Ladies Night

by Claudia Rose

  Ladies Night

  Claudia Rose

  Dr Helena Jewel has more than enough to do being the Chief Sociologist of New Washington, the huge 23rd-century city that covers much of North America. The last thing she needs is to win a convict as a sex toy for a week. Helena doesn’t care how handsome Brandt de Vos is, she doesn’t want him taking up space in her apartment. Particularly after she discovers he’s the same murderer who turned her predecessor into so much sushi…

  Ladies Night

  Claudia Rose

  Chapter One

  The small thin man thanked the goddess of thieves. Staying out late looked likely to pay off, and food on the table would mollify Alisha. If the mark were loaded he might even be able to treat the kids to a trip skyward.

  He nervously shuffled his tired feet, and then he risked a second look around the corner. She was still on the edge of the platform waiting for a sky-cab. The main cage-fight might be over, but the rest of the entertainment had an hour to go. Not many cabs around yet. Not many cops either. It’d take two seconds to slip a blade between her ribs, lighten her purse, and drop her over the side. She’d be a corpse by the time she hit asphalt two hundred yards below.

  The huge man standing in shadow on the opposite side of the platform was a risk. But he couldn’t be with the upper-level bitch. His denims were cheap and a layer of dirt and sweat coated his skin. Odds were he wouldn’t interfere. Down here at the lower-levels people kept to themselves.

  The thief flicked open the blade and commenced his approach. The big bastard spotted him but didn’t react, so he relaxed, concentrating on not being seen by the bitch.

  “Aiyeee!”

  One huge hand encircled his throat. It was so quick he didn’t even see the man move. He choked. Stars flashed across his vision as he was lifted off his feet by the neck.

  “You picked the wrong place, the wrong time, and the wrong person.”

  The thief uttered a strangled croak. He felt like a kitten hanging helplessly in the jaws of a lion. The giant turned him easily in mid-air and looked into his eyes. The thief spasmed in terror when he saw who had him by the neck. It was the city’s most feared cage-fighter. No mercy softened that chilling green-eyed stare.

  The woman looked around to see what was happening.

  “Is this one of yours?” the cage-fighter asked.

  She said nothing, and made no move to intervene.

  They are together! He beseeched the goddess for salvation. Oh why hadn’t he finished early? Alisha would be so pissed with him. Panic overtook him. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see the faces of his children. Desperately he slashed at the hand at his throat. The fighter’s other hand stopped him.

  “That was a mistake, little man.”

  With an effortless flick the giant hurled him across the platform. The woman stepped delicately back as he teetered for a second on the edge of the abyss. Gravity won.

  “Aliishaaa…” he screamed as he fell. Silence came abruptly when he hit the asphalt, one hundred floors below, where the mighty tower blocks of New Washington sprouted out of darkness and filth.

  “Don’t expect any thanks, De Vos.”

  The huge fighter said nothing. But his eyes narrowed at the way the woman’s finger hovered over a button on the small, ugly bracelet fastened around her left wrist.

  I won’t be intimidated! His jaw firmed and he chuckled defiantly, daring her to stun him. It was risky baiting such a cold bitch. She’d relish the chance to make him suffer.

  Instead Dr. Helena Jewel turned her back and resumed scanning the skyway for a cab. Her glance repeatedly flicked back at him to make sure he hadn’t moved.

  He hadn’t, but his mind was racing.

  Perhaps I should have let him kill her. It would have been a quick death for us both, quicker than the one she has planned for me. I’m surprised she doesn’t have more of her goons here. Perhaps she has snipers trained on me.

  He resisted the urge to survey the area and instead studied the slender neck, shoulders and naked breasts of his enemy. Although it was mid-summer, the cool evening air had hardened her nipples, each swelling point accentuated by fine gold rings encircling its base. The sight made his cock harden inside the prison-issue blues. My God, she’s beautiful. It would be a crime to snap her neck.

  What am I thinking? Chivalry’s a weakness I can’t afford. If I hope to die without torture, I have to kill her before she stuns me.

