Gabriel's Inferno (Gabriel's Inferno #1)(86)

“Yes, Professor.”

She clutched at the doorknob behind her. It was locked. “I’ll apologize to the class.”

“And expose us to even more gossip? You will do no such thing. Why wouldn’t you talk to me? One phone call. One meeting. I could have spoken to you through a door, for God’s sake. And instead, you finally choose to talk to me in the middle of my f**king graduate seminar!”

“You put a bra in my mailbox…I thought — ”

“Use your head!” he snapped. “If I’d mailed it to you, there would have been a paper trail. That would have been far more incriminating. And I wasn’t about to leave your iPod on your porch in the middle of a rainstorm.”

Julia was confused by his apparent non sequitur but decided not to question him.

“I started this clusterf*ck by changing my lecture, but you finished it, Julianne, and you finished it with the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.

You are not going to drop my class. Clear? You are not going to drop out of the program. And we’re going to pretend this debacle never happened and hope that the other students are too wrapped up in their own lives to notice anything.”

Gabriel fixed her with an impassive look. “Come.” He pointed to a space on the carpet.

She took a few steps forward.

“Have you returned the bursary?”

“Not yet. The chair of Italian Studies has swine flu.”

“But you’ve made an appointment?”

“Yes.”

“So you made an appointment with him, but you didn’t have the courtesy to send me a two word text message when I was desperate to know how you were,” he growled.

Julia blinked.

“You’re going to cancel that appointment.”

“But I don’t want the money, and…”

“You will cancel the appointment, you will take the money, and you will keep your mouth shut. You’ve made the mess; I have to clean it up.”

He glared at her darkly. “Understood?”

Julia held her breath and nodded rather reluctantly.

“The e-mail you sent me was disgraceful, a real slap in the face after all the messages I left you. Did you even listen to my voice mails? Or did you just delete them?”

“I listened to them.”

“You listened to them, but you didn’t believe them. And you sure as hell didn’t answer them. You used the word harassment in your e-mail to me. What the f**k did you hope to accomplish by that?”

“Um — I don’t know.”

Gabriel closed the gap between them, standing only inches from her.

“It’s quite possible that your e-mail has been red-flagged by someone already.

Even if I erase that e-mail, and I did, someone could still find it. E-mails are forever, Julianne. You are never going to e-mail me again. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“You seem to be the only person capable of pushing all of my buttons, and I do mean all of them.”

Julia glanced over at the door, wishing she could fling it open and escape.

“Look at me,” he breathed.

When she met his eyes he continued. “I’m going to have to do some damage control. I just handled Christa, and now I’m going to have to deal with Paul, thanks to you. Christa is a menace, but Paul was a good research assistant.”

Was a good research assistant?

“Please don’t fire Paul. It’s my fault he came to you. I’ll make sure he doesn’t say anything,” she pleaded.

“Is he who you want?” Gabriel’s tone grew glacial.

Julia fidgeted with her book bag.

“Answer me.”

“I tried.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing when I see you in his arms in front of the mailboxes. It doesn’t look like nothing when he knocks on my door, like a knight, ready to fight me to protect you. Why can’t you tell me what you want, Julianne? Or do you only answer to Rabbit?”  Gabriel’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

Julia’s eyes widened in surprise, but she said nothing. She didn’t know what to say.

“Fine. I give up.” He waved his hand contemptuously at the door.

“Paul can have you.”

It took a moment for Julia’s brain to tell her feet to walk toward the door, but eventually it did. She walked with lowered head and hunched shoulders, looking remarkably like a butterfly that had had its wings torn off. But she’d kept her spot in his class, and she hadn’t been expelled. Small consolation for some of the other losses she had just suffered.

Gabriel stood motionless as she fumbled with the door. A whimper escaped her lips as she struggled with the lock. He stepped behind her and reached an arm around her waist to unlock the door, brushing against her left hip. When she didn’t flinch, he leaned closer, bringing his lips to her ear.

“So all of this agony was for nothing?”

She could feel the heat of his body behind her. It radiated from his chest to her shoulder blades. The silk of his bow tie brushed against her hair, penetrating it, until it grazed across the surface of her neck, causing it to explode into goose-pimples.

“You exposed us to malicious gossip for nothing?”