Then the writer at Yride, a wonderful-crazy-ghetto-guerrilla start-up where I work, decides to try and get a story out of her, so he calls her and pretends to be a "high profile" CEO named Cameron. She calls his cellphone back and leaves a message. Trouble was, his message says his real name: Mark. So he calls back and says Mark is his "associate," acting as a security filter for Cameron, a really bad, white-trash kind of word choice lie if there ever was one.

She e-mails me, her knight in shining armor, saying she looked at our site -- but what's going on with Cameron and all that security bullshit? "I have CEOs who call from household-name companies who don't use so much security," she says.

I e-mail her back, blowing Mark's cover and suggesting she play with him if she wants. (I'm playing the nice guy once again.) The guys in the office are looking over my shoulder now, totally into the unfolding "educated escort" story.

Next morning, no news. My fantasies are crushed. No money, no honey. She's gone, like a one night e-stand leaving only sweaty keys and a few blurry mental freeze frames. On a whim I send her this letter that I have half written and I ask her if I can post it, with her quotes, to a mailing list for Webheads in the San Francisco Bay Area I started five years ago. She comes right back (She must have slept in ...) in the afternoon with a long letter.

I find out that she is a real "she." Wow. I discover that Slate has already done a story on her, back when she was only charging $5,800 a day. And she likes my writing. I blush again. My co-workers huddle around my computer reading our e-mails. It's fun.

Then she sends me the e-mail that hits me where I live: "PS so after doing a little search on that nifty program called NeoTrace I see that you use CTS Network Services? Is that a cable line? Or do you guys have DSL down there as well? Let me know. And I use Hushmail to hide my static IP address (I am DSL up here). You'd be surprised what you can find out with an IP."

My face feels hot. My co-workers are making fun of me. My heart pounds. She used IP [Internet Protocol] in a sentence!!! Now that is just super-sexy. I start to think that she could go very far with this new site she's planning. Imagine this: She puts her site on her own server, and then does a seminar at a conference called "Linux and the Lady: How a self-managed escort used Linux servers to keep from going down too often." She'd pack 'em in.

Then she e-mails me, asking what to do about our Yride.com writer. Should she call him back and pretend to be two people, she asks? I give her my number at work. She calls me. Her voice is deep and sexy. We spend a half-hour talking about a new site she's planning. She wants to retire from escorting. There are a couple of touchy moments -- like when I ask, "So, um, are you going to use the same, uh ... business model?" Turns out she put the Educated Escort site up in one night almost a year ago and has had floods of work since then. She only works once a month now, very picky. She explains that with the new site she wants to get away from escorting and "Anne Marie" totally.

Turns out she went to USC for a master's and claims to know some high-powered geeks who I don't want to mention by name because she asked me not to. I mention the classic Dungeons & Dragons connection with geek culture and she confesses she's putting a lot about D&D on her new site. She's thinking maybe 500 or so guys at $20/month. "Maybe I'll do yoga, or lean over to read Thoreau, and there will be lots of pictures with laptops," she breathes into the phone. She says she's got a non-porn shoot this weekend with geeks and her.

Talking to her, I hold back on asking for a dinner date. But I'm undeniably challenged by the thought of meeting her. What's that worth hourly? I'm under her spell, the spell that she uses to get geeks to willingly pay $500 an hour to be with her for 48 hours, including sleeping, going to the bathroom, eating, so that's ... Anyway, the call was great and I didn't ask anything, even cutting it short because I was late to meet friends.

I drive home thinking she likes me a little more than the rest of the guys who hound her. I'm different. The "Pretty Woman" myth has seeded deep in my brain. I wonder how I could do a story about her for a magazine. I'd have to meet her then but I can't remember the third step in "The Tao of Steve." Time for a trip back to imdb.com and one more e-mail ...

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