Gemini Heat (2 page)

The gallery was a rambling modernistic affair, and what no-one else seemed to have noticed was a balcony, on the first floor, which - judging by its elevation -would have a commanding view of the whole room. From the floor where she stood, Deana could see very little of the upper level, but above the featureless white parapet, the tops of a number of picture frames were visible. There was obviously more art displayed on the wall beyond, so Deana decided to find her way up to the balcony and look at it.

It took her several minutes to find the right stairs, but when she arrived on the balcony the view was disappointing. True, when she stood at the waist-high wall and looked over, she could see the whole of the gallery and its gaggle of smartly-dressed 'art lovers', but Mr Tall, Dark and Handsome was stunningly conspicuous by his absence.

'Oh well done, Ferraro,' she muttered, 'he's gone. You should have chatted him up when you had a chance, you twit!'

'Chatted who up?'

The voice from beside her was soft and light with an insidiously husky catch. Pure sex, filtered through human vocal cords, and Deana knew exactly who it belonged to. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she turned around.

Her moments-only impression hadn't done him justice. She'd formed a sketch in her mind but what stood before her was a masterpiece, a living composition more fine and sensual than anything in this mad, bad collection.

'Who were you going to chat up?' her vision in black persisted, but for several seconds all Deana could do was stare at his smiling lips, his large dark eyes, his hands, his body, his crotch. His narrow black eyebrows lifted in enquiry and amusement, and after what seemed like a century she recovered her voice.

'You/ she said sharply, making a split second decision to be her usual unflinching self. He was raw eroticism on two legs, but she wasn't frightened of him. She wanted him, yes - instantly and unequivocably -but she didn't fear him. Although a small voice inside her said she ought to.

'Yes,' she went on as she faced him. Panicking, creatively she said the first thing that came into her head. 'Although "chat up" is purely a figure of speech. You seem to be one of the few people here who is genuinely interested in the exhibits. So I thought it would be nice to "chat you up" and get your opinions. I'm an artist myself and I wanted to compare . . . compare my reactions with someone else's.' She paused, flustered, realising that she was rabbiting on and that he was still smiling his slow, indulgent smile. 'You are interested, aren't you?'

'Of course. It's my speciality.' He accompanied this cryptic utterance with an elegant flip of his fingers. Deana noted the slenderness of his hands and how beautifully kept they were, and suddenly she imagined them slipping knowledgeably over her body, seeking out the most sensitive places and stroking her to climax after climax. She could almost see her own juices on his narrow toffee-coloured fingertips.

'Is that a fact?' she answered pertly, feeling the blush rise again, then fall as it had done before, to the place that now yearned for this strange dark man. 'Are you an artist yourself? Do you paint? Or draw?'

'No, sadly I have no talent. I merely observe beauty,' he replied, his eyes roving almost crudely across her body. As his gaze returned to meet hers, Deana met dark, electric-blue fire and was shocked. Not just by the blatant desire there, but by the fact that with his colouring she'd been expecting brown eyes, or grey ones like hers.

The shape of his eyes was unusual too. In a Caucasian face, they were slanted, oriental, almost cat-like. Wide-set and with thick, sooty lashes, they had a slight overfolding of the lids at the inner corners. Mr Mystery here had the East not too far back in his heritage, and his eyes bore the epicanthus to prove it.

His hair was also eastern. Steel-black and straight as water, it was smoothed back closely against his head and caught at the nape of his neck in a pony-tail. Its hard, unruffled shine reminded Deana of a seal's coat, but almost instantly, she revised her assessment. Seals were cuddly and playful, and this man just wasn't. He was a shark or a king cobra, hovering to strike or kill, smiling and deadly. Suddenly, she
knew
she should fear him.

'Me too,' she said, responding belatedly. He must think I'm a complete ninny, she thought, annoyed by her own inability to impress. 'Why don't we get together?'

