Sweet Deception (43 page)

“Truly?” she whispered.

“Truly,” he answered. And yet, despite his assurance, she sensed he would not be happy in either place. She didn’t even know if she would be happy in Derbyshire anymore, not after all that had happened.

Upper Derbyshire would always hold a special place in her heart—it was her birthplace, the home of her youth. It was where she’d first met Derick and fallen in love with him. It was where he’d come back and fallen in love with her. Yet maybe they needed to start fresh, too. Make new memories. With him, she realized she wasn’t afraid to try. But perhaps they wouldn’t have to go so far as the Americas.

“Can we move to London?” she asked. “I hear there’s a terrible crime problem that could use some serious analysis.”

Derick’s quick grin flashed, telling her he liked the idea. “London? I don’t know if Bow Street and the House of Lords are ready for the lady magistrate and the French viscount…”

“So we’ll practice a little deception,” Emma said, hugging him tightly to her. “We’ll pretend to be plain old Lord and Lady Scarsdale. By the time they figure out we’re not exactly what we seem…” She shrugged.

Derick’s booming laugh filled her with joy. “I love you, Pygmy.”

She poked him playfully in the chest. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t call me Pyg—”

But he cut her off with a kiss, and the last thing Emma could remember thinking was that if he kissed her like that, he could call her whatever he wanted.

September, 1819—The London town house of Lord and Lady Scarsdale

D
erick slipped unnoticed into Emma’s study, melting into the shadows along the far wall. It wasn’t even a challenge, as she didn’t pay him a bit of mind. No, she was standing at her blackboards, lost in her equations.

Her cheeks were dusted with green, blue and white, with a dot of pinkish-red on her nose for good measure. A smile of satisfaction crept over his face. He wouldn’t have her any other way.

He slid quietly behind Emma and waited until she lowered her hand and stepped back to study her work. He held his breath for a few long seconds and then snaked his arms around her from behind.

“Oh!” she shrieked, instinctively clasping her hands over his across her middle. “Curse your damnably silent spy footsteps,” she muttered, but there was laughter in her voice.

He turned her in his arms, affectionately wiping chalk dust from her nose with his thumb. “There was no need
for stealth, my love,” he chuckled. “The clacking of chalk on board was so loud an elephant could have snuck up on you.”

He eyed the board she’d been working on. Her strokes seemed different than usual…harsh and heavy-handed. Almost angry. “Is something bothering you, Emma? I know you’re disappointed that Parliament refused to institute a nationalized system of crime reporting, but Stratford won’t give up. He’ll be back at them again next season, you can be assured.”

Emma blew out a breath, fluttering a lock of chestnut hair that had come loose from the knot at the back of her neck. “Yes, of course. I know he will, and I
am
disappointed, but…”

Her shoulders slumped and she brought a hand up to rub at her eyes.

Alarm clenched Derick’s gut. He took a closer look at her face, noted the dark circles shadowing her eyes. “Emma, what is it?”

Her brows dipped and her lower lip began to tremble. “I don’t know,” she cried plaintively. “Maybe I’m fighting some melancholy.” Her amber eyes filled with tears and a sharp ache squeezed in his throat as his unease mounted. Emma rarely cried. “I just don’t feel myself. And I’m so
tired
all of the time…”

Derick tipped her face up, staring at her for a long moment with concern. Then he let his gaze travel over the rest of her body. Was it a trick of the light, or did he detect a subtle rounding…Of course! He closed his eyes, his body relaxing as fear left him only to be replaced by an elation that filled his entire chest. He couldn’t contain the grin that split his face.

Emma frowned. “This makes you happy?” she grumbled.

“Yes.”

His darling wife actually scowled at him then. “I don’t understand.”

“I know.” He glanced up at her blackboards. “Here, let me put it in a language you will understand.”

He felt Emma’s eyes on his back as he picked up a piece of her chalk. A few strokes later, he stepped back to Emma’s side. “There.”

