The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Akiko’s New Protégé

Part Six

The people and events in this story come from my brain, not the real world Regardless of what that tells you about my brain, it means that I’m not writing about you, your mom, your friends, or your friends’ friends. So you can’t sue me. Neener neener.

If you’re underage in your territory (and you know what I mean), then read something else, please. If you’re easily offended by sexually explicit fetish content, may I suggest reading something else? If you’re easily offended by sexual content and are determined to help yourself to a dash of moral outrage, I put it to you this way: you have too much time on your hands.

Synopsis: Devon awaits her fate, as Marlin – the GIA mind control counterforce – licks its wounds and prepares to even the score.

* * *

God, the smell of that hospital… It was the worst antiseptic odour imaginable, worse than the stuff they use at crime scenes when people are splattered all over the walls. It permeated everything, and I smelled it in my hair as the orderlies wheeled me down the narrow halls. I was supposed to be asleep from the IV drip, but at this point I’d developed a tolerance. Instead, I had a headache so intense that a steady stream of tears dripped onto my pillow.

These people had been working on me for weeks, coming at me with everything they had. I was so far gone that the only time I noticed what they were doing to my head was during the inevitable appearance of my terrifying flashbacks, which caused my minders to abruptly change tactics. And whenever that happened, they got quite grumpy with me.

Now I could do little more than listen to the wheels of my gurney squeak and count the florescent light fixtures going by overhead. One of the orderlies lit up a cheap Russian cigarette, for which I was grateful. Covered up the hospital smell a bit.

They took me into a filthy, dimly lit wing—of course I couldn’t make out the Cyrillic signs – and we stopped in a small ward with mostly empty beds. There were three other ‘patients’ here. “Hey, what happened to my old room?” I croaked at the chaps, as they turned to go.

One looked at the other, who blew smoke at the wall dramatically. “Is where we bring the damaged goods,” he shrugged, and thumbed up the dose on my drip before leaving.

Brilliant. My next stop would no doubt be the morgue.

* * *

I don’t know how long I slept. It was better not to know, really. But the next thing I smelled was the most wondrous cologne. It so obviously had nothing to do with the hospital – and nothing to do with bloody wretched Kamchatka, for that matter—that I blinked in the daylight and tried to resolve the two blurry shapes around me.

A girl’s voice whispered, “Is this her?”

A man’s answered, “Yup.”

I tried to be quiet, having learnt not to attract attention to myself, but someone lifted my arm to take my pulse. It may occur to you that this act would not be unusual in that setting, but I was not in a place they sent people to get well. Someone else put a damp cloth on my head and pulled a strand of hair out of my mouth.

My curiosity piqued, I spoke up. “You must be new here.”

Fingers brushed my lips. “Shush!” It was the girl.

The man leaned down to whisper in my ear. I was so distracted by his cologne that I almost didn’t pay attention. “Devon Knightley, we’re getting you the fuck out of here. We’re posing as compromised personnel. Just be cool, okay?”

Oh, he was British! “Whatever you say…”

“Turn off that junk they’re feeding her,” the girl suggested. Hmmm. Aussie accent?

“I’ll do better than that,” the man said. I felt a gentle tug on the needle, then he pulled it out of my wrist in one smooth motion. “Get the door, Nina, and for chrissake keep your cool.”

Next thing I know, these two were wheeling me out of the ward.

“What’s that say?” the girl – Nina – asked.

“’Terminal Ward’,” the man answered, “As in, this was her final destination.”

Nina… Nina, Nina, Nina… The stimulus of being moved around and the lack of meds roused me. I blinked twice, hard, and tried to get a look at the girl. Finally my gaze came into focus. She was in black military fatigues – those of my old division. Her long-ish black bob was pinned back under a beret. She didn’t seem like anyone I’d ever worked with in black ops. And she was sneaking glances at me as she walked beside my gurney. Hmm, a Japanese girl with an Australian accent…

Oh.

“Nina?” I mumbled at her.

She may have been trying to smuggle me out of this death trap, but the look she gave me was quite nasty. “Bevan?” she answered. I found out later that this is an Australian term, like Pikey or redneck. Not very nice, especially the way she employed it as a pun for my name. Yep, this was Akiko’s Nina, and even though I didn’t understand the snipe, I realized she knew all about me and what I’d been up to with her woman.