It was a fairly innocuous remark, and yet the dark eyes before her seemed to spark and court her as if she'd asked him to strip naked and take her. 'It'd be a pleasure,' he purred, gesturing towards a nearby painting with that same exotic grace that had affected her so powerfully a moment ago.

Dear heaven, the man's a cliche, Deana thought, as she fell into step beside him. An erotic cliche. The classic 'man in black', posed like an icon against the featureless white walls of the gallery. A dark and handsome stranger who scored ten out of ten for both technical merit and artistic expression - although on closer inspection, there were some minor but telling idiosyncracies.

He was tall, certainly. Using her own five foot seven as a yardstick, Deana estimated him to be about five foot eleven. He was dark, too, not only in his hair and eyes, but also in his skin; which was as smooth as polished wood, its ambery-olive tint another indicator of very Far Eastern origins.

Handsome? Yes, but not in any bland, conventional sgpsp.- Hep-beanTy-loving friend was a beauty himself, the near perfection of his features flawed only by a-thin white scar that scored his left temple from brow to hairline. This and his strange slanted eyes - so oriental in a western face - set an unassailable new standard of maleness; as did his reddish, rather full-lipped mouth and a nose that was strong and straight, but with an ever-so-slight and impish up-turn.

Almost without thinking, she glanced down towards his groin, wondering what his cock would be like. She'd never set much store by old wive's tales, but with his long slender hands and that bold, pointed nose, she imagined he'd have a penis with similar characteristics. Long but slender, and with a naughty probing glans that would go soul-deep inside a woman and caress her right at her core. He was wearing a pair of tight, narrow-cut, black leather trousers, and where they skimmed his crotch there was a substantial, extenuated bulge that tended to lend credence to her ramblings.

Of course he had to catch her looking . . .

Flicking his gaze down to his own leather covered loins, her companion than panned upwards again, slowly and infuriatingly. His smile was faint but disgustingly and complacently a man's. Without shame, he was cataloguing her charms as thoroughly as she'd checked out his. More so. And for all his beauty and his sensual chemistry, Deana could have quite happily punched him in the mouth.

Men. They were all such vain swines . . . Even if they had every cause to be so.

'Seen enough?' she retorted.

'No. Not really. But then again, the night is young . . .' The slight smile became a broad bright grin that hit Deana square in the solar plexus - as well as in some other more critical areas. She felt herself heat up. Melt. Run.

'Come along, my dear,' he said, reaching out to take her free hand. 'Let's look at some art instead. The very best exhibits are up here, and you and I have got them all to ourselves.'

He started with surprise when their fingers touched, and Deana smiled, enjoying the tiniest of advantages.

'You're so warm,' he said, taking hold of her hand and stretching out her arm. He seemed to study it as a curious artefact for a moment, then he ran the fingertips of his free hand all the way up from her wrist to her bare shoulders in one smooth, continuous caress. The long stroke felt deliciously soft and cool, but she knew that to him, her flesh would feel hot. 'Do you have a fever? Or is it something else?' His dark blue gaze bored into her, as if ordering her to say
he
was the source of the heat.

Deana didn't give him the satisfaction. 'I have a higher than normal body temperature. It's a family trait. It's nothing to do with you, if that's what you're thinking.' Realising she was still clutching her glass of wine, she raised it to her lips for Dutch courage.

But before she could drink, her companion took the glass from her, and proposed a toast.

'Here's to heat then,' he murmured softly, 'especially hot women.' He took a sip of her wine, his brown throat undulating voluptuously as it went down, then he held the glass to
her
lips, touching her mouth with its chilly rim and forcing her to drink down its contents.

Something went flip in Deana's belly. Men never treated her like this, they were usually slightly in awe of her. But this dark stranger had bent her to his will in the simplest of ways within only a few minutes of meeting him. She drank obediently until the glass was empty, then stood like a doll as he swooped down, placed it on the floor beside them, then stood up again just as quickly and wiped her lips with a flick of his fingers.

'What's your name, fellow art-lover?' he asked, his velvet voice far more potent than the wine.

