“I have a confession, my dear,” Matthew said, getting up to lock the door. “I have been naughty.”
Theresa set down half her biscuit and dusted her hands. “I do so adore your naughty streak, Mr. Belmont.”
“I suggested to Nick that if he’d pay a call on Christopher and Remington, I’d be most appreciative.”
The way Theresa watched Matthew cross the library suggested another kind of appreciation all together.
“Candlewick is in Oxfordshire,” she said, scooting closer to the middle of the sofa.
Matthew dropped to the carpet and positioned himself between his wife’s knees. “So it is, and I have yet to warn my brother of this suggestion I made to our Nick.” He insinuated a hand beneath his wife’s skirts, where lovely memories abounded. “Mrs. Belmont, promise me you will never take up the Continental fashion of wearing drawers.”
“Drawers would be a waste of time,” she said, fingers going to Matthew’s cravat. “One would end up taking them right back off again. You will write to Axel today Matthew, and alert him to Nicholas’s impending visit.”
Matthew closed his eyes and for the hundredth grateful time, memorized the contour of Theresa’s bare knee against his palm.
“Of course, my dear. Later.” Much, much later.
Axel returned from his morning with the Stoneleigh ledgers bearing a sack from Mrs. Jensen and a brown glass bottle with an inch or so of liquid in the bottom. He also brought a list of questions for his guest.
“If you are up to further interrogation over the noon meal,” he said when he found Mrs. Stoneleigh in the library, “I’d like to ask you about Stoneleigh’s finances.”
“I’ll manage.” She rose from the sofa, her movements a little stiff, a little careful. When they were seated in the breakfast parlor, steaming bowls of chicken soup before them, Axel considered a bit of small talk might be in order.
Though not witty repartee—never that. “What did you find to do this morning?”
“I finished putting away my clothing, acquainted myself with the layout of your house, investigated your stillroom, replied to the notes of condolence I’ve received so far, copied Gregory’s obituary for Sir Dewey, and stared at the same page of some book or other for several years.”
How well Axel knew that last activity. “What preoccupies you?”
He asked the question out of curiosity, but also because Mrs. Stoneleigh had started on her soup.
“With your staff off to market, this morning is the first time I’ve had real solitude since Gregory died, and I find myself… He was here, on this earth for nearly sixty years. He got up one morning, rode out as he always did, spent the morning in the kennels, stopped in at the Weasel for his customary pint, perhaps chatted up the vicar, Sir Dewey, who knows who else… A typical day, and then he’s gone forever. No more Gregory Stoneleigh.”
She put her spoon down, took a measured breath, and rose. “Excuse me.”
Well, hell. Axel caught up to her at the door, foiling her escape with a hand on her wrist. She’d spent the morning brooding, and he’d forgotten this was market day. Not well done of him, to leave her without any company at all.
“Go ahead and cry. It won’t be the last time.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, staring at Axel’s cravat even as he drew her into his arms.
“You will,”—unless the murderer went after her too, or Axel had to arrest her—“but your husband’s life was ended too soon and wrongly, and that is sad enough to make any wife cry, or it should be.”
Her weight settled against him, too slight, too angular, for all her endowments. “Our soup is getting cold. You’ll chide me if I don’t eat.” Then, more softly, “I hate to cry.”
Gregory Stoneleigh’s widow went down to defeat silently, shuddering against Axel in slow, drawing sobs that cut him like a winter wind. He held her and stroked her hair, smoothed his hands in circles on her back and nape, hoping simple proximity and touch comforted her.
Holding her, he had time to notice exactly how her bones were too prominent under his hands, though she fit him; her body lined up with his such that he could rest his chin at her temple and take all of her weight against him.
He snatched a linen serviette off the table for her to use as a handkerchief. “Do not apologize for crying, or letting the soup get cold, or anything else.”
“Then shall I apologize for seeking my room?” She drew back, but didn’t entirely leave Axel’s embrace. “After such a performance, you can’t expect me to sit at table, can you?”
