Page 42 of Signed, Sealed, Married

‘Julien and I weren’t particularly remarkable, but the media interest continued for years. As a result I tended to...’ She looked across the room as if seeing into the past. ‘I withdrew. I didn’t trust easily. As I said, I should have known better.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Seventeen. He was in his twenties.’

‘Bastard!’

An older man hitting on and hurting a vulnerable girl. Adam wanted to find him and damage him very, very badly. It would be one occasion in which he’d thoroughly enjoy living up to his reputation for being dangerous and too rough to have real class.

Gisèle’s head shot up, gaze meshing with his. The painful mix of emotions in her face made him wish he’d been around to deal with the guy.

‘As you say.’ Her mouth firmed then she continued quickly. ‘Anyway, we went to his place. We were on the sofa kissing.’

Adam winced at the similarity to this evening.

‘Then...’

She swallowed convulsively and pain tore at his belly, watching her suffer at the memory. He ground out through gritted teeth, ‘The jerk used his phone to film you making love.’

‘It wasn’t love.’ Her voice was razor-sharp. ‘I only mattered to him as the girl whose private life everyone wanted to know about. He wanted to cash in on my notoriety.’

The look in her eyes was enough to make steam rise from snow. Adam was glad to see that anger. He found it hard to witness her pain.

‘I’m sorry, Gisèle.’

He felt ashamed to belong to the same sex as the man who’d abused her.

She shook her head. ‘Not your fault.’

‘That doesn’t matter. I hate that it happened to you.’

Understatement, much?

He stroked the back of her hand. ‘Give me his name, Gisèle. I’ll make him sorry. You can be sure he’ll never make any more secret sex tapes.’

Had he shared them with friends? Posted them online? Adam’s flesh crawled and it was all he could do to sit there, pretending to be a civilised man when he wanted to find the perpetrator and—

She turned her hand against his, squeezing, drawing him from his violent fantasy. ‘There’s no need. I took care of it.’

Adam’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You did?’ She’d been seventeen, abused by an older man.

‘And it wasn’t really a sex tape. Well, it was but we didn’t actually get as far as...’

A rosy blush swept from her red dress all the way to her cheekbones. It made her seem younger and more vulnerable.

Hell! Had the guy been her first lover? The possibility made Adam want to gag.

‘It wasn’t consummated,’ he bit out, needing to cut short the details.

‘No, it wasn’t. It was...’

Again that pause, and it took all his controlnotto wrap his arms around her and gather her close.

‘It was heavy petting. We weren’t even fully naked.’

Yet Adam’s fingers twitched with the need to wrap themselves around the filthy beggar’s throat.

‘For some reason, I don’t remember how, I noticed the phone propped on the mantlepiece, trained on us. When I mentioned it his response was...off. He pretended it meant nothing but he wasn’t convincing. I’d had too many paparazzi snapping unwanted photos all my life so I suppose I guessed something wasn’t right.’

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