For the first time, Abby looked at him. She had put her tears aside, perhaps to be renewed in private, and her gaze held both betrayal and determination.
“If any man, ever, thinks to keep the truth from me again,” Abby said, “he will do so at the cost of his safety. I love words, Mr. Belmont, I love elegant prose and the exquisite turn of phrase. For the loathing that grips me now, I have no words. I have no, no… I haven’t anything adequate to convey my sentiments. Death for Gregory was a mercy, compared to what I’d do to him.”
“Perhaps somebody saw to the matter for you,” Axel said. “We at least know where Gregory’s money came from. His wealth came from your inheritance. Now we need only determine where it went.”
“At present, I leave that puzzle to you gentlemen, and you will excuse me,” Abby said. “I’ll take a tray for dinner, though don’t expect me to eat a bite, and don’t presume to scold me for it. My grandfather’s journal wants reading.”
Axel rose and held up the unfinished drink. Abby downed it at one swallow, replaced it gently on the sideboard, and departed the library on a soft swish of her hems, the journal clutched against her chest.
“She’ll cry hysterically,” Nick predicted, abandoning the piano. “And yet, I have the sense you pulled your punches, Professor. There’s more, isn’t there?”
There was more brandy, fortunately.
“Investigating this murder will turn me into an obese sot,” Axel said, switching seats to take Abby’s corner of the sofa. “Pettiflower knew which firm of solicitors handled the Pennington estate.”
“Lawyers,” Nick said, coming down beside Axel. “Now comes the truly nasty part.”
“The import business—not the printing press, the bookshop, or the tea shop—was handled by Handstreet and Handstreet. Pettiflower has relations who no longer use them, and said the firm has become, in the hands of the present generation, the type to not ask too many questions. The family solicitors responsible for the shops were Nehring and Son, a fine old firm Pettiflower could highly recommend.”
“Stoneleigh was a fine old cavalry officer too, I’m sure.”
“When did you get so skinny, Nicholas?”
“I’m in a premarital decline. I saw you kissing the fair widow, my friend. At least close the curtains before you dispense that sort of consolation.”
The consolation in that kiss had gone both ways. “You’ve taken to peeking in windows, Nicholas. Should I be concerned?”
“Cheer me up with talk of murder, please. We’re taking trays in the library so you can play me out of my megrims.”
Axel would play his violin for the woman upstairs, who was mourning the murder of her dreams at the hands of a greedy old man, for purposes Axel had yet to divine.
“The entire Pennington estate,” Axel said, “for the grandfather and both of Abby’s parents, was handled by the Handstreet lawyers, the same firm that was responsible for the import business dealings here in Oxford.”
“While another pack of mongrels dealt with the London end of things,” Nick said, yawning. “Probably more of the same in Portsmouth, or Liverpool… But why would Handstreet—a firm charged with business matters—get involved in chancery issues such as the Pennington estates? You said the Nehring firm was already in place and known to the family.”
Between the brandy, the earlier long, cold ride to Oxford and back, and the seductive warmth of the fire, Axel was falling asleep. He rose, though a scoot and a shove were needed to win free of the sofa’s embrace.
“I don’t know why the colonel’s business firm took over the settlement of the deceased couple’s affairs,” Axel said. “But I intend to find out. Doubtless, the Handstreet solicitors will attempt to thwart my investigations, and demand that I produce some sealed document confirming the colonel’s death and the need for an inquest.”
Nick slouched lower into his corner of the sofa. “Let’s visit the lawyers together. I’ll produce my left fist and my right fist, throw around the title, drop some coin in the hands of a few ferret-faced law clerks. This will be good practice.”
Axel’s investigative instincts, numbed halfway to frostbite by the day’s outing, stirred.
“Practice, Nicholas?”
For a moment, Axel thought Nick had dozed off. The fire crackled softly, and the violin warming on the sideboard called to Axel’s spirits.
“My papa is dying, Ax. I don’t know what to do.”
