Sweet Deception (7 page)

The rolling multiplied, magnified. Emma swallowed. That was a line of questioning she had no intention of following.

She couldn’t take the chance that he would puff up
with autocratic male pride and act…well, exactly like he was acting now. If he uncovered the truth about her brother, a man like him would think it his duty to take the matter to higher authorities. That was certain to bring her comfortable life crashing down around her. No. She needed to get him out of the house, none the wiser, before he had the opportunity to make trouble.

Emma fisted her hands. “No reason,” she said with a shrug that she suspected made her look like a stiff puppet. “I simply expected you’d be relieved not to have to involve yourself in Molly’s murder. I’m certain you had other plans in mind for your visit—”

“As much as I am enjoying your
delightful
company, Emma, I insist upon seeing your brother. Is he here or not?”

Emma snapped her mouth shut on a frown. She considered lying, saying George was out in the woods combing the spot where they’d found Molly’s body, as she herself had done this morning, but deceit had never sat well with her…even when she was doing it for good reasons. “Yes. But—”

“Then I will have this conversation with him.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake—” Emma bit her lip as Derick casually brushed nonexistent lint from his finely cut jacket. She couldn’t shake the gnawing sense that he wasn’t quite what he seemed. Something…dangerous lurked just behind his emerald gaze. Emma wondered if other people saw it, or if only she did because they had once been friends of a sort. Or perhaps she only imagined it. It was just…he seemed so different from the boy she’d known. She had learned, as part of her research into the behavior of criminals, that people didn’t change very much once their personalities had developed. Yet her memories of the boy he’d been didn’t match up with the image of a fop that he projected now.

Well, either way, she couldn’t allow him to see George.
She’d just have to delay and hope he lost interest. “My brother can’t see you today. He…isn’t well.”

A frown shifted the perfect angles of Derick’s face. “Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” she hedged.
For him
, she added silently to quiet her conscience.

“I see,” he said, turning toward the door. “Very well.”

Emma’s stomach unclenched as she took her first deep breath since Perkins had interrupted her with that white linen card. While she regretted that Derick would leave thinking her an awful shrew, at least he
was
leaving.

“I shall expect to see Lord Wallingford at Aveline Castle in the morning, then,” Derick called over his shoulder.

”That will be
quite
out of the question.” She hated how the pitch of her voice rose like an aggrieved peahen’s.

Derick turned on his heel, seeming every bit the autocratic nobleman she’d feared. “While
I
appreciate
your
assistance last evening,” he said, tossing her earlier words back at her in a thoroughly infuriating way, “investigating murder is a business for men.”

Emma bristled.
Of all the—
Her worries flew from her mind in her outrage. “I hardly see how one’s gender plays into this. I have handled such matters quite well on my own over the years.” How dare he come to her home,
her
village, and act as though he owned it? “And I’ll have you know that—”

“You’ve handled
what
such matters quite well on your own?” Derick’s question cut through her bluster and quite nearly knocked her off her feet.

Cold flowed from her head to her toes as quick and shocking as a spring-fed waterfall.

She’d just given up the game, hadn’t she?

Perhaps not.
Her palms turned clammy as she scrambled for a way to recover. “What kind of question is
that?” Emma couldn’t help averting her eyes, focusing on the bust of Archimedes to her left. “I do many things well on my own.” She glanced back at him, pasting what she hoped was a look of confused annoyance on her face, hoping he would let the matter drop.

“Such as?”

Emma huffed. “It isn’t relevant.”

But one black brow cocked expectantly.

Her eyes strayed back to the bust. “I m-manage the house, assist my brother…” This was getting worse and worse. A pox on all perceptive people, and a pox squared on her foolish tongue.

“We’ve strayed from the point. A murder—or any other misdeed—in our village is a business for those of us who
live
here, who have a vested interest in each other.”

A corner of Derick’s mouth kicked up in…
amusement
? This wasn’t at all funny. Who did he think he was?

“Not for some
interloper
who hasn’t deigned to grace us with his presence in fourteen years,” she accused. Oh, what could she say to get him to leave? “Not even for his own mother’s funeral.”