  Helena was palpably relieved when a sky-cab eventually arrived. She stepped well back and held the bracelet out so he could see it.

  “Get in slowly De Vos, sit over on the far side, and don’t make a move. I’ll stun you if I have to.”

  “You can call me Brandt.”

  “I’ll call you a hearse if you don’t hurry up and get in!” She pointed at the bracelet. “I’m not joking.”

  Brandt De Vos did as he was told, fitting his frame through the small opening with unusual grace for someone so large.

  Helena Jewel climbed in after him, wrinkling her nose at the odor of blood and sweat. Shouldn’t he smell disgusting? Her pulse quickened at the memory of perspiration coating his naked body. My God, I’m getting wet! I can’t be turned on by this. She set the air-conditioning to maximum recycle before punching in the coordinates of their destination. Her apartment was forty minutes away.

  Sinking back in her seat, Helena regarded the awesome brute opposite her. He didn’t return her stare, but gazed out the cab window as the skyline flashed past.

  This can’t be real. I’m the Chief Sociologist of New Washington. I can’t be saddled with a convicted murderer for a week.

  As hard as she tried, she couldn’t reconcile what was happening with the reality that less than three hours earlier she’d been taking a shower and anticipating an entertaining research trip.

  That shower seemed a lifetime ago.

  Chapter Two

  Three Hours Earlier

  Helena’s skin glowed from the stolen hour she had spent luxuriating under the jets of hot water. Of all the privileges that came with success, unlimited water supply was the one she truly relished. She was sorry the masses had to live on five gallons a day, but she’d been there and wasn’t going back. New Washington’s Chief Sociologist had earned her position the hard way—the hardest—and damned if she’d apologize for it.

  Naked, she used the full-length viewer filling one wall of her dressing room to inspect her body in minute detail. Was there a mark on her face?

  “Left profile,” she commanded. The hovercam swooped and zoomed, and the left side of her face displayed on the viewer screen, magnified ten times. Nothing, she thought, exhaling in relief. It must have been a shadow. No blemish marred her skin’s porcelain perfection. Nor should it. She’d undergone a complete skin enhancement at the hands of the galaxy’s greatest derma-surgeon.

  “Full front view.” The camera drifted around, and her image shrank until she was looking at herself normal size. The body she saw filled her with awe, just as the perfect skin did. Where was that little disfigured girl now? She possessed a beauty and elegance that perfectly complemented her professional role. “Classical Woman” was how Figure Shape Inc.’s catalogue described the body she had chosen. Apparently the limb and tissue grafts were cloned from some beautiful princess who died tragically in the late twentieth century.

  Not that Helena really cared about someone who had been dead more than two hundred years. However she acknowledged with private gratitude the forgotten princess whose looks changed her own life in ways even Nigel hadn’t anticipated.

  She hesitated, remembering the argument that started it all.

  “You’re grotesque, Helena,” Nigel told her over dinner, waving Figure Shape Inc.’s catalogue at her. “You shock pe
ople, and they can’t see past your mutation to the brilliance of your mind.”

  His voice dropped to a persuasive whisper.

  “Just think how far you could go—how far we could go together—if your external appearance matched your inner beauty.”

  “I don’t want to spend Mom and Dad’s legacy on something like that. They’d be ashamed of me.” She bit hard on her lip to stave off tears. Her objection made him angry.

  “Are you such a fool you’d risk everything, including losing me?” he spat. “No one else is going to want a woman that’s half lizard! Much as I love you, even I’m revolted at times. I want to be with you, but I can’t face that across the table every morning over my coffee.”

  “I know some people who cherish their gamma ray mutations as marks of beauty and difference. One told me he thought my patterning very beautiful.”

  “Fine, go move in with him!” raged Nigel, rising to his feet and thumping the table. “I can’t look at you a moment longer.”

  So she did as he ordered—God help her!—and he was right, she succeeded beyond the predictions of either of them. Helena allowed herself a small smile at an outcome he hadn’t bargained on. It wouldn’t have happened if he’d made the smallest pretence of caring about me.

