager blurted out.  He was crowding her again.  Kneeling just behind her with his hands on her hips, he peered eagerly over Lara’s shoulder.  She could feel his erection bumping up against the crevice of her ass-cleavage as he casually dry-humped her bum.  “I can’t believe I dumped a tray of champagne glasses on our guest of honour.  They’ll fire me if they find out!”

“Shhh...”, Lara hushed him, calmly removing the boy’s hands from her hips.  She was tempted to knock him out with a well-placed judo chop to his carotid artery, but realised that even he might have his uses – a guide to the museum’s floorplan; another pair of eyes to watch her back; and, if necessary, when push came to shove, a human shield.  Lara wanted to get out of this mess alive, even if that meant exploiting every option she had open to her.

“Well, they won’t hear it from me”, she soothed the boy with a hushed voice, turning to face him.  “Now, how well do you know this museum?”.

“L-like the back of my hand”, he stammered nervously, “I-I’ve worked a bunch of parties here”.

“Good...”

Lara kicked off her heels and shimmied her dress up a little.  Grabbing a fruit knife from the table above her, she made a tiny incision in the garment’s fabric just above her mid-thigh.  Then with a long, smooth, quiet tearing motion she ripped the lower half of her dress off, and turned it from an ankle-length evening gown into a tight, black mini.  Running was going to feature quite prominently in her survival plan, Lara foresaw.  The other part of her plan also seemed to be working out quite well: the teenage boy was now gawking at her legs with guileless lust.

“Is there a service corridor nearby?”, Lara asked quickly, glancing around.

“Err... yeah”, the crotch area of the boy’s slacks looked like they were about to tear open at any moment.  “There’s one through those glass doors over there”, he pointed.

“Thank you”, Lara bobbed down in a sprinter’s crouch behind the table.  She felt her dress ride up over the backs of her thighs, revealing the undersides of her ass-cheeks.  She smiled at the boy’s reaction.  She could feel his eyes all over her thighs and bum.  “I suppose you’d better come with me then... Mr...?”

He actually had to shake his head just to remember his name – such was the mesmerising effect of Lara Croft’s perfect peach of an ass wrapped in tight black satin less than a foot away from his face – but finally the teen came to his senses, and said: “Er... Davie.  Yeah, Davie Davis”.

“Well it’s a pleasure to meet you, Davie Davis”, Lara quipped back, pushing her bum in his face, shaking out her long toned legs in preparation.  “Now, try not to get shot”.

Davie gulped.  He staggered to his feet just as Lara exploded from her sprinter’s crouch and beelined towards the service corridor.  He watched her firm round ass dimple healthily, her bare muscular thighs pump like slender pistons, propelling her forward with an almost balletic grace.  His cock bulged, drawing him on like a magnet as he stumbled after her.

“I’m right behind you”, he grinned, “Ms. Croft”.

One of the mercenaries spotted the pair a moment before they could make it to the doorway.  “There she is!!”.  Shots boomed.  Bullets pinged and ricocheted off the walls and floor all around them.

Davie got scared half to death, and hauled ass.



To be continued...