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

over her shoulder, to where his coat lay on the chair. Cressida hurriedly stepped aside, and he moved past her, his boots brushing her skirts. She stood clutching Papa’s journal to her chest as he put on his coat and collected the ledger and bills. They walked into the hall, where she murmured a good-bye and he bowed and left with a promise to return soon.

Alec. He swung onto his horse’s back and touched the brim of his hat to her. We’ll be thrown together…Did that mean he wanted to call her Cressida? He hadn’t asked. She hadn’t invited him, either, but that was more because her tongue seemed tied up in a knot. What would her name sound like on his lips? And just how often would he call?

“Cressida.” She started, and turned to see Tom standing in the hall behind her, twisting his cap in his hands. “Might I have a moment?”

“Of course, Tom. What is it?”

He glanced over her shoulder. Cressida could still hear hoofbeats, and her mind called up the image of Major Hayes—Alec, she reminded herself with a nervous tingle—with his perfect cavalry posture, riding away, guiding the horse with the smallest touch of a heel or a knee, his hands as calm and gentle as they were steady and commanding.

“He’s been around a lot lately,” Tom muttered.

“Er—” Cressida plastered a smile on her face to hide her wandering thoughts. “He’s going to help us find Papa.” She held up the journal in illustration. “And see, today we’ve found something.”

Tom stared at the dusty old journal, and the color drained from his ruddy face. “Where’d you find that?” he asked in a thin voice.

Cressida narrowed her eyes at him in surprise. Tom had obviously seen it before. What did Tom know that he hadn’t told her? she wondered suddenly. “In the study.”

Tom’s eyes were riveted on the book. “Did you find anything else?”

“Yes,” she replied slowly. “A ledger. Major Hayes has taken it to see if it will reveal anything useful.”

“Should you have let him take it?”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering, Tom sighed and pushed one hand through his hair, standing it on end. “What do you hope to find?” he asked her, sounding weary and almost despairing.

“The truth. I want to know where Papa is, and why he hasn’t come home.”

He closed his eyes and hung his head. For the first time Cressida noticed there was a small bald patch at the crown of his head, and that his sandy hair had threads of gray. “Truly? What if it is ugly or unpleasant?”

“What do you mean? How could it be worse than not knowing?” He didn’t answer. “I want to know what happened to my father,” she exclaimed. “Do you fault me for that?”

He sighed again. “No. I just fear…I fear you might not find the answers as comforting as you expect.”

“Do you know what happened to him?” Cressida was shocked by the possibility, but then, she was just realizing that never once had she heard Tom say he hoped Papa came back. He was always ready to lend a helping hand or a comforting word on almost any other subject, but not that one. When he had offered to go look for Papa, and she and Callie had refused, he never pressed the issue—as if he wasn’t sorry his offer had been rejected. But Tom had been with her father for years, over a decade. If he didn’t have any affection for Papa, why had he stayed so long?

Tom shook his head. “As God is my witness, I have no idea. I know as much as you do, that he went to London to see Lord Hastings and planned to return within a fortnight.”

“But you have seen this before.” She held up the journal.

Tom glanced at it before dropping his eyes to the floor. “Yes, that’s the sergeant’s journal. He kept it for years.”

Cressida flipped it open and paged through it. The writing was small but precise; Papa did write a very gentlemanly hand, something he took great pride in. But it was clearly in code, an odd thing for a private journal. “Do you know what code he used?”

“No,” Tom mumbled. “He started that in Spain, after hearing about French letters being in code. He liked the idea tremendously.”

Cressida believed that. For all that she loved her papa, she knew he had a secretive bent and a fondness for mysteries and drama. When she was a child and he would come home on furlough, he would make puzzles for her and Callie to solve, usually revealing the location of a bag of sweets he’d brought them. She never knew how he managed to hide the sweets before he got home, but they would always be right where the puzzle indicated. Callie had been frustrated and then bored with the puzzles, but Cressida loved them. She loved the euphoria of solving one, and the twinkle in her father’s eye when he would pinch her cheek and say she had a quick brain behind her pretty face. And this promised to be the biggest, most challenging—and perhaps most important—puzzle he ever gave her. Already her fingers were itching to start making notes, looking for patterns and clues.

But there was something wrong about Tom’s reaction to the sight of the journal, as if he knew—or suspected—Papa had dangerous secrets hidden inside it. But dangerous to whom? And if Tom had known about it for years, why did he never say anything sooner?

“Tom,” she asked slowly, tracing one finger down the edge of one page, “do you want Papa to come home?”

“I don’t want you and your sister to be hurt.”

“That’s not the same thing—or is it?” She closed the journal and took a step toward him. “How could Papa’s return harm us?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“I know he wasn’t the noble saint my grandmother describes. I suspect he was…is…a bit of a scoundrel at times. I’m not blind. But I want to know; he’s my father.”

Tom looked