Axel by Grace Burrowes Read Free Book Online Page B

snowy landscape, though she likely did not see the gray stone walls marching over the bleak pastures and fields.
    “I am… knocked off my pins, Mr. Belmont. I found myself thinking this morning that we hadn’t enough chairs in the formal parlor, because we’d need one for Gregory when the will was read. I expect Gregory to come in to breakfast, kiss my cheek, and tell me how his ride went while he fixes my first cup of tea with twice as much sugar as I prefer. I hear a door slam and think he’s back from the kennels… but he isn’t, and he never will be again.”
    “You can’t prepare for those ambushes.” Nor could Axel have prepared for the urge to comfort this woman with an embrace. “Knocked off one’s pins is a good way to describe the ordeal you face.” Axel settled a hand on her arm, then moved back to the hearth, out of the range of hysterics and temper, both.
    Though if ever a woman had justification for a bout of dramatics, Mrs. Stoneleigh did.
    “The first year is the hardest,” he said. The second was hardest too, in a way, and the fifth as well. “The first spring, the first summer holiday, the first Christmas, the first time you observe all those small rituals alone that you used to observe together.”
    Outside the cozy parlor, flurries danced down on the bitter wind. In deepest winter, Axel had gloried in the hours required in his glass houses, while Caroline had complained about having the boys constantly underfoot and her husband nowhere to be seen.
    “You know you are making progress,” he said, “when you can recall the bad things honestly.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    Telling her this was not disloyal, it was honest, and Abigail Stoneleigh deserved at least that. Axel had the sense that nobody else, not the widows in the churchyard, not Mrs. Weekes, not anybody, would explain this aspect of grieving to her.
    “Six months after Caroline died, I admitted to myself while fishing with the boys, how blessedly quiet it was without their mother along. A fellow could hear himself think and catch some fish, though the very thought made me feel like a cad. I realized then that one day, one distant, unimaginable day, the grief would become manageable.”
    Mostly.
    Mrs. Stoneleigh resumed her seat, and Axel settled beside her, as much fortification as he could safely offer.
    “When I am relieved not to have to smell Gregory’s blasted pipes, that is not a bad thing?”
    Poor woman. The entire house still reeked of the colonel’s fondness for tobacco.
    “It is not. Have a sandwich.” Axel chose one for her, and she took it without any fuss or posturing—a relief, that.
    “I will have to think on this, though we are far, far from the topic of our murderer.”
    Or her lovers.
“We are. Are you comfortable turning the colonel’s correspondence over to me, or shall I read it here?”
    She made a face, probably finding the prospect of Axel running tame in her halls distasteful.
    “Why not sort through it here and take with you what you want to read in detail?”
    “That will suit, but as for the estate books, I’d best look at those on premises.”
    Another grimace, this one around a bite of sandwich. “In some ways, Mr. Belmont, that is more presumptuous than asking about my personal life.”
    Her love life, given how women typically viewed sexual intimacy. “If somebody has embezzled from your accounts, Mrs. Stoneleigh, then they had a motive to murder your husband.”
    An uncomfortable thought intruded: They had a motive to murder Mrs. Stoneleigh now too, if she was about to discover the embezzlement.
    “You are so sure you are correct about the means of death, Mr. Belmont, all you concern yourself with is the motive.”
    Gregory Stoneleigh had not died of a heart seizure or an apoplexy while cleaning his weapon. He hadn’t had the grace to die of a plant-based poison either, which Axel was uniquely positioned to have detected.
    “I saw your husband’s body, and yes, I am convinced