As she approached the bed, Thomas wouldn’t look up at her, still pouting over the move, as if there had been some way she could have prevented it. She wished she’d had the luxury to do a little pouting of her own, but all she’d been able to do was cry.

She tried to sound cheerful, however, when she asked, “No chills from that cold ride here?”

“Cold? You had me so buried in those blankets, Lari, I roasted.”

“Good, roasting is fine as long as you didn’t catch a chill.”

Mara tried to hide a smile, unsuccessfully. Thomas glared at them both. Larissa “tsked.”

Thomas called her Lari only when he was annoyed with her, because he hoped it would annoy her as well, it sounding like a man’s name. When all was right with his world, he called her Rissa, as their father did.

“Why did we have to come here?” Thomas brought his real complaint out in the open—once again. “This room is like a hotel room.”

“And how would you know what a hotel room looks like?” Larissa countered.

“I went with Papa once, to meet that French wine merchant at his hotel.”

“Oh, well, yes, this house is much bigger than ours, and it does seem very—impersonal, from what I’ve seen of it so far, like a hotel. Baron Windsmoor has no family, though, which I suppose accounts for that.”

“We won’t have to stay here long, will we?”

“Not long a’tall,” she assured him. “Just as soon as father returns—”

“You’ve been saying that for weeks now. When is he going to return?”

It was hard to remain cheerful when Thomas was asking the very things that she had been asking herself—and had run out of answers for. Two months was all he was to be gone, which would have allowed a week, two at the most, to conduct his business. He had promised to be home by the beginning of November. It was now a full month beyond that. Bad weather might be responsible for some delay, but four weeks worth?

No, she could no longer hide from the fact that something must have gone terribly wrong on his journey. Ships were lost at sea all the time, with no one ever really knowing what had happened. There were even pirates rumored to still roam the very waters that their father would have sailed through, ready to pounce on a heavily laden merchantman. She’d had time and plenty to imagine the worst, shipwrecked, stranded on a deserted island, starving . . .