“Professionally mean?”
Gabriel stood still and scowled.
“Fine. I’ll take the money for Julia, and I’ll buy her a briefcase. But I’d rather buy her shoes.”
Gabriel sat back on his bar stool. “Shoes?”
“Yes. What if we were to buy her something to wear? She likes pretty things, she just can’t afford them. And she’s cute, don’t you think?”
Gabriel twitched beneath his gray wool trousers. He brought his thighs closer together to hide the disturbing fact from his sister.
“Spend the money on whatever you like, but you must replace the book bag.”
“Good! I’ll buy her something fabulous. But I’ll probably need more money…and we should take her somewhere special so she can show off her new clothes.” Rachel batted her eyes playfully at her older brother.
Without argument or negotiation, he removed a business card from his wallet, picked up his Montblanc fountain pen, and slowly unscrewed the cap.
“Do normal people still use those kinds of pens, or just medievalists?” She leaned over inquisitively. “I’m surprised you’re not using a quill.”
Gabriel frowned. “This is a Meisterstück 149,” he said, as if that should mean something.
Rachel rolled her eyes as he used his sparkling eighteen karat gold nib to write a brief note on the back of his business card in a confident but old-fashioned hand. Her brother was beyond pretentious.
“There.” He slid the business card across the counter. “I have an account at Holt Renfrew. Show this to the concierge, and he will direct you to Hilary, my personal shopper. She’ll place everything on my account. Don’t go completely mad, Rachel, and you can keep the cash for yourself. Happy Birthday, six months in advance.”
She leaned over to press a light kiss to his cheek. “Thank you. What’s Holt Renfrew?”
“The Canadian Saks Fifth Avenue—they have everything. But you must replace the book bag. That’s all I care about. The rest are just…inconsequential details.” His voice sounded gruff all of a sudden.
“Fine. But I want you to explain why you’re so agitated about an L. L. Bean knapsack. All the undergrads had one. I had one, for crying out loud. Before I grew up and discovered Longchamp.”
“I don’t know.” Gabriel removed his glasses and began rubbing his eyes.
“Hmmm. Should I add lingerie to my shopping list? Do you like her—like her?” Rachel grinned annoyingly.
He snorted. “How old are we, Rachel? Remember, she’s my student. It isn’t about romance—it’s about penance.”
“Penance?”
“Penance. For sin. My sin.”
Rachel snorted. “You really are medieval. What sin have you committed against Julia? Apart from being a jackass! You don’t even know her…”
He replaced his glasses, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He was twitching at the mere thought of sin and Miss Mitchell. Together. In the same room. With him. And nothing else…except perhaps a pair of couture stilettos…which he could finally touch…
“Gabriel? I’m waiting.”
“I don’t need to confess my sins to you, Rachel. I just need to atone for them.” He snatched the magazine out of her hand.
She set her teeth. “How good is your French? And your knowledge of women’s fashion?”
Gabriel glanced down to find the magazine open to a photo of an airbrushed and spread-eagled model wearing a très petite white bikini. His eyes widened.
Rachel crossed her arms in annoyance and glared at him. “Don’t bark at me. I’m not one of your students, and I’m not going to put up with your shit.”
He sighed and began to rub his eyes again, minutely adjusting his glasses to do so.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, returning the magazine, but not before he gave the model one more serious look, purely for research purposes, bien sûr.
“Why are you wound up so tight? Are you having girl troubles? Do you even have a girl right now? When was the last time you had one? And by the way, what’s with those photos in your…”
He interrupted her quickly. “I’m not having this conversation with you. I don’t ask who you’re fucking.”
Rachel bit back an angry response and took a very deep breath. “I’m going to forgive you for that remark, even though it was insensitive and crass. When you’re down on your knees making your penance, include the sin of envy, will you?
“You know I’ve only ever been with Aaron. And I think you know that what we do together goes way beyond what you said. What’s wrong with you?”
Gabriel muttered an apology and refused to make eye contact. But his warning shot across the bow had accomplished what he wished it to, and that was to divert her attention from one of her questions. So he felt no remorse. Not really.
Rachel toyed with her brother’s business card for a moment as she tried to calm down.
“If you don’t like Julia, then you must feel sorry for her. Why? Is it just because she’s poor?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed and shook his head.
“Julia brings out the protective side in people. She was always a little sad and a little lost. Although make no mistake, she has steel in her bones. She survived an alcoholic mother and a boyfriend who…”
Gabriel’s blue eyes shifted to hers with interest. “Who?” he prompted.
“You said you didn’t want to know about her personal life. It’s too bad, really. If you and she weren’t in a professional relationship, you might have liked her. You might have been friends.”
She smiled at him, testing the waters, but Gabriel kept his eyes on the breakfast bar and began rubbing his chin absently.
Rachel drummed her fingers on the countertop. “Do you want me to tell her the briefcase and the shoes are from you?”
“Of course not! I could get fired for that. Someone will jump to the wrong conclusion, and I’ll be hauled in before the judicial committee.”
“I thought you were tenured.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered.
“So you want to spend all of this money on Julia, and you don’t care if she knows that they gifts are from you? It’s a bit like Cyrano de Bergerac, don’t you think? I guess your French is better than I thought.”
