"I envy you, Colonel Coally. Were I a man, I, too, would have ridden out in search of companionship."

"It wasn't companionship I rode out for, Miss Abigail."

"I know very well what you rode out for, Colonel Coally."

"Do you, Miss Abigail?" The voice in the dark was curiously passionless. "Do you know what it is like for your body to burn and throb until you want to throw aside everything you have ever believed in for just one moment of oblivion?"

Abigail closed her eyes against a lifetime of wanting things that could never be, gently reared as she was. Things she would never have, spinster that she now was. "Yes, Colonel Coally. I do."

The bed shifted. "Do you have fantasies, Miss Abigail?"

Unbidden images danced behind her eyelids. Forbidden images of a man's naked desire filling a woman's body. Sexual images of things she had never done. Things she had never seen. Things she had never even read about.

Yearnings that in the next three weeks she must somehow put aside.

"Yes." She opened her eyes and stared into the darkness. "I have fantasies."

"Tell me." The abrupt command was harsh.

"I…" How could she tell this man who was a virtual stranger what she had privately dreamed about for years? But the darkness provided a certain anonymity. It almost seemed as if she talked to herself… or a fantasy.

"I fantasize about what it is like to kiss. Not the small peck that I give and receive from my family and friends. But a real kiss… like they do in my books. With their… tongues." Before she could lose her courage, she blurted, "Do men and women really kiss that way, Colonel Coally?"

"Sometimes. What else do you fantasize about, Miss Abigail?"

Abigail transferred the journal to her left hand and scooted sideways across the mattress so that her back rested against the iron headboard. The sole of her right foot brushed against wool and a muscular leg.

Heat shot up her calf.

She curled her foot underneath her skirt. "I… fantasize about what a man looks like. I mean… I have little nephews and I… have changed their nappies. They are… not really very impressive. Yet in the books they describe a man as being… much larger.There. Are men as large in real life as they are in books?"

It could have been the intake of his breath that she heard. Or perhaps it was hers. Because suddenly she realized exactly what it was that she had grabbed in the darkness, all silky sinew with pulsing veins.

And yes, it had been very large indeed.

"Some men are large, some men are small." The voice in the dark deepened. "Just as some women have large breasts, and some have small. Is it important to you?"

"Yes," she said softly, wondering what or evenif he had thought about her breasts during that fleeting touch, wondering how large were his measurements, wondering if all men were his size. Then she laughed self-consciously, embarrassed yet strangely exhilarated at discussing a man's anatomy. "I meanI suppose it would not matter as long as a man can give a woman satisfaction. Is it possible, Colonel Coally? Can a man give a woman satisfaction?"

"Do you doubt it, Miss Abigail?"

"Oh, yes, Colonel Coally. Every time I look at one of my pomaded, bewhiskered brothers-in-law I doubt it. I try to imagine them kissing with their tongue oror touching a woman's breast oror kissing a woman between her legs, and, quite frankly, I cannot. I cannot imagine them doing any of the things I read about. I cannot even imagine them begetting their own children. They have fat bottoms, Colonel Coally. I simply cannot imagine those fat bottoms pistoning up and down."

Fat bottoms pistoning up and down rang out over the muted frenzy of the storm.

Abigail clasped her right hand over her mouth in horror at the words that had come from it. At the same time, a shout of laughter burst from the other side of the bed. The mattress shook and shimmied.

"I am glad that you find my speech amusing, Colonel Coally," Abigail said stiffly.

The masculine laughter subsided. "I suddenly find this whole conversation amusing. Here you are, telling me your darkest fantasies, yet you address me as 'Colonel Coally.' And here am I, equally reprehensible, calling you 'Miss Abigail.' Let's call a truce, shall we? For the duration of the storm, let us be simply Abigail and Robert."

It was absurd, of course, but calling the intruder by his first name seemed more intimate than telling him her "darkest" fantasies. As long as he remained a colonel instead of a man, then he was a part of the storm and she remained a spinster lady merely engaged in safe, however illicit, conversation. But cross that barrier and

"Very well." Abigail took a deep breath to still the rapid acceleration of her heartbeat. "I find that I am sharing my fantasies, but you are withholding yours. What do you fantasize about… Robert?"

