Gemini Heat Read online

  Sex! Oh damn! Not that again! Delia smoothed her fingers over her navy blue linen skirt and wondered what the heatwave was doing to her hormones. Here she was, on possibly the most important business day of her life, with a pivotal interview ahead, and she was already having carnal thoughts again. Carnal in the form of a dusky mental intruder who both improved her sex-life with Russell and showed her how utterly pathetic it really was.

  And that was another thing! For a fairly sexless sort of man, Russell had surprised her with a strangely salacious birthday present: a gift she’d had to wear this morning because she had no clean underwear to put on.

  It felt very peculiar to be wearing a pair of lemon silk camiknickers beneath her tailored suit, instead of the usual M&S cottons. She was disturbingly aware of its lace-encrusted bodice delicately stimulating her nipples; and worse still, the feel of a fragile popper-fastened gusset working its way slowly but insidiously into her sexual furrow. Every movement seemed to tighten it against her inner lips and clitoris and she hardly dare imagine what state the garment might be in. It was so flimsy and she was sweating and already lightly aroused again. Not to mention the fact she’d had sex twice in the last twelve hours … She was just about to slip into a cubicle and make some intimate adjustments when there was a sharp panicky rapping at the cloakroom door.

  ‘Delia! Please! Come quickly,’ squeaked her secretary, Susie, almost tumbling into the room. ‘De Guile’s PA just called. You’re next! He wants you upstairs now for your “informal chat”.’

  A million ominous thoughts occurred to Delia as she ascended in the lift, and most of them were self-recriminations.

  Why hadn’t she had the guts to go home and change? Surely she could’ve cooked up some excuse? What on earth had possessed her not to go to the big man’s art exhibition? It was another of de Guile’s disquietingly ‘random’ things, but he was bound to ask the recipient of his invitation what she thought of his collection. Unfortunately for Delia, only Deana could answer that question!

  Most of all, why hadn’t she done herself a favour and found out a bit more about the mysterious de Guile himself? He owned the company she worked for and was one of the wealthiest men in the world, yet she’d no idea what he looked like or even how old he was.

  She tried to imagine him while she waited outside his office. To picture someone so powerful and so unthinkably rich. Logic suggested he’d look like Ross Perot or one of those silver-haired tycoons from the glamorous ‘soaps’. But the only image Delia could summon was—

  ‘He’ll see you now, Mizz Ferraro,’ murmured de Guile’s bland, super-competent secretary.

  Delia’s heart started bouncing and her bloodstream flushed with adrenalin. This was stupid! He was only a man, and probably a boring old stick at that. She was good at her job, superlative in fact. What the devil had she got to worry about? And even if he did ask about the flaming exhibition, it wasn’t a hanging offence to give your invitation to your sister, was it?

  The office she entered was immense. From where she stood, it appeared to run the entire width of the building, and its sole occupant was a man sitting reading at a large and distant desk. A dark-haired man, who seemed engrossed in a file that lay open before him. A man whose eyes were masked by a pair of gold-framed reading glasses and whose height and body were obscured by both his clothing and the wide expanse of leathertopped wood in front of him. A man who by all that was sane and understandable in the world, should’ve been a total stranger … but it was the man who Delia had kissed and caressed and been possessed by in virtually all her waking dreams for the past few sex-obsessed weeks.

  And as ‘The Prince’ rose elegantly to his feet and walked smoothly towards her, holding out his hand in welcome, Delia felt the same old instant sexual response she always felt.

  For several seconds, she could neither think, speak nor breathe, and afterwards she often wondered how she had been able to stand.

  The man wasn’t real but he was here. This was the hard, bleak prosaic City, not the sumptuous harem of her fantasies – but it was still him. It was his face she’d seen in that splitsecond this morning; and in a notion of pure outrageousness, she knew that if she knelt at his feet now, unzipped his perfectly tailored trousers and sucked him, it’d be the same flesh she’d tasted in her fantasy.

  Before her stood the stereotype, the cliché, the archetype of everything that had ever been tall, dark and handsome. A man with the mouth, the hands and the body which had initiated the entirety of her sexual pleasure since the very first moment she’d dreamed him up.