The man intervened. “That’ll be enough, young lady,” he hissed. “Keep walking and try to act like a soldier, not a bloody pop star.”

I turned my attention to him. He was decked out in the same uniform, a beret perched on top of his shaved head. He was a tall, black Brit bloke. Very nice looking.

Speaking of uniforms, we reached a security checkpoint then. My gorgeous man put his hand over my eyes. Right. I was supposed to be asleep.

“Papers,” said a bored Russian bloke. I heard documents ruffle. “Good timing. She was going to be executed tonight.”

“And your super is going to catch hell for that. Do you know who you’ve been torturing in this godawful place?”

“I don’t get paid enough to know such things.”

Then I was wheeled onward, feeling more and more like we couldn’t get out of there fast enough. “What if this doesn’t work?” I asked.

“Never you mind, love. We’ll be out of here in five minutes.”

I grew a little braver. “What’s your name?”

“Roderick Davis. But please let’s save the introductions. You’re supposed to be sedated.”

I closed my eyes for him. Really, I was too exhausted to stay scared for more than a few seconds at a time.

“Here’s the lobby, guys,” Nina warned.

There were a lot of voices, and every so often there was a strong, cold breeze. It had been a long time since I smelled fresh air. My heart leapt when my gurney left the tiled floor for concrete. It got very cold and I smelled petrol on the whipping wind.

“Nice,” Roddy said, in a way that got me instantly worried.

“Nurse Ratchet over there has all the discharges in a queue,” Nina complained.

“Fuck that. They’ll make us for sure. We’re pulling rank.”

We sped up, and I desperately wanted to open my eyes. I heard very angry Russian coming from a female, approaching us quickly. The gurney jerked to a halt as someone kicked it.

“Oi!” threatened Roderick. “We’ve got wheels up in twenty minutes!”

“You will wait with the rest,” the mean Russian cow spat, “or I can arrange to have you jailed!”

“Director Popova would be interested to know that our efforts to carry out our orders were being impeded.”

She called his bluff. “The Director himself conceived of this protocol for discharging patients. With no exceptions.”

I heard the safety catches click on several rifles, and held my breath.

Then a car gunned its engine. I heard it hop the curb just near us. Then there was gunfire and Roderick was lifting me out of the gurney and yelling, “Go! Go!” to Nina. I buried my face in Roderick’s fatigues and hoped for the best. Then the three of us sprawled into a big Mercedes limo, which rocketed off before we could get the door shut. In the front seats there was a man at the wheel and a woman leaning out the passenger window, hosing down the way behind us with a machine gun. “That could’ve gone better!” she remarked.

The rear of the limo was kind of posh. One pair of passenger seats faced the rear and another pair faced forward. Nina faced Roderick and me from the front, and she continued to lob sullen gazes at me while she loaded a clip into her pistol. This was more action than I could bear at the moment, so I cowered against Roderick in the back as he dialed a cell phone. Behind me, the trunk was getting shot up at an alarming rate.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he yelled. “We need an egress to the airstrip! Can you give us cover? Hold on… Nina, what the hell are you doing?”

This last question was directed at the crazy girl trying to fit herself through the sunroof to get off a few shots. “Roddy, if we don’t get out of this, nobody will ever find her,” she told him, before wriggling through the opening.

Roddy grabbed her waist and roughly yanked her back in. “Look, I was told to look after you, so I let you come with me, but you’re not field-rated. I’m not going to be the one to tell Akiko you didn’t make it!”

There was a tense moment, and a staring match, while Nina doffed her beret and her black bob. Under the wig she was blond – a very expensive dye job. She continued to glare at Roddy, whilst she worked out some bobby pins and shook her long, straight hair out. When she saw that Roddy wasn’t going to back down, she tried me on for size. “What are you looking at?” she wanted to know.

I didn’t know where my stones had gone, so to speak. Guess I left them in that hospital. So I did my black ops comrades proud and burst into tears.

Roddy began to dial another number, as two helicopters swarmed in to flank the car. Apparently this was our escort out of town. He looked at me, then at Nina while he waited for his call to pick up. “Look at her,” he told Nina. “You know exactly what she’s been through. Still feel like picking a fight?” He was deadly serious.

I sunk down in the seat, covering my face with one hand and trying to pull down my dirty hospital slip with the other. Guess I was trying to present as small a target as possible. I was so dehydrated that I couldn’t make proper tears, just a lot of dry, wracking sobs.

