What He Needs (What He Wants, Book Four) (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) (3 page)

I stared after him as he retreated,
fighting the urge to follow.

“Charlotte,” Worthington said.
 
“Go with him.”
 
He gave me that knowing look again, the
one he’d given me at the police station when Noah had called me into his limo.
 
He knew there was something going on
between
me and Noah,
probably not exactly what it was,
but he knew there was something.
 
And he didn’t care.
 
I
thought about telling him no, about saying it wasn’t my job to babysit our
client.
 
But of course it was my
job, at least to some extent.

I was a law student.
 
I was lucky to even be working on this
case, and even though I would have preferred to be working on it in some other
aspect, if Professor Worthington wanted me to go after Noah, then I had to go
after Noah.

You want to go after him.

I raced down the path toward Noah, who was
striding through the trees, taking a short cut back toward the main road.
 
There were sirens in the distance now,
and I could hear the voices of the detectives turning up at the crime scene.

“Noah!” I called, but he just kept
walking, not even turning around to acknowledge me.
 
“Noah!
 
I know
you can hear me,” I grumbled as I struggled to keep up with him.

Finally, when we got onto the sidewalk,
he turned around.
 
“What the fuck
was that?” he demanded.

“What the fuck was what?”

“The whole ‘Josh will behave
professionally’ bullshit.”

I shook my head.
 
“I had to say that!
 
This is my job, Noah.
 
I can’t look bad in front of Professor
Worthington.”
 

“Well, maybe I’ll fire him, too, then,”
Noah seethed.
 
He turned and
started walking down the sidewalk, dodging in and out of the Sunday walkers,
who weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere.
 
They were strolling along, bags full of things from the farmer’s market,
coffees in hand, enjoying the day.
 
Noah almost ran into a man holding a box of doughnuts.

“Noah!” I yelled.
 
“Noah, stop!”

He slowed down, but just barely.

“Noah,” I said.
 
“I understand you’re upset.
 
I would be, too.
 
Katie just died, which I’m sure has been traumatic.
 
And then you had to come and see Josh
there.
 
But firing Professor
Worthington isn’t the answer.
 
You’re going to need him, now more than ever.”

Noah finally stopped in the middle of the
street, walked over to a bench and sat down.
 
He put his head in his hands and didn’t say anything for a
moment.
 
I sat down next to him and
waited.

Finally, he rubbed his eyes and looked
up, his gaze fixating on something across the street.
 
“How did she die?” he asked softly.

“She was strangled.”

“Jesus.”
 
He dropped his head back into his hands.
 
I wanted to reach out, to touch his
shoulder, to comfort him in some way, but I had a feeling that would just make
him more upset.
 
I didn’t want to
risk the chance of him rejecting me, of him pushing me away, his walls coming
up and forcing that distance between us.
 
“When did it happen?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.
 
“They’d just found her body when they
called me.”
 

He shook his head again.
 
“She was only twenty-two,” he
said.
 
“She wasn’t even… she still
lived with her parents.
 
She wasn’t
even done with school.”
 
Something
about the way he was talking about her betrayed a certain familiarity, more
than one would have with an employee.

“Did you… did you have a relationship
with her?” I asked carefully.

He shook his head.
 
“No.”

I didn’t want to annoy him, or push him,
and I knew he was upset.
 
But what
I said next had to be said.
 
“Noah,
that won’t matter to the police.
 
They’re going to know you had a connection to her.
 
You shouldn’t have shown up at the
crime scene like that.
 
And you
shouldn’t have punched Josh.
 
You
were so lucky that the police weren’t closer.
 
Josh could still press charges, he could –”

“Now you’re defending him?” Noah
asked.
 
He shook his head.
 
“After what he did to you?”

“I’m not defending him,” I said.
 
“I’m just saying that you can’t let
what Josh did start to effect your case.
 
It looks really bad, Noah.”

He turned to me.
 
“You think I did it?”

“What?”

“Do you think I murdered those women?”

“What I think doesn’t matter.”
 
The last thing I wanted was for him to
think that my opinion had anything to do with his case.
 
No one’s opinion did, except for the
police and the jury, if it came to that.
 
And I was pretty sure it might be headed that way.
 
One woman
dead, okay.
 
Two
women, awful.
 
But
three
women?
 
All connected to one
man?
 
It looked bad.
 
Really, really bad.
 
If he
wasn’t
arrested,
it would be a miracle.
 
And if he
did
get
arrested, he was going to need Professor Worthington.
 
In fact, he was probably going to need even more than that
-- he was going to need Professor Worthington to head a team of high-powered
lawyers, all working together.

“I didn’t ask you if it mattered,” Noah
said.
 
“I asked if you thought I
did it.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment, and
he turned to look at me.
 
His eyes
had softened, and it was that same expression I’d seen on him in the lobby
yesterday, the expression that made me feel like he did care about me, that
this wasn’t just fun to him, that it wasn’t just about sex.