He stood up, effectively ignoring her, and walked over to the large espresso machine on one of the counters. He began the somewhat laborious process of making the perfect espresso, keeping his back to his annoying sister.
She sighed. “All right. You want to do something nice for Julia. You can call it penance, if you like, but maybe it’s just kindness. And it’s doubly kind, because you want to do it in secret and not embarrass her or make her feel like she owes you something. I’m impressed. Sort of.”
“I want her petals to open,” Gabriel breathed softly.
Rachel dismissed his admission as incoherent mumbling, because she couldn’t believe that he’d said what she in fact heard. It was too bizarre. “Don’t you think you should treat Julia as an adult and tell her the gifts are from you? Let her make her own decision about whether she should accept them or not?
“She wouldn’t accept them if she knew they were from me. She hates me.”
Rachel laughed. “Julia is not the type of girl to hate people. She’s far too forgiving for that. Although if she hates you, you probably deserve it. But you’re right—she doesn’t accept charity. She would never let me buy things for her except on very special occasions.”
“Then tell her it’s for a backlog of Christmas presents from you. Or tell her it’s from Grace.” A meaningful look passed between the siblings.
Rachel’s eyes filled with tears. “Mom was the only person Julia would accept charity from, because she thought of Mom as her mother.”
Gabriel was at her side in an instant and wrapped her in his arms, trying to comfort her as best he could.
In his heart, he knew exactly what he was doing by persuading his sister to buy some pretty, girlish things for Miss Mitc
hell. He was paving hell with energy—buying an indulgence, forgiveness for sin. He’d never reacted this way to a woman before. But no, Gabriel wouldn’t indulge himself with that line of thought. That would serve no purpose, no purpose at all.
He knew he lived in hell. He accepted it. He rarely complained. But truth be told, he desperately wished he could make his escape. Unfortunately, he had no Virgil and no Beatrice to come to his aid. His prayers went unanswered, and his plans for reform were almost always thwarted by something or other. Usually a woman wearing four-inch heels and long blond hair, who would scratch long fingernails down his back while screaming his name, over and over and over again…
Given his current state of affairs, the best that he could do to reform himself would be to take the old man’s blood money and lavish it on a brown-eyed angel. An angel who couldn’t afford an apartment with a kitchen, and who would blossom a little when her best friend gave her a pretty dress and a new pair of shoes.
Gabriel wanted to do more than buy her a briefcase, although he would never admit what he truly wanted; he wanted to make Julianne smile.
While the siblings were discussing penance, forgiveness, and ridiculous abominations of book bags, Paul was waiting for Julia just outside the entrance to Robarts Library, the largest on the campus of the University of Toronto. Although Julia could only guess at this, in the short time in which he had known her Paul had grown quite fond of her.
He was used to having lots of friends, many of them women. And he’d dated his share of both well-adjusted and troubled girls. His most recent relationship had run its course. Allison wanted to stay in Vermont, and be a schoolteacher. He wanted to move to Toronto and study to become a professor. After two years of a long distance relationship, it was not meant to be. But there was no malice—no slashing of tires or burning of photographs. They were friends, even, and Paul was proud of that fact.
But now that Paul had met Rabbit, he began to appreciate how a relationship with someone with whom he shared common interests and common career goals could be very exciting and very fulfilling.
Paul was old-fashioned. He believed in courting a woman. He believed in taking his time. And so he was perfectly content only to build a friendship with the beautiful and shy Rabbit until he knew her well enough to express his feelings. And until he was confident of her regard for him. He was determined to spend time with her and treat her properly and pay her a lot of attention, so that if someone else came along in the meantime and tried to muscle in on him, he’d be close enough to tell that individual to back the fuck off.
Julia was sorry that she would miss out on shopping with Rachel, but she’d already promised Paul that she would spend the day with him at the library. She needed to get started on her thesis proposal now that Professor Emerson had agreed to be her supervisor. She felt more than a strong motivation to perform well in his class and to dazzle him with her proposal, although she knew based upon his previous behavior that she was likely to do neither.
“Hi.” Paul greeted her warmly and immediately slipped her heavy knapsack off her shoulder and transferred it to his. He barely felt its weight on his massive shoulder.
Julia smiled up at him, relieved to be unburdened for a little while. “Thanks for agreeing to be my guide. The last time I was in here I got lost. I ended up in an obscure section on the fourth floor that was entirely devoted to maps.” She shivered.
Paul laughed. “It’s a huge library. I’ll show you the Dante collection on the ninth floor and take you to my office.”
He held the door open for her, and Julia floated by, feeling very much like a princess. Paul had excellent manners, and he did not use them as a weapon. Julia considered how some people, who-would-not-be-named, used manners to intimidate and to control, while others, like Paul, used them to honor and to make others feel special. Very special, indeed.
“You have an office?” she asked, as they flashed their student ID cards at the security guard who sat by the elevators.
“Sort of.” He held the elevator door open, waiting for Julia to enter before he joined her. “My study carrel is next to the Dante section.”
“Can I apply for a carrel?”
