Axel by Grace Burrowes Page A

you?”
    “After such a performance, I know you need sustenance more than ever. Will you join me in the library if I put some of this food on trays?” Every morsel of it, in fact.
    “I will, though you must not badger me to eat. I seldom have much appetite at times like this.”
    Times like…? Axel recalled her furious blush over breakfast.
    “I don’t badger, I merely suggest.” And occasionally lecture. He was capable of exhorting in a pinch, and admonitions were also within his reach. Axel stepped away from her and rummaged in the sideboard for trays, then set about assembling two full plates, cutlery, and glasses of wine.
    When they reached the library, he kept the conversation superficial, reporting on which neighbors had collected hounds from the dispersal of the colonel’s kennel and how the staff fared at Stoneleigh Manor.
    “Shreve is a dithering sort, isn’t he?” Axel asked, as he set the trays on the low table before the sofa.
    Abigail went wandering across the library, though doubtless she’d inspected the entire room.
    “I used to joke to Shreve that Gregory didn’t need a wife when he had such devoted help on his staff. Shreve took his duties very seriously within the manor, and Ambers was Gregory’s trusted shadow out of doors.”
    Ambers, who had dodged or cut short Axel’s every attempt to interview him since the day after the murder. Matthew had said to avoid any show of haste, though, to allow the miscreant a false confidence that no arrest would be forthcoming.
    “Eat your lunch, Abigail, or I will chide you for it.”
    She peered at a sketch Axel had done of swamp roses beside a still pond. “Was that a suggestion? I don’t believe it was.”
    Better
, for her to be chiding him. She wandered back to the sofa, situated herself behind her tray, and speared a braised carrot on the end of her fork.
    “I’m a papa. Perhaps scintillating repartee eludes me because I’ve had to develop such a sure touch with my scolds and chides.”
    Abigail did not make faces at her vegetables before consuming them, unlike Axel’s offspring.
    “You expect me to be grateful that I won’t have children, Professor?”
    Ah. Of course.
“You may yet have children. You are young.”
    “Not that young,” she said around at bite of carrot. “I will mourn for anywhere from one to three years, two at least, at which time I will be thirty. Thirty is old for a woman, quite old to start a family.”
    She ate more when Axel disagreed with her, and on this topic, he could offer a genuine difference of opinion.
    “If you truly wanted a child, you could marry next week and have a baby by Christmas, God willing. Once you become a parent, though, time itself alters. One minute you’re singing every last lullaby you can recall in hopes the little blighter will go to sleep, the next you’re lecturing him about proper deportment at university. Fortunately, when my boys go to university, they’ll be only a couple of hours away.”
    Until such time as Axel became an Oxford fellow himself.
    “Unless they choose Cambridge, Professor Belmont.”
    “Eat your beef, Abigail, and do not commit such sedition in my house again. Cambridge, indeed.”
    She cut off the smallest bite of beef. Dayton and Phillip would have regarded sharing a meal with Abigail Stoneleigh as a form of torture.
    “Speaking of young men,” Axel said. “I’ve mentioned that two of my nephews are in Hilary term and may join us of a weekend. Do not neglect your potatoes, Abigail.”
    She put her fork down. “Another suggestion?”
    A plea, did she but know it. “You are uncomfortable?” She’d eaten about half her food, and that only because Axel had pestered her.
    “Increasingly. Not much of soldier, am I?”
    “You are a widow. Shall I bring the laudanum to your room?”
    “Please.” She winced as she rose, so Axel slipped an arm around her waist and led her to the door.
    “Humor me,” he replied, anchoring his arm more firmly around