Then someone perched next to me. Wispy arms wrapped around me tightly and little hands found mine. Soft, blond hair spilled into my face as Nina put her lips to my ear. “Baby? Hey… I’m so sorry. Shhh-shhhh…” and so on. It made me feel a lot better, but I only cried harder.

* * *

Two hours later, I was a little more composed. The sun was going down and the cabin lights in the plane came on. Nina, Roddy and I had boarded a black GIA jet and we were on our way to Tokyo. A couple of Marlin field medics worked on me in the back, while Nina sat in the window seat next to me, squeezing my fingers and brushing my hair. We hadn’t spoken in some time.

Someone draped another blanket over me, and I wiggled my toes, pleased and warm. “How’s our escaped patient?” Roddy asked.

Nina looked expectantly at one of the medics, who said, “I can’t tell you anything definite until we run tests.” He noticed my eyes widen, and quickly added, “I think she’ll be fine, once she starts eating solid food again.”

Roddy took the seat across from me and watched Nina brush my hair. “So how’re we doing, Ms. Knightley?”

I loved his smooth, deep voice. “Call me Devon,” I said. “I’m wearing a potato sack and I look a frightful mess.”

“I’ll bet you clean up nicely, Ms. Devon. Where you from?”

“Redbridge.”

“Ah, East Ender…”

“And you?”

He smiled. “You mean you’ve been in that Russkie joint so long you can’t tell?”

“Bristol, if I had to guess.”

Roddy laughed and leaned into the aisle. “And you’d be right, me China.” For those of you not familiar with the bizarre rhyming slang of my homeland, that meant he was calling me his mate: ‘China plate,’ ‘mate…’ Well, you get it. “What would you like for your first solid meal, Ms. Devon from Redbridge?” he asked.

I bit my lip, considering. “A fag and a pint.”

He looked over at Nina as they raised eyebrows at each other. “Our kind of people,” she observed.

* * *

There was a bit of a convoy lined up at the tarmac. At the front and rear were large, black Japanese SUVs that had been converted into armed troop carriers. In the middle was an ambulance, but I pleaded with Nina and she convinced the medics to let me ride with her in the limo. I didn’t care if I was on death’s door. I’d had my fill of white interiors. Roddy wanted to be up front where any action might be. I was a little shocked that he expected some between Narita and Tokyo. A lot must’ve happened while I’d been away.

“First thing we do when we get in is find you something to wear,” Nina said She’d given me her jacket, which was a start, but my legs were freezing. She began rolling down the window.

“What are you doing?”

“Promise not to tell.”

“All right…”

She pulled something out of her pants pocket faster than I could track, and nimbly stuck a cigarette in my mouth. I was lit up before I could thank her.

It had been so long since I’d been to the same place twice that getting back to Marlin HQ almost felt like coming home, even if I hadn’t been given the grand tour the first time. A whole team of doctors and technicians awaited me, and they whisked me off to the lab. Nina refused to leave me. Not that anyone objected to her being around – no one ever does. They just had to ask her to move a lot.

There was the usual prodding and poking, but since these people were trying to treat me instead of cause me irreparable brain damage, I felt a little less tense about it. Apparently Nina had been through this whole process at least twice, so she was full of trivia and silly jokes about each thing they were doing to me.

“This is to tell how much you like orgasms,” she stated, when a tech waved some kind of wand over my hips.

“Begging your pardon, Ms. Nina. That is not what this does at all.” The young Japanese guy blushed earnestly.

“That’s what Doctor Sato told me,” she mock protested.

“I believe she was teasing you. It’s really—”

She looked away, held up a finger. “Guys, excuse me for one sec.”

Miyu Ohmori – the woman whom Akiko had ordered me to kill – was here, and Nina ran to greet her. They fell into a quiet, deadly serious conversation I wondered what my final prognosis would be, and to be honest, the more I thought about it the more worried I got. I mean, would I contract some fatal brain disease from all the strange fields I’d been bombarded with? Would I drop dead of a heart attack from all the stimulants and depressants they’d pumped into me? Was I infertile, after being raped by men and women and machines for days on end?

And was my career basically over?

“Hey, that’s the face you promised to stop making,” Nina complained, resuming her tight grip on my left hand.

“How much longer?” I asked.

