Love Letters to Go : will write your way into your beloved’s heart--for a price.

It is Feb. 10, and your intentions are good. You sit at your desk for a full 15 minutes, sweat on lip, pen in hand, heart on sleeve. The best you can muster for a touching phrase is “Michelle, my belle, these are words that go together well.”

But it’s already been taken. And Valentine’s Day is just a few heartbeats away.

The problem is that you’ve been looking for love letters in all the wrong places. There’s a steamy little cottage industry out there, a host of gushing ghostwriters awaiting your order to pen anything from a page-long epistle to a 40,000-word fill-in-the-name romance novel starring you and your love.

All it takes is a phone call. They make a buck--actually $5 to $150, depending on your request--and you win her heart. Yes, her heart. Because 60% to 80% of the clients are men.

Not surprisingly, this is the busiest season for these sentimental scribes, who have cropped up in the past two years with businesses that cater to our writers block.

Love Letters Ink in Beverly Hills will do a full third of its business--about 150 standard and custom missives ranging from $12.95 to $24.95--in the three weeks before Cupid strikes. Special Occasions in Cerritos should mail out 1,000 letters by Feb. 14, many graced with poems such as Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty.”

And the two computers at Evelyn M. Brown’s Swan Publishing in Placentia are going day and night, grinding out some 300 orders this season for her personalized romance novels “Our Love” and “Paradise Dream.” The price tag for 100 pages: from $45 to $150, depending on how personal and how steamy you want it.

For while Victoriana--chunky cherubs and lots of lace--is big in the greeting card industry this year, these agents of amour offer something a little spicier:

“I want to stare searchingly into your eyes,” Elliot Essman, owner of Manhattan’s Incurable Romantix, writes for his clients across the country. “I want to kiss your lips, first gently, hardly touching, then with the flame of passion.”

Martine Greber, owner of Love Letters Ink, is a tad more subtle: “Before I met you, I would imagine that somewhere you were waiting for me,” says one of 12 standard love letters. “At last we met and today, I can touch and love you not just in my mind.”

Greeting cards, they’re not. And they do little to cause the card industry’s heart to flutter in fear.

Patti Brickman, spokeswoman for the Greeting Card Assn., estimates that 900 million to 1 billion Valentine cards will be exchanged by Tuesday, compared to a few thousand personalized letters and these personalized romance novels known as bodice rippers.

And she is not worried about the new competition. “Instinctively, I do not think they pose a threat,” Brickman said. “Cards are personal but not personalized. The letter concept is very personal and I think would be marketed much differently than greeting cards.”

Personal is not the half of it.

When Greber’s customers call in an order, they can choose a standard letter already in the computer, which is equipped with a calligraphy font. Greber’s assistant recites the steamy lines over the phone, the customer responds with a credit card number, and the letter--laser printed on deckle-edged paper--is mailed the next day.

Some desires, however, are more difficult to translate tastefully than others, which is one occupational hazard of laboring in love land. Greber, for example, has had would-be Lotharios ask her to help woo married women from their husbands.

And then there’s Brown’s very special Valentine’s Day client.

“I had one fellow this Valentine’s Day buy three of the novels,” Brown said. “They were to different women, with very tender dedications in each one of them. And he was the hero of all of them.”