  Figure shaping, the newest and most radical procedure in cosmetic surgery, was hellishly painful and notoriously risky. Despite that, Nigel failed to visit through the weeks of torment, not coming once to comfort and encourage her, or even sustain the illusion he cared.

  After the figure shaping was over she returned to their apartment. It was quickly apparent that all Nigel wanted was to have her on hand to pick her mind as needed. The fact he now considered her sufficiently presentable to hang decorously off his arm when he couldn’t get out of attending some official function was, to him, an added bonus. In all other respects he remained as unpleasant and self-serving as ever.

  His great error was in failing to realize he had pushed her too far. Although Helena was truly brilliant in the field of macro sociology, anger, not ambition, drove her to apply for the position of New Washington’s Chief Sociologist. He never counted on her jumping over his head to snatch from his grasp the job he coveted above rubies. But that’s exactly what she did, applying in secret and shocking the great names in the field by being appointed ahead of them all. What a celebration that had been!

  “Helena, I’m home!”

  “I’m in the kitchen, Nigel!”

  “Something smells wonderful and…my goodness…you look stunning!”

  “Thank you Nigel, how nice of you. Do you like it?” She shimmied so he could admire the way the little black dress molded to every curve of her new body.

  “Indeed I do. Is it a special occasion?”

  “It certainly is. Here, have a glass of bubbles, let’s have a toast.”

  “A toast…good…to what?”

  “To my new job.”

  “Your new job…”

  “Yes, look here, delivered in person no less, a warrant appointing Dr. Helena Jewel Chief Sociologist of New Washington.”

  Nigel’s glass shattered in his hand, small drops of blood dripped to the floor. With his other hand he snatched the document from her. As he read it, his face drained of all color and he began shaking so violently Helena thought for a second he was on the verge of collapse.

  “Nigel, are you all right?”

  He made no answer. Like a drunk he turned and staggered from the room. He never reached the bathroom. Helena heard him vomiting in the atrium.

  That was the day the balance of power in the relationship shifted. It was also the day Helena forgave herself for spending every last dollar her parents left her on such a foolhardy risk as a total figure enhancement. She felt so much happier she could almost delude herself it had been worth every second of the trauma and agonizing pain she endured through the stages of de-fleshing, amputation and re-growth.

  It wasn’t easy living in her new body; its sexual responsiveness was particularly problematic. Nigel had badgered her to select a nerve configuration with a high libido rating, his specious argument being that people in positions of power were statistically more likely to be highly sexed. So she did, and got a body that liked to fuck; not to mention a body Nigel was desperate to fuck.

  While she forgave herself for being persuaded to change her appearance, her anger towards Nigel solidified. Although she returned to the apartment with every nerve in her body screaming for sex, she grimly resisted his advances.

  “But Helena, I thought you selected a high libido configuration.”

  “Oh, I am sorry Nigel, didn’t I tell you? My inheritance didn’t stretch far enough for that. To achieve the perfect skin you demanded, I had to forgo sexual responsiveness.”

  Watching his frustration at living so tantalizingly close to a woman beautiful beyond his dreams, without being able to touch her, was a small compensation for the weeks of pain, fear and loneliness at the clinic. Once a week she allowed him a quickie to keep a sharp edge on his desire, but she lay passively while he grunted on top of her, feigning boredom until he had finished.

  Masturbation was her savior, but Nigel had taken to spying on her so she never touched herself unless she knew where all the hover cams were, and she only used a vibrator when he was out of the apartment. While she desperately wanted a lover, she’d take manual stimulation over Nigel’s prick every time. Masturbation was still good. Even now, when her mind was occupied with more important things, she knew she could bring herself to full arousal in a matter of moments. As inevitably happened, thought became deed.

