I’ve had a book checked out from my hometown public library for 26 years. It’s stamped with the due date of November 25, 1992, the spine is lined, and many pages are dog-eared. The cover features a raven-haired beauty gazing hornily into the eyes of a handsome courtier who cradles the back of her head with, one presumes, pre-coital passion. All the Sweet Tomorrows by Bertrice Small is the first historical romance I ever read. Small, a best-selling author who wrote over 50 novels, introduced me to many things: how beauty lives in the fine details of historical fiction, that research will always ground your writing in reality, and that not only can a woman whole-heartedly enjoy sex, but that she can go out and seek it if she damn well pleases. And boy, can our heroine get it. The sex is intense and inventive — at one point, she spends months as a sex slave in Algeria and experiences threesomes, dildos, aphrodisiac-based torture… and a sex game involving horse costumes. Horse. Costumes.