“Bullshit. She’s already slandering us. You said so yourself.”
Julia’s face was marked by disappointment. “I asked you to stop.”
“And I explained that I wasn’t about to let her speak to you that way.” He clenched his jaw and released it. “Let’s not fight because of that bitch. That’s precisely what she wants.”
“She was spoiling for a fight. And you gave it to her.” Julia glanced around the rapidly emptying room. “Tomorrow I have to stand up in front of everyone, knowing that they witnessed that embarrassing scene.”
“If I’d said nothing, if I’d done nothing, then it would look like I agreed with her.” Gabriel’s voice rumbled, low in his throat.
“I asked you to stop, and you brushed me off.” She gave him a wounded look. “I’m your wife. Not a speed bump.”
She clutched her old Fendi messenger bag and followed the crowd into the lecture theater.
Chapter Ten
Professor Emerson seethed with anger as he watched his wife walk away. He wanted to drag Christa Peterson outside by her hair and teach her a lesson. Unfortunately, based on her seductive behavior when she was his student, she’d probably enjoy it.
(And take photographs for her scrapbook.)
It was not like him to want to strike a woman.
Or perhaps it was. Perhaps it was precisely like him to want to strike a woman. Anger and violence were written in the bone, the product of DNA. Perhaps Gabriel was just like his father.
He closed his eyes. As quickly as the thought emerged, he tamped it down. Now was not the time to think of what he did and did not know about his biological parents.
Gabriel knew he had a temper. He tried to control it but frequently failed. On one such occasion, to his shame, he’d struck a woman.
He was teaching in Toronto. The women were beautiful and sexy; the city was ripe with diversions of music and art. Yet he’d been depressed. Paulina had been to see him and they’d resumed their sexual relationship—again. After every encounter, he’d swear it would be the last time. But every time she put her hands on him, he gave in.
He knew it was wrong. His continued involvement with her was damaging to both of them. But his spirit, although willing, was tied to flesh that was very, very weak.
After she went back to Boston, he began drinking heavily. He became a VIP at Lobby and f**ked a different woman every night. Sometimes f**king more than one in a single Scotch-soaked evening. Sometimes f**king more than one at the same time.
Nothing helped. Haunted by his past, made all the more recent by his few days with Paulina, he felt as if he were one careless moment away from resuming his cocaine habit.
Then he met Ann. They shared an enthusiasm for fencing and fenced a few times at their club, only to retire to a darkened room on the last occasion for a brief but explosive sexual encounter.
Ann Singer promised new, tantalizing diversions. She whispered words of raw, intense pleasure the likes of which he’d never experienced.
He was intrigued. She had the power to drag his mind into his body and keep it there, unable to think or worry. And that was how he found himself in the basement of her town house in Toronto, naked, restrained, and on his knees.
She confused his senses by both pleasing and punishing him. With every strike, all his emotional pain seemed to bleed away. His single errant thought was why had he waited so long to use physical pain to alleviate his mental suffering. But even that thought was soon forgotten.
Then came the humiliation. Ann’s dominance was over the mind, as well as the body. As she bruised his flesh, she sought to break his will.
Gabriel realized what she was doing, and his psyche bristled. He desired physical pain and accepted it, but not psychological manipulation. His mind was f**ked up enough thanks to his past.
He began to resist.
She accused him of attempting to top from the bottom and redoubled her efforts. She retold his life story, spinning a speculative myth based solely on her own armchair analysis. Some of it came perilously close to the truth. And the rest of it . . .
Without warning, something inside him snapped.
Standing in St. Anne’s College, Gabriel couldn’t recall exactly what Professor Singer said that set him off. He couldn’t remember how long the encounter lasted. He only remembered white-hot, blinding fury.
In one swift motion, he broke the restraint on his right wrist (a considerable feat) and backhanded her across the face. Her diminutive form crumpled to the tiled floor.
He stumbled to his feet and stood over her, breathing heavily. She didn’t move.
A door flew open and Gabriel found himself boxing one-handed with her bodyguard, who’d rushed to her defense. Bruised and bloodied, Gabriel was flung outside into the snow, his clothes scattered behind him.