‘You’re looking a little feverish,’ the man continued. ‘Perhaps you’re coming down with a cold? There’s a lot of it about. It’s the weather, of course. One day it’s cold and the next it’s sunny.’
‘Yes, probably,’ Joey answered awkwardly, looking up at the man for the first time.
He looked to be aged in his late thirties, and was quite handsome from what she could tell through the dark beard that hid most of his lower face. His eyes were a deep and pleasant blue. He also looked vaguely familiar…
‘Do I know you?’ she asked politely.
‘I’m sure I would have remembered you if we had met before.’ He gave her a brief, noncommittal smile.
Joey accepted the compliment. ‘Sorry to have held you up in there. I was miles away.’ On a bed with silk sheets, with Gideon. No! She had to stop thinking about that!
‘As I said, no problem,’ the man assured her lightly. ‘Do you work around here?’
Joey frowned slightly; it was one thing to apologise to this man for holding him up, but she wasn’t about to tell a complete stranger where she worked. A stranger who still looked vaguely familiar, despite his denial.
‘Yes. And it’s time I was getting back.’ She smiled again, to take the sting out of her dismissal, as she turned to walk away.
‘Enjoy your hot chocolate,’ he called after her.
‘Thanks.’ Joey was a little disconcerted to realise that the man must have been aware of her enough earlier to have noticed she had ordered hot chocolate to go. And she was sure she felt his blue eyes following her as she walked back down the street.
Paranoid.
She was becoming paranoid. The man was just being polite to show that he wasn’t annoyed at being delayed, for goodness’ sake. She was probably just feeling oversensitive after indulging in that steamy fantasy.
Probably? She was definitely feeling oversensitive. And in all the wrong places too.
‘Good lunch?’
Gideon had only just arrived back in the office, and he drew in a sharp breath as he turned and saw Joey, once again standing in the connecting doorway between their two offices.
‘I think we need to lay down a few ground rules, Joey,’ he rasped as he removed his jacket and hung it in the closet before moving to sit behind Lucan’s imposing desk. ‘The first one being that in future I would prefer you to knock before you come barging into my office.’
‘Why?’
He clenched his teeth. ‘Because I would prefer it,’ he repeated evenly.
She twinkled at him. ‘Are you going to be doing something…private in here that you don’t want me to walk in on?’
Three weeks, six days, two hours—and counting!
Gideon felt a nerve pulsing in his tightly clenched jaw. ‘I just don’t like you coming in here unannounced.’
Joey had decided, during the three hours since she had last seen Gideon, that the best way to deal with her earlier lapse into fantasyland was to face it head on. To face him head-on.
Looking at him now, as he sat behind Lucan’s desk, golden hair slightly ruffled from the cool breeze outside, his jacket removed and the width of his shoulders and muscled chest clearly visible beneath that white silk shirt, suddenly she wasn’t so sure…
Oh, get a grip, Joey, she instructed herself impatiently. So she’d had a sexual fantasy about the man? So what? Yes, Gideon was as handsome as sin, but he had just been out for a minimum two-hour lunch with another woman. No doubt a woman only too happy to cater to his sexual preferences, whatever they were…
‘My mother sends her regards, by the way.’
Joey blinked. ‘Your mother?’
Gideon gave a mocking smile—almost as if he had known exactly what she was thinking. ‘I had lunch with her before she caught the afternoon train back to Edinburgh.’
The still beautiful and very gracious Molly St Claire. Dowager Duchess of Stourbridge now, following Lucan’s marriage to Lexie on Saturday. And apparently the woman Gideon had just had a two-hour lunch with.
Was that relief Joey was feeling? If it was, then it was totally inappropriate. Ridiculous, even, when he had already made it perfectly obvious she was the last woman he would ever be attracted to.
And was she attracted to him?
Well, she was a woman with a pulse and a heartbeat, wasn’t she?
Maybe she was—but she wasn’t a stupid woman with a pulse and a heartbeat! Being attracted to Gideon—a man who showed no interest in her, and no emotion whatsoever for anyone other than those he considered his close family—would be the height of stupidity on her part.