“After such a performance, I know you need sustenance more than ever. Will you join me in the library if I put some of this food on trays?” Every morsel of it, in fact.
“I will, though you must not badger me to eat. I seldom have much appetite at times like this.”
Times like…? Axel recalled her furious blush over breakfast.
“I don’t badger, I merely suggest.” And occasionally lecture. He was capable of exhorting in a pinch, and admonitions were also within his reach. Axel stepped away from her and rummaged in the sideboard for trays, then set about assembling two full plates, cutlery, and glasses of wine.
When they reached the library, he kept the conversation superficial, reporting on which neighbors had collected hounds from the dispersal of the colonel’s kennel and how the staff fared at Stoneleigh Manor.
“Shreve is a dithering sort, isn’t he?” Axel asked, as he set the trays on the low table before the sofa.
Abigail went wandering across the library, though doubtless she’d inspected the entire room.
“I used to joke to Shreve that Gregory didn’t need a wife when he had such devoted help on his staff. Shreve took his duties very seriously within the manor, and Ambers was Gregory’s trusted shadow out of doors.”
Ambers, who had dodged or cut short Axel’s every attempt to interview him since the day after the murder. Matthew had said to avoid any show of haste, though, to allow the miscreant a false confidence that no arrest would be forthcoming.
“Eat your lunch, Abigail, or I will chide you for it.”
She peered at a sketch Axel had done of swamp roses beside a still pond. “Was that a suggestion? I don’t believe it was.”
Better, for her to be chiding him. She wandered back to the sofa, situated herself behind her tray, and speared a braised carrot on the end of her fork.
“I’m a papa. Perhaps scintillating repartee eludes me because I’ve had to develop such a sure touch with my scolds and chides.”
Abigail did not make faces at her vegetables before consuming them, unlike Axel’s offspring.
“You expect me to be grateful that I won’t have children, Professor?”
Ah. Of course. “You may yet have children. You are young.”
“Not that young,” she said around at bite of carrot. “I will mourn for anywhere from one to three years, two at least, at which time I will be thirty. Thirty is old for a woman, quite old to start a family.”
She ate more when Axel disagreed with her, and on this topic, he could offer a genuine difference of opinion.
“If you truly wanted a child, you could marry next week and have a baby by Christmas, God willing. Once you become a parent, though, time itself alters. One minute you’re singing every last lullaby you can recall in hopes the little blighter will go to sleep, the next you’re lecturing him about proper deportment at university. Fortunately, when my boys go to university, they’ll be only a couple of hours away.”
Until such time as Axel became an Oxford fellow himself.
“Unless they choose Cambridge, Professor Belmont.”
“Eat your beef, Abigail, and do not commit such sedition in my house again. Cambridge, indeed.”
She cut off the smallest bite of beef. Dayton and Phillip would have regarded sharing a meal with Abigail Stoneleigh as a form of torture.
“Speaking of young men,” Axel said. “I’ve mentioned that two of my nephews are in Hilary term and ma
y join us of a weekend. Do not neglect your potatoes, Abigail.”
She put her fork down. “Another suggestion?”
A plea, did she but know it. “You are uncomfortable?” She’d eaten about half her food, and that only because Axel had pestered her.
“Increasingly. Not much of soldier, am I?”
“You are a widow. Shall I bring the laudanum to your room?”
“Please.” She winced as she rose, so Axel slipped an arm around her waist and led her to the door.
“Humor me,” he replied, anchoring his arm more firmly around her.
“Another suggestion. What a helpful fellow you are.”
“You are teasing me. Were you this disrespectful to your late husband?” Whose ledgers they hadn’t so much as mentioned.
“Gregory had clearly defined expectations of what ladylike deportment entailed. I learned to meet those expectations.”
“Do you regret marrying him?” Axel asked, when they reached her door.
She shrugged free of his arm. “Of course not. My parents and most of their possessions had perished in a fire. My grandfather had died only weeks earlier of old age or a wasting disease. Gregory had been one of Grandpapa Pennington’s business associates, and thus I’d had a passing acquaintance with him for years. The colonel’s offer of marriage was all that saved me from the workhouse, and I would have married him if he’d kept me in his kennels.”