  ‘Delia Ferraro,’ he said softly, his intonation familiar in every meaning of the word. ‘How do you feel today? You look a little surprised to see me.’

  Delia’s head was whirling. This was crazy. He didn’t know her. They were her dreams, not his! How could he know what he was to her?

  ‘I … I’m sorry,’ she muttered, feeling genuinely dizzy. ‘You’re … You’re not what I expected. I—’

  The rest wouldn’t come out because great puffs of soft white light seemed to be exploding between her and de Guile. The morning heat was murder already, even in this air-conditioned haven, and suddenly it all seemed to swirl up and envelop Delia. She was definitely going to faint in the next few seconds, but just as the swaying started and the carpet seemed to tilt precariously, she felt herself being swept up off her feet and carried effortlessly across the width of the room. Almost before she could analyse precisely what had happened she was set down on a big squashy leather sofa that stood to one side in a kind of ‘conversation’ area; a set of opulent modern couches and armchairs arranged around a glass-topped coffee table, and standing by a breathtaking, window-on-the-city view. With her vision still impaired, much of this was lost on Delia, but in a couple of moments, she felt a glass of water being put against her lips, and a strong hand sliding behind her head, encouraging her to drink.

  The water was cool and had a faint mineral sparkle – and it was this subtle effervescence that returned her to her senses. Blinking furiously, she managed to focus on the man who was now sitting beside her, his dark, besuited knees almost touching her bare and stockingless ones.

  ‘All right now?’ de Guile’s light, velvety voice was as incredible as his looks. And as familiar. Delia had a manic, almost unbearable urge to ask him to say the word ‘sublime’ for her, but as her wits returned she thought better of it.

  ‘Yes, thanks, I’m fine now,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘I’m sorry about what happened just now, Mr de Guile. It’s this heat … I can’t seem to get used to it.’

  ‘Mr de Guile?’ Jet black eyebrows shot up in amusement – although for the life of her, Delia couldn’t work out why. It was his name when all was said and done!

  ‘How formal we are today, Mizz Ferraro.’ He chuckled quietly, then without warning reached out to take the glass from her shaking hand. When he’d put it aside, he took hold of the hand again, and ran his thumb in a slow, sensuous circle around the centre of her palm. ‘So warm,’ he whispered. ‘But it doesn’t say anything about this in your personnel file, Dee, does it?’ The thumb stilled and slid away, and as it did de Guile raised her trembling hand to his lips and placed a kiss on the area he’d stroked.

  As moisture spread across the hot landscape of her palm, she felt it in other places too. Between her legs, her sex rippled against the soft constriction of the camiknickers, and though her mind seemed temporarily unable to function, her hormones were firing and flowing. De Guile’s tongue moved and she moaned, transported instantly back to fantasy and the Prince. She was lying on a bed, her hot back pinned against silk, as the Prince pressed his face between her splayed thighs. The dream, and the sensations, were so real that she shuffled on the leather seat, unconsciously sliding her slim skirt up the naked length of her thighs. Making ready …

  ‘Mr de Guile! Please!’ she squeaked, and snatched back her hand. He’d started sucking her palm and it felt obscenely erotic. ‘I … I thought I was her
e to talk about work … About my performance ratio …’

  ‘My sweet Dee,’ he breathed against her hand, ‘I know all I need to know about your performance.’ He paused then and straightened up, pulling off his golden glasses and placing them on the coffee table.

  Delia suppressed a gasp of surprise.

  In her sexual dreams, she’d always had the impression that the Prince had brown eyes – to match his coal-black hair and his richly swarthy skin. Jackson de Guile had both the dark, lustrous locks of her phantom lover, and his toasted coppery complexion – but she saw now that his eyes smashed the pattern completely. They were blue. Deep deep blue. The blue of a storm-tossed eastern ocean and glittering intensely.

  More than this, they were a curious shape too; long and almond-shaped, slanting up at the outer corners and slightly hooded at the inner. She knew his middle name was Kazuto, but she’d not expected his Japaneseness to be so physically apparent.

