“Sir Dewey, you must agree that Mrs. Stoneleigh’s well-being takes precedence over all other considerations. I have an obligation to the king to solve Stoneleigh’s murder, but nothing less than honor itself requires that a bereaved widow be kept safe.”
Sir Dewey’s gaze lingered on the nearly empty tea tray. “There’s talk at the Weasel, you know. Nothing malicious, but not the sort of talk anybody likes to hear regarding a lady.”
Matthew plucked the last lavender tea cake from the tray before getting to his feet. “Talk about Mrs. Stoneleigh?”
“She’s thriving in Mr. Belmont’s care,” Sir Dewey said, “or in Mrs. Turnbull’s. Most are of the opinion that the professor should add her to his permanent collection of hothouse fancies.”
Doubtless, that was putting the sentiment euphemistically.
“Let any man who so maligns a woman tried by grief apply to me,” Axel said, wanting to slap a glove across Sir Dewey’s elegant mouth. “I’ll instruct him most—”
“Axel,” Matthew said, a bit too heartily. “The good folk simply mean you should marry her.”
“I am almost through with Grandpapa’s journal,” Abby said, leaning in to sniff a lovely pink blossom. “I want to savor the pages remaining, though they document a man in fading health. He and Mr. Brandenburg had some grand adventures as younger men.”
Axel had been in his glass house long enough to have taken off his jacket and turned back his sleeves, likely in preparation for a long afternoon of rearranging his potted trees. His hands were dirt-stained already too.
“I’d like to read that journal, Abigail.”
He’d taken her in his arms without Abby needing to ask, and when he’d turned loose of her, Abby hadn’t clung, though she’d wanted to.
“I’ll leave it with you when I return to Stoneleigh Manor.”
Axel turned away abruptly, as if the stout, thorny bush beside him—the grafting stock he referred to as the Dragon—had whispered unexpectedly.
“I cannot guarantee your safety if you return home now, Abigail. The killer is at large, and possibly more motivated than ever to do you harm.”
They needed to have this argument, but did they need to have it now?
“I have never seen a rose with as many thorns,” she said. Great, nasty, sharp prickles studding the stems at close intervals. “You think Shreve is the killer?”
Axel took off a thorn by virtue of simply peeling it aside. “He could be. He was early on the scene, and somewhat in the colonel’s confidence. Bequeathing a valuable collection of snuff boxes to a servant doesn’t make sense to me.”
He gently peeled another thorn aside.
“Shall I help?” Abby asked. “I can work on this side while you take that one?”
“I remove only a few at a time. Each lost thorn creates a wound, and every wound is an opportunity for disease to seize hold of the plant. But for the thorns, this is a vigorous fellow, and he takes grafts magnificently.”
Abby had interrupted the work that mattered to Axel. Investigating murder was a matter of duty, but these roses were his passion.
“Tell me about grafting.” She could ask later if Sir Dewey’s second interview had yielded any insights.
“Shall we sit? Grafting is a simple process, the breeding not much more complicated. I can make you a few sketches. A devotee of the rose needs mostly patience and persistence to succeed, and a bit of luck.”
What did a magistrate need to succeed? Or a man?
They repaired to the area before the hearth, the warmest part of the glass house, also the side of the building away from both the manor house and the stables. The second glass house sheltered this exposure from view, not that anybody should be peeking.
One could not be tense in this place. The soft air, the fragrance of the plants, the quiet, the lovely foliage all conspired against worry.
One could be sad, though. Like the blooms here, Abby’s dalliance with Axel would apparently be a fleeting pleasure. Lovely beyond description, but too soon over.
“Did Sir Dewey upset you?” Axel asked as Abby took the rocking chair.
He took the seat at the table, but turned the chair, so he and Abby were nearly knee to knee.
“In a way, yes. He said I seemed to be bearing up well, which I took for a genteel acknowledgment that I’m recovering my health. He couldn’t very well say I look happy to be widowed, but he was concerned for me.”
