title: The Passive Man's Guide to Seduction
author: Franklin Parlamis
description: The "chess" Chapter: ...My friend Becker and I started hanging-out in this bar after work. It was kind of a mellow bar, nothing too fancy, but for some reason there were a whole lot of really attractive women there. Too bad we never talked to them. We had been coming to the bar for three months, and in that whole time, we spoke with about three women. I say "about" three because, when you're up that high, it's difficult to remember the exact number-it might have been four. We could have been sitting home, drinking Old Milwaukee at $3.00 a six pack, instead of Heineken at $3.00 a beer. We would have met the same amount of women! In fact, every time we drank Old Milwaukee, we could have put $2.50 in a coffee can, saved up for a couple of months, then taken all the money we had saved and blown it on a really expensive night. Our chances of scoring on that one night would probably have been higher than on all the nights in that bar combined. Moreover, we could have been playing chess. At least then we would be doing something interesting with our evenings. But the whole idea seemed sketchy. Play chess for two months straight in squalor, then go out one night and maybe get laid. Then start the whole cycle all over again. It was all too regular, like a woman's period-and if we didn't score on our one appointed night, it would have been just about as traumatic as missing a period. Too much pressure...no, not for us. "Wait a minute," I screamed at last. "Why don't we play chess in the bar?" Utter silence. I might as well have suggested that we bust out our old Dungeons & Dragons book and sit around in the bar drinking Pepsis and eating Doritos. The ideas wasn't as bad as all that, though, and the more we thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense. So we tried it out. Let me tell you right now it worked. It worked so well that it even makes my Dungeons & Dragons scenario seem like a pretty damn good idea.... By the time Becker returned with the first beers of the evening, a young woman, Vera, had already approached the table to see what we were up to. Three months we had been coming to this bar, and not once had a woman approached us of her own volition. In retrospect, I know why. No woman ever had a reason to. What would she possibly have said, "Hey, I just noticed that you two gentlemen both have all your fingers...and two ears each. Plus you're wearing shirts and I think that's cool. By the way, I'm Vera." In an Ironic way, the chess board provided the type of "flash" I talked about earlier...Even though we were making terrible blunders, Vera didn't notice. She was too into talking with the chess geniuses she had met at the bar.... Author's note: It does not matter how good you are at chess. Ask yourself two questions: 1) what are the chances that a woman you meet in a bar will actually know anything about chess? 2) if she does, do you really want to go home with her? The conclusion is clear: proficiency is not mandatory....
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  Grayson Prentiss's Seduction
  
  Bronwyn Scott
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Spring, 1831, Spain
  
  Elena di Duero is desperate for a husband. But not just anyone—she needs to
  find her husband, the man given up for dead almost a year ago. If she doesn’t
  bring Alejandro home alive within the next month, she will be forced to marry
  cruel Don Alicante and cede all of her land to him.
  
  Then the lone survivor of a shipwreck washes up on shore with no memory of who
  he is or where he came from. And he looks remarkably like Alejandro. Elena
  knows he is not her husband, but he could be. She needs him to be. She just
  has to put it to him the right way, with the right incentive.
  
  And so begins the seduction.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter One
  
  Grayson Prentiss had minutes left to live. He had no illusions about how long
  he’d survive in the frigid, churning waves of the Atlantic if the ship sank.
  So—futile though it might be—he threw all his muscle into turning the great
  wheel of the ship in a last attempt to counter the