The half smile froze on his face, then began to twitch, hovering on his mouth like an angry hummingbird briefly before his features went completely smooth.

Emma held her breath as gooseflesh popped over her skin. Oh, she’d gone too far. Certainly she had wondered at Derick’s conspicuous absence all these years, had condemned him in her own mind as she’d watched his mother suffer over her son’s desertion, had been appalled when Derick had not seen fit to pay his respects even after the woman was dead. But she hadn’t intended to hurl such an ugly volley. She’d just wanted him to depart, leave her and George alone with their secret. She held her breath. Guilt choked her, warring with her hope that he’d been offended enough to retreat.

“You’re a terrible liar, Emma,” he said instead, his
voice all smooth, dark silk, as were his movements as he advanced upon her.

Her eyes snapped to his hard gaze and she tried to escape it, escape him, backing herself up until her rump bumped the arm of a settee.

“Your lips say one thing,” he murmured, standing so close that bergamot and bay tickled her nose, “but your eyes tell a completely different story.” Derick leaned forward, forcing her backward as his long arms came around her in a flash. He planted them on the settee, on either side of her hips.

Emma’s heart fluttered in her throat. She was trapped. No ducking to escape him this time, no matter how much taller he was. Her breath came fast and hard…not from fear, exactly, though there was that. But from something more like…excitement?

What was wrong with her? She had to put some space between them and get control of herself before this damnable attraction she obviously still felt for Derick ruined everything. Emma braced her own arms beside her hips to the inside of his and arched back until she felt her spine might snap.

Derick’s gaze dropped low, melted into a green pool. It traveled up over her mouth to her eyes, holding her entranced. “Give me the truth now,” he coaxed, and she felt his voice almost as if it were a warm finger brushing her cheek. It made her want to spill every secret she’d ever had. “What are you hiding, Emma?”

She wanted to give him a tart answer, but it was as if he had immobilized her entirely with some unseen energy that held her in his thrall. Emma swallowed, hard, in a desperate attempt to wet her suddenly parched mouth.

Derick leaned closer, taking in a deep breath. Emma frowned as fiercely as she could muster, but he gave her no quarter. “You know, Emma, I can stay here all day…”

She imagined tucking her knees and rolling backward
over the arm of the settee to escape him. She might take him by surprise, but she knew better than to think she’d get far. She would only make a fool of herself and make the situation more unbearable.

There was no way around it. Now he would learn everything, and the life she’d come to hold dear would be at his mercy. Emma heaved a choppy sigh. “
I
am the magistrate,” she admitted, her arms trembling from the strain of leaning away from him. But her voice didn’t warble, and she took strength from that.

If she had to tell him all, she intended to do it on her own two feet. Emma pushed off from the cushion in an attempt to straighten, but Derick had pressed her into an awkward position. She had no choice but to relent and fall back again, except to—

Without further thought, she threw her arms around his waist and tried to pull herself up. Electricity jolted through her, singeing her nerves as her skin tingled and her breath strangled in her throat.

Derick tensed beneath her hands, sinewy muscle rippling beneath fine linen. He tried to pull back, presumably to bring them both to their feet, but their angle was too acute. Instead, he toppled.

Emma squeezed her eyes shut as momentum carried them over the arm of the settee, expecting to be crushed beneath Derick’s superior weight.

But it never came. She lifted one eyelid to see Derick above her, holding his arms stiff on either side of her chest in an awkward, crooked position to avoid smashing her. Emma slowly became aware of where the rest of his weight had settled. Almost as if it were a natural thing, her legs had spread to accommodate him and he was pressed most intimately against her. Her blood spiked, then seemed to pool precisely where his body met hers. Her thoughts scattered as sensation flooded her mind.

“What do you mean you are the magistrate?” Derick’s
voice had gone raspy, but the man had at least retained his faculties. Unlike her.

Emma grunted. She wriggled, trying to dislodge him. But it was a mistake. A groan ripped from his throat, and that scratchy, vulnerable sound sent shivers through her, chills that tightened her nipples painfully and that froze the breath in her chest.

