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For long dangerous moments Joshua’s temper simmered on the edge of igniting like a short fuse surrounded by sparks. Gabriele’s instincts told her to be wary. Another confronting challenge would only drive him away from her forever.
That realization took the sting from her voice. Her features softened, and her voice dropped to a whisper.
“Who was it, Joshua?”
Joshua’s face turned blank and bloodless. “What are you talking about?” the snarl was dismissive but also uncertain.
“Who broke your heart?” Gabriele asked. “What was the name of the woman who made you into the man you are? What did she do to you to make you shut yourself off like this?”
Joshua’s features turned hard as stone. His eyes went black. The blood drained from his face. “Get out.”
Gabriele stood her ground but it was fear, not defiance that rooted her feet to the spot. Joshua’s sudden cold emotionless tone was so disconnected from the heat of their blazing argument that it frightened her. She swallowed down her panic and lifted her chin in silent defiance.
“I said get out!” Now the anger broke through the stony façade. Joshua’s voice rose sharp and barking. He went to the bathroom door and flung it crashing back on its hinges. “Get your clothes and get out of the house, Gabriele. Now!”
“I can’t,” Gabriele broke down in tears. She was shaking her head slowly from side to side.
Joshua was seething. Gabriele had dragged him to the darkest corner of his soul – a place where he didn’t want to be; a place that felt like Hell itself.
“Get out before I throw you out.” His face was stern, his jaw clenched tight, and his eyes were terrible.
Gabriele slowly shook her head. She was crying uncontrollably, her hand clamped across her mouth, her eyes dark wells of dread and stricken despair. She felt her knees go weak but she stood her ground, swayed before the storm of Joshua’s temper but unwilling to be driven away.
“Why are you angry at me?” she asked in the small voice of a confused and innocent victim.
“Because it’s easier!” Joshua snapped before he could bite back the impulsive admission. He was shaking with his anger, and it knotted the muscles in his jaw. “Because it’s easier to drive you away and to make you hate my guts than it is to open myself up to another chance to be hurt.”
“You want me to hate you?”
“Yes!” Joshua roared. His face was swollen red and mottled. “As much as I hate myself.”
His voice echoed in the sudden profound emptiness. Joshua seemed stunned by his own words, mortified into shock. For a long moment he stared angry-eyed into space, and then he threw back his head as though struck by a mortal blow. His face twisted into a mask of raw pain as his grief rose to the surface, and then he slumped against the nearest wall, numb. Slowly, very slowly, the expression on Joshua’s face began to alter. It turned neutral; blank. The life seemed to die in his eyes as his gaze turned inwards, back into the dark agonies of his past.
Gabriele waited in the silence, not daring to speak or even move. She watched Joshua fighting his own secret war in dreadful fascination and, though her heart went out to him, she knew she could only wait. She bit her lower lip between her teeth as the silence drew out.
The anger seemed to slowly seep from Joshua’s body. He closed his eyes. The tension went out of his shoulders and then the taut strain in his face softened until his features turned sad and wretched. He buried his hands deep into the pockets of his pants, braced against the bathroom wall as though he needed it for support.
“I gave up on love three years ago,” Joshua said at last. “On the day my wife disappeared.”
Gabriele went pale and cold with shock. “I… I didn’t even know you had been married.”
Joshua nodded his head, and his voice turned darker and heavy. “Her name was Jan. We got married when we were young, and we struggled like all couples do. But we were happy. I had just joined the Navy. Jan was studying to be a lawyer. We didn’t have much, but somehow that early adversity made us appreciate the little things even more.”
“And then she left you, Joshua?” Gabriele asked softly.
Joshua shook his head. “No.”
“But you said she disappeared…”
Joshua’s voice turned bitter in an instant. “She drowned,” he said as though the cruelty of it still could not be reconciled. “I was on the way back from a fleet operation. We lived near the naval base. Jan went to the beach one day with a girlfriend,” he shrugged in helplessness. “She went into the surf but didn’t come out.”
Gabriele clamped her hand over her mouth in gasping shock. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
Joshua seemed not to even hear her. He was gazing into space, talking now in a flat monotone that was scrubbed of all emotion. “The local police swept the beach and helicopters flew a search for her body, but she was never found,” Joshua said. “When I got back to the base, I resigned from the service and spent the next three weeks walking that stretch of sand, hoping against hope that she would just suddenly turn up,” he shrugged as though in hindsight his actions had been pointless. “But she didn’t.”