She might choose to present an outer shell of sophistication, but inside Joey knew herself to be as soft as marshmallow—as emotional and vulnerable, in fact, as her outwardly softer twin. She really wasn’t about to get her heart broken by falling for the coldly unattainable Gideon St Claire.
‘What an attentive son you are, to be sure,’ she commented.
Gideon visibly stiffened. ‘Maybe you aren’t aware of it, but the wedding on Saturday was a difficult time for my mother.’
Joey instantly felt guilty at this reminder that Lucan and Lexie’s wedding must have been something of an ordeal for Molly St Claire; Lexie was the granddaughter of Sian Thomas—the woman Molly’s husband, Alexander St Claire, the previous Duke of Stourbridge, had left Molly for twenty-five years ago.
Some sort of truce on the past had been called between the two older women before Lucan and Lexie’s wedding on Saturday, but even so it couldn’t have been an easy time for Gideon’s mother.
‘I am aware of it.’ Joey grimaced in acknowledgement of her faux pas. ‘Sorry.’
Gideon continued to eye her coldly for several seconds, before giving an abrupt nod. ‘Let’s move on, shall we? What did you want to see me about?’
What did she want to see Gideon about? Oh, yes. ‘Jordan rang while you were out; he and Steph have arrived safely back in LA.’
Gideon nodded. ‘He left a message on my voicemail.
It still felt slightly odd to him that he and this woman were connected by the marriage of their twin siblings. Not that he and Jordan were identical twins. But Joey and Stephanie were—even if they chose to be completely different in appearance. Gideon had always thought Stephanie to be warm and charming, while her sister had all the softness of a porcupine. An impression that had been shaken earlier that morning, when he’d heard the aching loneliness in Joey’s voice as she’d admitted how much she missed her twin.
Gideon had actually found himself thinking of Joey during lunch, as he and his mother ate dessert. Well, it had been his mother’s dessert that had actually triggered the memory—fresh strawberries covered in whipped cream. To his horror and intense discomfort he had found himself imagining Joey lying back on red satin sheets—they would have to be red; he already knew how beautiful her exotic-coloured hair looked against red—while he sensuously licked cream from every inch of her naked body.
The image had been so startlingly vivid that Gideon had felt himself harden, his erection hot and aching beneath the table where he and his mother sat eating together! He’d had to discreetly drape his napkin across his thighs in case anyone noticed that throbbing bulge in his trousers.
‘How did your visit to the coffee shop go earlier?’ His tone was all the harsher because of his unprecedented reaction to just imagining Joey naked.
There was no way she could have prevented the blush that warmed her cheeks as she was instantly reminded of her drift off into fantasyland earlier. Her breasts became fuller, the nipples hard and sensitive as they chafed against the black lace of her bra.
She moistened dry lips. ‘It was—good, thanks.’
Gideon gave her a tight smile. ‘Any luck with the buff young god?’
Joey wasn’t sure she would have noticed him earlier, even if he had been on duty today. Not when her thoughts had been so vividly fixed on Gideon.
Those images of the two of them in bed suddenly flashed into her br
ain again, so that she couldn’t even look him in the face as she answered. ‘I’m still working on it.’
Gideon stood up as Joey turned to leave the office, crossing the distance between them in long, purposeful strides. She turned round to face him as he spoke.
‘Thank you for passing on the message that Jordan and Stephanie arrived back in LA safely.’ His voice was now huskily soft.
‘A superfluous message, as it happens,’ she commented, very much aware of how close Gideon was now standing to her.
‘But you didn’t know that,’ he said. ‘And, despite my earlier comments, I appreciate you coming to tell me as soon as I returned from lunch.’
Joey smiled. ‘Even if I did come barging into your office?’
‘Even so,’ Gideon allowed ruefully, realising how tiny she was as he stood only inches away from her; her manner was always so mocking, so forcefully independent, that she had somehow always seemed…more fiercely substantial to him.