Emma narrowed her eyes on his equation.

1 + 1 = 3

“One plus one equals
three
?” she scoffed. “That makes no sense at all,” she said, planting her arms akimbo on her hips.

“It does if one is
you
,” he said slowly. “And the other one is
me…”

He waited patiently as his brilliant, literal wife worked it out.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, her eyes widening as she comprehended his meaning. One of her hands instinctively cradled her stomach. “Oh, do you think?”

“I do,” he said, reaching for her. He hugged her tightly to him and simply breathed her in.

“A baby,” she murmured against his chest.

“Indeed.” Derick tried to imagine what it would be like, having a child of his own. Would he get to relive his youth, only this time through the eyes of his own son or daughter? “Perhaps we could spend summers in Derbyshire,” he said, surprising himself.

“Do you mean it?” Emma said, turning up her face to look at him.

Neither he nor Emma had been back there for more than a day or two since they’d married. Maybe it was time.

“Well, we had such fun running those woods together. I just thought…it would be a shame not to share that with our children. The creeks—”

“My cave,” Emma interjected, a smile lighting her face.

“
My
cave,” he retorted. Then he huffed as another thought occurred. “You know, if it’s a boy, the viscountcy
will finally have some English blood in it again, if not that of a true Aveline.”

A troubled frown tangled Emma’s brow. “You don’t still think that’s what matters, do you?” she asked softly, hugging him closer to her.

Derick dropped a kiss on his wife’s forehead. She still tasted of warm sunshine and fresh air and promise to him—even though it was autumn now and the London air hadn’t been fresh in years. It was time to go back. To put the past to rest and look only to the future. “Of course not, darling,” he assured her, as overwhelming gratitude filled his heart. “You’ve taught me that nothing matters but love.”

I
hope you enjoyed reading
Sweet Deception
! The original idea for this story centered on a missing maid that led to the discovery of other missing women. It did feature the crude geographical profiling that Emma does in the book, but it had her hunting a serial killer instead of a traitor. However, as characters are sometimes wont to do, Derick showed up on the page and insisted that this was
his
story as much as it was Emma’s, and that
he
was a traitor hunter, thank you very much. He hadn’t spent fourteen years behind enemy lines just to show up at his family home and get drawn into someone else’s murder investigation. He wanted to be there for his own reasons. He was all fine and good with letting Emma work out most of the crime, but he fully intended on bringing his expertise to bear, as well. Therefore, they would be hunting a traitor—end of story.

Pesky characters.

Still, I was able to put most of the research I had already done to use. I just had to come up with a different set of bodies for them to find—rather than missing women, they were now looking for missing couriers and War Department agents, etc.

Emma was only a little ahead of her time in combining
her moral statistics project with crime statistics to try to affect policy. According to an essay by Michael Friendly in the journal
Statistical Science
, the systematic study of social numbers by mathematicians (such as population data, mortality, ability to raise an army, etc.) had begun in the 1660s, and by the mid-1700s, those numbers were already being used to affect state policy in other areas. But it wasn’t until the period following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 that crime became a pressing enough concern for policy makers to take notice, amidst the perfect storm of an exploding population, widespread inflation and unemployment that followed the wars. Because of the new class of desperate, dangerous petty criminals, people started seriously looking at how that growing problem could be addressed.

Nowhere was the crisis more prevalent than in Paris (think of the times depicted in Victor Hugo’s fabulous novel
Les Misérables
, set from 1815 to the Paris Uprising in 1832). Consequently, the Ministry of Justice in France was the first to institute a centralized national system of crime reporting (something Emma wished England would do in
Sweet Deception
). A young mathematician named André-Michel Guerry was able to harness that wealth of numbers, and by doing so, became the father of modern social science, criminology and profiling through his moral statistics mapping project. Geographic profilers and criminologists will tell you that his work, combined with similar work of a Belgian named Adolphe Quetelet, became the springboard for much of the criminal profiling that helps us capture criminals today. By analyzing the raw data, Guerry was able to show, for the first time, numerical proof that overturned widespread beliefs about the nature and causes of crimes. He also proved that human actions are governed by social laws, in the same way the laws of physics govern the universe, opening the door to further study in the social sciences.

