For a long time they lie, their limbs entwined, in the bottom of the shower, feeling as the scalding needles of water give way to gentle warmth and eventually cold as his unreliable water tank finally gives out under the strain. Eventually she moves within his arms and he opens his eyes and looks at her with surprise; he had thought that she was asleep although he hasn't been able to drift off himself because every time he closes his eyes he is plagued by the not entirely pleasant experience of flashbacks of their activity interspersed with images of Michael lying on the bed, tied up and screaming for help. He wonders if he should go and untie him but he doesn't want to risk her wrath when she finds out what he's done. Michael's a big boy; he's made his bed so he's got to lie in it.

'Are you alright?' he peers down at her as she shifts away from him and drags herself lethargically to her feet, reaching for a towel and wrapping it around her body, preserving modesty that she shed hours earlier. She looks exhausted but he isn't surprised; the course was demanding, she had been horribly hungover less than twenty four hours earlier and she was running on pure adrenaline from whatever she had inflicted upon her husband. At some point it was bound to catch up with her and it seems that it's going to be now.

'Fine' she states bluntly, barely looking him in the eye as she roots through the clutch – black studded leather he notes with a wry smile – and removes her mobile, running her hands somewhat seductively over the soft, silver plastic encasement before flipping it open and peering wearily at the dials 'there's a couple of calls that I have to make'

'You're not seriously intending to call the press on your husband are you?' he asks warily but he suspects that he knows the answer; of course she is intending to call the press on him, and his mother and whatever else she threatened. Coming from her, a threat is tantamount to a promise of pain.

'Eleanor' her tones are clipped as she speaks in the phone and he moves from the shower, lying beside her and wrapping his arms around her, slipping his leg between hers and feeling her shudder involuntarily. Perhaps she is not as worn out as she looks; from the way in which she responds, slipping her free hand between his legs with an innocent smile playing across her face, he feels relatively confident that he'll be in for a repeat performance before she goes home. Strangely he finds the idea that she is giving him a hand job at the same time as setting her Rottweiler of a mother-in-law on her husband, even more of a turn on 'I wonder if you'd mind doing me a favour. I'm away for the night… yes, work… but it was somewhat unexpected and I didn't leave any food in the house for Michael… Yes…' she emits a cruel and bitter titter at whatever her mother in law has said '…he is absolutely useless without a woman to run around after him. I'm not too worried about him – he'll root out a takeaway menu if he gets hungry – but I'm concerned he'll forget to feed Scarlet'

'Scarlet?' Ric whispers in consternation but he finds himself silenced by a single, manicured finger pressed against his lips and a warning frown leaving him to ponder the identity of the mysterious Scarlet in silence. It must be a pet. They don't strike him as a couple who would go in for pets but at the same time, he is absolutely certain that they haven't got children and he can't think of any other possible explanation.

'Thanks Eleanor' she smiles tightly and ends the call, sending several speedy text messages which he has unpleasant suspicion are going to land in the inboxes of several members of the gutter press. Eventually she turns to him with a weary smile, wrapping her arms around him and gazing up at him with what looks suspiciously like contentment. This is strange; he has never known her to be content – she spends her life striving for better and better things and contentment and complacency aren't in her nature.

'Who's Scarlet?' he asks eventually and she gives a small snort of a laugh through her nose and buries her face in his chest in a vain attempt to disguise her obvious amusement.

'Scarlet is the clownfish that Michael bought me on our tenth wedding anniversary. Wasn't quite the gesture I was looking for – jewellery or a dirty weekend in Paris would have served just as well – but he thought that it was romantic and she's quite a pretty little thing. It seems a shame to let her die just because he's useless' she shrugs lightly and gives a slightly twisted smile 'and a little tied up at present…'

'That was nice' Chrissie gazed up at him sleepily and gave a small smile as he looked down at her and tried not to grimace. His problem was not with waking up beside her – she was beautiful and since she had relieved him of the horrendous pain in which Connie had left him, he found himself increasingly drawn to her. He grimaced because his shoulders had completely seized up and his knees were stiff and aching. He grimaced because his head thumped and in the back of his mind was the notion that when she found out that he had managed to gain his release – and as a result of her own carelessness and ill thought out actions – she would do something far, far worse. He grimaced because for all the beautiful woman beside him had saved him and followed that by some of the most tender and spectacular sex that he had ever experienced, he found that he wished that he were lying beside his wife, even if her sanity was questionable. It seems strange but no matter what she did to him – and with the handcuffs she truly had excelled herself – he can't resist her and knows that he will always go back for more. It appeared that he was incapable of hating her.

