Axel by Grace Burrowes Read Free Book Online

Belmont.” And what were tea cakes with chocolate icing doing on that tray? “I do not recall asking Mrs. Jensen to stock our larder with sweets.”
    “I sent them over.” Mr. Belmont was not apologizing for that presumption either. “When Caroline died, Day and Phil developed a fondness for chocolate. I enjoy it myself.”
    Abby chose a confection and held it out to him. Someday she might be capable of saying the words
when Gregory died
without wanting to clap her hands over her ears and run shrieking from her own home.
    “My thanks.” Mr. Belmont took the sweet from her hand and set it on a plate.
    “The treat provides greater pleasure if you place it in your mouth.” Abby demonstrated with her own tea cake. For the first time since the colonel’s death, she was almost… enjoying herself. Not in the sense of merriment, but in the sense of feeling on her mettle, despite an unsolved murder, bad digestion, and an utter lack of energy.
    Feeling somewhat safe too, as long she had Mr. Belmont to spar with—lowering thought.
    He watched her devour her sweet, his scowl thunderous. Perhaps he was feeling on his mettle too.
    “Have you family, Mrs. Stoneleigh?” he asked when he’d dispatched his tea cake.
    “How is that relevant?”
    “Greed,” he said, quartering an apple with the silver paring knife. “You are now personally wealthy; hence, your heir’s circumstances have improved.”
    He held out a section of apple on the point of the knife.
    “I don’t know as I have an heir.” Which was sad, and also Gregory’s fault, though Abby hadn’t pressed him on the matter. She’d learned not to press him on any matter.
    She plucked the apple from the knife.
    “The Regent will be happy to serve as your heir of last resort. Have you no family whatsoever?”
    “Third cousins, perhaps?” Abby bit into the apple, thinking. “When I was a girl, my grandfather took me to Yorkshire to meet some cousin of his. He was a delightful old fellow, the Earl of Helmsley. His lordship grew flowers over every arable parcel of his estate, or so it seemed to a child. I recall two girls and a boy, his grandchildren. I was older than the girls, but younger than the boy, and he was a boy—nasty business, boys of a certain age, you know? I cannot recall their names.”
    “The last Earl of Helmsley,” Mr. Belmont said slowly, “died this past summer under house arrest for attempting all manner of mischief against his sisters. The title has lapsed, and the estate reverted to the crown long enough to be passed out to some war hero—a duke’s by-blow, I believe. The flowers were famous throughout the realm in their day, though the gardens have long since been neglected.”
    “You know this, how?” Abby asked, because really, what need had a rural squire for such gossip?
    “I read the papers, and I have an abiding interest in ornamental horticulture.”
    Mr. Belmont also lied when it suited him, though not well. He must have a towering
passion
for his flowers to know this sort of trivia.
    “I do not read the papers, much less the society pages. What was your next question?”
    “Have you any lovers?”
    * * *
    “Why do you ask?”
    Color stained Mrs. Stoneleigh’s cheeks, and Axel was relieved to the point of gladness to see a normal reaction from her.
    Duty alone could force him to put such a question to a recent widow. “You might lack the ability to end your husband’s life, but you are an attractive woman, and a man intent on spending the rest of his life with you, on this large and thriving estate, could act rashly.”
    Attractive was a parsimonious word for her beauty, but she’d take offense at anything more honest. She resembled a pale, blown rose, all the more lovely for the delicacy of her appearance.
    She munched a chocolate tea cake into oblivion. “You insult me by suggesting I would play false a husband who provided for me generously when I had neither grandfather nor parents to look after me. You