sensual. She was long-legged and narrow-waisted, and her breasts were large

and

firm. She could do more to arouse a man with a slight lowering of her

eyelashes

than most any woman could do with her entire body. She had a walk that made

men

bump into lampposts and women loathe her on sight. It was as if her every

curve

had been purposely designed to provoke the maximum amount of lust. Tern knew

this, of course, and had learned to take advantage of it at an early age.

Many men made the mistake of thinking that a woman as beautiful as Terri

could

not be especially intelligent, since the obsessive cultivation of beauty and

the

painstaking emphasis on its display were superficial preoccupations that did

not

require much intelligence at all. But Terri was different. Terri was both

extremely beautiful and highly intelligent. She catered outrageously to the

sexual imaginings of men... the better to destroy them.

In many respects Terri Clancy was the exact reverse of Joey Lymon. She

despised

men because of the effect she had on them. A tragic childhood of physical

abuse

and emotional neglect had left her with an empty heart and a twisted mind.

She

wanted to be loved, but she didn't really know what love was. She dreamed of

finding the man who would want her for herself rather than the way she

looked,

but she felt the only way she'd ever know if she had found him was if he

proved

to be immune to her considerable arsenal of charms, so each man who came into

her life was struck with a barrage of sexual temptation, the likes of which

had

not been seen since Salome had danced for Herod.

And, predictably, since men are only men, and paragons of virtue such as

Galahad

are few and far between—one comes along every two thousand years or so—the

men

that Terri met invariably succumbed to her allure. It didn't take much,

either.

A knowing smile. A lingering, suggestive look. A slow, deliberate moistening

of

the lips. A show of leg, a slight display of cleavage; it really was absurd

how

little it would take to make a man's brain turn to oatmeal and his hormones

rage

out of control. And having thus proved once again her innermost conviction

that

all men were basically scum, Terri would proceed to lay waste to their lives.

She left a long trail of broken marriages and bankrupt businesses, of men who

turned to drink or were convicted of embezzlement or fraud or theft, all for

her

sake. She brought men to an intimate acquaintance with their baser selves and

set their feet irrevocably upon the path to self-destruction. And with every

male thus brought to justice, Terri grew wealthier and more embittered. Then,

one day, she finally found the man she had been seeking all her life. It was