After the song, during a standing ovation, he placed his guitar on its stand and made his way directly towards me, the whole room in paroxysms as time stopped and he pulled me to my feet and into a lush kiss.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he whispered into my ear.

“Okay,” I said, unsure my jelly legs would hold me upright. I waved a goodbye to Kit and Pauline as Mark tugged me through the still-clapping crowd and backstage into the bustling green room. We swept past his sweaty, chatty band members, one changing his shirt, another standing with a wife or girlfriend, another hovering nearby, blowing smoke out the back door. We pinballed through the room, exiting through a narrow, dark hallway where we made a right, then a left, until we hit upon a small office with a metal desk and a bleak bulb swinging overhead.

“Wow, you take me to the nicest places,” I said, a little tipsy from the attention and from the wine.

He shut the door behind us, sending a yellowed calendar crashing to the floor. And then Mark Drury came at me slowly, hungrily. I moved back until I could feel the concrete wall behind me. Reaching me, he placed one arm, then the other on either side of me.

“So it is you,” he said, peering into my face.

“What do you mean?”

“They gave me a name and a picture. I thought I recognized you. But I didn’t believe it until I looked out into the crowd and saw you there. I’ve seen you at my shows,” he said, his perfect lips inches from mine.

“You have?”

“Yeah. And I always go to find you after and you’re always gone. Then I saw you on the patio of Ignatius’s a few months ago, but I got pulled into a conversation with someone else.”

“You mean with Cassie?” I said. “She’s … she’s a friend of mine.”

“Mine too,” he said. “Life’s funny, how things sort themselves out, don’t ya think?”

He was right. He was totally right. And I nodded. We could hear the next band cueing up on the other side of the wall, their opening beats pulsing through my body and his hands.

“I’m supposed to take you to the Mansion,” he said, nuzzling my ear, smelling my hair. Oh god. “We have a car waiting for us out back. But I’ve been wanting you all night. Knowing you were in the crowd … knowing it was you. I don’t think I can wait.”

He smelled so good, a hint of apples, his breath warm, minty.

“May I?” He inched my jacket off my shoulders. “This too?”

I nodded as he began unbuttoning my blouse. As I stood there in my lavender camisole, he dragged a palm across my clavicle, circling a breast, the pad of his thumb waking up a nipple through the silk. He sweetly lifted the camisole up and over my head, then released my breasts from my bra.

“Fuck me,” he said, taking them both in his hands, kissing them and leaving a wet path from one tense nipple to the other. He slipped a hand down the front of my leather pants, looking astonished to discover how wet I was.

Sweet Jesus.

I couldn’t do anything but cover his mouth with a firm kiss that quickly turned ferocious. I melted into him, his whole body pressing me against the wall.

“I’m going to make you scream,” he said, as I sighed at the feel of his mouth making its way down the front of my body. On his knees before me, he peeled off my pants, and started with tender, tentative licks, along my hip bones and over my belly button, coaxing my legs apart with his beautiful face, his talented tongue. Lifting one of my thighs, he buried his face in my cleft, nearly toppling me over before I found footing on a nearby chair. I was pinned against the cool cement wall of Tipitina’s, by Mark Drury! I looked down as his tireless teasing found my clit and he swirled it inside his warm mouth like found treasure. My hips cocked forward as his tongue circled and flicked, his fingers darting in and out and taking me right to the edge of my senses, parting me more, and more, until his whole mouth owned the very center of me.

Then I felt it, the hot rush that pulled me under as I came—quickly, loudly, fully—heavy waves crashing over me, my fingers raking his hair. “Oh god, oh god, oh god, Mark” was all I could say, until I finally, completely, wilted over his body. He rose slowly and kissed his way back up to my face, cradled it with both his hands. But my legs were shot as I sank into the nearby busted office chair, my knees flung apart, my pants around one ankle like a black leather cuff.

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

“All day I’ve fantasized about doing that,” he said, wiping his sexy mouth victoriously.

“What else do you fantasize about?” I asked, already wanting more of him.

“This is your fantasy, Dauphine. It’s supposed to be about you. Don’t get me wrong. This works for me too.”