Her admission earlier of missing Stephanie had given Gideon a different insight into her—had hinted at that forceful independence being a defensive veneer rather than an intrinsic part of her nature. Perhaps a defence mechanism that came into play to hide the vulnerability that lay beneath her surface bravado—the same vulnerability that had enabled Joey to sing with such beauty and depth of emotion at Jordan and Stephanie’s wedding, maybe?
Joey was shorter than Gideon had thought too. The top of her head only reached up to his chin—no, that couldn’t be right. This morning, in the underground car park, he distinctly remembered that her eyes had been level with his mouth as they’d talked.
Gideon stood back slightly to look down at her feet. ‘You aren’t wearing any shoes …’
Even Joey’s feet were beautiful—her ankles shapely, her toes gracefully slender, with pearly pink nails at their tips.
‘I have a habit of taking them off whenever I sit down,’ Joey admitted.
‘It’s a little…unorthodox when you’re at work.’ It also, Gideon realised with a frown, gave an intimacy to this situation that he would rather didn’t exist.
She tossed her head. ‘Haven’t you noticed? I am unorthodox!’
Gideon had noticed far too many things about this woman today! Such as the softness of her hair. The creaminess of her skin. The fullness of her breasts beneath the silk of her blouse. The delicious curves of her hips and bottom. The slight vulnerability to those sensuously full lips when she wasn’t being smart-mouthed…
Joey was very aware of the sudden tension that surrounded herself and Gideon. She was also aware, so close to him like this, that his chest appeared as hard and muscled as she had imagined it would be, and her senses were being bombarded equally with the heat of his body and his smell: an elusive spicy aftershave mixed with hot and heady male.
She was almost afraid to breathe, and she resisted the impulse she had to step closer to him, to put her arms about his waist and feel the ripple of muscles beneath his shirt as her palms rested against his back. She was certain that he would feel good to touch. Hot and hard. Like steel encased in velvet.
It was a dangerous impulse—especially after the erotic thoughts Joey had had about him earlier on today. And yet she couldn’t move away. Could feel the mesmerising pull of his seductive heat. Couldn’t take her gaze from those hard and chiselled features. Except they didn’t look quite so hard any more. Gideon’s mouth was more relaxed than Joey had ever seen it—lips slightly parted, his breath a warm caress against her brow—and his eyes…oh, God, his eyes.
They were no longer just that dark and brooding bitter chocolate brown, but now had shards of gold fanning out from the pupil. That gold deepened, increased as his gaze shifted from her eyes to her parted lips. As if he too were imagining what it would feel like if they were to kiss—
A knock sounded softly on the outer door before it was immediately opened.
‘Gideon, I—Oh!’
Lucan’s secretary, May Randall, came to an awkward halt in the doorway, her eyes wide as she stared across the room and saw the two of them standing so close together.
‘I—I’ll come back later!’ Her cheeks were bright red as she turned away and shut the door behind her.
May’s unexpected interruption had the same effect as a cold shower on Gideon, bringing him instantly to a sense of exactly what he was doing—and what he had been about to do.
Damn it, he had been about to kiss Joey McKinley. Joey McKinley, for heaven’s sake!
She was everything Gideon disliked in a woman.
The women who briefly held a place in his life were chosen for having the same qualities as his favourite white wine: cool and crisp, with just a hint of seduction to tantalise the senses. Joey had all the explosive qualities of a rich and ruby-red wine: deep and fruity to the palate, with a headiness that attacked rather than tantalised the senses.
Joey only had to take one brief glance up into Gideon’s expressive face to know that he regretted even this much of a lapse in the previous antagonism that had existed between them. It was there in the way he breathed deeply through his nose, in his eyes, now a dark glitter, his stiff shoulders, hands tightly clenched at his sides.
Whereas she was still reeling from the very real and heart-pounding desire that had ripped through to her very core as she’d become mesmerised by the intensity of emotion burning in the deep gold of his eyes.
