A Masquerade in the Moonlight

A Masquerade in the Moonlight Read Free

Book: A Masquerade in the Moonlight Read Free
Author: Kasey Michaels
Tags: England, Historical Romance, 19th century
Ads: Link
I don’t pick at my teeth with my dinner knife. In short, I do my best to please. So you see, kitten, if you look carefully, look deeply, you will find the goodness and the flaws as well. When you love you can overlook the flaws, but when you have need, you can use those same shortcomings to your own advantage. Perhaps that’s why the man in the moon hides most of himself from view. To protect himself. God knows we all have something to hide.”
    Marguerite lowered herself to the ground once more, again taking up the position of stargazer. Her papa had shared something important and intensely personal with her, and she felt she had to return the favor. “I have a most terrible temper, Papa,” she said as the silence between them grew to be uncomfortable, the first such interlude Marguerite could remember. “But I take especial care to hide it very well.”
    “So you have, kitten, and so you did—until this moment,” her father pointed out. “Not that
I
was ever unaware of that particular failing. Remember, I have known you forever, and it’s difficult for a small child to hide her temper, especially when she is shrieking and kicking and launching her toys at her loving papa’s head. But you’ve learned to control your ferocity these past years, for which, might I add, your mama and I are endlessly grateful, even if we know that terrible force could be roused if the right pressures were applied. Loving you, we don’t employ those pressures. But an enemy, someone who wished you ill or was searching for a way to best you—”
    “—would go looking for the body the 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

Similar Books

The Suburbs of Hell

Randolph Stow

Pirates to Pyramids: Las Vegas Taxi Tales

JJ Carlson, George Bunescu, Sylvia Carlson

Hot Blooded

authors_sort

The Gambler

Jordan Silver

Great Sky Woman

Steven Barnes

They Found Him Dead

Georgette Heyer

Lord Somerton's Heir

Alison Stuart