This is the conclusion—I think—of a trilogy begun long ago with Saved by Duty and continued in A Better Offer?.
Really Rescued?
It had been three years, four months, and twenty-four days since the Raider, an up-and-coming local superhero who had been making great strides against the city’s crime syndicate, had disappeared. Around the same time, Amy Karessmah, a promising music student at City University, and the graduate student who had either been tutoring or dating her (depending on the witness whom one asked), also disappeared.
Police investigated for a while, and concluded that there may have been some violence involved, violence that may have been too much for this “Raider” to handle—the police were generally quite suspicious and disdainful of supers—and the two students had gone on the run. A number of superheroes also came in and out of the area, looking for answers, trying to work out exactly what happened. Wonderboy uncovered the smuggling operation that Raider had been investigating, although the three largest piers in the seaport were destroyed by the syndicate’s attempt to stop him. Sparkler actually exposed and captured the leadership of the syndicate (and the corrupt public officials who had protected them) shortly after that.
But it was Vision who blew into town and worked out a possible connection between the Raider and the graduate student. She also determined that the hero was probably alive—or was, at least, when he left the city—and that he had probably not been captured through violence, but some sort of mind control. She stayed for several months, and even managed to locate most of his suit: the body armor, boots, and mask had been sealed in a high-tech container that couldn’t be scanned, and dropped into the ocean about five miles offshore. Vision had simply gone after the only object within nearby waters that resisted scanning.
But, just when she seemed to be getting warm, she went to visit her friend Danger Girl, and hadn’t been back for some time.
Things had quieted down, other concerns had taken the attention of local residents, and besides, as the old saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind.” By and large, the city had forgotten about its hero and gone on with life.
All except for Carrie, the witty, sharp-tongued manager of the coffee shop down the block from the grad student’s basement apartment. She looked out for several of the more earnest students, giving them part time jobs, letting them have sandwiches she had “accidentally” gotten wrong or extra crocks of soup she had “mistakenly” ladled out. But she had a special place in her heart for Jay.
It began that day when a couple of teenage hoodlums came in after the lunch rush, knocking over tables, breaking crockery, and threatening her with a handgun. Jay had walked in behind them and, before either of them heard him, grabbed a broom, used the handle to knock the gun away and hit thug number one hard in the solar plexus. The other one jumped the student from behind, and Carrie was sure he had a knife, but, somehow, Jay had tripped over his own feet and fallen backward onto the goon, knocking his head into the wall. By the time three cops answered the silent alarm she had pushed, both thugs were unconscious on the floor near their useless weapons.
The unlikely paladin saw what he had done, and, before the five-foot-six redhead could hug her rescuer, he hyperventilated, got a nosebleed, and fainted.
Her hero . . .
This contributed to why she never thought him a super until that day in 2007 when both he and the Raider disappeared. Nobody else was sure it was the same day, but Carrie was quite sure: the next morning, Jay hadn’t shown up for his cup of tea before she opened. Jay always came by for that morning tea—never paid, but always stopped by. She could absolutely count on him for that.
Just as she could absolutely count on him to never notice how she really felt about him. It wasn’t like she was bad looking. Ironically, Jay had often told her how cute her hair looked in that bob she liked to wear and how she should show off her shapely bosom a bit more. While she was unsure of her figure, he went on about how any man would be lucky to have her. Too bad his head wasn’t out of his thesis for long enough to really look into her smiling, and sometimes glistening, green eyes, or else he might have realized how lucky he could be.
Well before that could happen, before she could get him to see what would be in his lap if he would allow it, the bookish scholar disappeared. That was three years, four months, and twenty-four days ago.
Carrie met Vision once or twice, as the heroine tried to figure out what the scholar and the Raider had in common. The barista had superior poker skills, it would seem, and could tell that the out-of-town hero had deduced things about her missing colleague’s secret identity. That easily convinced the titian-haired shopkeeper that Raider and Jay were one in the same. Some of that may have been wishful thinking, of course; if, on top of everything else, the young man she fancied was leading a double life, then that could help explain him not noticing her.
Once Vision left town, the shopkeeper seemed to be the only person keeping vigil for, well, at least two of the three missing persons. She regularly went through the roomful of items she had collected from Jay’s apartment when the landlady was ready to put them out on the curb: there was, even after all these months, a lingering scent of a strange perfume. Carrie sniffed it, and, immediately, she was jealous. Then she felt a burning need to inhale more of the scent; she buried her face in her friend’s overstuffed chair, desperate for more of the fragrance. Finally, she felt herself more than a little aroused. Carrie was no expert, but the conclusion was unmistakable to her.
There had been somebody else in Jay’s apartment, and it was no shy undergraduate musician.
Carrie made herself into an amateur investigator, and began preparing herself for the opportunity to get Jay back. If the Raider was part of the deal, that was all well and good.