  Experimentally, Helena ran her fingertips down the flanks of her body, reveling in the silky smoothness of her skin, and delighting in the responsive tingle of the nerves beneath the surface as she lightly brushed over them. Her fingers reached the tops of her legs and followed the natural depression between thigh and hip that flowed smoothly towards her pussy. Instead of allowing them to seek out the warmth and moisture she felt increasing down there, she teased herself by tracing back up her torso to the full rounds of her breasts. Sensuously she slid her hands under the generous orbs, feeling the lubrication of a fine film of body lotion not yet absorbed in the creases where breast joined chest. She cupped her breasts and squeezed them, as if offering them to herself in the viewer screen.

  “Close up on my breasts,” she commanded huskily. The camera obeyed and the screen filled with an image of her breasts, gripped firmly by her own hands. It was exciting to see them this way, as if they belonged to someone else. Helena lifted one towards her mouth. On screen a slender pink tongue appeared and lightly grazed the swelling nipple. The feel of her own tongue on the engorged nub was electric; it was as if there were a direct connection between the tips of her breasts and her pussy. In just a few licks she was clenching her thighs tightly together in response to the intensifying arousal.

  For some time Helena played with her breasts and licked her nipples, engrossed in the exciting vision on the screen—enlarged four times normal size. While stimulating herself, she began imagining a man…the man. Not a cruel, selfish man incapable of love, like Nigel, but a real man, a lover. The sort of man who, in real life, never fell in love with someone who felt so damaged. She’d imagined this man before, indeed she knew every inch of him, and the only thing not entirely clear was his face. She had fantasized about the solid presence of his body, the swollen desire of his cock, the heat of his mouth on her nipples and the welcome invasion of his tongue as it entered her pussy in a prelude to the hot, slippery thrusts of his love making. As the fantasy impressed itself on her mind with increasing insistence, she gasped another command.

  “Close-up of my crotch.”

  The hovercam panned slowly down her body until her pussy came into view. The juncture of her hips and tightly pressed thighs formed a perfect “Y” shape, the upper “V” filled by a fine down of carefully trimmed brunette pubic hair.

  As Helena watched, two hands slid into view from abo
ve, seeking out the moist depths concealed by this coy exterior. She fantasized they were his hands investigating her, his fingers discovering, beneath the neat covering of hair, the first delicious creases in the flesh, an erotic signpost directing him to explore further. Before he found his way into the heated interior, he encountered her swollen clitoris standing erect, as if on guard. His hands knew what to do, they pulled her labia back, so that in the viewer she spied, magnified, the rich pink of her inner vagina, glistening with the moisture of desire. Then his index fingers explored her erect clit, but rather than pouncing upon it they approached it obliquely, just the way she preferred, rubbing around the sensitive protuberance, bringing her closer to a climax with gentle, insistent pressure.

  Then, while one hand concentrated on the area around her clitoris, the other roved further, exploring the soft folds of flesh so wet with her arousal. The fingers traced her labia, dipped in and out of her hot pussy, and even roved beyond to excite the sensitive rim of muscle at the entrance to her anus. The hands knew what she liked, they were his hands, the hands of an expert, touching her as only a lover absolutely attuned to his partner’s needs and desires could.

  “Ahhhh,” she gasped. “Yes! Oh yes! Just like that. Harder, harder! Yes, just there, you know that’s how I like it…you’re making me come…making me come…come. I’m coming!”

  On the screen the hands took possession of her pussy, exciting it with firm pressure, loving it, and loving her. The fingers rubbing her clit and exploring her pussy and anus, brought her to climax after climax. The contractions of her orgasm were so strong her legs gave way. With loud moans and gasps she fell to her knees on the thick carpet of her dressing room floor.

  As the last of the waves of release crashed and broke, she opened her eyes to see in the viewer screen her own face, flushed and panting. Ordering the camera to turn itself off, Helena knelt on the floor of her dressing room for a minute longer while her pulse slowed and her breathing evened. Then, with a small hiss of irritation, she realized the time and rose hurriedly to her feet. Really, it was most frustrating. Desire virtually overwhelmed her sometimes, making it impossible to get anything done.