  The total effect was shocking. He’d first locked himself into her fantasy then visibly deviated from it. Suddenly she felt lost. Out on a limb. Adrift in a strange sexual land where the signposts were rapidly disintegrating.

  ‘Didn’t you realise I wore glasses?’ he enquired, blinking once as if to emphasise the exotic submarine brilliance of his gaze. ‘I wear them for reading. And I’ve just been reading your file, Dee. Very carefully.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, unable to disguise her stare, and wondering why on earth he kept calling her ‘Dee’. The company personnel files were fairly comprehensive, but to her knowledge they’d never listed nicknames. There was something very weird going on here, she decided, but faced with the living embodiment of her dreams, she felt powerless to shape proper questions.

  But he was more than the dreams. And different … He had all the beauty that was de rigueur for a sexual fantasy, but had the Prince had that thin white scar on his forehead? Had his hair been so long it needed tying back in a pony-tail like that? These new variations only made him more alluring, though, and he was as erotic in a two thousand guinea business suit as he’d been in his rampant nakedness. Even as she watched him, he threw back his head and laughed at her question. His brown throat was a long bare elegant line emerging from his sparkling white collar and Delia could’ve wept at her aching urge to kiss it.

  ‘Why?’ he repeated, reaching out and pressing his cool fingers on her cheek. ‘Because I want you, Dee. I’m intrigued by you. You’re exactly like your file, and yet you’re a complete surprise too. It’s like being with two different women.’

  As his fingertips skated slowly across her cheek and jaw, then on and boldly down into the long, steep vee of her neckline, a bright, flashing light popped on in Delia’s mind. A hazard warning beacon.

  Deana! The erotica exhibition! Last night! Of course! De Guile had been at his own art show … and he’d met Deana.

  And now he was touching her, Delia, like this. Talking to her intimately. Indecently. What had Deana said, for heaven’s sake? What had she done?

  But as Jackson Kazuto de Guile began unfastening his Divisional Admin Manager’s severe suit jacket, the answer was obvious. He was undressing her now because he had last night. Or he believed he had.

  Choices and emotions whirled in Delia’s brain as the sensations roiled in her body. The sensible, rational side of her said ‘Tell him now!’ Explain it all now before he strips you naked and you can’t turn back.

  But then another voice spoke up. A louder voice. The voice of her senses and her dreams. The voice of her yearning sex.

  He’s mine! it cried. He’s mine, Deana, and you’ve stolen him! Goddamn you, sister, he’s mine and I want him back!

  It wasn’t sensible and it wasn’t rational. But as de Guile’s clever fingers flicked open her jacket buttons, Delia’s own hands rose up to help him.

  Sanity made one last rally, ‘Mr de Guile, please,’ she panted as he pulled open the dark lapels of her suit and exposed her lace-encased breasts.

  ‘“Jake” … I told you, it’s “Jake”,’ he said, locking his navy blue eyes with her pleading grey ones. He cupped her breasts and kneaded them with a roughness that made her gasp but was exactly what she wanted. ‘My God, Dee, you’re lovely! I had to leave last night, but I wanted to stay. I woke up this morning and the first thing I thought about was your body. I had to touch myself because I couldn’t touch you! I brought myself off imagining how your breasts would feel and look when I made them naked. Remembering what it felt like to slide myself into your luscious flesh. How wet and hot and ready you were. I went crazy wondering how you’d taste … Do you realise something, Dee? I haven’t even kissed you yet.’

  All this was whispered against her cheek, the instant before he inclined her face towards him and word became deed.

  Without conscious thought, Delia opened her lips beneath his for that first sweet foray into her mouth. His tongue was cool, moist and flexible inside her hot wetness, and she met it immediately and boldly. As their mouths duelled, she let her mind run ahead, imagining the taste of his skin and his sex. She imagined every intimate flavour and texture of his body, then felt his hands – both of them – take an imperious hold of her jacket lapels and slide the garment down off her.

