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Combined
with her light caramel skin tone, the exotic eyes gave her a stunning appeal
that would make any man look twice.
    High cheekbones graced an oval face enhanced by perfectly
arched eyebrows. She’d pulled her straight hair back and secured it at the base
of her neck with a flat barrette. Its chestnut brown fullness fell between her
shoulder blades against a gold-colored blouse she’d paired with a pencil skirt.
The skirt stopped decorously right above her knees, but the cheetah print pumps
she wore accentuated her shapely length of long legs.
    To his chagrin, when she’d walked away to take her seat, his
eyes had dropped to the sway of her hips. He’d looked up to find Chase watching
him with a questioning look. Michael had taken a quick glance around to see if
anyone else had noticed where his eyes had strayed. No one had seemed the
wiser.
    He angled his conference chair to the left and leaned back
in the comfortable black leather swivel rocker. With his right foot propped
over his left knee, he kept Jordis Morgan directly in his line of vision. Every
once in a while, she flicked her left hand and rubbed her left wrist. She wore
no watch. He wondered if she’d forgotten to put one on this morning and subconsciously
missed it.
    She had nice hands with long fingers and soft skin. A French
manicure in beige instead of white tipped her nails. Her hands kept busy,
either casually fingering the rim of her cup or fiddling with her pen. The
constant movement fascinated him. He could imagine those hands trailing
languidly across his naked body. The place on his anatomy he’d most welcome her
touch twitched at the thought. When she opened her mouth to lobby for the
landlord-tenant matter of a single mom in a depressed neighborhood, he squashed
his wayward thoughts and shifted his awareness of the discussion from the back
of his multitasking brain to the forefront.
    “Look, sweetheart, I feel for the little inner-city single
mom as much as the next person,” Eric Covington said to Jordis with barely
disguised superiority.
    Michael’s right hand, which had heretofore absently twirled
his pen atop a yellow legal pad on the table in front of him, stopped abruptly. Did he just call her “sweetheart” in the middle of a business meeting?
    Michael looked at Chase who slowly raised an eyebrow,
confirming for Michael he hadn’t imagined the inappropriate appellation.
    “However, we have the opportunity to be the legal face of a
major patent dispute that could lead to some historical legal precedent. Here,”
Eric tapped the folder of his preferred case, “we have an everyday guy whose
brilliant innovation was ripped off by a major corporate conglomerate.” He
leaned forward in his chair, getting into his pitch. “It’ll be great PR. We’ll
be touted for fighting for the underdog. We shouldn’t pass that up for a case
that could easily be handled by Legal Aid.”
    Jordis leaned back in her chair and simply stared at Eric.
Michael watched a slow smile creep across her face. He’d swear he’d seen the
same look on the face of his uncle’s favorite tomcat right before he took out a
family of rats. He thought to intervene, but something about Jordis’s relaxed
poise made him bide his time.
    “Excuse me, studly , but I thought the point of the
firm’s Pro Bono Program was to make a difference in the community, not to
select cases with the intent of improving the firm’s PR profile.”
    Eric glowered at Jonathan, to his right, who came down with
a sudden coughing fit at Jordis’s use of the word studly .
    “Legal Aid is a charitable organization with a finite annual
budget,” Jordis continued. “There’s no guarantee they’ll be able to take on this
woman’s case, at least not immediately. If the patent case has such promise,
I’m sure some other firm will be more than happy to take it on a contingency
fee basis. Besides, we already have a high profile intellectual property case
on the firm’s docket. Using