Axel (34 page)

Abby’s voice floated through the shadows. “I’ll miss you, Axel Belmont.”

He braced himself with both hands on the sturdy porcelain washstand—more cabbage roses. Now would be a fine time to make further impassioned arguments against her leaving and in favor of holy matrimony to the nearest handy botanist.

He dipped a cloth in the cool wash-water and wrung it within an inch of its life.

“I’ll worry about you, madam.”

Silence, then the sound of Abby flipping covers back and batting at the bedclothes.

Axel tried again. “I’ll lecture your staff at length on the matter of your safety. You will eschew solitude, please, until my investigation has concluded. You will rest frequently, napping in the middle of the day if you so choose, and fashioning menus with your cook that appeal to your tastes, however eccentric or unusual those might be.”

He added toothpowder to Abby’s toothbrush, and regarded the desperate, besotted fool in the mirror who silently pleaded with him to shut his stupid mouth.

When his teeth were quite clean, the fool recommenced lecturing. “You will do with Stoneleigh Manor as you please, and I will provide you detailed sketches of some ideas I’ve been cultivating for your conservatory. The space has potential, despite the neglect of its previous owner.”

A shadow moved behind him. When he turned, Abigail stood to his left, her arms crossed, a single braid over her shoulder.

“Even your back is beautiful, Axel Belmont. I’d love to sketch you without clothes. Start my own erotic collection.”

She broke his heart, over and over. “I would not object, provided you allowed me the same privilege.”

Axel expected her to flounce off to bed, though he wasn’t teasing. He did not know how to tease.

Abigail held out her hand. “Before I leave, we’ll lock ourselves in the glass house, and have a sketching session.”

He’d move a bed in there first. “I am your servant in all things.”

Her aroused servant, though Abigail wasn’t shy about her desire. She stopped Axel halfway to the bed and kissed him free of what few wits he still possessed. When he peeled out of his breeches, she unbelted her robe and shrugged—what an elegant, devilish movement—out of her nightgown.

“You jeopardize your health and my sanity,” Axel said, lifting her onto the bed. “But how lovely, to be naked with you.”

That last part just slipped out, and got him Abby’s hand fisted in his hair, holding him still for another kiss as he bent over the bed.

The lovemaking did not go according to Axel’s plan. He’d intended gentle, measured, respectful intimacies with a woman new to passion. He’d been determined to savor and cherish, to add a warm and sweet memory to their small store of shared encounters.

He’d not intended to
be
cherished, to close his eyes the better to feel Abigail’s hands mapping his back, his shoulders, his chest. He’d not planned on her touch reorganizing his awareness of his own body, so he became a creature confused by lust and tenderness in equal abundance.

And she touched him everywhere. Put him on his back and got friendly with his stones, his cock, his thighs and belly. Then the nuzzling began, and Axel nearly spent from the feel of her braid teasing about his parts.

“You have been at my books,” he said. “The ones behind the desk.”

Oh, what a woman could do with the tip of her braid and two inquisitive lips. “I love books. I want to be on top.”

Axel loved books passionately right about then too. “I’m the academic sort, you will have noticed. I esteem a liberal education.” He guided her to her chosen perch, then endured the mortal pleasure of Abigail Stoneleigh learning how to indulge herself with a man so willing to accommodate her, he nearly lost consciousness restraining his own passion.

She leaned forward, flushed and disheveled from her exertions. “When do you have a turn?”

“Any more of a turn, madam, and I’ll be the one needing to nap in the safety of the glass house.”

She swooped in for some more kissing, a skill for which she had a precocious aptitude, particularly when her tongue and her hips synchronized.

“I want you to spend this time,” she said, pinning Axel’s wrists to the pillow. “You said it yourself. The law provides a period of grace, when a new widow is not accountable for sharing her favors. I want that grace.”

She wanted his soul. “Abigail, that is not wise.”

“I will not entrap you. I’ve read the draft of your women’s herbal, and certain tisanes…”

He rolled them rather than roar out that any child of theirs would be his greatest treasure, conceived in love and reared with every advantage—including legitimacy, by thunder.

