A veteran author of panting heavy-petters, Small (Darling Jasmine, etc.) tells a tale of two stepsisters with the same first name and very different attitudes toward men and sex during the reign of George III. Charlotte Aurora Kimberly and Charlotte Calandra Kimberly swap fates: when Aurora discovers that her late father arranged for her to be married on her 17th birthday to Valerian Hawkesworth, Duke of Farminster, she sends socially ambitious Calandra in her place. All seems well as young Calandra sails with her dashing groom from the Kimberlys' plantation on St. Timothy for England. But when, months later, Aurora visits the motherland to choose a suitable mate of her own, it becomes apparent that something in the Hawkesworth marriage is amissand that Calandra has none of her virgin stepsister's "ardent bent." Aurora becomes engaged to Hawkesworth's rival cousin, but the duke can't hide his attraction to her. When an unwanted pregnancy conveniently claims Calandra's life, Hawkesworth swears he will claim the woman who is his by destiny. The tale shuttles between the West Indies and the court of the young George III, but turgid sex, not well-rendered setting, remains its primary passion.

Appalled to discover that she is expected to marry an English duke she has never met, free-spirited West Indian heiress Aurora Kimberly trades places with her social-climbing stepsisterand ends up in love with the same man she "gave away." A take-charge hero, a heroine who eventually discovers what she really wants, and a cast of interesting but stereotypical characters add to this bawdy Georgian story that will be read more for its colorful period descriptions and bold, earthy sensuality than for the complexity of its plot or the sophistication of its writing. Small (The Love Slave, Ballantine, 1995) is a well-known writer of sexually explicit historicals in the sweet/ savage tradition and her fans will demand this. Small lives in Southold, New York.