Derick clenched his jaw, but made no move to get off of her. Indeed, he lowered his chest, settling himself onto his elbows. “Emma,” he said, his voice gravel, “you can either tell me what I want to know, or we can stay here like this until your brother comes looking for you. Then I can ask him myself.”

Flames licked her as her traitorous body screamed to let him stay all day. How could she be of two minds like this? “Let me up,” she whispered. “Now,” she said more loudly. “Let me up, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Several heartbeats pounded past. Emma felt pinned. Pinned by Derick’s strength, pinned by his penetrating gaze. And yet while her insides squirmed, the feeling wasn’t necessarily unpleasant. Discomfiting, yes, but also hot, inquisitive, curious…almost desperate to know where these sensations might lead.

“As you wish…” he murmured.

The breath whooshed out of her as Derick lifted himself. Though he did so gingerly, Emma felt every excruciatingly titillating press, shift, slide of his body. At last he extended a hand and helped her to her feet.

Emma pushed out of Derick’s arms and took a deep breath, desperate to clear her mind. But his scent lingered in her nose like a cherished memory. “I am the magistrate,” she repeated, trying to pick up the strains of the conversation they’d been having. “
Acting
magistrate,” she corrected.

Derick’s brows dipped into a midnight vee. “Why?”

Emma wrapped her arms around her waist to quell her
still rioting senses. She had more important issues to worry about than how Derick affected her. She well knew that the men who appointed the county magistrates would never allow a woman to hold such an important position. One word from Derick to the Commission of the Peace and her brother would be stripped of his position and she of the duties that had given her life meaning these past years. Not to mention the access to all of the magistratorial records she needed to complete her moral statistics project. If she could prove that a high percentage of criminal behavior was not a result of bad blood, but instead was due mainly to learned, environmental factors—and if she could get someone in Parliament to take notice—it could change the face of England for the better. “My brother no longer has the competence.”

The vee deepened as he looked off to his right. The corners of his lips turned down. “I think you should explain.”

It wouldn’t take him long to find out the whole truth now that he was looking for it.

Emma released a resigned sigh. “George had some sort of apoplectic fit a few years back, brought on, we think, by a fall from his horse. He was found unconscious after one of his morning rides, a wicked gash on his head and his horse nowhere to be seen.” She moved away, still needing to escape his draw on her senses. She paced about the sparsely furnished room. “As he came back to his senses, in a fashion, his wish was that no one know. He is a proud man, even now when he is himself less than a third of the time.”

“When was this, exactly?” Derick said, his gaze following her intently—she could feel it almost like a ray of sun beating on her and like that brilliant star, it heated her to a splotchy red.

“Nearly six years ago,” she answered. Why did it matter? Unless she could convince Derick to leave well enough alone, it was all over. “We brought in the best
doctors. We thought George would recuperate and for a while, it seemed like he might. I…had been handling most of the administrative side of his post, as I had done for my father before him, but after George’s accident, I began handling some of the more physical aspects as well.”

A tightness settled in Emma’s chest. What if her position was taken away from her? Assisting first her father, then her brother, in their roles as magistrate had given her life meaning in a time when she’d been floundering and facing a life of bleak prospects. She’d been a dismal failure in her one London Season, ridiculed for her oddly rational mind and for her tendency to say what was on it without veiling her thoughts. Accepting that she was destined to end up a spinster and a burden to her family, she’d been grateful for some purpose. She couldn’t admit that to Derick, however. A man like him would never understand what it felt like to be searching for a place to belong.

“But then he took a turn for the worse,” she went on, pushing any sentiment from her tone, “and by the next year, it had all become too taxing for him. So I stepped fully into his role.” And found a life of her own, a life of being needed by the villagers and townsfolk, respected for her logical mind and straightforward approach to life and problem solving. It hadn’t been easy. She’d had to prove herself to them first, but it hadn’t been long until Emma had gone from being pitied to being appreciated. And now Derick had it in his power to take that from her.