Axel looked at his hands, the fingers of which were stained brown with dirt, though around his right thumbnail, the cuticle was green.
“His concern upset you? He was knighted for bravery, Abigail, and he’s wealthy.”
“If you try to matchmake, that will upset me more.”
The next thing Abby knew, soft lips were pressed to hers. An apology, perhaps. “You are in mourning. Did you know that the law regards any child born to a widow for a year after her husband’s death as her husband’s legitimate issue?”
The breeder of roses was making a point of some sort. “Children do not take a year to be born.” Abby knew that. Any adult woman knew that.
“They take something under ten months in the normal course. Some come in less than nine months. Lawyers do not give birth, so we can ascribe their error to ignorance. Nicholas thinks the law allows a new widow a period of sexual permissiveness without penalty, or a time when she might take measures to conceive an heir for her deceased spouse through expedient means.”
Another kiss, which only muddled Abby’s ability to follow whatever profundity the professor was preparing to launch at her.
“I don’t want Sir Dewey,” Abby said, trapping Axel near with a hand to his nape. Sir Dewey was another soldier, and Abby had been married to one of those already, with disastrous results. “I want you, and I know I should not have disturbed you here, but soon I will return to Stoneleigh Manor—I must, Sir Dewey alluded to talk—and you will take up your duties at Oxford, and all will be—”
Axel was out of his chair before Abby grasped his intent. He scooped her from the rocker and carried her to the worktable.
“Do you know why I went tearing into town yesterday, ready to wreak havoc on lying solicitors and fraudulent ghosts?”
Abby’s bum landed on the worktable, and Axel stood between her spread knees. “So you wouldn’t have to face me over breakfast, the maid bringing the fresh teapot, and all that, that… intimacy between us.”
His hands, warm and callused, traced the sides of her neck, his thumbs brushing over her cheeks.
“You are daft if you think I was avoiding you, Abigail. I had to walk past your door to leave my room. A drunk forgoes his gin, a lotus-eater his opium, more easily than I passed your door. I fixed my gaze on the newel post at the top of the stairs, the one fashioned in the form of a closed tulip blossom. This put in my mind the image of the male breeding organ happily prepared to fulfill its intended office. I marched down the corridor, one hand on the wall, my eyes closed, until I passed your door. I’m lecturing.”
Babbling, more like. Abby was so pleased with Axel’s disclosure, she urged him closer with a hand on each sleeve.
“I dreamed of you again,” she said. “Wicked, wonderful dreams.” The best dreams, some of which she suspected weren’t dreams, but rather, memories. Axel’s hands tracing over her back and shoulders, the rhythm of his breathing as she lay in his arms.
His kisses were wilder here among the lush green plants. He hauled Abby to the edge of the table as easily as if she were a potted peach tree, and wedged himself against her. Desire punched through her, a sharp prick of pleasure and longing.
“My skirts,” she muttered against his mouth.
He drew back far enough to press Abby’s forehead to his shoulder. “Now, Abigail? Here? Are you sure? One wants to be considerate, and I was less restrained previously than—”
He’d been passionate. Wonderfully, unashamedly, passionate, and so had Abby.
“You are more yourself here than anywhere else,” she
said between kisses. “You’re happy, we have privacy, and the roses won’t mind.”
Axel apparently did not need convincing. Abby’s skirts were soon frothed above her knees, his falls were undone, and bliss beckoned with every stroke of his fingers over her intimate flesh.
“Can you come like this?” Axel whispered.
“Mmm.” Which meant she could. Thanks to her own curiosity, books, persistence, and a stout lock on her bedroom door.
And then she did. Axel knew exactly when to cease his caresses and instead drive two slick, blunt fingers into her heat. What he did with those fingers inspired Abby to soft moans, clinging, bucking, and to insights—when she could again think—into why the artificial phallus figured prominently in some of the erotic woodcuts that had made the least sense to her previously.
Axel’s kisses gentled, and he kept his fingers hilted inside her.
