Did he mean that the way it sounded? He had no idea who she was and must assume she was equally ignorant of his identity. He might believe he could say anything to her without fear of consequences. Perhaps he too had inconvenient feelings he sought to purge before he embarked on a marriage in which love would play no part.
For this one night, Grace felt free to speak words she had never dared address to him before—words she would be obliged to lock away in her heart beginning tomorrow. Might they place less of a burden on her heart if she gave them their freedom now?
“Tonight it is my favorite number as well,” she murmured in reply, “provided you are that one.”
His step slowed even more. “You sense it too?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“This.” He gestured from him to her and back again. “Between us a... bond... a connection.”
He struggled to explain something he seemed not to understand himself but hoped she might. “I feel as if I know you far better than our brief acquaintance would allow. Is it possible we have met before?”
How could she reply to that threatening question? Those delightful little bubbles in Grace’s stomach rushed upward to clog her throat. Must she deny her feelings for him with an outright falsehood? Or did she dare tell him the truth and trust that he might understand?
Chapter Twelve
WHAT HAD MADE him blurt out that question? As his mysterious, yet oddly familiar, companion inhaled a sharp little gasp and froze in her tracks, Rupert cursed his blunder.
The whole point of a masquerade was the secrecy in which it shrouded the guests’ identities, freeing them from the bonds of strict propriety to behave in ways they might not otherwise. He had railed against it in the case of men like the lecherous sultan. But for others—ladies in particular—the motives and consequences might be far more innocent.
Would his charming companion have dared steal away with him into the moonlit garden if her reputation had not been shielded by that mask? Now his intrusive question threatened to rip away her flimsy protection. Might she consider it almost as brazen a liberty as the sultan had tried to take with her? Might she flee from him, too, and perhaps from the masquerade itself?
If he frightened her away, he might never discover who she was and never learn whether the feelings she stirred in him were genuine.
“Forgive me!” he cried before she could turn and flee. “I do not mean to demand your identity.”
“You don’t?” Even the deep shadows of a summer night could not conceal her relief.
Rupert shook his head. “I only wanted to explain this unaccountable familiarity I sense between us. But perhaps I am mistaken—deceived by a trick of the moonlight.”
“I feel as if I know you too.” She began walking again. “You are Hercules and Galahad and every fairy tale hero who ever came to the aid of a damsel in distress.”
Could it be as simple as that? Part of him wanted to accept her explanation. Was his head so full of his daughters’ Mother Goose stories that the beautiful lady he’d rescued came to represent every fairy tale princess? Was that why he’d taken such an immediate fancy to her—because that was how love blossomed in those stories?
Love? Rupert chided himself for letting that foolish notion even enter his head. This mysterious beauty engaged his interest to the point of fascination, but that was a different thing entirely. Yet he could not deny it was the closest he had felt to that heady, all-consuming emotion since Annabelle. He’d assumed his capacity for that sort of feeling had died with her. Or perhaps it had been channeled into his devotion to their daughters.
Part of him tried to resist his overwhelming attraction to the masked lady with her air of wistful innocence. He feared such feelings might be a betrayal of his late wife’s memory. And yet his heart welcomed this unexpected reawakening after a long fallow season of grief. It made him question whether he was wrong to seek a marriage that would be nothing more than a “practical arrangement” unsanctified by love.
“I am no storybook hero,” he warned, not wanting her enamored of a false image, “just a simple man who enjoys simple country pleasures.”
He longed to tell her all about himself and learn everything about her—her tastes, her beliefs, her past experiences. But would she consider such questions a further effort to discover her identity?
“I see no reason why a simple countryman cannot also be a hero in his own way, if he does his duty and treats those around him with honor and kindness.” Something in the lady’s voice seemed to suggest that she still considered him a hero in spite of his protests to the contrary.
It did not sound as if she were referring to a nebulous ideal but to him in particular, praising qualities she knew he possessed. While her words gratified him, they bolstered his conviction that they had a previous acquaintance. Could it be that she recognized him in his well-known bauta but he did not know her? Though that would put him at a disadvantage, Rupert could not resent it.
He wondered what subjects they could converse about without revealing too many personal details.
“A very fine night, is it not?” He fairly cringed at his own words. How tiresome of him to talk about the weather. Too much of that and his mystery lady might flee back indoors, prepared to risk the sultan’s liberties rather than be bored out of her wits.
“Very fine, indeed.” She did not sound bored—not yet at least.
But he must find something more interesting to say that might make her want to remain in his company. “The moon is bright. I fancy I can see human features on its pale face—the man in the moon, looking down on us from the night sky.”
As a topic of conversation that was a little better at least.
“I see the face.” She stopped on an ornamental stone bridge, which spanned a narrow stream that wound down the hill. “But I have always thought it looked more like a woman’s. See how delicate the features are?”
“Perhaps.” He came to stand beside her, close enough to satisfy his compelling inclination to be near her but not so close that it might frighten her away. “But a bald woman seems rather improbable.”
His quip coaxed forth a melodic trill of laughter that blended with the trickle of water beneath the bridge. “I suppose it does. But what if the night sky was her black hair adorned with diamond-studded combs?”
Even that could not compare to the beauty of the lady who spoke those words, though Rupert guessed the silver moonlight did not flatter her. He longed to see her golden curls kissed by the first rays of dawn, while the rose-colored horizon echoed the hue of her gown and her lips.
“But what does that beauty signify,” his companion sighed, “when the lady in the moon looks so mournful? I wonder what sorrow afflicts her.”
“Loneliness perhaps,” Rupert suggested. “Or grief at being parted from her beloved, the sun.”