Bloody perishing hell. “Nicholas, I am so sorry. When papas get to dying, there’s often not a damned thing one can do.” Axel pressed a hand to Nick’s shoulder, moved the brandy bottle nearer to Nick’s elbow, and went off to order supper trays—and another bottle of spirits.
Chapter Ten
Abby could read no more of her grandfather’s journal. The handwriting was faint in places, her head throbbed, her eyes ached, and the hour had grown late.
A soft tap came at her bedroom door, disturbing a mental state too riotous to qualify as brooding.
That gentle knock was the gesture of a man who wanted to be able to say over breakfast that he’d come by to check on his guest, but hadn’t wanted to disturb her slumbers.
Abby pulled the door open and found Axel Belmont holding a white rose in a pink porcelain bud vase.
“You are awake.” The professor spouted a metaphor, did he but know it.
Abby stepped aside. “Come in.”
He ought not to set foot in her bedroom, and not because the hour was late and they were unchaperoned. Unchaperoned apparently did not signify, when a woman’s late husband had made sure all and sundry thought her prone to hysterical fancies.
Axel eyed the journal in Abby’s hand. “Abigail, I am sorry.”
“I don’t want your pity.” She dragged him by the sleeve into her room and closed the door before all the fire’s heat escaped into the dark and drafty corridor. “I want to kill Gregory Stoneleigh several times over, I want to thank the person who pulled that trigger, and I don’t care if that makes me a monster.”
Axel set the rose on her night table. “You are not a monster. You have been monstrously wronged. I’ll get to the truth. That, I vow to you.”
The covers had been rumpled as Abby had tossed and turned her way through her grandfather’s pages. Axel began making the bed.
“You might not find the answers,” she said, setting the journal on the desk, well away from the hearth. “I almost don’t care who killed Gregory. I care that Gregory likely squandered every shilling my family worked their entire lives to acquire. I care that Gregory lied to me, repeatedly, for years. I care that I was made to feel grateful to him, grateful, every waking moment, season after season, when he—”
She’d whipped back toward the hearth to find herself face-to-face with Axel.
“Curse if it helps,” he said. “Bellow down the rafters, rant, hurl the breakables. You’re entitled.”
If Abby ran cursing into the night, Axel Belmont would find her. That thought alone preserved her from the frightful impulse to strike him. His crime was to tell her the truth, and yet, violence coursed through her.
“Do you know what the worst part of a fire is?” she asked. “A fire takes lives. So do disease, war, and old age. Fire takes everything else too—your dearest treasures. Not money—money can be replaced—but your great-grandmother’s recipes written in her hand, the sketches done by a great-uncle who emigrated to Canada and was never heard from again. The sentimental anchors that tell you who your family is, who has loved you, and for how long.”
Abby was crying, again, when she’d thought all her tears had been shed. “Fire destroys the very place you thought would be your refuge when your loved ones were gone. Fire eats up your memories and turns them to ash; it consumes everything, your past, your hopes, your home. And there was Gregory, all solicitude and concern, stealing even my right to grieve.”
She’d been nearly shouting.
Axel brushed his thumbs over her cheeks. “Then grieve now, for grieve, you mus
t.”
His touch was… everything unexpected, and everything good. Gentle, unhurried, intimate. Abby closed her eyes and turned her face to his palm.
“I hate Gregory Stoneleigh.” The words gave her a sad kind of peace. “I hate him with a passion I didn’t realize I was capable of.”
“Good. Hate him as passionately as you need to, for as long as you need to.”
She opened her eyes, and held Axel’s hand to her cheek. His gaze was steady, fierce, and approving.
Hatred was exhausting, though the force of Abby’s antipathy had been a revelation. How dispirited had she become? How weak, that a betrayal of this magnitude had been necessary to rekindle her temper?
Tomorrow she would look like a harridan. She’d make herself eat, make herself go down to breakfast, or possibly luncheon. She’d swill tea, scold Nicholas, and start planning her return to the estate she now owned in fee simple absolute.
