A Masquerade in the Moonlight - By Kasey Michaels Page 0,4

man in the moon hides so well,” Marguerite finished for him, feeling slightly smug that she had digested this latest lesson so well.

“If the man in the moon truly has a body,” Geoffrey said, confusing her once more, but only for a moment.

“Ah, Papa, yet the lack of a body is a weakness in and by itself,” she countered as Geoffrey helped her to her feet. “Real or imagined, everyone has a weakness that can be seen, used to our own purpose, if we but look closely enough. Isn’t that right, Papa? Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to teach me? To look for the obvious, yes, but also for that which is concealed?”

Geoffrey gathered his daughter close against his side, then pressed a kiss on her smooth forehead. “You’re quick, kitten—almost too quick for me—and you have yet to put up your hair. Heaven help the young bucks once we take you to London—you’ll dance rings around them.”

“And I’ll have none of them,” Marguerite pronounced flatly, lifting her faintly pointed chin defiantly, so that her long, wrist-thick pigtails slapped against her elbows. “There is only one true love for me, and that is my own dearest papa!”

Geoffrey threw back his head and laughed aloud. “Ah, kitten, you still have so much to learn. And learn it you will.” He flung out his right arm, as if declaiming to the world, and said, “Ladies, good milords! Behold before you Miss Marguerite Balfour—she may not set the world ablaze, but she most assuredly will make it smoke!”

Two years later, without warning, Geoffrey Balfour was gone.

It had been left to her grandfather to tell Marguerite after she skipped down the stairs in her riding habit early one sunny April day, eagerly calling for her papa to accompany her in a gallop across the fields; her mama, cursed with a frail constitution, had already collapsed and been put to bed, to be cared for by Maisie.

Her father’s heart, his pure, loving heart, had simply given out, Sir Gilbert had told Marguerite as she stared at him, shivering with an unnatural cold and hating him for saying what he was saying—hating everything and everyone who was alive when her papa was dead.

Dead! No! It couldn’t be! Not her papa. Never her papa.

But Sir Gilbert had said it again, as if she hadn’t heard him correctly the first time. Death had been swift and painless, he had promised her, coming to meet Geoffrey as he sat in his study sometime after midnight, a book in his lap, and Marguerite should not grieve, but only remember her father with fondness, for he had been a good man. “It’s what your father would have wanted, darling child. You must be strong and take care of your mama now.”

Marguerite had nodded slightly as she stood, stunned into immobility, drawing in great gulps of air in an attempt to keep from crying like some idiot child who didn’t understand that grief was useless... and life was for the living... and her mama must be protected... and her grandfather was merely saying what was true, what her papa would have expected from his “kitten.”

She had only kissed Sir Gilbert’s cheek and walked slowly to the stable yard where her pony, Luna, waited for her. Avoiding the pitying eyes of the grooms, who were sniffling and rubbing at their wet cheeks and runny noses with the sleeves of their shirts, Marguerite had mounted at the block and turned Luna toward the open fields in an instant gallop.

It was only after she realized she was in danger of pushing her beloved pony past exhaustion that she reined in and slipped from the saddle in the middle of a newly plowed field. She then fell to her knees, spread her arms wide, and glared up at the heavens, her overwhelming grief and despair tearing at her as she screamed out her unanswerable question to God. Why? Why did her most wonderful papa leave her? Why?

The years passed, time wearing smooth the jagged edges of her grief, and Marguerite Balfour grew to young womanhood at her home in Chertsey, beloved by all who lived there. Indulged by both her grandfather and her mother, she was never really a spoiled child, for there was not a malicious bone in Marguerite’s body—although, according to Maisie, there were more than a few mischievous ones.

Marguerite’s waist-length carroty curls had darkened since that momentous fourth birthday, to become a rich, warm chestnut with flashing hints of red and gold,