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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 himselfimagining 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 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