“If you move,” Abby said, “at all, the merest twitch, I will not answer for the consequences.”
His smile was devastatingly sweet and beyond naughty. He wiggled, he twitched, he teased, he drove her up and over every inhibition, until Abby was braced back on her hands, panting, her hair coming undone, and her body that of a happy, well-pleasured stranger.
“We are not finished,” she said. “Nobody leaves this glass house without finding his pleasure, Axel Belmont.”
“Your bottom—”
She grabbed him by his cravat. “When you lecture me, I grow amorous. Lecture me about my bottom, why don’t you?” She gave his derriere a firm squeeze.
“Do that again, Abigail. As hard as you like.”
She squeezed, he pushed forward, and anything resembling thought fled Abby’s grasp. She’d tried to learn the mechanics of breeding roses by studying a manual earlier in the day, and found the whole business too sexual.
The seed rose wept a sticky exudate when ready to receive the pollen rose’s offerings; the pollen rose was stripped nearly naked of petals, the better to present the precious pollen for collection.
Those words and images collided with Axel’s steady, relentless loving, and submerged Abby in a pleasure bordering on insensibility. She felt the moment of Axel’s surrender, felt the instant when their joining grew so intimate that they became a single entity, suspended in a limitless, perfect passion for each other.
As the incandescent pleasure faded to a hot glow, and then something gentler still, Axel did not leave her. Abby had the sense he could not. Words tried to coalesce in her mind.
Unique. Precious. Hold me. Help. Axel.
Love.
Axel kissed her brow, stood tall, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders.
Was this how the bud felt when torn from its own stem and wrapped tightly to the sturdy graft stock? Utterly bereft of identity save for the sheltering generosity of the rooted plant? Willing to reach past the most wicked thorns if a glimpse of the sun meant the joining could become perpetual?
Axel kissed her again, left cheek, right check, mouth, then he gently withdrew. He stroked himself almost contemplatively, as if unsure where the experiment might lead, until his head tipped back, his neck corded, and on a soft exhalation, his desire came to its natural conclusion.
Resentment wedged against the pleasure and wonder in Abby’s heart, for that final, silent pleasure should have been shared with her, not withheld in the name of prudence and consideration.
Axel used his handkerchief, then resumed his previous posture, arms around Abby, his warmth once again sheltering her from the cold. The resentment faded, warmth seeped through Abby’s limbs, and rest beckoned. She leaned against her lover, and surrendered to peace.
Chapter Fifteen
Time in the glass house had on several occasions produced for Axel a species of euphoria.
Late at night, working quickly with newly cut rosebuds to preserve them from drying or unnecessary trauma, time often faded. The silence, the delicacy of the work, the pleasure of bringing together two different species to create something stronger… Axel could lose himself in that process until the rising sun alone brought him back to mundane reality.
His grafts were notably successful, and he’d wondered if making the cuts and binding the plants together by night wasn’t part of that success. Making love with Abby had cut him, cut him to his soul, and left him bleeding and new and more at a loss for words than ever.
He’d loved his wife, and he still in some regard loved Caroline’s memory. They’d been young together. They’d started a family together, fought hard with each other though not always well, and in the short space of Caroline’s illness, they’d grieved together too.
Nothing, not any of that profound, unremarkable, precious marital history had prepared him for the lovemaking he’d shared with Abby Stoneleigh. He was not sore, he was wounded by the intensity of the intimacy they’d created.
Abigail, by contrast, had never looked lovelier, her dark braid over her right shoulder, her lips rosy, her complexion flushed, her gaze…
The moment required words, the right words, and Axel hadn’t any to offer. Even no words could be wrong, because clearly, Abigail was prone to fancies, such as that he’d avoid her over the breakfast table, for God’s sake.
“If you take a tray at dinner,” he said, “I will go into a decline.”
With a brush of her hand, she dropped her skirts over boots, garters, stockings, and pale thighs. Axel would miss the sight of those thighs in particular.
