Chapter 5: Back To Work And Danger

Katie O'Brien, once more an up and coming journalist, on the brink of a very distinguished career, awoke on the morning of her return to work and saw the sun pouring into her bedroom. She had enjoyed ten days of recuperation following her ordeal in Central Asia and was now ready to return to the fray.

I will not bore the reader by repeating at length her experiences in a distant, untamed, primitive, savage and unforgiving land. She had accidentally locked herself out of her hotel room after a wild party in the bar some hours earlier, and been unlucky enough to have been spotted by a jealous colleague, who had then bribed a corrupt police captain to have her arrested and chained in the yard of his police station for over a month, naked and exposed to the cold of the night and the heat of the day, all the while being secretly filmed so that her humiliation might one day amuse a wider public.

As she gradually emerged from a wonderful, heavenly dream in which she had been slowly and methodically flaying Charlie Ford alive with a blunt and rusty penknife, her mind looked happily forward to the prospect of returning to her duties in that luxurious working environment which her precocious young talent had already earned her.

She cast off the flimsy sheet that was all she seemed to need for night-time covering nowadays (do I even need that?) and stretched her naked body, abandoning herself to the blissful enjoyment of being twenty four years old and totally - but TOTALLY - fit and healthy.

She sat before the mirror and contemplated herself. Still that hair on her legs! Still the unshaven armpits! Must get them seen to - I suppose! Oh I don't know. Got to like the wild look, somehow!!

Into the shower. She pulled on the cord to switch on the power... and pulled again to switch it off. She turned the control and immediately a douche of ice-cold water poured over her. "!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yikes!! AM I MAD??!! NO!NO!NO!" She gloried and exulted and rejoiced in the lovely, lovely, splendid icy cold as it washed over her and stimulated every nerve ending and ate greedily into that lusty young body. A pink mist appeared before her eyes - a savage frenzied throbbing seized her between her thighs. Her hands moved to touch her pulsating womanhood. "STOP IT KATIE, YOU DISGUSTING COW! AHHH!!!!"

After ten minutes, she heaved herself out of the shower and turned it off. She was shaking from head to toe, but not with cold (she had never felt so hot since, all those years ago, her fellow fifteen-year-old Tommy Smithers had shown her... (CENSORED!!!).

Recovered after a few minutes, Katie staggered in to the lobby and picked up from the mat, the letters which had just arrived.

A few bills and the usual junk mail and... THE ENVELOPE!!!! THE BLACKMAIL PHOTOS!!

It was just as she had pictured it, that envelope. Buff, plain and bulky - full of hidden menace. Her troubles were not yet!