Tonight… tonight she would run wild.
She kissed Axel Belmont, grateful that Gregory’s sterile, avaricious version of marriage hadn’t imbued her with even this skill.
“I will never refer to him as my spouse again,” Abby said. “He was my jailer, an assassin preying upon innocence. Don’t stop kissing me.”
For long, quiet moments, Axel obliged. As he’d once indicated, he possessed an entire vocabulary of kisses. Sweet, soft, savoring, comforting, daring—kissing was not a silent endeavor either. Mouths touching and learning each other, arms embracing, had a whispered music Abby had never heard before.
She followed that whisper, tucking herself close enough to feel the evidence of Axel Belmont’s arousal, and like a fire finding a fresh breeze, her emotions shifted.
Axel drew back. “Abigail, we must not. You’ll regret—”
“I have many, many regrets,” Abby said, resting against him. “I will have them for years, as you have your regrets. I want you now, Axel Belmont. I want all of you there is to want, with all of me that remains to do the wanting.”
Little enough though that was. Axel couldn’t know how little, nor could he know how badly Abby wanted to give it to him and him alone.
His hand, slow and warm, caressed her hair. “I will not take advantage of—”
“That is the most wrong, misguided argument you could make. I desire you, you desire me. I’m a widow. Will you presume to know what’s best for me, to tell me what I want or need? To judge when I’m competent to make a decision, and when I’m not?”
Oh, the terrible pleasure of hoisting an intelligent, honorable man on the twin petards of logic and respect. Axel could not deny her without disrespecting her wishes, as she’d been so brutally disrespected in the past.
“I won’t beg,” Abby said, kissing him again and nudging a knee between his thighs.
“You should never have to beg,” he muttered against her mouth. “Not ever, Abigail. Do you understand me?”
She understood that he’d relented, that despite the convoluted, male flights along which honor might speed in the morning, her desire for him would be gratified now. This was a victory, against Gregory, but also against grief, and against losses so intimate, Abby could not have shared them with even the man about to become her lover.
“Begging does not serve,” Axel said, easing back from Abby’s embrace. “Not until we’re under those covers, not a stitch of clothing between us, our mutual dignity in a panting heap on the floor. Then you may beg me all you please.”
He locked the door, but his lecture was not complete. “Haste does not serve. If you are determined to take this bold step with my humble and obliging self, though it complicates all and solves nothing, though it confounds both reason and decorum, though Nicholas will be most—”
Abby unbelted her dressing gown.
“Lectures will not serve,” she said. “Do you need assistance undressing, Mr. Belmont?”
He held out a hand. “You may undo my cuffs. Dexterity at this hour eludes me.”
Abby’s room was warm. She’d been pacing, reading, fuming, and crying behind her closed door for hours. She shrugged out of her dressing gown, draped it over the chest at the foot of the bed, and took Axel’s hand in both of hers.
She kissed his knuckles, for the sheer pleasure of rewarding his surrender—also for the newfound delight of unnerving him. He had experience, of course, but Abby was convinced his experience was far from recent.
His sense of his own desirability had been a casualty of the failures and hopes in the glass house, of parenting, botany, time, and benign neglect.
She dropped his cuff-links into his palm.
“Get into bed, Abigail. I can’t have you taking a chill.”
Abby glowered at him, though in her heart she was beaming. Axel slipped his cuff-links into his watch pocket, pinched the bridge of his nose, then stared at the ceiling.
“Please, rather. Abigail would you please consider, at your leisure of course, getting into the bed, so that in all my frail conceit, I might be spared the burden of concern for your welfare? A gentleman never imposes on a lady, particularly not when in her very bedroom, contemplating intimacies so precious and unexpected that the same gentleman, against all dictates of rational—”
How she loved to hear him babble. Abby hopped onto the bed, which had that lovely, cozy, half-made feel because Axel had straightened the covers earlier.
