She disappeared into her bedroom and slammed the door.
She’d told him, he thought as he stood there in surprise, his hard-on pulsing behind his zipper.
* * *
Kate knelt on the carpet watching Jericho sleep. Thick dark lashes lay against his bronzed skin. She noted the dark circles beneath those lashes and remembered his words the night before. He wasn’t sleeping well because of her. A thrill of excitement tingled down her spine at that admission.
He had dropped her off and she’d suggested that he wait in her office. No one should have to go through an autopsy unless they really had to. When she got back from the autopsy, this was how she found him, asleep on her office couch.
Her eyes roamed over his face, and she sighed with the sheer joy of just watching him when that intense gaze was shuttered. Asleep, the force that was so much a part of him was dormant. She could still see it in the lines around his sensual lips, in the proud nose, and powerful, compelling beauty of his face. Jericho was not like other men she’d met in her life. Maybe that was why she was drawn to him despite his silver-spoon look.
He’d loosened the bow tie and it lay against his stark-white shirt. Here and there, the studs had popped open while he’d slept, revealing patches of smooth, supple skin. His cuffs were undone, the gold cuff links with initials—JSJ—hung loosely from the stitched buttonholes. Worried he would lose them, she reached out and snagged them, dropping them into the pocket of her jeans.
His presence never ceased to cause a stir in a room. Women would follow him with their eyes, desiring all that lightly restrained masculine energy. He prowled, and when he moved, women were compelled to watch, seeing in him qualities that spoke of the best of the species.
There were many more compelling attributes in Jericho other than his mind-drugging good looks and his finely formed body. Regardless of the toughness he showed in court, she suspected he hid a sensitivity that he guarded like a fortress. A sensitivity that had shone through when he’d touched her arm during Danny’s interrogation; a sensitivity that came through each time he looked at her. It seduced and lured her and was as powerful and engaging as his personality.
Even in sleep, the lines of his face were taut, as if he struggled in his dreams. His face shadowed with dark brown stubble looked sexy on him. He jerked in his sleep and moaned softly.
The sound cut through her, arrowing to her groin as though it was shot from a bow.
The male scent of him was thick in her nostrils, and she breathed deep, irresistibly drawn closer. Her eyes traveled down to his abdomen, bared by his restless slumber, the waistband of his briefs, starkly white against the deep bronze thickness of his stomach muscles, and…she looked closer…black lines?
How she wanted to touch his skin, wanted to see what that waistband hid, wanted to put her lips on his skin. Suddenly, she was beginning to wonder who was enticing who.
“Get as close as you want, Kate.”
She gasped. Her eyes flew to his, heavy-lidded and filled with passion. She blushed deeply and furiously to be caught staring at him so obviously.
To hide her embarrassment, she rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m finished with the ME.”
“Cause of death?”
“Manual strangulation.”
“So, it wasn’t the blow?”
“No. It was just a glancing blow with no real force behind it.”
“You look beat,” he said.
“I am. I don’t want to make any mistakes, so I’d better get home and get to bed.”
His very brown eyes veiled beneath his tangled chocolate lashes caressed her face, the heightened color on her cheeks. He reached out and ran the back of his hand down her cheek. “Sorry about the ‘look closer’ comment. It was a response to my very intense and vivid dream of you riding me.”
“Are those the only kinds of dreams you have of me?” She looked away from the blatant look in his eyes and wished she hadn’t. His shirt still rode up, the taut thick-ridged muscle of his stomach enticing her fingers. If it was his body she was interested in, why did she care so much about his dreams?
“My dreams are uncontrollable, part of my subconscious. Wouldn’t it be more important to know what I think when I’m awake?”
“What makes you think I care what you think about me at all?”
“You were just looking at me as if you wanted to devour me. I can only wonder at what you’re thinking. The female mind is so intricate, so beautifully complicated.
“And men aren’t complicated?”
“No, we’re not. I want to be inside you. That’s a fact, and if you need evidence to back that up…”
She couldn’t help it. Her eyes fell to his groin and the enticing glimpse of that black ink. Did he have a tattoo there? Jericho, the straitlaced, dedicated deputy district attorney didn’t seem loose enough to get a tattoo.