Emma took a calming breath and stepped through the doors.
Derick was sprawled on
the
settee, one ankle propped negligently on the opposite knee, one arm stretched out over the back of the piece, his long fingers drumming idly on the fabric. His green gaze glittered and a smile spread across his face, as lazy as the rhythmic beat of his fingers.
Emma stopped suddenly. She cleared her throat, hoping to cover the tiny catch in her breathing.
Come now, girl! This won’t do.
She straightened her shoulders, wondering if she’d ever noticed before that the critical voice in her head sounded so much like her late father. Regardless, the voice was right. It
wouldn’t
do for her to react like a lovesick girl every time Derick Aveline so much as looked at her. He hadn’t known she existed when she
was
a lovesick girl, and he certainly didn’t now. It was ridiculous, really.
She
was ridiculous. And it was time she got this conversation started on a proper foot.
“As I’m sure you must agree, my brother—”
Derick stood abruptly, cutting off her line of thought. He unfolded his lanky form and gained his feet with a speed and masculine grace one wouldn’t expect from a man of his height. Then, almost like the contradiction he seemed to be, he took a languid step toward her. The odd light that entered his eyes made Emma’s belly go all aquiver with foreboding, and something else.
“Did you
really
set your cap for me, Emma?”
Emma gasped, and it was all Derick could do not to grin at the way her eyes widened and her lips spread thin in horrified affront. Her poor cheeks turned the color of succulent late-summer cherries.
“H-how did you hear that from all the way out in the hall?” she sputtered.
In retrospect, it mightn’t have been the wisest thing to tip his hand as to how very observant he could be, but he hadn’t been able to resist. Her reaction was better than he’d expected, and truly, he hadn’t had this much fun baiting someone in—well, since he used to bait her as a girl.
A lot of memories had surfaced last night as he lay in his bed at the castle. He’d never slept well in the drafty old pile. The recollections were inevitable, he supposed, given that he was here. Luckily, most of them had been pleasant. Many about Emma, actually—and how ridiculously easy she’d been to tease—always taking everything so literally, even for a child.
He ignored her question, of course. “Well, did you? Set your cap for me, that is? You were all of twelve, Emma.”
“I was fifteen!” she exclaimed, flustered, and then those amber eyes widened even more, if such a thing were possible, as she realized what she’d just admitted. “And what does that
mean
, anyway? Granted, I’ll be the first to agree that most things in the world can be explained through numbers, but I never did understand at
precisely what degree of angle one sets one’s cap to attract a man. And why that should…matter…anyway.” Emma curled her lips around her teeth, clamping her mouth shut along with her eyes.
She was so easy to fluster, this one. Which should make her equally easy to read. Hell, when agitated, Emma blurted out her every thought, which was a good thing for him, particularly since he’d sworn off using his tried-and-true method of seduction to get information out of women.
Still, he really should stop teasing her. He reached out a hand, curled his fingers and gently lifted her chin. Her eyes flew open at his touch.
“Well,” he murmured, “you really shouldn’t have. I wasn’t worth it.” He’d meant the words offhandedly, but the undeniable truth of them echoed in his mind.
Emma’s head tilted, pulling her chin from his grasp. Her eyes narrowed, just slightly. “No, you weren’t.”
Derick took a step back, his arm dropping to his side, as lame as her brother’s lower half. While he wholeheartedly agreed with her, Emma’s words still felt like a gut punch. He had to remind himself that he didn’t care. He’d done far worse things than breaking little girls’ hearts since he’d left Derbyshire so many years ago. If little Pygmy knew even the least of his dark deeds, she’d likely heap more than condemnation on his head.
He cleared his throat in the awkward silence. “Your brother—”
“I’m sorry.” Emma rushed the apology out. “That was badly done of me and I—”
Derick held up a hand to forestall her. “Think nothing of it,” he said. In truth, he’d rather deal with this tougher Emma. He’d felt dirty after intimidating her in this same parlor yesterday afternoon, no matter how much he’d also enjoyed the press of his body against hers, the sensual hitch of her breathing, the liquid melting he’d glimpsed in her amber eyes.
