was in the midst of choosing from an eye-catching tray of appetizers when May Stevens came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.
“I’ve found her. Dan, I would like you to meet my cousin Victoria. Vicky, this is Dan O’Hara.”
Dan thanked the waiter and motioned the tray away. “Pleased to meet you,” he said as he turned around—then froze. One look into her blue-green eyes and a moment of déjà vu broadsided him. “I’m sorry…I know you, don’t I?”
To his surprise, she tensed and took back her extended hand. “I don’t think so.”
Dan looked to May for help. May shrugged and looked just as puzzled as he felt. He was on his own. “Perhaps we met at your cousin’s wedding last year?”
“Perhaps,” she answered, still tense.
Dan shook his head to clear the cobwebs that muddled his thoughts. He returned Victoria’s apprehensive gaze and felt his heart thud in his chest. The atmosphere surrounding them turned heavy. The sound of music and voices faded into the background.
This was a different time and a different place, he told himself. In her white silk dress and short, cropped blond hair, the woman gazing back at him looked familiar, but he wasn’t sure where and when they’d met.
He’d only met one woman before tonight who had had such an immediate effect on him. An exquisite woman with expressive eyes and a spirit that had caught at his heart the moment he’d glimpsed her from the palace window.
Was this the woman he’d met in the deep of night and made love to in Baronovia? And why was she so frightened?
He sure couldn’t ask her such intimate questions with her cousin watching them and surrounded by dozens of people.
He cleared his throat and tried to recall the image of his mystery woman on that magical night. She’d had flowing waist-length auburn hair, so soft it had slipped through his fingers like silk. May’s cousin had blond hair and it was cropped short in the irregular lengths so popular today.
As for her figure, his mystery woman had been so slender he’d been able to span her waist with two hands. Tonight’s woman not only had fuller breasts, there were subtle differences in the rest of her body. If it were possible, she looked more womanly and more attractive than the woman he remembered.
“No, sorry. I guess not,” he finally answered when the silence grew too long to be comfortable. “If we’d met before this, I’m sure we both would have remembered it.
As he spoke, he noticed an expression of relief cross her features. But not before he also caught a passing flash of regret.
Whatever was going on inside her, this Victoria’s stiff body language didn’t compute.
He recalled an announcement he’d heard last year at May’s wedding. If this was the same cousin, she’d been engaged to a future Baronovian ambassador. If the memory was true, and even if this was the same woman, she was untouchable.
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry. It was damn hard to let go of the memory of his mystery woman.
“Something to drink?” he said when May smiled and drifted away, leaving her cousin behind. Even though he and Victoria were alone now, there was no way was he going down the prickly path of asking her if she had been the woman he’d held in his arms and made passionate love to one night long ago.
“No, thank you,” she answered softly. “I don’t drink anymore.”
Anymore? Dan glanced at his companion. If there was ever a word that called for a question and an answer, anymore was it. He started to speak, but there was something about the way her clear eyes regarded him that kept him from asking. His turn to find out more about her would surely come before the night was over. “How about a Perrier and maybe something to nibble on?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Dan thought of his companion as he made his way to the bar. There was something odd about the way she kept avoiding looking at him. He’d be damned if he could pass up the opportunity to find out if she was his mystery woman without at least trying. He couldn’t come right out and ask her, but there was one way he could discover the truth.
“Care to dance?” he asked after she’d silently sipped the drink he brought her. “Unless you’ve given up dancing, too?”
She hesitated. “No. I love to dance. I’m just not in the mood.”
“Come on,” he coaxed. “Just one dance?”
“Just one,” she answered. “Then I have to leave.”
Dan put their drinks on a tray held by a passing waiter, put his hand under her elbow and led her across the hall to the dance floor.
The answers to his question were going to add up without him even asking.
He knew she’d been at the palace the night before Wade Stevens had married his duchess.
She’d admitted to loving to dance.
The first time he’d laid eyes on his mystery woman, she’d been dancing her heart out.
Those clues had to mean something, Dan thought as he took her in his arms. At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering why she looked as if she wanted to run.
Their encounter that night in the palace gardens had been a natural encounter between a man and a woman. She’d been a woman so beautiful, he’d gone down to her to see if she were real. When he’d taken her in his arms, felt her vibrant body and tasted lips as sweet as honey, he’d been lost.
He’d been attracted to that woman, and he was attracted to this one. As he held her in his arms, all his senses told him the woman he remembered was the same woman he was holding in his arms tonight.
If this Victoria did turn out to be her, he silently vowed, he’d take it from there. If not, one dance to be polite, an apology, and he’d find a way to be out of here.
He gazed in wonder at Victoria’s blond hair and tried to envision her as a brunette. Outside of the difference in hair coloring and her more womanly figure, she had to be the same woman.
Maybe his mystery woman had a double.
Maybe…then again, he wondered, how could he account for the same, familiar faint scent of gardenias that clung to the woman in his arms?
Chapter Three
When Dan O’Hara took her into his arms, Victoria’s heart skipped. The very meeting she’d feared had happened and her worst fears had come true. Not only had she found her phantom lover tonight here at her cousin’s housewarming, she now found herself in the last place she should be if she had any sense—in his arms! There was no doubt in her mind that Dan was the man who had made love to her on that magical night eighteen months ago. Even then, with the afterglow of his embraces lingering long after she’d left him and gone back to the palace, she had thought he could be her destiny. Instead, he was dangerous.
“Enjoying yourself?” Dan asked.