She nodded quickly, getting it. “Okay.” She flagged someone down and whispered to them, then held up five fingers at me. “Can you last that long?”

“Yeah. I want to know the results.”

“Devon, if you’re sitting here talking to me, you’re going to be fine. I swear. Maybe not right away, but you’re going to be fine.”

“Are you being straight with me?” I asked.

She crossed her heart. “I wouldn’t bullshit you about this.” She leaned in close. “And the word is that you’re the big new thing around here.”

I blinked at her while they drew a blood sample. “What are you going on about?”

“Doctor Sato found you in their database, after she was captured. She’s the one who found out where you were and sent us after you. That is, after she escaped from them.”

“She escaped?” I was suddenly very impressed, but Nina started to pull the face that she’d just asked me not to make. “What’s wrong? Is this about Akiko?”

She began sniffling a little, and tried to laugh it off. “Okay. Now we’re both thinking about rotten stuff we can’t do anything about.”

I reached for her hand, rattling the paper on the examination table. “She’s still out there, isn’t she?”

Poor dear. She was about to lose her grip on that brave face. “Somewhere… Yeah.”

Miyu, who’d been chatting with some of my attentive doctor friends, chose that moment to approach us. “Okay, okay,” she soothed, lightly rubbing our heads, “No more tests, no more worrying. Please?”

“’Kay, Miyu,” Nina agreed, wiping her eyes.

“Tomorrow we’ll all introduce ourselves and answer questions and everything will make more sense.” She was so poised—and I was so tired—that I believed her.

* * *

That night was wonderful. The doctors wanted to keep me in the infirmary for observation, but Nina took one look at my white face and cheerfully dismissed them. She pointed out that we would just be upstairs, that we’d call if we needed anything. She led me to the suite she shared with Akiko and put me in the bath. An hour or so later, she gently pulled me out and we had dinner on the bed in front of the telly – yakitori and noodles. Then we ended up getting a little drunk.

“I never would’ve done, otherwise. Honestly, I’m straight.” I’d just finished telling her my whole sordid tale, and was ritually apologizing once more for my intimacy with Akiko Masumi. On the bed where we’d spent the night together, no less.

“You don’t have to explain,” she said, stirring her whisky with a finger. “It’s happened to me, too.”

I regarded her. She’d put her blue contacts back in, now that she wasn’t in disguise as a soldier. “Really? With her?”

She nodded vigorously. “How do you think we met?”

“No…”

“On an island of slave girls. I was hers…”

“You’re shining me on,” I grinned, scandalized.

She went quiet, and I thought I’d pissed her off again for a moment. “I like when you do that,” she murmured.

“Do what?”

“Smile, silly.”

I was relieved, but I wanted things out in the open. “So are you and I okay?”

She smiled mischievously and threw an ice cube at me. “I get a little psycho when it comes to her. And I don’t know where she is and I’m worried out of my mind. But I didn’t have any right to be such a cunt to you. You’re one of us…”

I breathed a little sigh of relief. “You’re a generous soul, Nina.”

She refilled my tumbler. “Yes yes, now let’s talk about Roddy.”

The whisky had warmed my heart and head and definitely loosened my tongue. “You mean the magnificent Roderick Davis?”

“Yes,” she pointed, squinting through her buzz to make sure she was aiming in the right direction. “Yes. That one. The one who thinks you’re all that.”

I sniffed. “Hardly. He’s only seen me looking like a cadaver.”

“Devon, let’s be real. You couldn’t even look bad in a clown costume.”

I studied my drink, embarrassed. “He thinks I’m ‘all that,’ huh? And how do you happen to know this?”

“I’m a girl,” she pointed out, exasperated.

* * *

Next morning, I had to see the doctor. It wasn’t Natsumi; apparently she wasn’t quite up to coming back to work. Instead, I saw a nice lady named Sakura Takagi, who’d learned English from the English.

“I just want to go over the test results with you for a moment, please,” she was saying, as she pushed her glasses up her nose. Her dyed brown hair was stylishly clipped back in several places.

I tried to calm myself, but my heart was pounding. “Okay.”

She took my wrists and gently shook them. “Hey, relax.” The doctors here were a funny lot. They knew what was going with me, outside and in, the latter in ways I couldn’t begin to understand.

