“Can I please remove the scarf?” she whispered.

“You can remain blind.”

“Benedict, I—”

“Like I was blind this past month,” he continued angrily. “Why don’t you see how you like it?”

“You didn’t fall in love with me two years ago,” she said, yanking at the too-tight scarf.

“How would you know? You disappeared.”

“I had to disappear,” she cried out. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“We always have choices,” he said condescendingly. “We call it free will.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” she snapped, tugging frantically at the blindfold. “You, who have everything! I had to— Oh!”  With one wrenching movement, she somehow managed to yank down the scarves until they hung loosely around her neck.

Sophie blinked against the sudden onslaught of light. Then she caught sight of Benedict’s face and stumbled back a step.

His eyes were on fire, burning with a rage, and yes, a hurt that she could barely comprehend. “It’s good to see you, Sophie,”  he said in a dangerously low voice. “If indeed that is your real name.”

She nodded.

“It occurs to me,” he said, a little too casually, “if you were at the masquerade, then you are not exactly of the servant class,  are you?”

“I didn’t have an invitation,” she said hastily. “I was a fraud. A pretender. I had no right to be there.”

“You lied to me. Through everything, all this, you lied to me.”

“I had to,” she whispered.

“Oh, please. What could possibly be so terrible that you must conceal your identity from me?”

Sophie gulped. Here in the Bridgerton nursery, with him looming over her, she couldn’t quite remember why she’d decided  not to tell him that she was the lady at the masquerade.

Maybe she’d feared that he would want her to become his mistress.

Which had happened anyway.

Or maybe she hadn’t said anything because by the time she’d realized that this wasn’t going to be a chance meeting, that he wasn’t about to let Sophie-the-housemaid out of his life, it was too late. She’d gone too long without telling him, and she  feared his rage.

Which was exactly what had happened.

Proving her point. Of course, that was cold consolation as she stood across from him, watching his eyes go hot with anger  and cold with disdain—all at the same time.

Maybe the truth—as unflattering as it might be—was that her pride had been stung. She’d been disappointed that he hadn’t recognized her himself. If the night of the masquerade had been as magical for him as it had been for her, shouldn’t he have known instantly who she was?

Two years she’d spent dreaming about him. Two years she’d seen his face every night in her mind. And yet when he’d seen hers, he’d seen a stranger.

Or maybe, just maybe, it hadn’t been any of those things. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe she’d just wanted to protect her heart. She didn’t know why, but she’d felt a little safer, a little less exposed as an anonymous housemaid. If Benedict had known who she was—or at least known that she’d been the woman at the masquerade—then he would have pursued her. Relentlessly.

Oh, he had certainly pursued her when he’d thought she’d been a maid. But it would have been different if he’d known the truth. Sophie was sure of it. He wouldn’t have perceived the class differences as being quite so great, and Sophie would have lost an important barrier between them. Her social status, or lack thereof, had been a protective wall around her heart. She couldn’t get too close because, quite honestly, she couldn’t get too close. A man such as Benedict—son of and brother to viscounts—would never marry a servant.

But an earl’s by-blow—now that was a much trickier situation. Unlike a servant, an aristocratic bastard could dream.

But like those of a servant, the dreams weren’t likely to come true. Making the dreaming all that much more painful. And  she’d known—every time it had been on the tip of her tongue to blurt out her secret she had known—that telling him the  truth would lead straight to a broken heart.

It almost made Sophie want to laugh. Her heart couldn’t possibly feel worse than it did now.

“I searched for you,” he said, his low, intense voice cutting into her thoughts.

Her eyes widened, grew wet. “You did?” she whispered.

“For six bloody months,” he cursed. “It was as if you fell right off the face of the earth.”

“I had nowhere to go,” she said, not sure why she was telling him that.

“You had me”

The words hung in the air, heavy and dark. Finally, Sophie, propelled by some perverse sense of belated honesty, said,  “I didn’t know you searched for me. But—but—” She choked on the word, closing her eyes tightly against the pain of the moment.

“But what?”

She swallowed convulsively, and when she did open her eyes, she did not look at his face. “Even if I’d known you were looking,” she said, hugging her arms to her body, “I wouldn’t have let you find me.”

“Was I that repulsive to you?”

“No!” she cried out, her eyes flying to his face. There was hurt there. He hid it well, but she knew him well. There was hurt in his eyes.

“No,” she said, trying to make her voice calm and even. “It wasn’t that. It could never be that.”