“You ask too much,” Axel said. “And yet, you ask not nearly enough.”

Abigail was primed to fly, fast and high, and he took advantage of her arousal. When she was keening against his shoulder for the third time, her teeth scoring his flesh, Axel withdrew and spent in a great, shuddering mess on her belly.

That much, he had planned, more or less.

As he hung over her, panting, mind for once without an opening thesis, supporting statement, or even a single corroborative detail, Abby brushed his hair back from his brow.

“I have something to say to you, Axel Belmont.”

Tell me you can’t leave, tell me you want to stay.
“I’m not in any condition to take myself out of earshot.”

“I am proud of you. Proud that Oxford would offer you your pick of the fellowships. Grateful to you for your generous hospitality, and your efforts on my behalf. You have done nothing less than save my life, and I will miss you for the rest of my days and nights. When you grow that thornless rose, nobody will toast your success more sincerely than I.”

He buried his face against her shoulder, lest she watch a grown man struggle with tears. Her fingers winnowed through his hair, her words scraped across his soul.

Gratitude, pride, good wishes… all very lovely. Very precious. For years, he’d longed to have an intimate companion who appreciated what his science meant to him.

God damn the timing, the thorns, the fellowships, all of it.

“Thank you for those kind sentiments,” he said, pushing up onto his arms some moments later. “Stay as you are, and I’ll tend to the mess I’ve created.”

Axel left the bed, but as he twisted a wet flannel halfway to oblivion, he also began composing a reply to the Oxford committee’s offer. Only a draft of course, for a man who’d advised an empress regarding one of the most renowned botanical collections in the world, knew that each cut of the drafting knife had to count, and with all his hopes and dreams hanging in the balance, each stroke of the pen had to count too.

“B
e careful,” Abby said, making no effort to keep her voice down. “They are lawyers, and you are confronting them with irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing.”

Axel drew on riding gloves that Abby suspected would do little to keep his hands warm.

“I will get answers from them, then put them out of business, madam. They will be relieved I stop there, considering the harm their mischief caused you.”

She loved it when he called her madam. “If it starts to snow, you come straight home. Ivan can slip, the same as any other horse.”

Around them, grooms put three horses under saddle, else Abby might have kissed her love on his way.

“Take the key,” Axel said, passing Abby a small, familiar object. “You are not to spend the entire day at Stoneleigh Manor. Face down a few demons, let Matthew have a look around the place, confer with your staff and plan your renovations. Collect up the pipes for Ambers in case he takes a notion to leave before April, but don’t tire yourself out.”

Axel had slept with her previous night, the most glorious, restful, sweet, hours Abby had spent in a bed, ever. She twitched at his scarf, simply as an excuse to touch him.

“You have a clear aptitude for sharing a bed, Professor. I am well rested.”

She was ruined, having learned just how delightful a night spent with an affectionate man could be. Axel had wrapped her in a warm embrace. He’d rubbed her back, massaged her scalp, tucked covers around her just so when her shoulder might have taken a chill.

He’d also awoken ready to pleasure her with a leisurely loving, her back to his front, before he’d stolen away into the pre-dawn darkness.

“You are… You be careful too, Abigail. No disappearing up to the attics unescorted, no investigating the cellars without Matthew. I’ve told him not to let you out of his sight, and I expect your cooperation.”

And yet, Axel would not stop her from taking yet another step in the direction of returning to Stoneleigh Manor, nor did Abby entirely want him to.

She saw Axel to the mounting block—no good-bye kisses with Matthew standing at her side—and settled aboard her mount, determined to make a start on turning Stoneleigh Manor into her home.

“I want to change the name of my property,” she told Matthew, as he climbed on his gray. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“We must ponder possibilities, of course. A few bottles of wine might aid our endeavors. Will you marry my brother?”

This much Abigail knew: If Axel asked, she’d be tempted to say yes, and that would not be fair.

“He has waited years for the letter sitting folded on the desk in the library, Mr. Belmont. He has worked endlessly, earned the respect of his peers across the realm and across the world. A university appointment would be acknowledgment of academic achievements most men could not attain in three lifetimes.”

