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 brain 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
