Then he meets an attractive young woman with startling green eyes. Maybe she'll change his luck, but how much?

There's a bit of crude language in this one, but other than that no caution necessary — unless of course you're allergic to controversy. I think I may have found a hornet's nest in this one and poked it with a stick. I'm looking forward to the comments on this one and hoping I don't upset anyone too much.

Scratch that earlier comment on the word count. MS Word put the initial value at just over 10,000 and I've since managed to bring the number down to 9,996.