I smiled a bit and took a deep breath. “Trying…”

She knew I wouldn’t calm down until it was over, so she started flipping through the charts. “You lost a lot of weight. You’re malnourished. Nothing that can’t be fixed by good diet and taking things easy for a few days. And you were very active, sexually.”

I blushed. “Not by choice.”

“I understand, believe me. I’m just saying there was swelling and some… Let’s just say you shouldn’t engage in sex for a while.”

“Not a problem. I’m depressingly single at present.”

She laughed. “Okay, fine. Now, I don’t have to tell you that you suffered prolonged exposure to some of the most dangerous mind control techniques in existence.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I’ll be straight with you, Devon. You’re going to need a lot of help here I can’t give you any kind of timetable.”

I wanted to cut to the chase. “Doctor. Should I be looking for another job?”

She held up a finger, not wanting me to break her train of thought.

“Can I still be triggered?” I wanted to know. “Am I going to be easily convinced by strangers and led into dark alleys? Am I such a headcase that no one’s going to want to date me?”

Sakura’s finger started to wag. “Devon—“

“Do you see where I’m going here, Doctor?”

Her finger landed on my lips. “Let me answer those questions in order. No, you are not finished. You will still be a valuable field agent. You can still be triggered, but we can fix that. As for how all this will affect your love life, that’s a complex issue.”

“Meaning I’m a headcase…”

“Devon, that’s what’s so extraordinary about you,” she enthused, grabbing my hands. “Your ability to withstand everything that’s been done to you is unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like it. You should’ve blindly followed Akiko until you were told to do otherwise.” I could tell my case appealed to her very much. “And after that… Nightmare in Russia… You should be nearly lobotomized after what they did to you.”

“You’re not painting a cheery picture, Doctor.”

She showed me the finger again. “Your resilience saved you, Devon. It’s what jumped out at Dr. Sato, while she was ordered to review the assets that Stingray had targeted for acquisition. She had planned to take you on herself. No one at Stingray could interpret your data like she could. But when she escaped, she remembered and told us where to find you.”

I considered this. “So you’re saying if she hadn’t seen my file…”

“You’d be dead,” she finished, shrugging. “They had exhausted all avenues in their attempts to enslave you. You were scheduled for cancellation.”

I shivered. “There were three other people there. When Roddy and Nina came to get me.”

She got solemn. “There are two ways to end up in that particular ward, Devon. Your way, and—“

“Going insane.”

She nodded glumly.

It was my turn to lighten the mood. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I feel about all this?” I teased.

She smiled and swatted me on the rear: I was free to go. “It would be condescending to psychoanalyze you in this context.”

* * *

So I’d been shaken but not stirred. I could live with that. Next on the agenda was a meeting upstairs. In my rush to get to the infirmary, I’d forgotten what I’d been given to wear that day. See, Nina and I are the same size, with almost the same measurements. She took great delight in fixing me up, and while the result wasn’t exactly me, I did admit to liking it. She was completely fascinated by my hair. And as clothes go, she doesn’t own anything remotely professional, to my way of thinking, but she got close: a lovely, sky-blue top made of Thai silk (naturally), a black skirt and very flash sandals. Evidently she spared no expense on her wardrobe.

I mention this because I couldn’t figure out why I attracted so much attention on my way to the conference room. When I walked in a little late, several pairs of wide eyes greeted me. Roddy’s were widest, and his smile was half apologetic, half something I’d have to address with him later.

Miyu, who was standing up front, beamed at me and pointed to an empty chair next to Nina. “Good morning, Ms. Knightley. Please.”

“Dayum, lady!” whispered Nina as I took a seat. “I forgot what a good job I did on you.”

There were quick introductions. I already knew Nina and Roddy. Miyu was apparently Acting Director of Marlin now. A dashing fellow named Alex Cortazar was acting as her second. Doctor Sato was sitting in. There were some other blokes whose names I didn’t catch.

I had to admit, Miyu was a stunner who commanded attention easily. “Now that we’re all here, we can get down to it.” Her English was quite good, and she was deft with US colloquialisms. It was a little disconcerting. “As of today, the leadership and senior field agents of this division are sitting here. We’re what’s left.”

There was no chorus of gasps, but the silence conveyed the same feeling.

Miyu didn’t wait around for it to sink in. “This office is now the command center for the entire GIA counteroffensive. As we speak, teams from all the major branches and divisions are on their way here.”