I leaned forward and pulled him by a belt loop to stand in front of my face. I flashed my eyes up at him, my mouth slackened, looking for silent permission.

“And that works too,” he said, as he stroked himself through his jeans.

My hands, shaking slightly, unbuttoned him, freeing his perfect erection, my god, taking his smooth tip in my mouth, never hungrier for anything. I looked up at him again as my tongue began circling his tip, and he died a little, his face collapsing at the site of my growing enthusiasm. Then I took him fully into my wet mouth, moaning at the same time, my firm hand pumping ever so rhythmically along his shaft, my other one under him, cupping him, feeling him rise with his aching arousal. He closed his eyes as I took him deep into my mouth. I sucked in my cheeks, my lips a firm ring, my throat relaxed, my low moan moving through his groin. He whimpered. I was good at this, had always been good at this, but I had never wanted to be the best like I did now.

My mouth and hands were working their magic, but it was the eye contact that did him in, just as I slid a wet finger back and around, pressing in on him at the exact moment he came, hard and loud, deep into the back of my throat, one of his hands stroking my hair, the other one outstretched on the wall, as he said god and my name over and over again until spent. After a few tender strokes, I let go of him, flinging myself back in the chair, deeply pleased. My eye caught the calendar splayed on the floor; it was dated five years ago. Just who was I back then?

“Holy shit. That was … mind-fucking-blowing, Dauphine.” His hands were on his knees, his jeans bunched around his ankles. “I’ve never … it was so … what the fuck.”

“Best ever?”

“Uh … yeah.”

“Well, that was my fantasy,” I said. “Complete.”

“Oh, but it’s not over yet. Let’s get the hell out of here. The Domino Suite awaits!”

“What’s that?” I said, reaching down for my bra.

“I don’t have a clue, but we’re going to find out.”

“So there’s more?

“So much more,” he said, plucking up our clothes and pulling me up to my feet. “More than you know.”

We dressed stealing soft glances at each other. And then we slipped out the back door of the club, where the same long black car that had dropped me off now took on an extra passenger. He held my hand in the back seat, and somehow this gesture was more intimate than what we’d just done to each other with our mouths at Tipitina’s.

“That Margaret Lewis song … so good,” I said.

“You know her?”

“Know her? I have all her records. Vinyl.”

“Who would have thought this is how I’d meet my dream girl,” he said, raising my hand to kiss the back of it.

His dream girl?

He noticed my bracelet for the first time. “You earned them all, right?”

I nodded.

“I think you get some do-overs tonight,” he said, kissing my fingers.

Matilda was right: this fantasy was unrolling in a way that I could not have imagined myself. We kissed the rest of the way there, coming up for air only when the limo glided through those ivy-covered gates. The Mansion was dark, one window lit on the second floor.

“This place is so freaky, don’t you think?” he said, exiting the limo in front of a small fountain with little angel statues.

“You’ve been here before?”

Mark looked at me.

“Right,” I said.

“I’m going to assume you’ve been here before too.”

“Once, and only back there,” I said, pointing over the crest of a hill to the garage at the end of the driveway.

“What were you doing back there?”

The look on my face told him it was best not to ask.

“Right. This is so insane,” he said, grinning widely. “I fucking love it.”

The side door was open, and instead of taking me to the right, where I assumed the front foyer would lead us upstairs, he tugged me to the left, down a long, black-and white-tiled corridor with swinging oak doors at the end. We were quiet as mice, creeping hand in hand into the massive kitchen. A single light over a stove cast shadows on appliances the size of cattle. The pots and pans hanging from the ceiling were big enough to prepare meals for Vikings.

Mark pulled open an industrial-sized fridge stocked with enough food to feed an army. Snatching a large serving tray from an upper cabinet, and a box of crackers, he bent into the fridge to scoop up handfuls of chocolate truffles, grapes and cheese rounds.

“All they have is romance food,” he said as he handed me the tray so he could continue to load it up. “They need to start buying cold cuts and bread.”

“Ahem. Hello.” The voice came from the kitchen door.

In my fright I screamed rather loudly, and Mark tossed the box of crackers in the air as a diminutive woman in a starched maid’s uniform turned the lights on full force.