'D—' She almost said it, but in the micro-second before she completed her name, her interior alarm bell started clanging. Maybe it didn't matter, but wasn't she supposed to be 'Delia' here?'

'Dee/ she answered after a momentary pause. 'People call me "Dee".'

It was true, she did get called 'Dee' - and Delia got it too, especially when people weren't quite sure which twin they were with.

'And people call me "Jake", her companion replied, sliding his arm around her shoulders before she could stop him and turning her bodily towards the nearest exhibit. 'So, Dee, what you do think of this?'

'This' was a frighteningly beautiful oil painting; the best thing she'd seen in the gallery and by far the most disturbing. Especially now, here, with this audacious Jake who was stroking the tender skin of her shoulder as if they were lovers and had been for years.

Against the Parapet
showed a masked woman, bent from the waist over a low, white plastered wall, and being taken from behind by a dark-haired, broad-shouldered man. His rumpled jeans indicated that he was unzipped in front, but otherwise the man was fully clothed. The woman, in contrast, was bared from the middle of her back to her ankles, her soft red dress bunched ruthlessly at her shoulders and her panties a crumpled blur and still draped around her feet. Her pale thighs and buttocks, where they could be seen behind her assailant, were criss-crossed with thin streaks of pink - implying that she'd been recently and cruelly beaten. She was handcuffed, and her thin wrists, crossed at the small of her back, seemed to command the eye more than any other part of the painting. It wasn't clear if she was being buggered or simply screwed. It didn't seem to matter.

'Glorious, isn't it?' said Jake from behind Deana, his fingers drifting from her shoulder to the warm bare skin of her back. She felt the cuff of his silk shirt brush delicately against her, then his hand slide slowly around the curve of her rib cage to settle on her breast like a feather.

Deana registered both his touch and the smoky arousal of his voice, but her attention was still claimed by the painting. The woman's face was barely sketched, but her attitude was not one of suffering. On the contrary, her willowy body was supremely sensuous and the marks on her smooth white skin were more like marks of pleasure than of pain. The man who was taking her was a cipher - a dark animal form, an accessory to the woman's enjoyment rather than a protagonist in his own right.

And yet, somehow, the black shape seemed familiar. She didn't dare turn and look at him, but Deana could almost imagine that the long, dark marauder was Jake.

The pressure of his fingers on her nipple dragged her rudely back from her imaginings. He'd taken the stiffly swollen stalk between his thumb and one finger and was swirling it slowly but determinedly. Deana could hardly believe what was happening. Or that she was letting it happen. Or, worse still, that she was responding to it purely on instinct, her hips slowly weaving as the pinching of her nipple transferred itself directly to her aching clitoris - the sensation remote but identical.

'Does it arouse you?' Jake asked, his warm breath flowing across her neck as his free hand lifted her hair and his mouth settled lightly on her shoulder. She felt his teeth against her skin, very hard and deadly, then a single touch of his tongue. But just when she thought he was going to bite her, he let her hair fall back into place and reached around her to enclose her other breast.

'Does it arouse you, Dee?' he repeated, gently kneading her, cupping the soft weight of her flesh, and holding both nipples in his fingers now. She'd no idea whether he meant the painting or the way he was holding her, and she didn't much care. She heard herself sigh 'yes' in the affirmative to either.

'Good,' he whispered, and in a move of total vulgarity, he pressed the jut of his erection into the cotton-covered cleft of her buttocks.

Deana knew she should try to break free, but instead her body swayed backwards to caress him, gripping at his hardness with the cheeks of her bottom, the gesture as gross as his had been. Under her thin dress she wore only a G-string, and as Jake's penis poked rudely at her rear, she could feel a single strand of furled silk being rubbed like a goad against her anus.

She whimpered, trapped between two powerful poles of sensation: his brisk workman-like mauling of her sensitised breasts and the slower, richer, more subversive stimulation of her bottom. He was bouncing her on himself now, and as she gasped and put her hand to her unattended crotch, she heard him laugh like a devil in her ear.