The room had a privacy screen. Axel disappeared behind it, and the sounds of water splashing and fabric rustling came next. Abby yanked off her nightgown and fired it in the general direction of the foot of the bed, then scooted beneath the covers.
So that’s how this is done. She hoarded up the simple sequence of a mutual seduction, one small increment of knowledge against all the ignorance she’d been enshrouded in over the years of her marriage.
Axel emerged from the shadowed corner, naked from the waist up, the firelight gleaming against his damp chest. He held his boots, shirt, waistcoat, and cravat in his arms and deposited the lot in a pile on the chest.
“Do not scold me for failing to hang up my clothing,” he said, setting his boots near the door. He banked the fire next, casting the room in damnably thick shadows.
Abby had wanted to see him, had wanted to glory in every inch of him, exposed once again for her delectation, but perhaps that wasn’t the done thing on a first encounter, or perhaps ladies never expressed—
Woodcut images of smiling women, their knees spread, their bodies exposed for the mutual pleasure of both—or several—parties, came to mind.
To blazing hell with what ladies did and did not do. With Axel Belmont, at least, Abby need not be a lady. She need only, finally, be herself.
Axel sat on the bed, his back to Abby. “In the past, I have been ridic—chided, rather, for excessive modesty,” he said. “I am not… I am not—”
Abby rose, pressed her bare breasts to his back, and wrapped her arms about him. The contact was warm, friendly, pleasurable, and shocking—probably to them both.
“You bring a few bruises and memories of your own to this bed,” she said, kissing his shoulder. “I could not be here with you otherwise. Be as modest as you please, Axel. I could never trust myself with a strumpet of a man.”
Those broad shoulders relaxed. “The things you say, Abigail.”
She liked hugging him this way, liked exploring the odd contour of male chest hair, muscle, ribs, and even nipples without being able to see any of it. She paused on a happy sigh, in charity with a life that a half hour ago had seemed endlessly bleak.
The bleakness would encroach again, but this night would give Abby at least one torch to hold up against that darkness.
“Is madam quite finished having her way with my person for now?”
Madam was barely getting started. Abby let Axel go, though. He couldn’t get his breeches off as long as she was plastered to him.
“Have I told you, Mr. Belmont, how much I admire your patience?”
He stood and faced the bed, his breeches lo
ose about his hips. Abby climbed under the covers and realized he was waiting for her to dart a glance his direction. He pushed his breeches off, paused for a deliberate, unblinking moment, then bent to toss them onto the pile on the chest.
Anger and bravado had inspired Abby to proposition Axel into intimacies, as had a sense that if she did not seize this moment, she might become the woman Gregory had tried to paint her—spineless, retiring, fragile, and dull.
With one small moment of naked silence, Axel had recast the nature of the encounter. A gentleman would never impose on a lady, but a lover, a bruised veteran of his own private battles, could offer his trust.
And in that moment, much to Abby’s relief, the shadows on her heart receded. Her deceased family, the murder investigation, marital betrayals, and fortunes squandered ceased, for a time, to hold sway in her mind.
Widows were permitted to dally discreetly, that was a universal truth, whether Miss Austen had ever acknowledged it as such.
“Come to bed,” she said, holding out a hand. “Please, rather. Axel Belmont, won’t you please come to bed?”
The mattress dipped, and for the first time, Abby found herself sharing a bed with a lover.
Truly, Axel’s academic calling was genuine, if he could not recall the last time he’d been intimate with a woman. He’d given up house parties years ago—polite orgies for the most part, and a high price to pay for a peek at some viscount’s conservatory, or an earl’s gardens.
He would never forget this night with Abigail.
He’d withdraw, of course. He’d become frightfully adept at withdrawing. The boys had come so close together, he’d been determined Caroline would not be burdened with another pregnancy until she was demanding more children of him as only Caroline could demand.
Axel sank onto the bed and, as naturally as he pulled on a favorite riding jacket, drew Abigail into his arms.
It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 16