Marcus had been buying Lotto tickets since he was 18, and had never won a nickel. But as he stood outside the Lonely Star Steakhouse and watched the most beautiful woman in the world glide his direction, he realized that he stood alone in a very special Winner’s Circle.

Blind dates always lied. Or so he thought. This woman had been too good to be true. Her personal ad had stated simply:

“I am the sexiest woman you will ever meet. I dare you to prove me wrong.”

As a bit of breeze caught the golden strands of her hair and tossed it slightly, as he caught sight of those sky-blue eyes, those soft, full lips, as his eyes drifted down and over the swelling promise of her ripe figure, admirably esconced in a dress as black as midnight, and down the long length of her legs to her glossy black pumps, he felt a sudden weakness in his knees and a stirring elsewhere.

She smiled at him.

“Marcus Wilbee? I’m Susan.”

His voice just cracked.

“I’m, um, Marcus.”

She knew that. She just smiled.

“Shall we go in?”

They passed through the doorway, into a dark entryway pungent with the aroma of steaks grilling and noisy with the clanking of dishes and dinnertime chatter.

“Smoking or non-smoking?” asked the employee at the door, a bored-looking lady of maybe 40 or so years old.

Before Marcus could voice his usual “Non,” he heard, clearly, emphatically, from beside him, “Smoking, please.”

What?

Numbly he followed the waitress and his date to a table in the corner. Somehow, he sat down.

Susan smiled at him and sat down too, gently, with all the dignity and beauty of a lady.

“I smoke, Marcus. At least ten cigarettes a day. Sometimes more, when I’m in the mood. Does that shock you? Many women smoke. We enjoy it.”

“You said in your ad that you didn’t smoke,” he said, unable to hold back the hurt and disappointment in his voice.

“Well, I lied,” she said. “Wouldn’t you rather have me lie about that than the other part? You are going to find out that I am the sexiest woman you ever met, if you don’t think so already. And it’s all natural. No knife has ever touched this body.”

“If I had said I smoked, maybe due to your prejudice you would passed up this chance,” she continued. “You are one lucky man.”

Marcus didn’t know what to say. None of the women he knew were anywhere near this brazen, this confident, and, he had to admit, this damn gorgeous and this damn right.

He didn’t like smoking. Well, truth was, in these days, he had few dealings with it. Couldn’t remember the last time he had even seen a smoker.

She lowered her lovely hand into her Gucci purse and plucked out a long box of Virgina Slims, extricating one expertly. It seemed almost to glow in the gloom of the restaurant, slim as its name, and virgin-white from tip to filter save for a thin gold band.

She paused for a moment, holding the unlit cigarette in her fingers, twirling it for a moment like a tiny baton.

“I smoked my first cigarette when I was 13,” she said. “Smoked it all by myself, in my bedroom one night when my parents were out. Smoked it just after doing my health class homework about the evils of smoking. I had all those black lung pictures fresh in my head. I didn’t have the guts to inhale the first puff, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The second puff, I inhaled. Sucked it down deep. Coughed so hard I thought I was going to die.

“And the rush, Marcus, that rush is like nothing else in the world. Suddenly I didn’t care that the class bully had tried to “pants” me that afternoon or that I had an F on my last Algebra test. Oh, it wasn’t like doing drugs, coke or whatever. But I just felt good, like I had touched myself, or maybe like Saturday morning in summer kind of good.”

“I forced one more puff into my little pink lungs, though it burned and stung and I could visualize all that nasty cigarette stuff swirling around down there and settling in.

“That was all I could stand, at the time. I opened my window and tossed the cigarette out, and, well, you don’t want to know what happened next. But hey, you get over it. I was a pro-smoker in less than a week.

“I have never tried to quit, not once. I enjoy being a smoker. My mom wasn’t happy, but what could she say? She’d smoked right through being pregnant with both me and my sister, though she’d quit a few years later. She always presented us as living, healthy proof that a woman’s smoking was her right, pregnant or not, not some horrible sin.

“Why don’t you light me up, Marcus?”

A small plastic lighter was being held out to him, and he summoned ancient Boy Scout campfire knowledge of the workings of a lighter to free a flame from the little device and hold it to the tip of her cigarette.

He couldn’t believe he was doing this.

She leaned in close, with the cigarette firmly grasped in her lips, close enough that he could clearly see her cheeks cave in, vacuuming in a breath of air to help ignite the tobacco. He could actually see the bright red stain of her lipstick form on the filter as those lips pressed down hard upon the cigarette.

The lighter was beginning to burn his fingers and he almost dropped it. The cigarette jerked sharply upwards as she continued to drag, as the power of her inhale converted the tobacco grains into a coal of fire.

Now her cherry-red fingernails clasped in a narrow “V” around the gold band of the cigarette, squeezing gently as she continued to pull in the last of that first puff. The cigarette, its filter tip clearly marked with the red of her lipstick, now rode away in her finger’s embrace and she opened wide her mouth, treating him to the sight of thick, creamy smoke completely filling her mouth, swirling like English fog around her teeth. For a moment, a tendril of smoke started to escape, twisting past her lips but then was sucked back in, helpless as a drowning swimmer in a riptide. The smoke poured down into her throat, like milk being swallowed. She licked her lips and smiled.

“First puff is always the best,” she said.

He was amazed that she could talk with all that smoke still held down inside her lungs.

That was about to end. For as he gazed into those gorgeous blue eyes, as he admired that pretty little nose, that golden hair, as he visualized what she would look like stepping out of that black dress – flaunting breasts as perfect as any woman ever had, turning to give him a luscious view of “where the good Lord split her” – her lips opened and she exhaled.

She never broke her gaze. She locked her eyes to his and aimed her lips, with casual calmness, at his face. He felt rather than saw, the arrival of the smoke pressing suddenly hot and warm and strong against his mouth and nose, felt the strength of her lungs pushing it deliberately into his face with all the intensity of a hot summer wind. He could barely see her now, just those baby blue eyes in the haze of the exhale that boiled around and upon him.

She pursed her lips slightly, varying the stream, now into his eyes, now against his lips, teasing him, torturing him. How much smoke could one woman have inhaled? He finally gave up holding out, and took a smoke-soaked breath, tasting her exhaled smoke in his own mouth, feeling the blood surge through his veins at this bizarre experience.

It could not last forever. Her lips closed as they expelled the last of that first puff of smoke. She smiled again. He had not blinked, had not moved, had not even coughed – the devil only knew how.

She lifted her cigarette to her lips again and before she drew in a second puff, said in a voice husky with smoke and innuendo:

“Mind if I smoke?”

“No,” Marcus squeaked, feeling as helpless as a moth by a porchlight.

And suddenly the creamy smoke was pouring out of her lips again and he realized something. He had forgotten her name, his name, where his car was parked, but he knew one thing. She was every bit the sexiest woman he had ever met, just like she had said, and he was as hooked on her as she was on those pretty cigarettes in her purse.