Paul grimaced. “They’re like gold. It’s almost impossible to get one, especially as an MA student.”
He read the question in her eyes and hastened to add, “I think MA students are just as important as PhD students. But there aren’t enough carrels to go around. The one I have isn’t even mine—it’s Emerson’s.”
If Paul hadn’t allowed Julia to push the button for the ninth floor, he would have seen her skin turn slightly green and heard her sharp intake of breath. But he didn’t.
Once they arrived on the ninth floor, he patiently guided her through the Dante collection, showing her both the primary and secondary sources. And he watched with delight as she trailed her hand across the spines of the books lovingly, as if she were greeting old friends.
“Julia, would you mind if I asked you a personal question?”
She stood very still, fingering a quarto volume that had a tattered leather binding. She inhaled its scent deeply to keep herself calm and nodded.
“Emerson asked me to pull your file from Mrs. Jenkins and—”
She turned her head to face him, eyes large and unblinking. Oh no, she thought.
He held his hands up to reassure her. “I didn’t read it. Don’t worry.” He chuckled softly. “There’s nothing too personal in those files anyway. Apparently, he wanted to remove something he’d put in there. But it was what he did afterward that surprised me.”
Julia raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to spit it out.
“He telephoned Greg Matthews, the chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard.”
She blinked slowly as she reflected on what he said. “How do you know?”
“I was dropping off some photocopying, and I overheard Emerson on the telephone. He was asking Matthews about you.”
“Why would he do that?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you. He demanded to know why they didn’t have generous enough funding for their MA students. He’s an alumnus of that department, you know. Matthews was the chair when he completed his PhD.”
Holy shit. He was checking up on me? Of course. He wouldn’t believe I actually got into Harvard, just like him. Julia closed her eyes, her fingers clutching the bookshelf for support.
“I couldn’t hear everything that Matthews was saying. But I heard Emerson.”
She kept her eyes closed and waited for the other shoe to drop. She only hoped that Paul would drop it quickly and not directly on her toes.
“I didn’t know that you got into Harvard, Julia. That’s pretty amazing. Emerson asked if you’d really been accepted into their program and how highly you were ranked in their admissions pool.”
“Of course,” she mumbled. “I’m from a small town in Pennsylvania. I went to a Jesuit university of about seven thousand students. How could I get into Harvard?”
Paul frowned. Poor Rabbit. That sick fucker really did a number on her. I should seriously kick his ass. And then I should go to work on him…
“What’s wrong with Catholic schools? I did my undergrad at St. Mike’s in Vermont, and I got a great education. They had a Dante specialist in the English Department and a Florentine specialist in History.”
Julia nodded as if she heard him. But she hadn’t really.
“Listen, you haven’t heard the whole story yet. The point is that Matthews tried to persuade him to send you back for your PhD. Said you were very highly ranked. That’s pretty good, considering the source. I applied to that department and was rejected outright.” He smiled somewhat half-heartedly, not knowing how she would react to that piece of information. “So if it isn’t too personal, why didn’t you go to Harvard?”
“I didn’t want to come here,” she whispered, her voice low and guilty. “I knew he was here. But I had no other choice. I have thousands of d
ollars in student loans from Saint Joseph’s…I just couldn’t afford to go to Harvard. I was hoping to finish my MA quickly and go to Harvard next year. If I win a larger fellowship, I won’t have to borrow money for my PhD.”
Paul nodded reassuringly, and as Julia distracted herself by turning around to examine the books more carefully, he regarded her, entirely oblivious to the small piece of information she had unknowingly revealed. The piece of information that told him much more than why she hadn’t gone to Harvard.
As he watched her opening and closing the dusty volumes, her eyes widening and a smile playing across her lovely lips, he realized that the nickname Rabbit was an even better fit than he’d initially thought. For yes, she was very much like a rabbit one might find in a meadow or some such place. But she was also very much like The Velveteen Rabbit.
Paul would never have spoken such words aloud, and if you’d asked him if he knew the book, he would have lied while looking you straight in the eye. But Allison had loved that book, and early in their relationship she had demanded that he read it so that he could understand her properly. And Paul, all two hundred plus pounds of Vermont farm boy, had read the damn thing surreptitiously because he loved her.
Although he wouldn’t admit it, he loved that story too.
In looking at Rabbit, he had the feeling that she was waiting desperately to become Real. Waiting to be loved, even. And the waiting had taken its toll on her. Not on her outward appearance, which was very attractive (although Paul would have said she was clearly too thin and too pale, something a good deal of Vermont milk and dairy products could have improved). Not that, but on her soul, which he thought was beautiful but sad.
Paul wasn’t even sure he believed in souls until he met Rabbit. And now that he knew her, he had to believe. He hoped privately that some day she would become what she wanted to be, that someone would love her and she would transform from a frightened rabbit into something else. Something bolder. Something happy.
Not wanting to indulge himself in too many literary flights of fancy, Paul swiftly decided that he needed to distract Rabbit from her sorrows, and so he smiled at her again. Then he led her to a door that had a brass nameplate on it that said in very elegant cursive script: Professor Gabriel O. Emerson, Department of Italian Studies.