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She swallowed and looked away, uncertain whether he’d been trying to reassure her as to her safety or intimidate her into cooperating with him and Gabe.
Blake frowned when Page suddenly set her burger aside, her appetite completely gone now, but he didn’t insist that she eat it. Instead, he began to question her, just as Gabe had earlier. “You have no idea why anyone would do this to you?”
“None,” she answered tightly, her patience strained. “I only know that this man has killed once—twice, if you count my kitten—and that he’s willing to do it again. He has an uncanny ability to find me wherever I go, and to get within photographing range of people I care about.”
Even empty, Blake’s hands seemed restless as he plucked at the crease in his slacks, picked a minuscule dot of lint from his shirt sleeve, straightened his collar. “No jilted lovers?” he asked. “Ex-boyfriends who had reason to resent your marriage to Gabe?”
Feeling her cheeks warm, she shook her head. “No ex-lovers,” she muttered. “I...didn’t date much in school. My parents were very strict when I was in high school, and I was rather shy and studious in college. I concentrated on my schoolwork, and had very little social life.”
Something made her glance at Gabe. She found him watching her with an expression that made a shiver of reaction run through her.
Gabe could have told Blake that there had been no jealous ex-lovers. Page had been a virgin when she met Gabe—something she’d shyly told him on their fourth date. He’d been almost primitively pleased by the idea, and quixotically old-fashioned enough to insist that they wait until their wedding night to consummate their relationship.
And then he’d insisted impatiently that they be married very quickly.
Their wedding might had been perfection.
“The professor who harassed you in college,” Blake continued, apparently unaware of the new tension that had developed between Page and Gabe. “Could this. possibly have anything to do with him?”
Forcing the memories away, and hoping her cheeks weren’t as red as they felt, Page turned her attention back to the P.L “Gabe told you about that?”
Gabe shook his head. “He found out on his own.”
“Professor Wingate is dead,” Page said flatly. “He shot himself, his wife and his only child four years ago, over a year after he was fired by the university where he’d taught for more than twenty years.”
“Because of your charges against him,” Blake murmured.
“Yes,” she said, glaring at him. “I suppose you could say that he, too, died because of me.”
“That’s not what he meant, Page,” Gabe said.
“No, it’s not,” Blake agreed. He looked at her with a sympathy she didn’t want to acknowledge, because it frightened her too much to consider that she was no longer alone, no longer without friends.
She couldn’t afford to let her guard down after all this time. For Gabe’s sake, for Blake’s—for her own.
She nodded curtly. “Whatever. He’d dead. He couldn’t possibly be behind this.”
Blake tugged at his lower lip. “Tell me about him.”
She grimaced, reluctant to rehash the sordid debacle. “He was a computer science professor, nearly forty years my senior. I took his class the first semester of my final year, needing one more credit towar
d my degree. I don’t know why, but sometime during that semester, he...well, he seemed to become obsessed with me,” she said uncomfortably.
“He started asking me to stay after class, ostensibly to discuss my work, but treating me in a way that made me uneasy. He asked me out. I knew he was married, and I turned him down—which I would have done even if he had been single. He started writing me notes. Love letters. Calling me. Following me around the campus.”
“Had he ever done anything like that before?” Blake asked.
“Not that I know of. No one wanted to believe me when I told other students what was going on. He was eccentric, even a bit weird, but he seemed to genuinely like his job. He was a popular instructor, and his students didn’t want to hear anything negative about him. I tried to deal with it without turning him in. I dropped the class before the semester ended. He didn’t give up. I finally had to go to the dean. I took the letters and a message left on my answering machine to prove my claim.”
“They fired him immediately?” Gabe asked.
Page shook her head. “They warned him to stay away from me. He’d never done anything like that before, and he promised it wouldn’t happen again. Two days after our meeting with the university administrators, he started calling me again. Begging me to run away with him. Telling me he would...he would kill himself if he couldn’t have me.”
“What did you do?” Blake asked, when Gabe only growled something beneath his breath.
“I went back to the dean,” she replied, rubbing her forearms against a sudden chill in the room. “I asked for his help. That’s when Professor Wingate was fired. It was a deal he made with me and the administrators. We all agreed to keep the matter as quiet as possible, on the condition that he never contact me again. He took early retirement, kept his reputation relatively intact, his legal record clean—and I was able to finish my last semester of college and earn my degree in peace.”
“Did his wife ever learn about you?” Blake wanted to know.