'Hello?' he hears a key turning in the lock and his mothers voice echoes through the house, shrivelling him instantly as Chrissie looks up at him in askance. How can he tell her that the situation has horrifying parallels with the time when he was fifteen and caught with the next door neighbours older daughter in his parent's bed by his devout Catholic mother and the vicar? She's about to catch him not only in bed with another woman but in a bed with handcuffs dangling uselessly from it, making it look like a prop from a low budget porn film.

'Mum…' he calls out, shifting Chrissie discreetly beneath the pillows and moving painfully towards the bedroom door as his muscles seized up in protest 'I'm in the bedroom…' he trails off as he hears the telltale creak of her stepping on the bottom stair 'I'm not…' he pauses as his mother throws open the door without a second thought, just as she used to when he was younger '…decent…'All at once he is fifteen again. He reaches out, grabbing the sheet from over Chrissie and wrapping it around him, paying little attention to her anguished screams as she finds herself unceremoniously exposed to his mother.

'Well…' for a moment the old woman is silent and he would swear that the temperature in the room actually drops although that may be because he's standing naked in the path of a breeze '… that isn't Connie'

'You look…' he searches his extensive vocabulary for a word to describe her appearance but can come up with little more than the unimaginative 'different' that he settles upon. She does, in fact, look like a completely different woman to the one who appeared on his doorstep dressed in S & M shop finest and brandishing a whip. Now the only hint of leather in her attire is in the sensible flat, brown shoes that adorn her feet. Gone is the tight black corset that left little to the imagination and it's replacement, a white blouse and brown wrap-around cardigan flung casually over her shoulder is much less intriguing. His gaze moves further downwards and he takes in the brown, tweed trousers that graze her ankle, catching a glimpse of a hint of last nights stocking peeking out in the small space between where her trouser ends and her shoe begins. Her make up has been toned down; instead of red, whore lipstick and dark, dramatic eyes she now sports little more than moisturiser, clear mascara and a pale lip-gloss. It seems she's even found time to wash her hair, swapping the gel which held it in seductive spikes for softly blow-dried curls which frame her face, giving her an air of femininity that he has never seen in her before. She looks oddly demure, every inch the suburban housewife, and if he didn't know different he would never in a million years believe that she would go within a hundred metres of a corset or a whip. She doesn't even look much like Connie; she looks terrifying.

'I've had a call from my mother-in-law' she states shortly, her face twisting into the displeased grimace of one who has fallen into her own trap and doesn't like it 'seems that when she went to feed the fish she found Michael in bed…'

'With the handcuffs?' he asks wearily, wondering at precisely which point her plan has fallen down. He is in no doubt that she has been unsuccessful because the air of triumph he would have expected if Michael had been caught as planned is entirely absent. Instead she seems almost upset.

'With the W h o r e of Babylon' she states bitterly, sitting on the edge of the bed and sinking her head into her immaculately manicured hands. He notices that she's even found the time to swap her red talons for a neat French polish. For a moment he wonders whether he dreamt the night before. If not he wants to marry her; having been married to five women who've spent far too much time in the bathroom it is a breath of fresh air to meet a woman who can perform such a spectacular transformation in less than an hour.

'Chrissie?' he guesses and one look from her confirms his suspicions 'how?'

'Because I was too f u c k i n g clever for my own f u c k i n g good' she snarls, obviously disgusted with herself and he fights the urge to flinch, run and hide behind the sofa. She might look like a Desperate Housewife but she still as the temperament of a volatile whore. Strangely this is a relief; it proves that the change is only skin deep.