What a ghastly admission, not because it whispered of reasons to kill a man, but because it reflected so miserably on the late colonel.
“Abigail, sometimes I am relieved my spouse is gone. I loved her as well as I could, but in the end, she was suffering terribly. One finds peace, eventually, in being honest, and I’m honestly glad Caroline’s suffering ended. I’ll not chide you for honestly resenting that Gregory was a disappointment.”
A disgrace to his gender more like.
Abby nodded once, then slipped into her room, quietly closing the door behind her.
What in the hell was wrong with the young men of England, that a self-important, fifty-year-old cavalry veteran had been the only option for a woman as lovely as Abigail Stoneleigh?
And when had Axel begun to think of her as not simply pretty, but lovely?
Chapter Six
A long, laudanum-laced nap did nothing to restore Abigail’s spirits, though the thought of all the books in Axel Belmont’s library was modestly cheering. Mr. Belmont owned a variety of novels, and Gregory had scoffed at fiction.
Women were to read improving tracts, sermons, and recipe books in addition to the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible.
Sometimes I am relieved my spouse is gone. A woman whose husband had been murdered did not dare admit to the same sentiment. Axel Belmont’s honesty had been so welcome, such a relief, Abigail had nearly hugged him for it.
And yet, she’d also been happy to doze through the dinner hour, and sorely hoped Mr. Belmont had sought his own chambers for the late evening hours rather than the warmth of the library.
The library door was a few inches ajar, and a murmur of masculine voices drifted into the corridor. For a moment, Abby was thrown back to all the times she’d heard Gregory and Sir Dewey chatting similarly, all the times she’d waited, hand poised to knock, until the conversation had found a natural lull, for Gregory had not tolerated unannounced interruptions.
“I haven’t any real suspects yet.” That would be Mr. Belmont. “More brandy?”
“If you please.” Another man spoke, his voice as cultured as Mr. Belmont’s, maybe a little smoother. “What about the wife? You say she inherited the property, and is decades younger than the deceased.”
Liquid sloshed, glass tinkled. “She didn’t inherit any more than the son or daughter did. Two reliable witnesses placed her on the next floor up when the shot was fired.”
“She could have hired it done.” The other man was idly speculating, while Abby’s heart had begun to thump against her ribs. “Thirty years is a great age difference, even in these opportunistic times.”
The corridor was chilly, but Abby could not have moved if her life had depended upon it—which, if Axel Belmont still considered her a suspect, it might.
Damn him, though. Damn him for his feigned solicitude. Do not neglect your potatoes, Abigail.
“If Mrs. Stoneleigh wanted her husband gone, why wait eight years into the marriage?” Mr. Belmont mused. “Why use a gun, when poison would have been tidier? She’s not a stupid woman.”
Abby wasn’t a smart woman, to have been so thoroughly charmed by Axel Belmont’s gruff attentiveness.
“Have you ruled her out or not?” the other fellow asked.
“I have,” Mr. Belmont said, causing Abigail to sag against the wall in relief. “And I haven’t.”
What?!
“Is she pretty, Axel? Your grieving neighbor who must share your roof?”
“Mrs. Turnbull would toss you over her knee for impugning the honor of the house, and if there was anything left of you, I’d take a turn thereafter. Mrs. Stoneleigh is quite pretty.” Pretty was a problem, based on Mr. Belmont’s tone. “She’s also not entirely forthcoming, hence my hesitation.”
Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no.
“Why not seduce her? You’d get your wick trimmed and learn her secrets.”
“Mrs. Turnbull deserves a go at you for that remark alone, Nicholas. I will not seduce a female under my protection,” Mr. Belmont replied, his voice, of all things, amused. “Particularly not in the king’s name. You seduce her. No, on second thought, don’t you dare. She’s grieving, alone, and in no condition to endure your casual trifling.”
Who was this man? And how on earth had Axel Belmont concluded that Abby was keeping secrets?
