"Meeting Shirley" by The Observer (observer@onramp.net). The man likes women who are a challenge: sexy, smart, classy, devious, and underhanded - with a whim of iron. As a favor to a friend, however, he agrees to take a frumpy young lady to dinner. After she changes clothes, she becomes beautiful - even enchanting, if non-French men would ever use that word. {Usually it works the other way, I'm told; beauty deteriorates geometrically during the first twelve hours - except near closing time. As one of my former professors used to say whenever he talked about nuances among synonyms: "She was a vision in the evening, and a sight in the morning."} Unfortunately, he has promised his friend not to seduce this young lady.

The chemistry between them is obvious. I don't know when I have read so many hot lines before any sex has occurred.

I think I once berated this author for dangling his modifiers. He has reformed almost completely - almost: "Alone at last with Shirley, my cock was making its presence known even more than it had numerous times during the day."

Incidentally, if I were the author of this story, I would have gone with "Damn you Charlie" for its title.

One problem I had with this story was that it ended a bit up in the air. The author starts a new subplot near the end and doesn't finish the first plot. However, he promises a continuation this week. A more serious problem may be that the author apparently intends to connect this story to his previous "The Photographer's Daughters." Unless he has some tricks I haven't thought of, I can't imagine how that would work. This is a much better story, and I don't see how the characters match up.