“I’ll buy you a drink this evening, Julianne. I think it’s time for us to have a little chat.”
The professor’s words jarred Julia out of her quietude. A thinly veiled expression of terror flashed across her features.
Gabriel grasped her around the waist. “That’s very generous, Katherine, but why don’t you join us for dinner, instead?”
“Thank you, I’d enjoy that. But I’ll speak to Julianne first.” She turned to her former student, her expression kind. “Come and find me after the last lecture and we’ll walk to The Bird and Baby.”
Professor Picton took her leave and was immediately surrounded by several academic admirers.
It took a moment for Julia to regain her composure, but when she did, she leaned against Gabriel.
“I’m so embarrassed.”
“I’m sorry Katherine interrupted when she did. I would have liked to say a few words.”
Julia began wringing her hands. “I never should have answered Christa. We should have walked away.”
Gabriel’s expression tightened. He looked around, then brought his mouth close to her ear. “You stood up for yourself, which was the right thing to do. And I’m not going to stand there and let her call you a whore.”
“If we’d walked away, she wouldn’t have gotten that far.”
“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 fucked a different woman every night. Sometimes fucking more than one in a single Scotch-soaked evening. Sometimes fucking 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.