The door opened the rest of the way without warning, and she was confronted with more human male than she had seen in one body. This Nicholas person stood at least six and a half feet tall, every inch of him bound in muscle. Worse—much, much worse—his blue eyes were full of unholy humor.
While discussing murder?
“Won’t you join us?” He took her by the wrist and drew her into the library’s warmth. “You haven’t the temperament for murder, Mrs. Stoneleigh. Only a truly calculating female would recall to eschew her perfume when she’s bent on eavesdropping.”
“You smelled my—?”
“Nicholas Haddonfield.” He bowed with easy grace, a blond curl flopping over his brow. “At your service. The scent of roses becomes you wonderfully, especially in this household.”
Mr. Belmont’s expression was far less welcoming. Abby could see him wondering how long she’d been listening, hearing no good about pretty, secretive murder suspects.
“Don’t look at the professor like that,” Mr. Haddonfield said, leaning brazenly close. “Makes him think you like the broody, academic type, when I am certain I can convince you that a golden god such as my lonely little self would be more to your liking.”
“Nicholas, for pity’s sake,” Mr. Belmont said on a sigh. “Mrs. Abigail Stoneleigh, may I make known to you Nicholas Haddonfield, Viscount Reston, though you will also hear him referred to in less-flattering terms. His familiars refer to him as Wee Nick. Nicholas, my neighbor, Mrs. Abigail Stoneleigh, whom you will not pester.”
“Good evening.” Abigail bobbed a curtsey, still dumbstruck by the man’s sheer size and more than a little impressed to be in the presence of a title—while wearing her nightgown and robe, no less.
“You’ll warm up to me, particularly if the professor can charm you into a tot of brandy.”
Mr. Belmont gestured with the brandy bottle. “Mrs. Stoneleigh?”
Mr. Haddonfield took the bottle, poured a finger, and passed Abby the glass. “A mere nip, to keep the chill away.”
Abby did not want a nip, she wanted to take a bite out of both men where it counted.
“Ignore him, madam. Nicholas thinks he’s being helpful by giving you time to fashion an excuse for eavesdropping.”
; Abby nearly dashed her brandy in Mr. Belmont’s face. “Are you fashioning an excuse for your suspicions, Mr. Belmont? You’re all polite concern over a meal, while suspecting me of murder most foul?”
“All murder is foul,” Mr. Haddonfield interjected. “My condolences on your husband’s death. I am ever fond of husbands, because the women they marry can no longer bother me with their conjugal aspirations. Let us talk of murder, which is more fascinating than my marital prospects.”
Axel Belmont’s fists went to his hips. “Nicholas, you make light of Mrs. Stoneleigh’s loss at your peril.”
The threat was sincere. Viscount or not, giant or not, Axel Belmont’s guest could find himself thrashed to flinders on Abigail’s behalf. And yet, the professor did not deny that Abby was still a murder suspect.
“My apologies, Mrs. Stoneleigh,” the viscount said. “I mean no disrespect. I will bend my considerable brilliance to assisting Professor Belmont in apprehending the felon. What does Matthew think of this situation?”
Matthew would be Mr. Belmont’s brother.
“Does all of England except the victim’s own widow have a say in this investigation?” Abby asked.
Axel took her glass from her—Abby was not in the mood for spirits—and set it on the desk. “I hesitate to pursue this topic in Mrs. Stoneleigh’s hearing.”
Because the professor did not want to distress her, or because he did not trust her? Abby could not read him, though he could apparently read her.
“Pursue it,” Abby said, stalking to the estate desk and taking the seat behind it. “Perhaps I might share a few of those secrets I’ve been keeping.”
The lady unwittingly confessed to keeping secrets—plural—and Axel’s heart sank.
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Stoneleigh,” he said with a bow in her direction. “I should not accuse you of secrecy, so much as of reticence.”
She wrinkled her nose at this wilted specimen of an apology. Axel would not have been surprised if she’d begun rifling his desk drawers in retaliation for his suspiciousness.
It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 9