AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Joshua stood impotently behind his desk and watched her go. He hated himself. He despised his cruel need to shatter Gabriele’s hopes and dreams. He gulped down the tumbler of scotch and felt the punishing burn of the alcohol in his throat. It wasn’t penalty enough. He turned to the nearest wall and punched a hole in it, feeling the flesh around his knuckles torn apart and a blinding stab of pain leap along his forearm. It came to him through the numbing anesthetic of the alcohol. Gabriele’s heart-wrenching sobs tormented him and compounded his loathing guilt. He snatched up the folder off the desk and tore it into shreds, then went down the hallway, expecting to find the front door flung open and Gabriele gone into the night.
Gabriele was slumped in a corner of the foyer with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms tightly hugging herself. She had her eyes screwed shut, her head thrown back against the wall, and her face a rictus of dreadful heartbroken pain.
Joshua went to her like he was approaching a timid forest animal.
“Gabriele… I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
She opened her eyes and turned her face to him. The agony and despair in her features plunged at his heart like a knife. “Just tell me why,” she begged him tearfully. “I need to know why.”
Joshua didn’t answer for a long time. He went down on his haunches beside her but his gaze was far, far away. “I told you because I wanted to protect you from yourself,” he said, knowing that it wasn’t a good enough reason for the pain he hand caused, and needing to justify the cruelty. “You were putting yourself through the hell of submission, trying to make yourself the woman that your boyfriend would want… when all the time he was undeserving of you and cheating behind your back.”
She began to sob again. Joshua knew there was only one true answer for what he had done, and he knew too that Gabriel needed to hear it. He drew a deep breath.
“And I did it because when I kissed you last night, I felt the exact same things that you felt. I’m starting to care for you too deeply, and I wanted to drive you away and make you hate me – before it was too late.”
Joshua sat in the darkness for a long time after Gabriele had left for the night. He was in his office, cast in deep shadow, staring out through the bay window, tormented and struggling to come to grips with his feelings.
He sighed into the silence. This was not a place he liked to visit – not a place he had come to often in the past three years. Analyzing and understanding his feelings was like pulling back the flesh of a tender wound and exposing himself to fresh pain.
Joshua shook his head, still struggling to understand how he had developed any feeling at all for Gabriele. She had come to him like so many other women in the past; bright-eyed and filled with a passion for the submissive lifestyle. He had trained too many other women even to remember their faces, let alone their names. And he had remained aloof, professional, and dispassionate with every one of them. None had even come close to the thick armor with which he guarded his heart.
What made Gabriele so different?
Yes, Joshua conceded, she was extremely attractive. She had the figure and features of a model, but below the exterior was a disarming charm because she didn’t realize she was so beautiful. That fact redeemed her from the vanity of so many other women and imbued her with something unique and irresistible.
And yes, he admitted grudgingly – she was brave. He had taught a lot of women, and many of them failed because their fear overwhelmed them. They could never make the gigantic leap across the abyss that required them to shed their own self-image and transform into someone new; someone servile and submissive with a focus on a person other than themselves. Many had fallen by the wayside in the midst of their training because he had challenged them and they had quailed and shrunk away in either embarrassment or humiliation. For many women the appeal of the lifestyle was little more than a passing fad that was found wanting under the first tests. But Gabriele had fought him, and herself. She had stood out from the others because of her resolve and her bravery. Her willingness had won through against every obstacle.
He wondered guiltily whether the kiss had been the moment that had changed everything.
He remembered it still; the softness of her lips and the firmness of her body. The gentle sounds of her passion and the silent scream of her desire for him. The memory was like a wafting scent of perfume forever attached to a significant moment and made unforgettable because of that fact.
Wearily, Joshua pushed himself out of the deep leather chair and made his way to the bathroom. His hand was still seeping blood. He bandaged the swollen, torn flesh… and then made the dreadful mistake of catching himself in the vanity mirror.
He looked like a stranger; the eyes deep set and haunted, the smears cross the ridge of his cheekbones like bruises. Lines around his mouth were cut deep into the flesh, like the freshly chiseled marks of a stonemason. He looked haggard and drawn.
Do you love her?
The question seemed to come from out of the shadowed corner of the room and flash across his consciousness. Joshua checked. He fixed his gaze on his reflection and clutched the edge of the basin as though staring himself down.
No. He didn’t love Gabriele. Not even close. He didn’t know if he would ever love again, but he knew for sure that he wasn’t ready yet.
But he cared about her… and it troubled him deeply. He knew that behind the armor he had shielded his emotions with, was a vulnerable chink. There was something so innocent and open about the woman that it triggered an instinctive protective reaction in Joshua that was ingrained in his nature. The way she had cried unashamedly and bared her soul tugged at an instinct of compassion he thought he had buried and abandoned.
Then another question came from out of the mist, shouted so loud in his mind that he could not ignore it.
What do you fear more than anything else?
Falling in love again.
With that realization, Joshua suddenly knew what he had to do. He had to protect his heart at all costs.
He had to save himself.
He had to end Gabriele’s training.
Gabriele lay on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, gazing blankly at the pattern of shadows made by the city lights through her window.
She didn’t know how to feel. Her thoughts seemed a whirl of emotions, each like a tendril of smoke that she could not cling to long enough to make sense of.
Her eyes were raw and red from crying; she had wept until there were no more tears. Now she felt hollow and somehow aged – as though tonight her youth and innocence had been torn away; torn to shreds.
Try as she might, she couldn’t find it in herself to grieve for the end of the relationship with Randall. The three years she had devoted to him seemed like a heinous sham. She felt betrayed. She felt used. She felt foolish for believing his lies, and for trying to bend herself into the accommodating dutiful girl he had wanted her to be. The effort and the constant eagerness to please him had all been for naught. She was angry that Randall had pushed her to the very brink of suicide. Gabriele shook her head in silent disgust.
Then her thoughts turned to Joshua and the image of his face elicited a whole new set of confused emotions.
His confession had rocked her to the core of her being; taking her by such surprise that all these hours later she was still reeling with the implications and the turmoil.
He had said that he was starting to care deeply for her.
That was what he had said.
She replayed the words in her mind, remembering every detail, from the drawn agonized look in his eyes to the grim set of his mouth. She remembered every inflection of his tone. Then she remembered the moment he had kissed her, and the tumbling sensations and emotions she had felt at that moment, helpless and hungry within the safety of his arms.
Joshua was an enigma she could not understand.
She recognized his reserve even though she could not comprehend his reasoning. And she realized that he was the kind of man who lived h
is life by a strict moral code, and that violating those rules with her had shaken him, perhaps even more deeply than she instinctively understood. Gabriele knew also that a fleeting casual relationship would never appeal to Joshua. He simply wasn’t superficial enough to surrender his standards in exchange for casual sex. Joshua was an ‘all-or-nothing’ man. Gabriele was sure he loved deeply, or not at all.
And Gabriele loved Joshua.
Even in her own mind, the admission sounded like a childish crush without substance. She had known him for such a short time, and yet she could not deny the attraction of the man. She was drawn to his wisdom, his stability, and his sense of right that seemed at such odds in a corrupted world. She was in love with Joshua’s thoughtfulness, and the way he treated her.
Gabriele had no such illusions that Joshua loved her back. He was too complex, too experienced at life to give his heart with the same willingness that compelled her. Joshua was the dark shifting shades of night that she was yet to fully understand, but somehow that made the attraction of him a fascinating mystery that she wanted desperately to unravel.
She was falling in love with a man, and all she could do to keep the flame of her feelings alive was to cling to Joshua, and not let go.
