Gareth looked up at the sound of the butler’s voice. As always, Guilfoyle spoke in flat sentences, never queries.
“Your father will see you now,” Guilfoyle intoned. “He is in his study.”
Gareth nodded at the aging butler and made his way down the hall toward his father’s study, always his least favorite room in the house. It was where his father delivered his lectures, where his
father told him he would never amount to anything, where his father icily speculated that he should never have had a second son, that Gareth was nothing but a drain on the family finances and a stain on their honor.
No, Gareth thought as he knocked on the door, no happy memories here.
“Enter!”
Gareth pushed open the heavy oak door and stepped inside. His father was seated behind his desk, scribbling something on a sheet of paper. He looked well, Gareth thought idly. His father always looked well. It would have been easier had he turned into a ruddy caricature of a man, but no, Lord St. Clair was fit and strong and gave the appearance of a man two decades younger than his fifty-odd years.
He looked like the sort of man a boy like Gareth ought to respect.
And it made the pain of rejection all the more cruel.
Gareth waited patiently for his father to look up. When he didn’t, he cleared his throat.
No response.
Gareth coughed.
Nothing.
Gareth felt his teeth grinding. This was his father’s routine—ignoring him for just long enough to act as a reminder that he found him beneath notice.
Gareth considered saying, “Sir.” He considered saying, “My lord.” He even considered uttering the word, “Father,” but in the end he just slouched against the doorjamb and started to whistle.
His father looked up immediately. “Cease,” he snapped.
Gareth quirked a brow and silenced himself.
“And stand up straight. Good God,” the baron said testily, “how many times have I told you that whistling is ill-bred?”
Gareth waited a second, then asked, “Am I meant to answer that, or was it a rhetorical question?”
His father’s skin reddened.
Gareth swallowed. He shouldn’t have said that. He’d known that his deliberately jocular tone would infuriate the baron, but sometimes it was so damned hard to keep his mouth shut. He’d spent years trying to win his father’s favor, and he’d finally given in and given up.
And if he took some satisfaction in making the old man as miserable as the old man made him, well, so be it. One had to take one’s pleasures where one could.
“I am surprised you’re here,” his father said.
Gareth blinked in confusion. “You asked me to come,” he said. And the miserable truth was—he’d never defied his father. Not really. He poked, he prodded, he added a touch of insolence to his every statement and action, but he had never behaved with out-and-out defiance.
Miserable coward that he was.
In his dreams, he fought back. In his dreams, he told his father exactly what he thought of him, but in reality, his defiance was limited to whistles and sullen looks.
“So I did,” his father said, leaning back slightly in his chair. “Nonetheless, I never issue an order with the expectation that you will follow it correctly. You so rarely do.”
Gareth said nothing.
His father stood and walked to a nearby table, where he kept a decanter of brandy. “I imagine you’re wondering what this is all about,” he said.
Gareth nodded, but his father didn’t bother to look at him, so he added, “Yes, sir.”