Ellora’s Cave, $4.45, ISBN 1-84360-054-4
Paranormal Erotica, 2001

Elaine Nichols, our heroine in Last Kiss, shows up to attend a masquerade pleasure ball of sorts in her friend Dirk’s Denver mansion. There, she encounters the mysterious Alexei. Unknown to her, Count Alexei Romanov is actually a vampire and Elaine is the reincarnation of his lost love. The poor dear has found and lost his love three times already over the centuries. Will fourth time be finally the charm for poor Alexei? Ah, Elaine has a secret of her own, although when this secret is revealed, the solution to the problem is so obvious that I have to snort and roll up my eyes.

At any rate, the bulk of this short story deals with Alexei pampering and making Elaine feel as if she’s on top of the world when he’s not giving her the jollies in bed. There is a superficial kind of charm to this story, despite the characters rarely being more than one-dimensional due to the length constraints of the short story format. However, this also means that I will have a hard time remembering much about this story a week or so from now.