As for Emma trying to discover a killer’s residence from the position of the crimes he’d committed, the methods she used were crude, but they were certainly methods she could have devised at the time and ones that also could have worked. In fact, simple as they are, police forces still use the methods depicted in
Sweet Deception
, though their accuracy leaves something to be desired. Nowadays, of course, we have much more sophisticated equations—the most famous being the Rossmo formula, which you may have seen employed to catch killers in a couple of episodes of the television series,
NUMB3RS
. This incredibly complex equation, run by computers, takes in account everything we know about how killers operate, derived from nearly two centuries of crime analysis.

Were Emma working in law enforcement today, I fancy she’d be something of a criminal profiler, one of those brilliant researchers who analyzes the connection between people and the crimes they commit, searching not only for a way to catch criminals but also for a way to predict who might commit future crimes, and a way to stop them before they do.

Leeds, June 1817

Y
ellow suited her. Gabriel Devereaux’s gaze followed the young woman’s lithe form as she floated around the dance floor in her partner’s arms. Her flowing skirts of lemon, shot with some sort of white embroidered flowers he couldn’t name, barely brushed the ground as she twirled in the moves of the waltz.

He’d never liked blondes who wore yellow. They faded into their ensemble, like a monochrome painting that failed to draw the eye. Not so Lady Penelope. No, she seemed to glow, brightening everything and everyone around her like a ray of early-summer sunshine. Having known her but a few days, Gabriel had a feeling Lady Penelope was the type who refused to fade into anything.

He was glad of it, for her sake. Michael had a tendency to overshadow most ordinary people.

“Lusting after our cousin’s new bride, are you?”

Gabriel’s jaw clenched with indignation at the insult as his gaze snapped to the man who’d sidled up to him. He bit his tongue against a stinging retort, however. Even the most scathingly witty rejoinder would have
been lost on Edward, even were the man sober enough to comprehend it.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gabriel drawled lazily. Of course he wasn’t lusting after Lady Penelope, even if his skin tingled with inconvenient awareness as the happy couple twirled near. He fought the strange need to follow them with his eyes and instead turned toward his younger brother.

Edward’s bulbous nose shone bright with the redness of drink. Gabriel frowned. When had his brother become such a sot? The night was much too young to be so far gone. But even foxed as Edward was, his eyes glinted with a knowing look.

Hell. Edward might have become a drunkard in the years Gabriel had been away, but his brother also knew him better than perhaps anyone. Edward must have seen something in his expression to speak as he had, and Gabriel feared he knew what it was.

Jealousy.

His gaze strayed back to the dancers as he lost the battle not to look. This time, however, he forced himself to focus on his cousin, Michael, third Baron Manton, whose teeth were bared in a beatific smile. And why wouldn’t he be in raptures? Michael, it seemed, had found love.

And
that
was what Gabriel envied. Not the lady in specific, but the
idea
of her. Could finding the right wife bring back
his
smile?

Not that I deserve it.

Gabriel forced his gaze away.

“Well, it’s too late now,” Edward sniffed, taking a healthy swig of what must have been some rather potent punch. “For both of us.”

Gabriel glanced sharply at Edward, drawn by the hollow anger in the man’s voice. Surely he wasn’t saying…But Edward wasn’t looking anywhere near the dance floor, or the newlyweds. Instead he stared toward the west corner of the ballroom.

Gabriel followed his line of sight, wincing as he recognized his brother’s wife, Amelia, flirting shamelessly with a well-known rake.

Edward tossed back the remains of his punch with a low growl, then wiped his mouth against the inside of his cuff. “Excuse me, brother,” he said curtly before stalking off.