"A woman, Abigail. I fantasize about all the things I would like to do to a woman."

Abigail's breath caught in her throat. She envisioned his tanned hands caressing the pale skin of a woman's body. And wondered what they would feel like touchingher body.

Liquid desire pooled between her thighs.

"What about… size? Do you fantasize about the size of a woman's breasts?"

"No."

The short answer did not encourage further questioning. But this was the first manindeed, he was the first personwho had ever discussed sex other than in terms of polite platitudes andAbigail wanted to know more.

When she returned to London in three weeks' time she would have this memory, at least, to chase away the lonely nights.

"Well, then. What sort of things would you like to do… to a woman?" she asked casually, almost flippantly, while inside her chest her heart thudded against her ribs.

"Everything." The disembodied voice was a dark rasp. "Everything she has ever dreamed of. I want to ram my body into a woman until I lose myself insideher body, until her pleasure is my pleasure. I want to make her scream and beg for more. I want her to make me forget that I have spent the last twenty-two years of my life killing."

Abigail felt as if the air had been sucked out of her lungs.

Death was a part of war. The newspapers were filled with the tallies. Abigail read the accounts, mourned the victims, and had never once thought about the survivors, those soldiers who fought in the name of Her Majesty. Men who were not born to kill, but who did so nevertheless. Men who would suffer their actions for the rest of their lives.

As the autocratic colonel was obviously suffering.

For long seconds she clutched the cool, damp journal in her left hand, riveted by the raw need that radiated from the man at the foot of the bed.

As a soldier he had faced death; the only danger Abigail had ever experienced was that of exposure, should her erotica be discovered. As a man, he had endured physical pain; the only pain Abigail had ever borne was loneliness, pretending to be what she was not. Yet she felt the colonel's desire as keenly as she felt her ownhe forced to seek forgetfulness in the midst of a storm, she forced to bury her frustration between the pages of illicit books and journals.

She wondered what it would be like to forget the futurein the arms of this man. Just as he sought to forget the pastin the arms of a woman.

She was a woman, she thought on a leap of reckless desire. In the darkness she did not feel like an aging spinster. Surely her body would not feel old, either.

Suddenly a voice came from a long distance away, surely not hers, any more than the ache in her breasts and the throb between her thighs belonged to her, a spinster who should be beyond the desires of her youth, a lady who should never experience such desires no matter what her age. "I will help you forget, Robert, if you will help me forget."

chapter 2

"You're a virgin." The gravelly voice was flat.

Abigail's face flamed in the darkness. "Yes."

"And a lady."

No lady did the things Abigail did… or proposed to do. "No."

"What do you need to forget, Abigail?"

"In three weeks time I turn thirty years old."

And would forever leave behind her the vestiges of her youth.

"Turning thirty isn't the end of the world. You'll find that you won't feel any differently three weeks from now than you do tonight."

She stared into the bleakness that was her future."That is what I am afraid of, Robert."

"I haven't had a woman in over a year."

Abigail's heart thudded against her ribs. It sounded, incredibly, as if he was on the verge of accepting her offer. "All I ask is that you be gentle."

"And what if I can't?"

"Then I will no longer be a virgin," she said with a practicality she was far from feeling.

And she would at last know if there was anything beyond sleepless nights and endless frustration.

"Sex isn't fastidious." The disembodied voice was crude. "It's dirty and noisy and sweaty. Pain can become pleasure and pleasure can be painful. Once I start, I won't be able to stop. And I won't stop until I make you beg and cry for it."

A shaft of unadulterated desire stabbed through Abigail's stomach. It was chased by fear. And a blazing hope that what he said was true, that he could take her outside the realms of propriety and show her what her body cried out for.

She squeezed the rolled-up journal. "I sincerely hope not."

"Why?" he barked.

Abigail jumped at the sudden violence in his voice. And replied with quaint, totally incongruous logic. "Because you do not pomade your hair. And because I cannot imagine you insisting that a woman clothe a piano for fear the sight of its legs will overly excite her sensibilities."