In laravel how to pass extra data to mutators and accessors

What I'm trying to do is to append the comments of each article to the articles object, but the problem is that I need to request different number of comments each time.

and for some reason I need to use mutators for that, because some times I request 50 articles and I don't want to loop through the result and append the comments.

So is it possible to do something like the following and how to pass the extra argument.

This the Model:

    class Article extends Model
    {

        protected $appends = ['user', 'comments', 'media'];

        public function getCommentsAttribute($data, $maxNumberOfComments = 0)
        {
            // I need to set maxNumberOfComments
            return $this->comments()->paginate($maxNumberOfComments);

        }
    }

Here is the controller:

class PostsController extends Controller
{


    public function index()
    {
        //This will automatically append the comments to each article but I
        //have no control over the number of comments
        $posts = Post::user()->paginate(10);
        return $posts;
    }    

}

What I don't want to do is:

class PostsController extends Controller
{


    public function index()
    {

        $articles = Post::user()->all();

        $number = 5;
        User::find(1)->articles()->map(function(Article $article) {
            $article['comments'] = $article->getCommnets($number);
            return $article;
        });

        return Response::json($articles);
    }    

}

Is there a better way to do it? because I use this a lot and it does not seams right.