Cecilia had told the man intimate things. If not for his training, a lifetime of being reasonable and invisible, this would push him, shove him to that knife’s edge of reason.
“I’d love to love her, Gantry. You’re lucky I have one foot in the grave.”
“You will quiet, or I’ll push you all the way into the ground and bury you underneath my flower bed.”
“The spy, not-a-spy-retired spy can’t figure out what has happened?”
“I’ll dig the hole so deep and seal your tomb myself. No earthquake will unseal the rock I find.”
The man hooked his cane on his arm, then stretched his hands to the bench. Muscular in his physique, with salt-and-pepper hair, Tramel’s black eyes stared at him. “Son, you get your clever humor from me, you know. I wonder where the stupid comes from. Must be the Gladstone side through my sister. They are a bunch of cowards.”
“I left every service honorably. I only took leave when Elizabeth needed me.”
“Yes, the first-wife-dying excuse. Now you can’t protect wife number two.”
His father knew how to bait Felton. He’d taken everything, every tragedy, even Felton’s surviving the smallpox that scarred him, to belittle him.
Now that Felton had achieved financial independence, the man couldn’t hurt him anymore, or so he thought. He stepped closer to the bench and put up his foot near Tramel. “I’m used to your games, how you make everyone a pawn, but not Cecilia. Why can’t she see who you truly are? An evil, soulless troll.”
“Well, you’re not one to sing my praises.” The man clapped again as if he’d suffered through Jane’s recital. “It’s your wife’s artistic soul. She sees only the best in the world unless circumstances force her to confront the way things are. The poor dear is longing for care, for someone who’ll slay her dragons, who’ll kill for her. I love her. I’ll kill for her.”
The glint in his eyes—his father knew something, but he’d never tell. She’d confided in the very beast, the devil himself, not Felton.
He kicked the bench, jostling it. “If I find out that her tears are your fault, you will pay.”
“I didn’t cause this, but I might be the solution. You think she’ll paint me as a Roman soldier if I give her what she wants?”
It took everything in Felton—all the times that he abstained from fights, all the shots he refused to take to avenge a friend—to temper his spirit and refrain from striking Tramel.
“You’ve visited her so often since I moved my family from Warwick. You put this distance between Cecilia and me. I’ll never forgive you for this.” He pointed to the door. “Get out, don’t come back, ever.”
Tramel arose—tall, thick arms, powerful—and strode to the door. The sound of his cane slapping the patio stones echoed. “I’ll return if Lady Gantry invites me and there’s nothing you can do about it. You should’ve taken the time, my boy, to puzzle out your goddess instead of playing spy in the West Indies.”
“Get out before I finish what Mama couldn’t.”
The smirk dissolved from his father’s face. Felton’s mother was the only one of Tramel’s three wives the man actually cared about.
“Don’t be like me, so consumed with being right, you let all the wrongs in the world pile up. It chokes out the light.”
He unbuttoned his sleeve and prepared to slip on a Toga and do all the begging in the world to get his wife to talk to him and to confess to what was going on with his father and Gladstone. “Choking you is too good and too quick.”
“You’re funnier when you’re not fretful. You don’t realize how badly you’ve done. You’ve lost her. Now both the past and future Duke of Tramel will grow old, alone, and bitter. Ah my father’s revenge.”
“Tramel, you’re already old. Remember that foot in the grave?”
With chuckles falling harder, his father withdrew, but his malevolent laugh lingered long after.
The old man stirred trouble. Felton wasn’t going to lose a thing. He’d let Cecilia settle. When the house emptied and his children went to bed, he’d put on the toga and join Cecilia in her studio.
They’d talk. He would tell her everything, and he’d listen to everything. Any change she needed, he would do. He loved her, and she would know that tonight.
Tapping his foot on the cobblestones, he took another deep breath of the chilly air. Felton and Cecilia were always good at making up.
This time would be no different.
CHAPTER14
FELTON—EMPTYBED
