His father flinched at the question. Appointment to the Council had been Greve Danfey’s ambition, denied him due to a misstep in his youth. Never reconciled to the blunder, he was both proud and resentful of his son’s success.

He’ll not admit it, but I’ve surpassed him. Therein lies the seed of all his caution and rancour. And were he not my father I would rip out his meanness by its roots.

“My lord?” he persisted. “Have I not honoured you with that?”

“Yes, and I’ve already praised you for it,” his father muttered. “Don’t look for me to repeat myself. Besides, it would be of more use if you’d barter the honour into a taking of marriage vows. Perhaps I’d live longer if I had before me the timely prospect of your heir.”

Morgan bit his lip. Unkindness piled upon unkindness, and no way to portion all blame to his father’s poor health. This was an old wound rubbed to new rawness by recent events.

“My lord, I but learn the lessons you would teach,” he said, goaded enough to indulge in a little unkindness of his own. “Fathers with eligible daughters do not care to be flattered into submission. Nor are they vulnerable to the demands of a man so lately come into Council prominence. Given past Danfey indiscretions, a touch of circumspection cannot go astray.”

Another flinch as his father noted the barb. “And too much circumspection can run you to ground. In learning from my mistake, best you not make one all your own.”

“My lord—”

“Morgan,” said his father, fastening thin fingers to his shoulder. “You are thirty-six, unmarried, and you have no son. Yet here you kneel claiming you respect me. What am I to make of that, when words and deeds stand so far apart?”

The grip on his shoulder was painful, but he made no attempt to shrug his father’s hand free. If Greve Danfey chose to see his only child’s unwed, childless state as a mark of disrespect then what could he say to the complaint? The only answer to satisfy was a wife with a belly full of grandson.

“Morgan, Morgan…” With a sigh, his father released his shoulder and patted his cheek instead. “The girl died fourteen years ago. Will you mourn me as long?”

Luzena, his youthful passion. Eternally preserved in a stone coffin, her beauty arrested out of time. A flower he’d been too reverent to pluck before she was formally his to touch. He’d loved her, brutally. Her death had marred him. His father was cruel to beat him with her memory, but there was no use saying so. In this instance Greve Danfey was the one who’d been ill-used… or so the old man felt.

“Don’t speak of mourning, my lord. Such talk is nonsense.”

“Another insult,” his father said, sour as stale milk. “You’re in fine fettle today, Morgan. But you’re wrong and I’m right and I think I’d rather you smothered me in my sleep and had done with it. A slow death by disappointment is little to my taste.”