  Pinioned like a slave-girl, her arms were caught against her sides while her throat, her shoulders and her breasts were his to command. Somewhere in her fantasy, his tongue pushed in deeper and subdued hers – while his fingers took possession of her breasts. Delicately, almost tentatively, he pinched her nipples and rolled them this way and that. An exquisite tugging pressure shot straight to the tip of her clitoris and as he pulled at her sensitised teats, her vulva throbbed out its answer. The flesh down there was so excited she almost climaxed without contact.

  She wanted to cry out his name, call him ‘Your Highness’, ‘My Liege’ and a million other fantasy titles but her mouth was stuffed with his tongue. Pushing her body towards him, she offered him her breasts more freely.

  Her offer was instantly taken. With the deftness of great experience, he flicked down the spaghetti straps of her camisole top and exposed her. Delia gasped then, aware of the preposterousness of what was happening to her. They were sitting before a blind-less window in broad daylight; this office was unlocked and open to any intrusion; a secretary or typist could walk in at any second … and she was being kissed and her breasts were naked.

  ‘But Mr de Guile,’ she murmured against his mouth, her own vulnerability thrilling her. He was still fully and immaculately dressed while she was bared to the waist, her arms virtually immobilised by her own bunched-up clothing.

  ‘My name is “Jake”,’ he said, swooping down and putting his lips to one swollen breast, ‘“Jake”,’ he repeated, taking the nipple between his straight white teeth and biting it ever-so-gently.

  Delia’s hips bucked towards him, the movement involuntary, her whole sex shimmering with soft, wet tremors of yearning. She wanted fingers down there, touching and pressing. A tongue licking … A cock pushing and stretching … Anything. Anything of his, there between her legs to assuage her roaring hunger. And as he chewed delicately on her stiff, sensitive nipple, she moaned and wriggled, her bottom sliding helplessly on the leather of the sofa.

  ‘Patience.’ His breath fanned her breast. ‘We won’t be disturbed. There’s plenty of time. And there’s so much I want to do to you.’ He shifted his mouth to her other nipple, first sucking, then blowing, using his tongue to anoint the dimpled aureole with saliva, then flick at the peak itself.

  The pleasure was very precisely granted, very carefully measured; an exercise in building arousal and raising it to a new and as yet unachieved height. Until now, Delia had always coasted during sex, accepting stimulation as it arrived. She’d never thirsted and craved as she did now; never needed a man’s touch so desperately that she thought she might die if she didn’t get it. Needed it like a junkie needed dope … Never before had her breasts and vulva ached like fire, gnawed from within because she wanted every
sexual part of her to be caressed and sucked and fondled all at once and as roughly and savagely as possible.

  With a final sequence of long cat-like tongue strokes, de Guile made both her breasts wet all over, then lifted his head and reached out to take hold of her hands.

  ‘Hold yourself, Dee,’ he ordered quietly, shaping her fingers with his, and fitting them around her own body. She felt uncomfortable, and hindered by the tangled jacket, but still she obeyed him. Her own engorgement was warm against her palms, and she felt his spittle as a thin moist film. As he closed her fingers and thumbs around her own teats, she gasped, then whimpered. Below, her body was already betraying her …

  He’d made her come. Brought her to climax. He’d touched only her breasts, and yet she’d had an exquisite orgasm. Floating half-way between fantasy and the heat of the city, she surrendered to a cresting wave of pulsating sensation and heard a cry bubble helplessly from her lips. She squeezed hard on her own nipples and sobbed: then heard de Guile – who was suddenly and utterly ‘Jake’ – laugh archly as she squirmed before him.

  ‘I knew you’d be like this,’ he said, sliding neatly from the couch and dropping down to kneel at her feet. ‘When I first saw your picture in the files. Your eyes … I knew you’d come easily for me. That you’d be beautiful and melt and flow with the slightest of handling. I knew when we met that you’d perform for me.’

  Delia – who’d never performed or come easily in her life – was desperate to touch her quim. It was fluttering and beating like a second heart. It was crying out to be fingered and stroked. But she felt paralysed. Only Jake could give her leave to caress herself.

  When was it that he’d taken control of her? The exact moment eluded her but suddenly he was her master. The Prince, alive in the city and complete in the sovereignty of his title; and in the power to give her effortless pleasure.