For Your Arms Only by Linden, Caroline (best fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

his gaze. He hated it. He hated feeling like an oddity. He hated the fact that everyone wanted to stare at him, but no one would speak to him unless forced to do so. And he truly hated the fact that for some unknown reason, he cared what Miss Turner thought of him, and hoped that Julia was chattering about fashion instead of venting her spleen against him.

He just caught a glimpse of Miss Turner’s bonnet again as she went into the apothecary shop. Julia had turned his way, and seen him. Her face set, she was striding toward him, a package from Darnley in her arms. Alec stopped and waited, bowing his head as she approached.

“I suppose Mother sent you,” she said.

“She worried you would be caught in the rain.”

Julia cast her eyes upward. The sky had been overcast all day, but not one raindrop had fallen. “Of course,” she said dryly. “Well, let’s be off.”

Alec kept his face clean of expression and followed her to the gig. Julia climbed in without waiting for him to give her a hand up, and he made no comment. He untied the horse and swung up beside her.

Neither spoke until they were out of town, bowling down the same road he had just traveled with Miss Turner. Alec thought again of her face, of those expressive eyes and the way they flashed at him when he questioned her motives. Whatever else she thought of him, Miss Turner wasn’t afraid to look at him or talk to him. Three days…

“I could have walked, you know,” Julia announced. She still stared straight ahead.

“Mother thought it better if you didn’t.”

“Odd,” she replied. “She hasn’t minded for the last several years.”

Alec said nothing. He knew very well his mother had sent him in hopes that this forced companionship would revive his and Julia’s affectionate relationship of old. Personally, he doubted anything would. Not because Julia had made no secret of her anger at him, but because he had changed so much in five years, he didn’t know how to respond to it. He and Julia had always been much alike, both hot-tempered and impulsive, given to speaking their minds and apologizing later. There had been no reserve between them, for good or for ill.

Alec recognized all that still in his sister, even as he knew it had been hammered out of him. On his first mission for Stafford, he had lost his temper and been drawn into a brawl. When it was over, a man was dead—the man Alec had been assigned to befriend for information about a group plotting an armed uprising. After the brawl Alec was too notorious in that town to continue; all his work had been for naught, and Stafford’s deputy, Phipps, had cursed a blue streak at him and threatened to give him the sack.

Chastened and furious, he had vowed never again to lose control of himself that way. All his daring and courage mattered little if he couldn’t mind his tongue and temper. Ruthlessly he repressed that part of himself, becoming a silent, unnoticeable watcher instead of a brazen imposter mingling with the targets of his mission. Other agents took those parts, and Alec faded into the background as a servant or a beggar or a common tradesman, nobody worthy of note. He was used to that now; he was comfortable with it. And so he said nothing in response to Julia’s icy remark.

His silence seemed to increase his sister’s anger. Her expression grew stormy. “I wish you would speak to Mother,” she said suddenly.

“About what?”

“The party she’s planning.”

Alec had barely listened to his mother’s hopeful plans. “And what should I say to her about it?”

“You can’t tell me you want her to throw a party in your honor!” Julia exclaimed.

“I never asked her to, no.”

Her face was bright pink. “I don’t understand.”

“It was entirely her idea, and she didn’t ask my opinion of it, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” She twisted in her seat to face him, making the gig rock. “I don’t understand anything about you anymore.”

Alec thought of all the ways he could answer that plea. He wondered what his sister would think if he told her he had been a spy, guilty of deceit and impersonation. He wondered what she would think of his reasons for wanting to be supposed dead for so long, or his reasons for coming back as he did. Most of all he wondered what she wanted him to be. “Perhaps it’s best that way,” he murmured at last.

Julia inhaled loudly, then turned forward again. “You can make sure of that. You can keep your secrets and leave the rest of us to wonder and be forced to offer excuses for you, and there’s nothing we can do to compel you. Such a pleasure it is to have you home again.”

“So I should tell Mother to cancel her party?” he retorted. “I should tell her that I don’t want her to be happy? I don’t care tuppence for the happiness or good opinion of her guests, but I see no reason to crush her own joy.”

“Oh, this will be a marvelous party,” Julia replied. “The host glowering at everyone in sullen silence, and the poor hostess pitied by everyone else because of it.”

Alec pulled up the horse before he lost his temper. He handed the reins to his sister and jumped down. It was a quiet horse, she would have no trouble with him.

“What are you doing?” she cried as he started off down the road.

“I think I’d better walk.”

“Why?” She started the horse. The gig drew alongside him and kept to his pace. “Why won’t you tell me anything? What are you hiding, Alec? I assure you, it can’t be worse than what everyone thinks you’ve done.”

“Do you?” He kept his eyes forward. “Do you believe it?”

“You give me nothing else to believe!”

He stopped and looked at her. Julia was practically hanging out of the gig,