He finished his casino critique and reached across the table to put his hand on hers. “Now it seems to me we’ve got a decision to make. Do we have another round of drinks before we go to my room?”

For answer she picked up his hand, lowered her head and blew her warm breath into his palm. “For luck,” she said without looking up, and then her tongue darted out and she licked his palm. His sweat, she noticed, tasted not all that different from the Dirty Martini.

He had a nice body. Barrel-chested, with a little more of a gut than she might have preferred, and a lot of chest hair. No hair on his back, though, and she supposed he got it waxed at the same salon that provided his million-dollar haircuts.

Muscular arms, muscular shoulders, and that meant regular gym workouts, because he couldn’t have gotten those muscles simply by throwing his own weight around. An all-over tan, too, that probably came from a tanning bed. You could shake your head at the artifice, or you could go with the result — a fit, good-looking man in his late forties, who, it had to be said, was as impressive in the sack as he’d been at the crap table. And if he owed some of that to Viagra, well, so what? He got her hot and he got her off, and what more could a poor girl desire?

And the best was yet to be.

Optima futura—that was the Latin for it, and she knew it because it had been her high school’s motto. It was, she’d always thought, singularly apt, because anything the future held had to be better than high school.

Somewhere along the way, after high school was just a blur, she’d come across some lines from Robert Browning, and perhaps it was the high school motto that made her commit them to memory, but it had worked, because she remembered them still: Grow old along with meThe best is yet to beThe last of life, for which the first was made…