It had been three years, four months, and twenty-four days since Amora had captured the Raider’s mind so that she might have her way with his body. She had been paid handsomely by the various interests who had wanted him out of the way, but not quite as handsomely as she had anticipated—it seems her clients had never counted on other supers poking around once they eliminated one, and that oversight cost the temptress her final payments. Making matters worse, the global economic crisis hadn’t done any good for her investment portfolio.
After several months of enjoying the young crime fighter in every possible physical way, she had begun to venture back out for the occasional job, acquiring information, blackmailing middle-aged businessmen (and that one particularly tasty businesswoman), and undermining the occasional government. She brought the erstwhile hero along, at first to relax after work, and then, after a bit, to do some of her legwork. He couldn’t fly too effectively without his cape—he had always used it to help catch updrafts, and she now kept it for sex play and to prevent him remembering his own past—but he could still leap into and out of upper stories quite effectively.
The feats of derring-do actually seemed to make him more voracious in bed, which pleased his mistress immensely. What Amora didn’t realize was that this was building a conflict in her boy-toy’s mind; he had vague memories of having done something quite similar before . . . before . . .
Was there a before?
If it hadn’t been for the obscene—even by her standards—amount of money that she was being offered, Amora never would have agreed to return to the city three years, four months, and twenty-four days after her stealthy departure. This sort of payoff, however, would ensure her not only decades of quiet decadence, but a legendary status in both sexual and criminal circles. Besides, she so thoroughly possessed her pet’s mind that she shouldn’t have any problems, especially if she kept him in their hotel suite, far away from his old neighborhood, while she worked. Nobody in the city really remembered him or was looking for him any more, anyway.
“Hey, honey, why don’t you watch where you are going?” Amanda Kandore, the new corporate consultant at Megatrix, wore a smart business suit, albeit with her breasts almost spilling out of her silk blouse, her raven hair swept up onto the top of her head. Even with that, her scent registered—viscerally—with the young data-entry assistant who’d made the mistake of stepping out of the break room and into her beeline.
The young woman who was temping that week at Megatrix had begun with the perfume she had noticed in Jay’s upholstery and googled criminals who wore exotic perfumes. Along the way, she picked up quite a bit of computer savvy: Amora had been almost an urban legend, but the determined barista had a hunch, and the reports of Megatrix’s new technology breakthroughs, coupled with the rumored peccadilloes of some of their senior management, made them a prime target. Now, as her panties dampened just a bit in response to that aroma, Carrie knew that she was on the right track.
Amora, with phase one of her current contract complete, rode back to the Luxe Towers Hotel and took the private elevator to the penthouse suite. Her young stud had her out of that restricting business attire in no time. After enjoying him for about an hour—enough so that she could imagine him while she was driving a balding overweight executive into an appropriate frenzy—she departed directly to her waiting Town Car in the private elevator. Clad in a red latex dress, her dark curls cascading over her shoulders, her beguiling eyes unencumbered by unnecessary glasses now, she was headed for phase two of her assignment. By tomorrow, as the Megatrix board meeting fell into disarray and a certain Seattle-based firm wired the equivalent of the gross national product for a mid-sized developed country into her Cayman Islands accounts, she and her lover-pet would be jetting to a very private retreat.
She barely noticed the room service waiter with the mousey brown hair whom she had passed in the hallway. Her pet would need that hardy meal; she had many exertions planned for him later. Only when she was riding through midtown did she wonder if the waiter’s green eyes seemed familiar . . . “No, no, girl, don’t get paranoid now,” she admonished herself.
“I’ve brought some tea for you, sir.” The waiter had a sweet voice: “I thought you might like it.” She pressed it into his hands before he could even recall that he wasn’t to drink caffeinated beverages any more.
This tea reminded him of . . . something. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had given him something like this. He sipped, and it seemed familiar somehow . . . the taste reminded him of waking up each morning . . . waking up . . . he was waking up and beginning his day doing . . . ummmmmm . . . waking up and he saw . . .
There was a redhead straddling his lap, feeding him more of the tea. A redhead with smiling green eyes . . . something in his mind wanted to remember her . . .
“Jay? Jay, honey, don’t you remember me?”
“C . . . C . . . N-no, I am . . . I am Lover”—his voice almost took on the same lilt as his mistress—“I am Amora’s pet.”
“Oh, Jay, baby . . .” The false waiter—she had never before drugged anybody, but she had to get that trolley and deliver that order to that room—kissed her old friend’s nose and brushed her hand across his forehead. In her months of researching this siren everyone insisted didn’t exist, she had concluded that there was some aural and olfactory trancing going on. A hypno-therapist had suggested some tactile stimuli might be the best way to counter that. Carrie liked being tactile.
As the delicate, soft hand brushed across his forehead, the faithful pet could feel his entire body relax. Her hand caressed his brow again, and he felt over forty months of psychic constructs fall away inside his head.
“Carrie?” he asked, timidly, and then more confidently: “Carrie?”