“It’s not always like this, is it?” Abby asked, scooting off the table and pushing Axel’s hands away from his falls. She did him up, while he watched and mentally bundled together evidence, intuition, and courage.
“I’ve wondered about something, Abigail.”
“You wonder all the time.” She smoothed his cravat, which was probably torn in three places. “I like that about you. Your imagination is seldom still. I’m the same way, probably because I read too much growing up.”
Axel led her to the hearth, took the rocking chair, and pulled her down into his lap. Some scooting and rearranging of skirts was needed, but they got situated comfortably.
How to approach this? “I’ve been wondering about the colonel’s will. He was lax about many things, but the will was thorough and detailed.”
“He was evil. Of course he’d leave me Stoneleigh Manor, because he expected to outlive me. So generous of him.”
Abby was getting over the first, most vulnerable burst of rage, then. Settling in for a siege of well-earned bitterness.
Axel kissed her temple, a gesture of gratitude for allowing him to approach his inquiry from an oblique angle.
“Gregory provided for Lavinia and Gervaise,” he said. “He made specific bequests, established pensions for those approaching retirement. All very tidy.”
Axel’s own will was that tidy, and Matthew’s was probably a work of lawyerly art.
“You are reminding me that I’ll need a will—I haven’t one, you know—and I must decide what to do with my newly re-acquired wealth. I can’t think about that now.
I want to nap.” She scooted about most distractingly. “I must nap, in fact.”
A desk and a chair in the glass house made sense, but moving a bed in here…?
Axel would find a way. He’d built this glass house to come apart, expand, reconfigure, and disassemble, after all.
“Nap soon, listen now. Stoneleigh made no provision for after-born heirs.” This had bothered Axel the way a new tooth makes the gum sore. For some time, a child might complain of discomfort for no apparent reason, the gum irritated, the mouth tender. Then a sharp point visibly protruded from the child’s gums, and the misery made sense.
Though of course, nobody warned the little fellow’s father of that progression.
Abby nestled closer. “After-born what?”
“When a man dies, his widow might have a child following his demise. As thorough as Stoneleigh—or his lawyers—were regarding the rest of his estate, as young as you are, he would have
made a provision for after-born heirs.”
Abby ceased twiddling the air at Axel’s nape. Axel ceased breathing, for he could barely comprehend the magnitude of the trust she’d shown him.
“I’ve told you Gregory and I were not… entangled. He was getting on, thank God, and he spared me, that is to say, we didn’t—”
“I was your first.” Axel kissed her with all the wonder and sweetness of that revelation, and with a hint of smugness too. “I was also your second.”
The sensation in his heart was like moving down the rows between his failures, all of which he yet loved in some fashion: failure, embarrassment, near miss, disaster, near success, failure… and then coming upon a bloom so beautiful, so impossibly perfect, the fresh wind, good earth, gentle sun, and beaming stars had to have conspired with the most sparkling showers in its conception.
“I was your first lover, ever, Abigail, and you did not tell me, because you rightly supposed I would not have availed myself of your affections had I been aware of your virginity.”
Axel wanted to weep—for sorrow, that Abby would waste such a gift on him, and for joy, that he had been so privileged. Once in his life, he’d been somebody’s first, and he’d not, apparently, bungled that.
For he had been her second too. The experiment had been replicated with verifiable results, writ indelibly in his heart.
“We can talk about that later,” Abby said, “though you allow me to raise another question. I’m not… When I was younger, I wasn’t horrid to look at, I was willing. Gregory was my husband, and at the time I was prepared to be dutiful.”
Axel grasped her question and realized as well that she hadn’t had anybody else to ask, doubtless another intended result of Gregory Stoneleigh’s campaign to keep his wife isolated and ignorant.
“You wonder why Gregory didn’t exercise his marital rights?” This question—or rather, Gregory’s intimate indifference—likely accounted for Axel’s earlier sense that Abby had been hiding secrets. What new widow wanted to admit to a near-stranger that her husband hadn’t consummated the union?
It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 23