Joshua pushed himself away from the bathroom wall, shoulders hunched, his head hung low with his grief. “I resigned my commission. Somehow I couldn’t bear the thought of being anywhere near the ocean again – not after it had taken Jan from me.”
“I understand,” Gabriele’s voice was small.
Joshua felt the prickle of tears at the corners of his eyes, and he blinked them away. He had wept with futility so many times over the years. Now he choked down the rising lump of emotion that was jammed in his throat and turned his eyes on to Gabriele.
“I couldn’t even mourn her loss properly,” he said lamely. “There was no body to bury, no gravesite to visit with flowers. No closure. The ocean took her from me and gave me nothing but photos to remember her by.”
Gabriele said nothing. She was wringing her hands, empathetic to Joshua’s pain.
“It broke me,” Joshua confessed. His eyes became hard and haunted, his features ravaged by his rising grief. “While I was pacing that beach, looking for Jan and hoping against all hope, I swore I wouldn’t make myself so vulnerable ever again, Gabriele. I swore I would never care for anyone or fall in love with anyone else – because I’d seen first-hand how painful loss can be. I decided I was going to harden my heart and keep people at a distance. I vowed that no one else would ever get so close that I would hurt if they left…. or were taken from me… because I never wanted to feel that agony of Jan’s loss again.”
“Is that when you became a Master?”
Joshua blinked, and with a supreme force of will, he pushed aside the despairing memories of his wife’s disappearance. His focus came forward into the more recent past.
He shrugged. “Jan and I had lived the lifestyle since our early days together. She was naturally submissive, and I guess I was instinctively dominant. We explored the roles with each other because you don’t just decide to be a Master. It takes a deep understanding of people, their thresholds and their emotional reactions to different situations. But I became good at it. It was natural. Jan let me make my mistakes on her,” he gave a wistful fond smile at some fleeting moment of distant joy. “So after retiring from the Navy, I began to train women because I imagined what might have happened to Jan if she had chosen the same life-path but hadn’t found me. I pictured her being punished into obedience at the hands of some fucking thug and that thought inspired me. It’s still why I do what I do.”
“Have you ever come close to…?” Gabriele found she couldn’t continue. She didn’t need to. Joshua sensed the direction of her question. His face turned hard.
“I was perfect for the role. I stayed cold, remote and detached. No one got past my guard. No woman was ever able to reach me on an emotional level. It was purely physical. Every woman was a body and mind to be trained, pleasured… and to please.”
“Until me?”
&n
bsp; Joshua nodded guiltily. “Until that kiss.”
“And that’s why you…”
“It’s why you have to go,” Joshua’s mind came slamming back to the present like he had been awakened from a sad tormented nightmare. The brief glimpse that Gabriele had stolen through the door to his soul was hammered shut in an instant. She sensed the return of Joshua’s grim anger looming like a dark storm about to break.
“Please! Don’t shut me out, Joshua. Don’t blame me…”
“Get out, Gabriele. Now.”
Gabriele flinched, but didn’t move. She felt herself on the verge of more hopeless tears.
“Now!” Joshua shouted. It was a sound of mingled pain and anger.
Gabriele took short gasping gulps of breath She was trembling. The sudden transformation in Joshua had been terrifying. Against all her instincts; against her senses that screamed for her to flee down the stairs – Gabriele slowly lowered herself back to her knees, a silent plea in her huge tear-filled eyes as she defied Joshua’s command. “I’m sorry but I won’t go. I won’t give up.”
“Get out!” Joshua growled like he was hurting.
Gabriele lowered her head, submissively and clasped her hands behind her back. She was trembling, shivering. A tear rolled down her cheek and clung to the defiant line of her jaw.
“Get on your feet. Our arrangement is ended. Training is over.”
“No,” Gabriele shook her head slowly. “I’m your submissive, Joshua. You are my Master. You have made me yours. It was in your kiss. I just can’t leave and pretend it never happened because it did. And it changed me. I must finish my training.”
Joshua felt his rage become formless. He would never strike a woman in anger. It defied his moral code; it railed against everything he believed in as a man and a Master. But his sense of righteousness left him powerless to physically force Gabriele out of his home. His anger bloomed and then thrashed about the walls of his mind with no outlet for release. At last it reformed into bitter frustration.