Eyes that had suddenly been the same colour as the beloved dragon sitting on her desktop…
CHAPTER FOUR
‘AND how do you suggest we explain that touching little scene to May?’ Gideon barked.
Coldly. Harshly. Disapprovingly. Typically!
The warmth Joey had thought she’d seen as she looked up into the depths of Gideon’s gold-coloured eyes had to have been an illusion, she inwardly derided herself as she saw those eyes were now a deep and scathing brown.
‘What’s to explain?’ she dismissed flippantly. ‘We were only talking.’
‘We were obviously standing much too close to be discussing business contracts.’
Gideon realised with self-disgust that after only a single morning of working with Joey he was already starting to lose his mind. What other explanation could there possibly be for even thinking about kissing her? Thinking? He hadn’t been thinking at all as he gazed down at her soft and moistly parted lips!
‘Personally, I think we’re better off just forgetting about it,’ Joey said with a shrug. ‘It’s been my experience that people will carry on thinking what they want about you, no matter what you might have to say on the subject, so it’s better not even to bother to offering explanations in the first place.’
Gideon frowned slightly as he heard the underlying thread of cynicism in her voice. Was it because most people—including him—tended to judge her on that let-people-think-of-me-what-they-will attitude? It was an opinion Gideon knew he was guilty of harbouring towards her, and it had already been made something of a nonsense of earlier that morning. And yet it was an opinion he had to continue to maintain if he were to have any defences against the attraction he obviously now felt for her—perhaps always had?
‘Maybe you don’t care what people think about you, Joey, but I do,’ he said coldly. ‘Especially people I have to work with on a daily basis.’
Bright wings of angry colour heightened her previously pale cheeks. ‘You’re working with me on a daily basis at the moment, Gideon—perhaps you would be interested to know what I think of you?’
No, he really didn’t care to hear what Joey’s opinion of him was!
She had made it obvious from their very first meeting in her office two months ago that she didn’t like his high-handed attitude, or him—that in fact, she resented his interference in solving the problem of Stephanie having been wrongly accused of being ‘the other woman’ in the divorce of Richard Newman, one of her male ex-patients. An accusation Newman, for reasons of his own, had been happy to allow to continue.
Gideon had only ste
pped in at Jordan’s behest, when his brother had become worried about the mental stability of Richard Newman’s wife Rosalind, who had come dangerously close to causing Stephanie physical harm in her distress over the divorce. Maybe Gideon could have been a little more tactful in the way he had resolved the situation. Maybe he should have consulted Joey, who at the time had been acting on Stephanie’s behalf, before instructing a private investigator to follow Richard Newman and ascertain who the man was really having an affair with. That it had turned out to be his boss’s wife explained the man’s reluctance to clear Stephanie of blame!
Gideon hadn’t hesitated in using that knowledge to extract Stephanie from all involvement in the divorce, and he hadn’t felt any guilt when Richard Newman had deservedly lost his job, as well as his wife and family.
Yes, Gideon accepted that he might have handled the situation more tactfully than he had, by including Joey in what he was doing, but he liked and respected Stephanie, knew how much Jordan loved her, and at the time hadn’t thought of how Joey might interpret his behavior. He had only been concerned with extricating her sister from what had rapidly been becoming a dangerous situation.
He realised now—although Joey had obviously been relieved to have her sister removed from that tangled web—she had every reason to resent the arrogance of Gideon’s abrupt intervention. The resentment had been there in Joey’s manner towards him every time the two of them had spoken since…
He owed this woman an apology, Gideon acknowledged. An apology he daren’t even think of offering at this moment, when emotions had been so heightened between them a few minutes ago.
‘Only if I can return the favour and tell you what I think of you too,’ he said.
Perhaps not, Joey acknowledged. Earlier fantasies of being held in Gideon’s arms aside, they obviously just didn’t like each other.
‘I’ll pass, thanks,’ she replied in a bored voice.
‘Then perhaps we should both just get back to work?’ He raised dark brows in mute query.
Taming the Last St Claire Page 4