“All true. My brother is brilliant in his way.”

In the
way
of siblings, Matthew had implied his brother was also somehow not brilliant.

“Axel would not thank you for meddling.” That Matthew Belmont might welcome Abby into the family was a comfort though. Axel might offer, if the alternative was to destroy Abby’s reputation, or put her in harm’s way. “One marriage of expedience was more than sufficient for me. I would not ask a man I care for to undertake another, particularly when the result would be to deny his heart’s desire.”

That
comfort, of knowing Axel could have the recognition he deserved, was rich. A rose with thorns, but beautiful and fragrant, nonetheless.

“So expedience sent the professor straight up the stairs last night,” Matthew mused, “when he’d claimed to be intent on consulting his references regarding the long-term effects of smoking hashish? Interesting.”

“
Straight
up the stairs?”

“Bearing gifts of fruit and flowers, and looking mightily determined. Warms a brother’s heart, to see such a devotion to scholarship in a younger sibling.”

Abby knew not what to say to that, so she cued her mount into a canter, and left the observant Mr. Belmont laughing in her wake.

“Your retirement has just become imminent,” Axel said, jabbing a finger at the papers on the ornate oak table in Handstreet’s conference room. He’d laid Ambers’s and Shreve’s affidavits and a copy of Abigail’s signature next to Handstreet’s so-called power of attorney.

The evidence spoke for itself.

“You purport to have dealt honestly with Mrs. Stoneleigh prior to her marriage,” he went on, “but you did not observe her creating this power of attorney, or even compare her signature with any known examples. You accepted Stoneleigh’s word that these signatures were valid and cheated a young woman out of her fortune.”

Handstreet rose, a bad move from a histrionic standpoint, because he was several inches shorter than Axel.

“You take great liberties with the facts, Mr. Belmont. Mrs. Stoneleigh was grieving, barely an adult, without a friend in the world, depending on shops that teetered on the brink of ruin, and Colonel Stoneleigh took her entire situation in hand. You were not present, he was, and that woman desperately needed his good offices.”

Kicking, even in a choice location, was too good for such a maggot.

“Now you compound your fraud with mendacity, Handstreet. Cassius Pettiflower, who prospers in the book trade to this day, says the businesses were doing well, and always had. He investigated the Pennington family finances in anticipation of offering for Abigail, but was repeatedly turned away by Stoneleigh when he came bearing condolences. He has no reason to dissemble, while you wouldn’t know the truth if it delivered a stout blow to what passes for your cods.”

“You speak ill of the dead,” Handstreet sniffed. “The king’s man, insulting a respected military—”

Axel leaned across the table, treating Handstreet to his best professorial glower.

“I speak the truth regarding the living. You colluded in Stoneleigh’s fraud. You mispresented a young woman’s situation and delivered her into the hands of a scheming, vile, greedy, sick, murderous old man. The statute of limitations has not run, Handstreet, not on the fraud, not on conspiracy to commit fraud, not on conspiracy to commit murder.”

A beat of silence went by, while Handstreet’s gaze dropped to documents which proved his wrongdoing three time over.

The solicitor crumpled into a chair, a legal hot-air balloon losing its wind. “Murder, Mr. Belmont?” Handstreet tugged at his cravat, as if somebody had tightened a noose around his fat neck.

Axel stuffed the documents—including the fraudulent power of attorney—into his saddlebag.

“Mrs. Stoneleigh is recovering from poison administered repeatedly by her husband’s hand. You put her in the colonel’s care, knowing he’d cheat, lie, steal, and otherwise break the law for his own purposes. How long did you think he’d wait before conveniently assuming the role of sole heir to the Pennington fortune?”

Handstreet turned a mottled red. “Murder, you say?”

“Murder, from a proximity and position of trust you alone made possible.”

Handstreet filled the chair with his prosperous figure. Oxford boasted excellent tailors, fine bootmakers, skilled jewelers, all of whom he apparently patronized. No less than three watch chains stretched across his belly, and a gold ring winked on the smallest finger of his left hand.

Crime paid, as Matthew often observed. Crime could pay very well.