No, he much preferred her prickly.
“Your brother,” he began again. “I—”
“Surely you see I speak the truth,” Emma interrupted, rising up on the balls of her feet as she self-consciously smoothed that awful, matronly dress she wore. So transparent, Emma was. She probably thought that the plain clothes and tightly scraped-back hairstyle would help her cause.
“Yes,” he said. “About that—”
“And surely you also agree, what with Molly’s killer waiting to be caught, that bringing in another person will only slow the investigation down.”
Derick could almost see Emma mentally ticking off the tenets of her argument in her head.
“Yes,” he drawled. He nearly smiled as her shoulders relaxed in relief, along with her exquisitely formed features. “And no.”
Her body snapped to attention nearly as stiff as the foot guards who stood sentry at St. James’s Palace. “No?”
“While I agree,
for now
, that you should remain de facto magistrate,” Derick said, crossing his arms in front of him, “I insist you bring another alongside to assist you until the killer is found.”
“But I don’t—”
“If you refuse, I will send a messenger to the Commission of the Peace this very afternoon.”
Emma huffed an aggravated breath. Her right hand fisted by her side, and Derick noticed that her same leg tensed, as if she barely restrained herself from stomping her foot in vexation.
“And just who do you propose I ‘bring alongside’ to assist me?”
Derick let his smile flash quick and wide.
“Me.”
“Y
ou think I’m incapable?”
Damnation. Standing there with her amber eyes aglow and her ample cleavage rising and falling with her aggravated breaths, little Pygmy was stunning in her righteous indignation. Derick couldn’t resist provoking her further. “I have no way to judge that, Emma. Are you?”
She huffed, and the most darling touch of color turned the skin above her scooped neckline a splotchy pink. He wondered if she would be as passionate in bed as she was about what he thought of her—
Good God. Where had that thought come from?
“Of course not!” she fumed. “I am incredibly competent. Ask anyone.” She huffed. “You’re probably one of those men who thinks women are good for nothing aside from looking pretty,” Emma grumbled under her breath. But of course, he heard.
“On the contrary, Emma,” he murmured. His hardening body intimated that Emma would be good at
many
things. Derick struggled to rein himself in. He’d never had such a difficult time keeping his focus. What had he been saying? Oh yes. “I am well aware of how brilliant
women can be. Indeed, I find the wife of my friend the Earl of Stratford, to be an amazingly capable woman. She’s both a chemist and a healer whom I respect immensely,” he said.
While he spoke the words as a means to unruffle Emma’s feathers, he meant every one. He’d met Liliana, Lady Stratford, when she’d been simply Miss Claremont. He’d been sent to investigate the man who was now her husband as a traitor, much as he was currently investigating George Wallingford. His time spent in her company, as well as observing her loyalty, devotion and protectiveness toward Stratford, had given Derick pause regarding his views on women. Views he’d developed first from his abominable relationship with his mother and then from his experiences with the women he’d come across in the world of back alleys, back ballrooms and back bedrooms of the espionage game.
Emma, however, stared at him as if he’d said something particularly out of character.
Well, maybe he had. Out of character, at least, for the man he’d projected to her. Whether or not it was out of character for the man he actually was, he couldn’t say. After spending nearly half his life intentionally being someone else, Derick could no longer say who or what he was with any clarity. That was one of the many reasons he was anxious to make contact with Farnsworth, finish up this mission and leave England behind him for good. He would never be able to find himself if he stayed here.
Still, until that day he needed to do a better job of playing his part, even if every day the caricature grew more and more tiresome.
“Then what are you about?” she demanded, a deep vee forming between her eyes. “You can’t possibly care about Molly. If you’d ever even met her, she would have been but a babe.”
Derick opened his mouth to speak. “Tru—”
“And don’t start that rubbish about her being a member of your household,” Emma said, pointing an accusatory finger in his direction. “You have nothing at stake here. If you truly think I am capable, that I should remain as magistrate, why this farce of assisting me?”
