she had been given the job Joey had softened her attitude and appearance slightly, recognising that in some circumstances femininity—showing a little cleavage and wearing stiletto-heeled shoes for example—could be just as effective as abrasive aggression.
But she couldn’t say she was altogether comfortable with the fact that her highly professional persona had slipped slightly when she had been talking with Gideon St Claire.
‘I’m taking a break now, and going to the coffee shop down the street to get a hot chocolate. Do you want anything while I’m there?’
Gideon scowled his irritation as he looked up from the figures he had been studying on his computer screen to where Joey stood in the now open doorway between their two offices. A door she had opened without even the courtesy of knocking first.
‘Surely there’s a coffee-making machine in Lexie’s office?’
‘I don’t drink coffee.’
‘There are drinks machines on each floor, and a company restaurant on the eighth floor.’ Gideon should have known that the past hour and a half of relative peace and quiet wasn’t going to last with Joey McKinley in the building! ‘I’m sure you can get hot chocolate there.’
‘But not with whipped cream on top, or served by a buff twenty-year-old male with shoulder-length blond hair, I bet.’
Gideon’s frown deepened as he thought of the three slightly plump, kindly middle-aged women who usually worked in the restaurant two floors below. ‘Well…no.’
‘There you go, then.’
‘I take it this “buff” vision of manhood does work in the coffee shop down the road?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She smiled at him. ‘So, do you want anything? Something to drink? Muffin? Pastry?’
‘No, thank you,’ he answered, with a barely repressed shudder.
‘No to just the drink, or no to all of it?’
Gideon gritted his teeth at her persistence. ‘All of it.’
‘They do a really great lemon muffin—’
‘I said no and I meant no!’ Gideon was growing more and more irritated. If he wanted coffee he had his own pot, already made on the percolator, and if he wanted something to eat then he would send his secretary—Lucan’s secretary, now that Joey McKinley had commandeered his own—down to the restaurant to get it for him.
Joey lingered in the doorway, seemingly unperturbed by his irritability. ‘Tell me, Gideon, have you ever been into a coffee shop? ‘
‘No,’ he bit out tersely.
‘How about a burger place?’
‘If by that you are referring to a fast food restaurant, then the answer is no. Neither have I ever been roller skating, hang-gliding or scuba-diving—and I feel no more inclination to do any of them than I do to go to the coffee shop down the street!’
‘Nix to the scuba-diving—I’ve never been too sure what’s lurking down there in the depths,’ Joey said with a contrived little shudder. ‘But I’ve been roller skating and hang-gliding and loved both of them. As for fast food places and the coffee shop—you have no idea what you’re missing!’
‘In the case of the coffee shop, apparently a twenty-year-old male with shoulder-length blond hair.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Who obviously isn’t my type. And isn’t he a little on the young side for you?’ he added with disdain.
‘Younger men are all the rage at the moment.’ Joey McKinley was completely undaunted as she wiggled suggestive auburn brows at him. ‘Probably has something to do with the fact that they have more stamina in bed than older guys.’
Gideon stiffened. Who on earth had conversations like this one? Joey McKinley, apparently! Personally, he never discussed any of his own brief physical relationships with a third party, and he wasn’t enjoying these insights into Joey’s private life, either. Especially when she included slights to older men in her blunt commentary. He couldn’t help wondering—and he was severely annoyed with himself for doing so—whether she meant men of his own age!
He leant back in his chair to look across at her from between narrowed lids. ‘I would have thought experience would win over stamina every time.’
Joey almost shouted her yes! out loud, at having actually managed to engage the aloof Gideon St Claire in this slightly risqué conversation. His whole I-am-an-island thing was like a red rag to a bull as far as she was concerned;
she wanted to say outrageous things purely to shock him out of it!
With the weak February sun shining through the huge window behind him Gideon’s hair was the colour of pure gold. It looked as if it would be soft and silky to the touch. His eyes were dark and enigmatic between those narrowed lids, and there was a slight smile curving the sensuous line of his lips—as if he were enjoying the conversation in spite of himself.
Joey’s hands clenched at her sides as she resisted the urge she felt to cross the office and see if his hair really would be soft and silky to the touch. This was Gideon St Claire, she reminded herself impatiently. The man she had believed—until earlier this morning, a little voice reminded her—to be completely immune to all emotional feeling.
‘Don’t knock the stamina until you’ve tried it,’ she said wickedly.
That sensuous mouth thinned immediately. ‘Which you obviously have.’
As it happened, no…
Oh, Joey knew she gave off an image of eating up men of all ages for breakfast, and that most people assumed she lived alone and was unmarried through choice. But the truth of the matter was she had been too busy, too single-minded in attaining her law degree during her late teens and early twenties, to have much time left over for relationships. In fact, she’d had no time for them at all. There had been the occasional date, of course—the one with Jason Pickard six months ago being the most recent. And look how successfully that had turned out! But she had never been in the sort of long-term and loving relationship she felt necessary, and longed for. Her parents had been happily married for over thirty years, and Joey had decided at a young age that she wasn’t going to settle for anything less.
Unfortunately, the downside of the tough, uncaring image she had deliberately adopted was that it tended to completely overwhelm weak men, and the strong ones just felt threatened by her. Which was probably why, at the age of twenty-eight, abrasive, driven Joey McKinley hadn’t yet managed to find a man she could love completely and who loved her in the same way.
And the same reason she was still a virgin…
Something she was sure the cynical Gideon St Claire would find very hard to believe.
‘Not yet—but I’ll be happy to let you know when I have,’ she came back provocatively.
Gideon winced as he sat forward to lean his elbows stiffly on the desktop in front of him. ‘Do I take it that there’s some sexual connection between the whipped cream and the buff twenty-year-old?’
Those green eyes widened, and for an instant Gideon could