The thing was, deep down, I
didn’t
think
he did it.
 
I’d been with him, I’d
spent time with him, and I liked to think I had a good read on people.
 
He just didn’t seem like the type of
man who could kill someone, let alone
three
someones
, with
his bare hands.

But another part of me felt like I was
being ridiculously
naïve, that
I’d slept with him and
my emotions and my hormones were clouding my brain when it came to the facts of
the case.
 
How many times had I
watched tape of trials or police interviews where someone’s mother or father
insisted there was no way their son or daughter could have committed that rape,
or that murder, or that assault, even though there was DNA evidence linking
them to the victim?

I thought those people were ridiculously
stupid.
 
And now I might be turning
into one of them.

“Answer me,” Noah said.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

He nodded, then stood up and started
walking down the sidewalk toward his limo, which was parked against the curb.

I watched him go, my heart beating fast
in my chest.
 
I had a sinking
feeling that if he got into that limo and pulled away, he was going to be gone
forever, that I would never get a chance to be with him again.
 
The thought was unbearable.
 
A wave of despair and desperation
washed over me, scrubbing away any kind of protests my brain was preparing.

I rushed after him and knocked on the
window of the limo.

For a second, I thought he was going to
refuse to talk to me.

But then the window rolled down.

Our eyes met, and I didn’t have to say
anything.

He opened the door and let me in.

***

Once we were at his apartment, everything
changed.

The vibe, which back on the bench had
been about him wanting me to believe him, about him needing something from me,
had shifted.
 
Now his mood was
dark.
 
He walked over to the bar in
the kitchen, uncapped a bottle of something amber-colored, and poured the
liquid into a tumbler.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I stood
there for a moment, hovering by the door.
 
He sipped his drink and then stared down at it, brooding.
 
He was wearing a crisp white dress shirt,
a dark tie, and a black suit.
 
His
clothes hung on his large frame perfectly, hugging his broad shoulders and
chest.
 
He was freshly shaven, his
hair with just the right amount of gel to make him look gorgeous and put
together without coming across as someone who cared to much about their appearance.

We stood there for a moment, not saying
anything, and then finally, Noah pulled back and threw the glass he was holding
against the wall.
 
It shattered
into a million pieces.
 
I jumped at
the sound of the breaking glass, my heart stopping in my chest, the sound
seeming to echo through the eerie silence that followed.

After a moment, I moved toward it,
intending to start cleaning it up.

“Don’t,” Noah growled.

I froze.
 
He was removing his suit coat, draping it over the chair on
the breakfast bar.
 
He unbuttoned his
sleeves and began rolling them up.
 
A delicious shiver of fear and excitement skittered up my spine.

“It displeases me when I feel like you
don’t trust me, Charlotte,” Noah said.
 
“It displeases me even more when I feel like you’re not on my
side.”
 
He finally looked at me,
his eyes boring into mine.
 
“Do you
understand?”

I nodded.
 
I understood exactly what I meant.
 
He meant that I’d chosen Josh over him, that I’d protected
Josh back at the park.
 
But it
wasn’t like that.
 
I didn’t give a
shit about Josh.
 
What I cared
about was keeping my job with Professor Worthington, and making sure Noah
wasn’t doing anything to fuck up his case.
 
It was my job as part of his legal team.
 
And beyond that, I cared about
Noah.
 

“What do you understand?” Noah prompted.

“That you didn’t like it when you thought
I was sticking up for Josh.”
  
I took a step toward him.
 
“But Noah, I wasn’t --”

“Stop.”
 
He held his hand out, and I stopped moving.
 
“You don’t understand at all.”

“I don’t?”

He shook his head, his blue eyes blazing.
 
“When you upset me, Charlotte, when you
defy me, there are consequences.”

And then I got it.
 
There were consequences.
 
Sexual ones.
 
I bit my lip and looked down at the floor.
 
“Oh.”

“Look at me when you’re talking.”

I looked up at him, and he began removing
his tie.
 
“Bend over the counter,
Charlotte,” he said.

I swallowed.
 
“Um, I don’t – ”

“Bend over the counter.”

I walked over to the counter and bent
over, sticking my ass up in the air.
 
He made me wait there for what seemed like an agonizingly long time, but
was really probably only a few moments.
 
And then his body was on top of mine, his chest pushing into my
back.
 
He pushed my hair back from
my face and wrapped it around his hand, tugging on it gently.
 
Heat pulsed through my body and I bit
back the moan that was already threatening to escape from my lips.

Then Noah stood up, moving his weight off
of me, and lifted up my skirt.
 
“You know, Charlotte,” he said.
 
“We’re going to have to do something about you wearing these sexy little
outfits out of the house.”
 
The
cool air hit my ass, and that, coupled with the brush of his fingertips against
the back of my thighs made my pussy start to get wet.

“This isn’t sexy,” I said.
 
“It’s just –”

His hand slapped my ass, sending a
stinging pain through my backside.
 
“Don’t talk back to me, Charlotte,” he said.