A Daring Romance

Charlotte was too worked up for either the wisdom of the holy text or the subtle beauty of the Bard's poetry. Her mind turned to the forbidden romances hidden in her bookcase. Six years ago she had been given her first romance by Lady Worthington, a sometimes acquaintance of her aunts, while staying at the Worthington family hunting lodge in the foothills of the Welsh mountains.

"You might like this Charlotte," she told her with a wink as she slipped the book into her hand, "we can talk about it when you've finished it." And so, Charlotte spent the entire night reading about Florence, a simple country girl who caught the eye of the lord of the estate. The unfortunate maid was no match for the powerful and demanding Earl; even though he was nearly three times her age, the girl found herself his bed in less than a week.

The next morning at breakfast Lady Hazelworth smiled knowingly at Charlotte as she stumbled into her seat and barely spoke to her aunts when they chided her for her unkempt appearance. To this day Charlotte was unsure of the Dowager's motives. Had the widow planned on teaching her about sex like the girl in the book? Lady Hazelworth never got the chance. Perhaps suspicious of the attention Charlotte was receiving, her aunts insisted that they take the train back to London and no amount of persuasion on Lady Hazelworth's part would change their minds.

The book would have scandalized her aunts had they ever discovered it, but even at the tender age of sixteen, Charlotte knew better than to let anyone but her closest school friends see it. Several of these classmates had similar romances and over the years Charlotte's collection of risque works grew to include four other volumes.

A similar book by the same author was purported to be the biography of a Duchess who rose from her very modest station at birth by a series of encounters with gentlemen, each one a rung on her climb to her current heights. However just when she finds herself secure in her current station, the men from her past **** the social climbing woman. Fear of denouncement forces her to appease each of these men from her past in the bed chambers, parlors and gardens of the ducal palace.

A retelling of the Arthurian legends that put special emphasis on the stories of women was added to her collection as a present from a now married friend. These stories included the tales of maidens captured by ogres or black knights, and their dramatic rescues by the knights of the round table. Morgana's seduction of Arthur and then later Sir Gawain left Charlotte panting, but Charlotte's favorite story-line involved Genevieve's illicit passion for Lancelot and their final explosive fall from grace.

A third volume inspired doubtlessly by the colonial writer J. F. Cooper told the harrowing tale of two daughters of an infantry colonel. The pair were captured by Algonquin savages in a treacherous ambush in the great forests of the Americas. The young sisters were carried by the raiders back to their encampment, along the trail their young bodies were pawed shamelessly by several different braves. Only the presence of a French Liaison at the Indian camp kept the pair from being stripped and passed from one virile warrior to another until each brave had sated themselves between the pale thighs of the innocent girls. Charlotte had discovered the well worn romance hidden amongst her old nanny's belongings when the woman left the Marlton's service - ironically to resettle in the former colonies.

Her most recent addition she bought herself from a small bookseller in London who somehow sensed what she was looking for. "Josephine and the Ottoman Turks" recounted the adventures of a young French bride captured on her way to Egypt to meet the man she has been promised to by her father.

Charlotte had read all of these books before and a few others that she borrowed from her school friends. None of the authors explicitly detailed the moment of joining, but the descriptions of the scantily clad heroines being dragged by bare-chested strangers into bedchambers were vivid. It seemed in each story that somehow the hard bulge in the men's uniforms, robes or buckskins would be pressed into the soft curves of the heroine just before the scene ended.

Charlotte recalled her encounter with Black Brand by the brook. She recalled with a mixture of embarrassment and pride how Randy Fuller's trousers had bulged in just this way in an undeniable sign of his intent. She had felt his stiffness pressed to her soft belly just as in the romances, she was sure of it.