Her eyes were teary as she kissed him, taking the mug away and setting his tea aside. He recognized Carrie, and remembered his studies, his apartment, their friendship. He remembered that there was something else . . . something in his life . . . but . . . She began massaging small circles behind both his ears, and he gasped, then purred, then put his hands in her red hair—he couldn’t tell if he had done this before or simply had always wanted to do it—and was soon kissing her, deeply.
“Excuse me. Did I give you permission to play with my toys?”
Carrie caught the scent of Amora. She could tell that Jay had, too. Yet, while he tensed, he didn’t stop kissing the redhead.
“Enough of that!” Amora was clearly flustered as she pulled the interloper off her boy’s lap. “Maybe you have to be taught a lesson about tasting what isn’t yours.” Then, to prove her point, she said, “Kneel and lick my toes, Lover.”
Jay just sat there.
“Lover!”
“That . . . that won’t work, Amora.” He clearly wasn’t fully himself, yet, but he just as clearly was no longer hers.
But Carrie was biting her lower lip, and was clearly fighting the urge to sniff her adversary’s wrist where she held the troublemaker’s shoulder.
Amora smiled.
Carrie pulled away and turned back to the young man, brushing his forehead again and whispering him to sleep. But she had only barely accomplished this when she shuddered, feeling a manicured nail running along her spine and between her ass cheeks. Even through her clothing, this was shaking the manager-turned-adventuress to her core. She stood and turned, only to find herself eye-to-eye with the villainess, her own breasts pushed into the brunette’s soft pillows.
Carrie whimpered.
Amora smiled. “You know, baby, you are kind of cute, and I haven’t had any really tasty cheesecake in a while.” Her hands ran down the girl’s sides to the small of her back as the sexy mercenary pulled the relative ingénue in for a deep kiss.
A tsunami of sensations was washing Carrie’s plans, her very reason, away. She had never even considered sex with women, but this woman’s heat, her sensuality . . . Carrie’s hands were playing in Amora’s curls as their tongues dueled and the gorgeous criminal led her prey to the bedroom. The Raider was nowhere to be seen . . . Jay was asleep on the sofa . . .
“Jay.” that name became a life preserver for the last drowning wisps of Carrie’s reason. She was here to save him. She had been working on this for over three years, turned her life upside-down for him. But Amora was so electric . . . maybe she would let her two pets play together . . . Carrie took a deep breath and reached under the enchantress’ buttery skirt, stroking her pussy . . .
Jay opened his eyes, and there was Carrie’s smiling face, a bit flushed, but her eyes still sparkling. She put a golden cape around his shoulders.
It all came back to him. “I . . . I am the Raider.”
“Yes, you are, baby.” She was massaging behind his ears again. It felt so good.
“I have to . . . I have to . . .” His eyes glanced toward the bedroom where Amora had disappeared.
“Right now . . . please . . . you just have to get me out of here.” The redhead’s soft lips quickly pecked his own.
“Well . . . okay . . . Hang on tight.”
Carrie’s arms locked around Jay’s neck as he reached one hand behind her, lifting her slightly before exiting to the balcony and flying her away. The landing was a bit of a jolt, but he was just out of practice.
The next day, a few well-placed e-mails—bounced through several ISPs so that their origin couldn’t easily be identified—were enough to get officers of the Megatrix Corporation to check into their CFO’s activities. He was forced to resign at the same board meeting which had been scheduled to acquiesce to a takeover. Within weeks, several people on both coasts were being investigated by the SEC.
In the coming weeks, the Raider returned to the skies above his city, with no more explanation to most folks than when he had disappeared. Once again, his caped crusading proved more and more effective over time. In the fall semester, Jay was granted a medical dispensation to return and complete his dissertation. Everything was back to where it was.
Except that Jay moved in with Carrie quite permanently. She became the protector’s protector, doing grammar editing for his dissertation, helping him grade papers, and using some of the skills she had gained to become the Raider’s unseen backup and technical support. On his more stressful days, as he balanced these two lives, she would greet him with tea and gentle, calculated touches—brushing his brow, massaging behind one or both ears, rubbing the small of his back—and return his focus to where it belonged. Vision put them in touch with a trustworthy therapist who was able to make sure the young super was able to resist future attempts at mind control.
Well, except for Carrie’s . . .
After only a few weeks, the graduate student had learned some strategic touches of his own, touches that his housemate quite enjoyed. It wasn’t long before they were mates in other ways.
And, from time to time, a scented note would be delivered to Carrie at the coffee shop. She wouldn’t even need to read it before she quietly shuddered, her breath just a bit more shallow as she exited the shop leaving a subordinate in charge for a few hours. She would race to some nearby hotel room, using the key card invariably left for her at the desk, and would find a voluptuous, exotic brunette waiting for her in the bed . . .
. . . purring . . .
“Hello, lover . . .”
Sometimes, she would call Jay to meet her at the hotel. He remembered very little, except for having a lovely time . . .
Maybe he wasn’t really rescued after all.