'What did you do?' he enquires, taking the precaution of sliding along the bed out of her reach before asking this question; she might be furious with herself but he wouldn't put it past her to take out her fury on him. He's certainly not about to take the risk.

'I thought I'd taunt him by leaving a mobile just out of his reach but I seem to have miscalculated. He called the b i t c h, she trotted over with the bolt cutters and by the time his mother and the press arrived she was kissing it all better' she gives a twisted smile which he finds a little unnerving as he suspects that the game is far from over and really doesn't want to be drawn further into it 'the headline is now "Aide to the Minister of Health in Extra Marital S e x Romp Shocker" and as soon as I get home the bloody press will be camping to find out what I have to say on the matter'

'What do you have to say?' he asks, somewhat intrigued by her reaction as she stands up, stuffs the black clutch into the large, brown overnight bag and extracts a leather bag which matches the exact tone of her jumper; he doesn't think he's ever seen one person wear so much brown and he's not sure that it suits her. She's starting to make him crave chocolate.

'Nothing publishable' she replies with a snarl and picks up the bag, slinging it over her shoulder and striding towards the door, flinging it open and stalking over to her car before she turns back to him 'I'll probably be back later. Don't wait up'

'Wait, I'll come with you' he calls out, pausing only for a moment to ponder the wisdom of this course of action.

'Bloody hell' he peers through the windscreen at the six or seven journalists littering the front lawn as she pulls up outside and gives him a slightly nervous look. Even though she's bought it upon herself she seems afraid of facing them and without layers of make up he can see how pale and unhappy she looks.

'If they try and accost you, just say no comment and keep walking' she advises blandly, throwing open the car door and hurtling up the drive, not bothering to shut it behind her as she disappears through the door which an elderly woman who he presumes to be her mother-in-law is holding open. She looks as shell-shocked as he feels and he can't help but think that the two of them are nothing more than innocent bystanders in the Beauchamp's circus of a marriage. As he enters the house, the door slams behind him, narrowly stopping a couple of journalists following him inside and he takes in the somewhat amusing sight of Chrissie and Michael sitting like scolded children in the centre of a white leather sofa while Connie presides over the pair of them, clearly having trouble deciding who to murder first and whether to take them into the kitchen beforehand to avoid destroying her own soft furnishings.

'Don't make out that you're the wounded party here, Connie' Michael stands up and looks her in the eye, apparently prepared to discuss what had transpired the night before in front of his mother and the crowd of journalists who are listening at the letter box.

'Why not? I am' she snarls, shooting Chrissie a look which sends shivers down the spines of everyone in the room. Eleanor is starting to look as though she would dearly love the floor to open up and swallow her; he wonders if the hole would be big enough to take him too. This is one grudge match that he really doesn't want to witness.

'You left me chained to the bed' his voice rises in self-righteous hysteria and his lower lip starts to tremble; he looks like a petulant child and even his mother looks like she'd dearly love to disown him. Chrissie just looks sick.

'That's absurd' Connie states without missing a beat and he has to admit that she's impressive; he knows that Michael is telling the truth and he's still tempted to believe Connie's version of events 'I was called away with work and you took the opportunity to invite your little…' she trails off, giving Chrissie an unpleasant grimace as she attempts to come up with a way to describe her 'b i t c h over to keep the bed warm in my absence. Don't you dare try to blame me…'

'Oh come on Connie, you know that's a lie, Chrissie…' he looks at Chrissie who just shrugs and looks resigned; they all know that even if she leaps to his defence it will make little difference. It will just look as if they're both lying.

'Michael, you're the one who's bought all this upon yourself. You're the one who got caught with your pants down in the marital bed. Learn to accept some responsibility' her voice cracks and she presses a hand to her face as if stifling an outpouring of emotion. Beside him he notices Eleanor move towards her and put an arm around her, giving her son a disgusted look. Michael merely looks bemused and Ric finds himself almost pitying the other man who has been well and truly stitched up by a woman with twice his intellect.

'You're a poisonous bitch, do you know that?' he gives Connie a look of utter contempt and she pushes past him, hurtling through the kitchen and out into the garden. For several moments they're stunned into silence but eventually, without a word, he follows her outside.