It took years of discipline not to grimace. God save him from intelligent women. They
thought
about things. They asked
questions
.
He couldn’t very well tell her that she was now the only viable source available to him regarding George Wallingford and his activities over the years.
Wallingford may look less likely to be the traitor Derick was hunting, but with the man’s military experience and access to sensitive information, there was just too much smoke for there not to be fire—or at least kindling. If the man wasn’t a traitor, Derick needed to uncover who else might have taken advantage of Wallingford’s state of mind to wheedle sellable tidbits from him.
It would be much quicker to parlay Emma’s trusted position with the villagers than to take the time to establish his own contacts and inroads as he searched for a new suspect. At least until Farnsworth made contact,
if
he was even still here in Derbyshire.
Derick cocked his head just so, lifting one cheek in a half smile that he knew displayed a deep dimple to his best advantage. He lowered his voice charmingly. “Come now, Emma. We had great adventures as children, you and I. It will be quite a lark.”
Her frown deepened.
He raised the brilliance of his smile accordingly. “Just think. This time it will be me following
you
around.”
The overt eye roll told him he’d missed his mark.
Damned woman. He knew she wasn’t immune to him. So if sentimental charm didn’t appeal, what did? Logic, he decided. “Have you ever investigated a murder before?” he asked, thinking to use the two-heads-being-better-than-one argument again.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The only murders I’ve dealt with have been drunken disputes, with the killer easily identified. There
have
been a few suspicious deaths over the years. Nothing that could be called outright murder, but certainly deaths that no one was able to explain.”
Derick’s ears perked up at this. “Suspicious deaths” could often be laid at the feet of people like him, people who’d been trained to dispatch others without leaving a trace as to how or why. Though he hadn’t been specifically fishing for information, he intended to reel it in.
“How many of these ‘suspicious deaths’ would you say you’ve encountered, and over how long?” His heart sped up. Finally, he was getting somewhere. He’d bet anything she meant the Crown’s missing couriers. After Farnsworth had alerted the War Department of the traitorous tie to upper Derbyshire, someone in the agency had made the connection that two men carrying sensitive information had gone missing, albeit years apart, while on missions that would have brought them through Derbyshire or the Peak District. “Do you remember approximate dates and places where the bodies were found?” If he could establish—
“What does that have to do with anything?” Emma’s head had tilted slightly and she squinted at him, speculation shining in her amber eyes. “Least of all Molly’s death?”
“Nothing, of course. I was just curious about your work.” Damnation. He’d been so close to learning something about the couriers. He knew it, but he couldn’t press further now without raising Emma’s suspicions.
He’d learned one thing, though. Emma might know even more than he thought, which made it all the more important to stick by her side. “You don’t have a choice, Emma. You
will
allow me to assist you or I will be certain a new magistrate is appointed within a fortnight.”
She stared mutinously at him. The storm flashing in the depths of her eyes gave Derick the unnerving feeling that he might soon be struck down by amber lightning. But then Emma took a deep breath.
He released his breath in turn.
“You
were
rather useful in the search for Molly,” Emma admitted. “And I can see where having you beneath me could prove quite satisfactory.”
Derick felt his eyebrows rise, along with another part of his body. Had she meant…? But no, Emma stood before him looking quite serene. He knew, given their previous encounters, that if she’d meant that the way it had sounded, she’d be blushing red all over.
She must have meant “beneath her” in a more literal sense, such as him being below her rank as a mere assistant.
“I suggest we return to where we found Molly’s body and see if any evidence can be found now that the water has receded a bit,” Emma stated. She turned on her heel and quit the parlor, leaving him to follow or not. He followed, of course, knowing he should be pleased that he’d won her acquiescence with relative ease.
But something told him that naught else in this partnership would be easy.
If Derick thought she was just going to sit back and let him dictate every step of “their” investigation, he was sadly mistaken. Their search of the forest yesterday afternoon had turned up nothing new, leaving them both frustrated. But there was no way she was going to allow him to re-question Molly’s friends and family this morning. Not at the girl’s funeral.