She gave us the grim rundown. Stingray began as some off-the-books workshop that developed the Most Dangerous Mind Control Technology Ever, etcetera, etcetera. It was all academic, like some of the old US weapons programs, until someone on the inside met up with nefarious politicians on the outside, and they got to talking. They didn’t move overnight. No, they spent a few years plotting and watching, and after a series of experiments with agents long presumed dead, they put things in motion. I was intentionally reassigned to that conference in Norway about six months in, to be sucked into the machinery, and by then about a tenth of the GIA community had been turned. Someone had hand picked me as a target, but unfortunately Miyu couldn’t say whom it was.

While Akiko and I made our way from Norway to Tokyo, key people here at Marlin worked with GIA higher-ups to track Stingray’s movements. Strictly need-to-know. In fact, they knew what was going on almost as soon as Akiko had been taken. They just let their own people follow their hypnotic orders, watching agents like Akiko and I infect each other with sex and brainwashing. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that, but at least no one in this room had been in on things until Akiko absconded with Dr. Sato. In a bit of irony, those who’d decided on the wait-and-see policy – including Marlin Director Takizawa – had been taken next.

Nina told me then about how she’d gotten a strange phone call in Sydney to report to the local safe house, where she’d learned about Akiko’s misfortune. So they began shuffling potential targets around to keep them safe.

Wish they’d started that plan a little sooner. While they had worked at cracking me open in Petropavlovsk, a pitched battle had erupted, but here’s the odd thing: the outside world still had no idea what was going on, or what was at stake. To be honest, I thought this was insane. Why couldn’t we call in some help from the military? But at the end of the day we were a community of spies, and spies keep things secret. It seemed that Stingray’s stranglehold on us would be difficult to loosen, and the only way to go about it was the way we knew best, and without causing total panic throughout the world.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted after a while, holding up my hand.

“Yes, Devon?” Miyu said. “Do you need a break?”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure why I’m here. I’m don’t have enough experience to lead, and I definitely don’t feel I should be working in this area, after recent events.”

“I must agree,” Dr. Sato spoke up. “Ohmori-san, as a physician, I object to Knightley-san being returned to active status. This is a responsibility I don’t believe we should be asking of her.”

Miyu considered all this. “I agree, but Devon, we need you. I asked you here exactly because you survived. I can’t force you to go back into the field, but…”

But there was no one else left. “Right. What do you need me to do?”

She brought up a world map on the wall screen. There were several red dots, scattered everywhere. “Our top priority is to recover our Marlin personnel. We can’t win this without our people.”

So the plan was to bring in the compromised operatives, and that included Akiko. Alex briefed us on the particulars, but I’ve gone on long enough and you’ll be hearing all about it soon enough.

When we were finally dismissed, I placed myself by the door when Roddy rose to leave. “A word in your ear?” I asked, looking up at him. It was quite a ways up to those ears.

“You can put one in both, love,” he smiled.

“So you’re leaving?”

“Looks like. Tomorrow morning.”

I almost chickened out, but I shifted nervously from foot to foot and blurted, “You doing anything tonight?”

He made a little show of thinking about it, to cover his sudden embarrassment. “Well, I was going to shoot pool with Alex, but he backed out on me.”

“The burdens of command?”

He just laughed and looked over at Alex, who was making serious mooneyes at Dr. Sato. She was making them right back. “Heavy, heavy burdens,” Roddy noted dryly.

“They look like a new couple.”

“Alex was the one who went to collect her after she escaped. Guess she fell for her handsome rescuer.”

I swallowed, and an awkward silence ensued. I couldn’t think of a single clever thing to say to that, so I stuck to my original thought. “So you aren’t doing anything then?” I said it so quietly I was afraid I’d have to repeat myself.

He was still chuckling at Alex and Natsumi. “What? Oh, I’m not sure.”

His evasiveness was hilarious. “You’re a bastard!” I murmured, laughing softly. “Do you make it this hard on all the girls?” Nina chose that moment to nod comically behind his back on her way out.

This was a shy one, making me do all the work. He rubbed his head absently and stammered, “Yeah, sorry. ‘Sbeen a while since anyone asked me, you know, that.”

I crossed my arms. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Right.” We were the only people in the room now, so his attention turned to the floor.

I continued to do the heavy lifting. “So would you mind seeing me tonight, handsome rescuer?”

