Jared was just dropping off into dreamland when he heard a rapping on his door. It was repeated, more insistently.

He squinted at the bedside clock. Five a.m. Who the hell wanted to talk to him at 5 a.m., in this hotel 2,000 miles from his home? Probably some drunk.

He got to his feet and peered through the security peephole. It was a woman – a redheaded woman. He vaguely recognized her. Geral … Geralt … Geralt Systems. She was the convention rep for Geralt – he’d seen her yesterday and he had liked what he saw.

But what did she want at 5 a.m?

He unlocked the door and she slipped inside and shoved it shut with her shapely backside, which was ever so gently hinted at by the thin fabric of her nightie..

“I saw the sign and I hoped you wouldn’t mind,” she said.

Wouldn’t mind what, he wondered.

“The smoking sign,” she said. “On your door. This is a smoking room. Mine isn’t. They screwed up in the reservation. I was going to go downstairs and outside – but I passed your door on the way and remembered how nice you had been and thought I would ask.”

Jared didn’t smoke and he had been slightly annoyed when he walked into this room yesterday and smelled the aroma of long-ago cigarettes. But he had been too tired to care.

He was very awake now.

She was beautiful – her coppery curls twisted and plunged halfway down her back. Her face was small and delicate, but with big green eyes and full lips. She wore only the nightie, for he could see the outline of her nipples pressing hard against its silkiness – and no panty line marred the luscious curve of her hips. Her feet were bare, her toes painted crimson red.

Long-suppressed need surged through him. But he would be the gentleman, of course.

“Of course you can smoke in here. Later, we can switch rooms.”

“Thank you, thank you,” she breathed, and she sat in the little chair by his suitcase and shook a Marlboro out of her pack. He moved to her side and picked up the courtesy matches by the ashtray before she could lift her lighter. With a flourish, he struck the match and held it to the rich, red tobacco that danced in her trembling lips.

Her lips clamped tightly around the filter as she pulled in the first drag of smoke, sucking and sucking as if she wanted to inhale the entire cigarette in that single puff. The cigarette jerked upward as her lips increased the pressure on it. The cherry bit into the raw tobacco behind it as her drag continued, almost four seconds worth of inhale now, with her fingers carefully but tightly wrapped around the filter to ensure the minimum of air would be allowed to sneak in through the silly airholes and dilute the smoke.

She held the smoke in her lungs for four seconds more, until he thought she would surely pass out. Without lowering her cigarette, she exhaled through her nose, twin plumes of incredible intensity, the blasts of a beautiful dragon, and sucked in another breath.

Now, finally, she set the cigarette down in the ashtray and exhaled this second puff through her pretty mouth, a rich, aromatic stream of smoke that swirled around his face like fragrant fog.

“God, I needed that,” she said. “Four hours on that damn plane without a cigarette, and then no smoking in that damn taxi and then more no smoking even in my damn hotel room.”

She tapped the ashes from the cigarette and took another drag, half closing her green eyes against the rising swirl of smoke.

Then she handed it to him. He shook his head. “Not a smoker,” he said.

She looked startled. “I’m sorry – I didn’t realize. But you have a smoking room…”

“Mixup, like yours, he said.

“I’d better go,” she said. “You were more than a gentleman. You should have said something.”

“Kristy,” he said, thanking all the gods in the universe that he had remembered her name from yesterday, “Kristy, it’s just fine. I don’t mind smoke and you were surely something worth waking up to.”

He felt his face turn red, for he’d spoken quite without thinking.

She fixed those green eyes upon him and took another puff. He watched the beautiful ball of smoke vanish down her throat into her needy lungs and then rise up again to spill out of her perfect lips and fill the air between them.

“I’m dreaming,” she said. “I’ve met the sweetest guy in the world, at a frickin’ computer convention, and I’m smoking in his hotel room and he doesn’t mind at all.”

She snapped off more ash into the ashtray. And then it happened. She stretched out one long, bare leg, surely by accident, but her toes brushed his dangling fingers and it was if fire had singed him and his fingers followed them in their arc and then laid upon the delightful digits for a second or two and she didn’t move them away.

And now he was caressing those toes and those ankles and those thighs and suddenly she was on her feet pulling him towards his bed and he was going right along. And she lifted her nightie over her head and revealed those sweet, firm breasts that it had hidden and both her hands were behind his head, crushing it into them, warm and fragrant and yielding.

And her bare feet, in an amazing act of dexterity, were pulling at his pajama bottoms and yanking them off and then he felt her, hot and wet and willing beneath him. She arched her back and his hands found her bare bottom and rubbed it roughly and hungrily, from contour to contour, from full, yielding roundness to the deep valley between, and his questing mouth dropped down to her stomach and then his tongue burrowed deeply into her vagina, tasting the salty, hot wetness and thrusting while she shook and shuddered and then, in an amazing act of dexterity himself, he extricated his tongue and entered her with all his manhood and returned his lips to her beautiful face and he exploded just as she exploded, and just as she convulsed for the last time, her nearly forgotten cigarette flashed past his face in her fingers as she threw it away in utter abandon, somewhere beside the bed, hopefully not upon anything flammable and as their lips met and his tongue pushed her mouth open, it probed into the swirling smoke of her last inhale, questing in the fumes like a little animal lost in a mist. And her lips sealed around his and her fingers pinched his nose shut and she forced her entire exhale – second after asphyxiating second of a seasoned smoker’s full, lung-bursting drag into his mouth – diluted only by the slight bit of actual air her lungs had mingled with it

And she quivered again, in a spasm of the pure, raw pleasure that comes only from a woman taking complete, intimate control of a man.

And they lay there, spent, until their breathing returned to normal long minutes later.

And then she pulled another cigarette from her pack and he lit it for her and he held her tenderly in his arms and kissed her as she smoked, upon her cheeks as she caved them in, upon her throat as she swallowed her smoke, upon her lips as she lowered the cigarette, upon her tongue, tasting the sweetness of her saliva, tinged with the bitterness of the nicotine.

And he wanted her again. But she gently pushed him away, smiling sweetly. “Sure as hell I want you again, you god, but we’ve got a damned convention, remember?”

She exhaled a cloud of smoke into his face. He cupped her breast and kissed it one last time. She got up, walking to his bathroom, her naked hips shifting so desirably. He listened to the pleasing cascade of her urinating and then heard her step into the shower.

“My key’s on your desk,” she said. “Bring me back an outfit from my room and my panties and bra and my other pack of cigarettes and there might be a little extra time for us before the convention begins.”

To be continued.