Chapter 7

Lady Patricia stirred her simple well-aged whiskey poured gently over glacier ice and looked enviously at the young staff people playing like frisky seals in the pristine, heavily chlorinated water of the oversized pool.

She felt the urge to run up to her room and find her custom-made one piece bathing costume and look at her bum in the mirror to see if she still had that level of sensuality that made her desirable to any male with the willingness to risk rejection. Patricia had been officially relieved of her duties as the Ambassador’s final line of defense against the whims and rigors of the real world. Now, she had to face up with the fact that she was no longer working for the government. Her career in the Foreign Service was at an end and there was no doubt her value to the clandestine services was terminated as well. In any event, it was better to be a retired public servant than just another statistic to be notched on a wall of sacrifice.

She was over forty, unmarried, no children and her bank account was suffering withdrawal symptoms from unwise expenditures on shoes and cosmetics. Thankfully, she still had her trust fund with the principal and interest accumulating for almost twenty years. A visit to the law offices of her attorney in London was her first order of business to establish a line of credit for her purchase of a small apartment in one of the neighborhoods of new residential construction filling rapidly with people of little or no consequence and low expectations. She knew she would feel more comfortable in such an anonymous environment than in a swirl of pretentious society climbers vying for an inside track to success.

She sipped her drink slowly running her sensitive tongue around the edge of the little cube of ice and letting the shock of the frozen coldness send a shiver down her spine like a dagger of fear at a time of no danger. The nearby pool-boy was watching closely looking for that imaginary line about three/quarters down the glass that signaled action in suggesting a fresh replacement.

The still attractive mature woman tried her best not to think about her poor nipples nibbled relentlessly the night before by the military attaché with his French training in the most popular forms of fore-play for intensive copulation interaction. He was admittedly only an above-average lover with several flaws that tended to turn her off except at those times when she was overly lonely or desperate for the touch of a soothing hand or lip. Andre was further flawed by his weakness with school girls and an itch for gambling that made him a security risk for classified intelligence. Fortunately, his penchant for using his tongue to bring her off kept him on her list of favored military counterparts for occasional use in clandestine operations. The current ambassador was a former protégé of her father’s and she was obedient to him in most areas with the exception of telling him the truth about certain covert activities he would be better off not knowing a thing about. She remembered how shattered she had been when he married a widow with lots of money from some dreadful place in the midlands. She was particularly upset because she had given him her questionable cherry suspiciously shredded in a fall over the last jump at a local racetrack that allowed female riders. He had taken it gleefully and shown her the path to satisfying submission with repeated spanking sessions carefully hidden from her parents.

Sir Arnold’s boring wife had flown the coop almost two years ago opting to trade in the temporary title for the stability of countless acres of fertile farmland in Australia and a somewhat older man tanned so dark he looked like one of the native aborigines only with blue eyes and an Aussie accent.

Lady Patricia felt only pity for Sir Arnold, because her silly girl crush was long buried beneath thick layers of water under the bridge. She regretted the fact that she had allowed him to bend her over his desk recently and do her from behind like in the old days, because it was quite inappropriate and damaging to her career if they were suspected. Still, his seemingly always hard appendage was a boon to her libido on an otherwise boring day. His daughter was a bit of a flirt and was fully aware of her shameful conduct with her father. Her constant spiteful outbursts were an annoyance but her sense of guilt forced Lady Patricia to turn the other cheek instead of taking the younger woman over her knee.

In the typical disgraceful attitude of the new generation, the silly girl had married a gambler from Blackpool with more debts than assets. The frantic affair of the heart had ended in less than a year with Sir Arnold buying off the fellow with a chunk of his estate.

Strangely, her retirement came at the same time she heard the whispered rumor that Sir Arnold was in the latter stages of cancer and unlikely to sit out his term as Ambassador. She didn’t mention anything to him, because he had never brought up the subject of his health with her and she assumed him to be in tip-top shape.

Her last day at the Consulate was filled with parties and toasts, but she was not in the mood for merry-making in the midst of a sudden onslaught of depression that she kept carefully hidden under a shield of smiles and laughter. To make matters worse, her father sent her a letter to explain there was no room for her at the estate because his new wife had her relatives all over the place like an invasion of biblical locusts eating his food and annoying the servants. It was literally the last straw in her litany of slights and disappointments currently swirling around her like a school of hungry sharks.

The tunnel was an experience she had not had before and it worried her to be buried under tons of crushing weight in a tube that carried her at high speed with little thought for comfort or stress reduction. Her old nemesis of claustrophobia hit her like falling wall of bricks crumbling her defenses like skilled warriors with no peers. The daylight on the other end was like reaching the Promised Land or exiting the parting of the waters just in time to escape the trap. Her religious up-bringing was rarely used in her line of work but that was only to be expected in the midst of evil.

Lady Patricia didn’t see herself as an evil person despite the fact she had done some terrible things. They were things that most people didn’t even like to discuss, much less actually do. She knew her father was aware of her disgraceful conduct and sometimes unforgiveable deceit in the service of her country, but that he would be the last person to ever brag about his “darling daughter”. She suspected that if her name came up in conversation, he would quickly change the subject to politics or golf with the very next sentence. That didn’t bother her as much as the fact she truly loved her father and missed his strict discipline in a nocturnal setting. She remembered he was most attentive to her physical needs during that period when she was resting up from a failed mission and gunshot wound incurred in the Balkans and she allowed him to fill her void of loneliness with his demanding persona. Of course, it was wrong from any perspective but it seemed right in the context of their mutual isolation and need for human intercourse. She didn’t regret it but was fully aware he blamed himself for his lack of restraint.