“The howl of a lonely wolf shattered the stillness of the cold night, and turned Jessica’s blood to ice. She pulled her worn cloak even closer around her ears and glanced behind her at the darkness of the forest. It seemed that every shadow had grown larger, and every little rustle had turned into a footstep. She shivered.”

Eleanor Preston didn’t.

She tossed the paperback down onto her coffee table, wondering once again why the sight of a tall, dark and handsome man with huge fangs hovering over a helpless female should attract such enormous numbers of dedicated and loyal readers.

Glancing at the clock, Eleanor observed that it was precisely ten minutes later than it had been the last time she’d looked.

Twenty past eight. Still another forty minutes to go before her ride arrived.

They were leaving fashionably late, because it was, apparently, an unpardonable sin to arrive anywhere early.

Marsha had insisted that nobody who was anybody got anywhere before at least nine o’clock.

What, wondered Eleanor now, were they all doing with themselves? Primping? Reading? Talking on their eternally charged cell phones?

Or were they perhaps, like Eleanor, regretting that they’d ever agreed to go out at all?

She sighed and leaned back in her leather pub chair. She tidied a stray thread in the sleeve of her Anne Klein sweater and winced again at the sight of her legs encased in jeans.

Eleanor was not a jeans woman. By any stretch of anyone’s imagination. Pants — yes. Armani pants, preferably, but only if they were on sale. Liz Claiborne was fine, and Donna Karan a close second.

But jeans? Not likely. These were too new, too tight, and too — too jeansy.

Eleanor was convinced that jeans had been designed by men, for men, and were therefore totally unsuitable for women. Especially women who possessed a well endowed ass. Rather like hers.

It was only to humor the girls at work that Eleanor had consented to spend a lunch hour trying on these darn things. They’d been labeled “stretch”, but they didn’t do nearly enough of that for Eleanor’s liking.

Snug and clingy, they delineated every curve and hollow, and Eleanor felt that she had a damn sight too many curves and nowhere near enough hollows. She compensated with her newest emerald green cashmere sweater, which fell softly around her modest bustline and landed just shy of her totally useless pockets.

She sighed again and admitted the painful truth. She might do lunches with them, shop with them, and even spend an evening with them, but Eleanor was not really “one of the girls”.

She was an artist by nature and a graphic artist by profession, and was not modest in admitting she was good at both. Sure, she’d majored in business administration, but her minor had been graphic arts and that was where she’d found her heart.

Her office was one of the few that had a full window, a table with a large sketchpad, and the very latest in graphic rendering software on her computer. She spent her days happily lost in a world of morphs and vectors, and her nights wishing she had more time left to work on the million and one paintings that were waiting to be hung in the gallery of her mind.

So what, she asked herself for the thirty-seventh time, was she doing wasting her valuable down time on an evening out with the girls? They’d nagged and teased and dared, and tried every trick in the book to get her to come out for a drink with them. She knew why. They wanted to fix her up with someone dreadful, so that she could be as miserable as the rest of them and spend her coffee breaks maligning a good portion of the male species.

Hah. She didn’t need fixing up. She knew that men found her intimidating, unattractive, completely asexual, and about as interesting as last week’s newspaper.

Her dates had been sporadic, mostly unsuccessful, and she’d eventually stopped worrying about it as her professional career soared to new heights. Occasionally she missed the touch of another hand, but she’d found a marvelous toy site on line and now had regular catalogs from DontBeShy.com. Her newest purple vibrator was far more reliable than any of her previous dates, and also could be turned off when no longer needed. Quite an advantage to a busy career woman.

The phone rang and jolted her out of her tranquility.

“Elly? You there?”

She winced. She hated being called Elly. “Yes, it’s me. Marsha?”

“Yep. Look, I’m having some car trouble. Can I meet you at the club? You know where it is, right? Just park in the lot next door, and I’ll see you there at nine. I’m so sorry, but Harry’s coming by with a jumper cable to get me started.”

“Oh. Well, perhaps we should call it off, Marsha…”

“No, no. I promised you a night out, kiddo. The others will be there too. We’ll have a knock out night, Elly, you can bet your ass.” A laugh followed this statement.

It didn’t come from Eleanor.