All Through the Night by Shannon McKenna, Lori Foster, Suzanne Forster, Thea Devine

There were other games to test and she had to make a living. No more wandering around in a daze. She’d done that all night. She told herself sternly that she could get the computer working again without being tempted to revisit the scene of the crime. She was never going near Jean Valjean or his criminally seductive video game again.
She wasn’t.
Well, she wasn’t, damnit.
“Jean, are you in there?”
Kerry peered into the depths of her computer screen with a feeling of despair. She could feel the sequence of sighs starting again, but she’d been sighing all day, and she wasn’t going there again. She’d been wrestling with what to do all day too. It had taken her entire supply of tea bags, but finally she’d realized that no mattered how frightened—or crazy—she was, she couldn’t pretend that nothing had happened.
“Knock knock? Anyone there? Jean?”
“I don’t seem to be programmed to answer that,” the game guide said.
How like a man , she thought. They weren’t programmed to answer the really important stuff. And how like her life. She tried to have a relationship with a computer simulation, and even he turned out to be a jerk.
“Perhaps you would like to start by giving me a name?” the guide suggested.
“You have a name. It’s Jean. My name is Kerry and I’ve played this game before. You must have a record of me somewhere in your memory. Dammit, Jean! look again!”
“You’re not in my memory banks, Kerry. I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am.”
Kerry sprang from her chair and walked away from the computer. It had become the source of all her frustration and pain, and she couldn’t sit there any longer. She had to escape it, or she would go crazy, but how was she to do that? It was also the source of her income. She was trapped in her house and had no other way to make money.
She had to let go of this obsession with Jean and get on with things. Her survival depended on it. Even if there was a slight possibility that he’d ever existed, he didn’t now. She lost him the first time when the keyboard shorted out, and she lost him the second time last night when she wasn’t able to free him. Whatever the missing emotion was, she had not touched it. She hadn’t been able to give him what he lacked, and that had made her feel like a failure. That was why she’d told him to go. She was afraid of the feelings he touched in her and devastated that she couldn’t touch him the same way.
Out her window Kerry could see Lover’s Park and the defiantly graceful statue. Neighborhood folklore had it that the two young lovers were caught together against the wishes of their families. They were betrothed to others, and their punishment for falling in love was imprisonment. They were kept in separate towers, chained and naked, until they came to their senses and did as their families wished. It was believed that to venture out into the icy winter without clothing would freeze them solid and they would die the moment they touched.
Kerry had wholly accepted the story as a child, probably because the existence of the statue seemed to prove it. Her favorite part was the ending, which her grandfather swore was true. He told her the young lovers missed each other so grievously they felt as if they were dying anyway, and one night, with the help of servants, they both escaped their prisons. A terrible blizzard had blown in, but the passion flowing in their veins kept them warm until they found each other. The moment they touched, they froze, forever inseparable and locked in a lover’s embrace.
Decades passed but the exquisite ice sculpture did not melt as much as one drop, even in the hottest summers. The lovers had preferred death to separation, and the statue Kerry saw out her window was said to represent the way they were found by their families, entwined in naked splendor.
The statue was called Winter Lovers , and Kerry had often wondered if a love like that was possible. She wanted to believe it was