Veronika turned to Jules and smiled warmly. “Oh, that was simplyexquisite. Thank you for sharing such a fabulous evening with me.” She leaned across the table and lightly stroked his forearm with her fingertips. “Would you mind escorting me back to my hotel? I’d feelso much safer.”

“I-” Maureen’s face flashed on the mildewed movie screen of Jules’s mind. Hadn’t she put her arm over him the night before, just as she’d fallen asleep? What wouldshe think? Oh, she’d be fine with it if he intended to fang the woman… butfanging was not the verb Jules had in mind. He thought hard and furiously about the nature of luck. Until today, his recent luck had beenshit luck. What would happen if, now that his luck had turned amazingly, fabulouslygood, he ungratefully turned his back on it? Would it go and dry up into a desiccated turd again?

“I, uh-I’d behonored to walk you to your hotel.”

Veronika’s hotel was a Spanish Colonial-style mansion on Barracks Street that had been converted into time-share condominiums. She opened the front door, recently renovated to show off its intricate moldings. The air in the foyer was chilled to a crisp sixty-five degrees, a nearly twenty-degree drop from the temperature outside.

Veronika removed a handkerchief from her purse and delicately dabbed her forehead and neck. “Please excuse me… I’m simply not used to this humidity anymore.” She looked at her companion, who was arid as a white desert. “How do you manage to stay so dry in all this dampness? A big husky man like you?”

Jules leaned against the gilded back of a French Restoration side chair. “Oh, y’know, when you’ve been livin‘ in New Orleans as long as I have, you kinda get used to a bit a stickiness.”

She took his hand and led him to a stairway at the rear of the foyer. “Come. I’m up on the third floor.” She laughed, sounding more like a schoolgirl than a (very) grown woman. “The only fault I can find with this place is it doesn’t have an elevator.”

“That’s okay. I can handle two flights easy enough.” Heck, with her holding his hand, her perfume tantalizing him, he’d climb to the top of One Shell Square, fifty stories up.

To Doc Landrieu’s credit, Jules made it to the third floor without even breathing hard. Veronika fumbled with her room key; her excitement buzzed his skin like static electricity. Jules was excited, too. But he was also nervous as hell. His nerves accomplished what the nighttime humidity hadn’t; sweat poured out of the pinched glands beneath his arms. He half expected that when Veronika finally got the door open, Maureen would be standing on the other side, vengefully clutching a stake pointed at his (cheatin‘) heart.

After what felt like a sizable chunk of eternity, Veronika got the key to work. The door opened. No ten-foot-tall Maureen made a jealous grab for his testicles. He took a deep breath and followed Veronika inside. The room was sumptuous. It was dominated by a startlingly large whirlpool bath, which managed to overpower even the red-velvet-covered king-sized bed.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked him as she stepped quickly to the mini bar. “My employers are very generous. Anything I want, I just put it on their tab.”

“I’ll skip it, thanks,” he stammered, fingering the velvet bedspread.

“Well, I’m going to make myself something. I’mthirsty!”

Jules watched her pour Sprite, cranapple juice, cherry concentrate, and vodka into a tumbler. She mixed it with her pinkie and gulped it down quickly, not even pausing to add ice cubes. She set the glass down on the dresser by the bed. Then, before he could brace himself, she was all over him.

Her lips engulfed his mouth. He tasted cherry on her tongue, and a hint of vodka. He felt himself losing his balance as their bodies collided. He tumbled backward onto the bed, and Veronika followed. Their stomachs, like air bags, cushioned their impact, but her top front teeth banged into his as their combined weight mashed the bedsprings to full compression. She rolled off him, laughing uproariously as he struggled to regain the air that had been squeezed out of his rib cage.

“Ah-ha-ha-ha,”she laughed, turning red as she tried catching her breath. “Oh, I think I busted a tooth! Ouch! Are you all right? Oh, that’s not what I meant to do at all! Let’s try that again, okay?”

“Just give-just give me-a second to catch my breath, baby-”

“Sure, sweetie. Ha-heh. Sure.” They both lay there a minute, side by side, each half on and half off the bed. She reached over and tentatively, but amorously, caressed his arm. “Tell you what. I’m so hot and sticky from the walk back from that jazz club. How about we relax together in that big tub?”

“Sure-sure thing!” Jules groaned, rubbing his side where he’d slammed into the bed frame.I’ll have me a bruise worse than Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark, he told himself.Good luck explaining thatto Maureen.

“I bet I know how to get you in the mood,” she said, her eyes sparkling. She stood up from the bed and danced to the middle of the room, her hips gyrating to a mambo only she could hear. She slipped off her shoes, then sensuously slithered out of her jacket. The white flesh of her arms was toned and flawless, but that wasn’t what stunned Jules. Her black silk T-shirt clung to her Amazonian form like a good coat of paint. Embroidered just above her left breast was the stylized slogan: I (HEART) VAMPIRES. The picture of the heart was pierced by a pair of cartoonish fangs and dripped droplets of Day-Glo blood.

Veronika noticed Jules’s wide-eyed expression. “Isn’t this shirt justdarling? I picked it up a few days ago at Agatha Longrain’s boutique in the Garden District. She had so much wonderful stuff there. I’ve been one of her biggest fans almost as far back as I can remember.”

“Er, yeah, it’s beautiful, baby. You got good taste.”

“Thanks.” She grinned slyly. “Ithink I’ve got good taste, too. Especially inmen.” She continued her striptease. The shirt came off next. Her bra was massive but exquisitely stylish. Expensive lace hid an underwire apparatus on a par with da Vinci’s marvels of engineering.

She leaned against an antique bureau and gracefully removed her pants. Jules expected to see a girdle of Victorian severity heave into view. Surely her hourglass figure required one-no hips on earth could be so gargantuan and yet so classically and smoothly curved all on their own. But all she wore beneath her pants was a pair of lace panties, which were nearly hidden by the tummy rolls that cascaded down her upper thighs like ripples in a lake of pure cream.

The sight hit Jules like a thunderclap-those photos inBig Cheeks Pictorial hadn’t been airbrushed one bit-!

She grinned salaciously at him, turned on the spigot, then pressed a button on the wall next to the Jacuzzi. The big tub’s waters poured forth and bubbled into life. Veronika eased herself slowly and carefully into the hot froth, a Venus returning to her birthplace in the surf. “Oh God, this feelsheavenly!” She settled herself onto a submerged seat molded into the tub’s steps and leaned back, spreading her legs wide. Her painted toenails peeked above the bubbles. “Okay, handsome. I’m not the only one who gets wet here. Your turn.”

“Uh, maybe you’ll give me just a minute to, eh, get naked in private?”

Her full lips formed an exaggerated pout. “Oh, now what fun isthat? Don’t I get a striptease, too?”

Jules turned red all over. He couldn’t remember the last woman (aside from Maureen) he’d stripped in front of. The notion of taking off his clothes in a well-lit room in front of a strange woman made him feel eight years old again, the little boy who didn’t want to take a naked shower in the St. Ignatius locker room.

“Eh, this, well, this is gonna sound realstupid… but I’d be a helluva lot more comfortable takin‘ off these clothes in the bathroom. And you think, maybe, we could turn these lights down some?”