All he had to do was stop fidgeting and say it. Lucky for me he could handle this part on his own. “Oh, absolutely,” he conceded, smiling broadly

* * *

I was still quite wobbly, and there was a lockdown on all field ops during their off-duty hours, so there was no going out. But evidently Marlin had standing arrangements with the nearby restaurants. We had Thai take-out in Roddy’s room and washed it down with a few Singhas, while we talked about England and football and anything but work.

“It’s good to see you eating,” Roddy said around a mouthful of Korat curry.

I surveyed the empty cartons and deemed the mission accomplished. “That was perfect,” I sighed happily. “So you like your ladies with a little meat on them, do you?”

The shy guy whom I’d been forced to badger into this date was gone, now that we’d gotten comfortable with each other. “I like ‘em like you.”

It happened so fast. He cleared the little table of the takeout refuse with one swipe of his big arm as I sprang out of my chair, across the table and into his lap. We made out like we were the last people on earth.

“Are you up for this?” he asked between urgent kisses. He’d already reached up under my top and precisely unsnapped my bra, which I was busy pulling out through the sleeve.

“Whatever do you mean?” I whispered absently.

“Yesterday I wasn’t sure you’d make it through the night. What’s your doctor got to say about this?”

I stopped kissing him, regarding him while I licked my lips. They tasted like curry. “Why bring her into it?”

“Stop answering my questions with questions.” His hands found my hips and he bounced me on his knee, which made me giggle uncontrollably. “I don’t want to hurt you, love, is all.”

I wrapped my arms around his neck, titled my head sideways and kissed him so hard it made his head spin. “I need to be with someone I choose. Because I want to. Not because I’ve been programmed to. Does that make any sense at all?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” he demurred. His concern was of course competing for dominance with the notion that he was going to get to fuck me. His hands went up my back and we resumed our lip lock. “Just tell me if we need to stop.”

“Oh, I’ll be sure to,” I said as he cupped my bottom and rose from the chair, taking me with him. I squealed, but added, “Just go easy.”

“Yes ma’am.”

He carried me to the bed, where I pushed him down and began to undress him, but I exerted myself quickly. It was frustrating being this horny and this much of an invalid. I was sweating and struggling with his trousers, when he gripped my shoulders and slowly maneuvered me onto my back. I tried to catch my breath as he got me out of my clothes. He paused at the knife and the garter (which I’d compulsively replaced that morning) and my scar – the souvenirs from my first mission. He didn’t look up. He just knew. Knew what they signified, that they only represented a bigger nightmare inside me. He left them alone, and I knew I’d been right to come here tonight.

Then he came close and kissed my neck, before slowly working his way south. I had to admit, he was dealing with our height difference quite deftly. When he arrived at my button, I put my hands on his bald head and groaned.

“You okay, love?” he asked.

“Super,” I gasped. It felt unholy-good, but I was sore and I was sure he’d noticed the bruises.

“You’re sure?”

“Stop teasing!” I complained, so he went back to work. My back arched and I turned my head to make noise into the pillow. I had no idea how thin the walls of this place were. The way he ran his hands over my belly drove me mad. My orgasm was a long time coming, almost like it was unused to making appearances without the involvement of a brain ray. But there was no mistaking when I arrived.

I’d barely stopped shaking against his mouth before I pulled him up. He took his time easing inside me, carefully keeping his weight off me and watching my face. I had this stupid expression of amazement and euphoria, and I wanted to keep myself from wincing, because he stopped every time I did it. Before he could ask if I was all right again, I bit my lip and wrapped my legs around him. He pulled me down, my head slipping off the pillow, and I held on for the ride.

Then we went for it, but neither of us lasted long. I saw stars, my pulse pounding in my ears, and I cried out sharply just before he tensed and went off. Then we were just lying there, all tangled up in each other, gasping for air.

I finally caught my breath. “Moving too fast for you?”

His mouth was pressed against my shoulder, so it tickled when he spoke. “Under the circumstances, no.”

I ran a toe down his leg. “And what circumstances would those be?”

He lifted his head to look at me. “For one, we don’t have a lot of time together.”

I nodded. “And?”

He was still a little out of breath. “Do you have any idea how utterly fantastic you are?”

I shrugged, smiling. “Some. I’ve more of an idea about you.”

To Be Continued