What He Desires (What He Wants, Book Five) (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) (2 page)

“Great,” I said under my breath and sat
down at the other end of the table.
 
I wanted to leave the room and come back after Professor Worthington got
here, but I didn’t want to give Josh the satisfaction.
 
So instead, I plugged my phone into its
new charger and set it down next to me on the table.
 
Then I pulled out the file Professor Worthington had given
me at the police station, the one filed with photos and reports I was supposed
to have studied.
 
I hadn’t really
had a chance.
 

That’ s a lie.
 
You did have a
chance,
you just decided to spend your time out at a BDSM club instead of working on
the case.

“Is that the file on Cutler?” Josh asked.

I nodded, not looking up from the
documents, even though I wasn’t really reading them.
 
My mind was a mess, because of Noah, because of Josh,
because of everything.
 
The words
swam on the page, blurring into one big black smudge.

“Interesting, right?” Josh asked.

“Definitely.”

“He’s a psycho.”

“No, he’s not,” I said automatically.

“Oh?” Josh said.
 
He leaned back in his chair until the
front legs were off the floor.
 
He
grabbed the side of the table and balanced himself.
 
“Are you fucking him?”

I had to resist the urge to get up and
give his chair a good hard shove.
 
I imagined him hitting the floor, his head cracking against the
linoleum,
the
blood pooling underneath him.
 
It was a violent fantasy, and I was
surprised at myself.
 
I wondered if
spending so much time with a probable murderer was making me prone to having
violent tendencies.

I ignored Josh and pretended to be
engrossed in my reading.

“I’ll bet your pussy gets so wet,” Josh
said.
 
“I’ll bet you get so wet and
you scream while he drills that ass.
 
You have anal, right?
 
Julia
won’t let me get anywhere near her ass.
 
But I’ll convince her.”

I fought hard to control my breathing,
but tears of rage filled my eyes.
 
Josh seemed to like this.

“
Aww
, are you
gonna
cry?” he asked.
 
“You’re going to have a thicker skin
than that, Charlotte.
 
What if they
call you to the stand?
 
They’re
going to ask if he ever got rough with you, if he ever took you to that club,
what’s it called?
 
Rape?”

He was talking about Force, and he knew
it wasn’t called Rape.
 

He wanted me to refute him, wanted me to
get into a back and forth with him so he could get a reaction out of me.

But it wasn’t going to work.

“It’s called Force,” I said evenly, my
eyes still trained on Noah’s file.
  
“Which you would have known if you’d read the report.”

I glanced up at him, and he smiled at me,
like he knew exactly what the club was called.
 
He took in a breath.
 
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
 
“The guy’s a psycho for sure, but I still don’t think he did it.”

I looked up at him, interested for the
first time.
 
“Oh, yeah?” I said,
still struggling to keep my tone light
 
“Why do you say that?”

He swallowed,
then
bit his bottom lip nervously.
 
The
skin there was all torn up, like he’d been chewing on it a lot.
 
“There’s something weird going on in
this case,” he said.
 
“Have you
noticed –
”

But before he could finish, the door to
the office opened and Professor Worthington walked in.

“Good,” he said shortly.
 
“You’re both here.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding and smoothing down
my sweater.

Professor Worthington took a seat in the
middle of the table, in between
me and Josh
.
 
I was happy for the buffer.
 
He spread out a bunch of papers and a
legal pad,
then
turned his attention to his laptop.

“We’re going to have to do something
about Noah’s inbox,” Professor Worthington said, not wasting any time.
 
“He’s turned his password over to me,
and he has emails that are going to make him look exceptionally guilty.”

“What kind of emails?’ I asked, my heart
sinking.

“He was having an inappropriate
relationship with Katie Price,” Professor Worthington said, shaking his head as
he scrolled through the emails.
 
“Jesus Christ, Noah, you really should learn to keep your dick in your
pants.”

“Can I see them?” I asked, the blood rushing
in my ears.

Worthington slid the laptop over to
me.
 
It was open to Noah’s email
account, and there was an email between Katie and Noah up on the screen.
 
It was a long conversation, the kind of
conversation that only happened when two people were emailing back and forth
incessantly, all day.
 
The kind of
conversation you usually only had with someone you were involved with.
 
My stomach turned.

“Maybe I should be emailing you
from my personal account,”
Katie
had written.
 
“Since the conversation is getting
so personal.”

She’d followed it up with a smiley
face.
 
Was she that stupid?
 
Didn’t she realize Noah was the head of
the firm, and therefore, they couldn’t really get in trouble?
 
Noah owned everything.
 
If anyone found out they were emailing
using their work email addresses, there was nothing they could do about
it.
 

I kept scrolling through the
conversation, which started out being flirtatious and funny, then quickly
devolved into something borderline X-rated.
 

“I’ll bet you’re a good kisser,”
Katie had written.

“I’ll bet you taste so good,”
Noah had written back.

 
Bile filled the back of my throat.
 
I didn’t want to see how far it had gotten, so I pushed the
computer back over to Professor Worthington.
 
I pretended to make a note on my legal pad, hoping Josh and
Worthington wouldn’t be able to tell how upset I was.

I was devastated, not only because it
pointed to Noah being guilty – this made three women now he was involved
with who’d been killed – but because he’d lied to me.
 
He and Katie
had
 
been
involved.

I wondered how long they’d been
together.
 
Why had he killed her?
Did it have to do with why she’d called him last night?
 
Why
had she called him last night? Was Katie
in love with him?
 
My thoughts
swirled together, and I had to summon all my strength to bring my attention
back to the meeting.

“Charlotte?” Professor Worthington was
asking.
 
“Can you take care of
that?”

“Can I take care of what?” I asked.

He sighed and looked at me like I was
useless.
 
Which, honestly, I
supposed I was at this point.
 
“Of
interviewing Katie’s friends.
 
Poke
around,
find out who she hung out with, if there was
anyone else who might have wanted to hurt her.
 
Find out
who
she was, where she
hung out, what she was like.
 
Can
you do that?”

“Yes,” I said, even though I would have
rather poked my eyes out with a fork than find out exactly what kind of person
Katie Price was.

“Here’s her address,” Worthington said,
pushing a piece of paper over to me.
 
“You can start there.”

I folded the paper in half and placed it
in my purse.
 
What had Noah
said?
 
That Katie still lived with
her parents?
 
I’m sure they weren’t
going to welcome me showing up at her house, asking them all kinds of questions
about what Katie was like.
 
Especially when I told them I was a defense lawyer for her boss, who
might have been the last person to talk to her before she was killed.

There was a headache starting at my
temples, and all I wanted to do was go home and have a long, hot bath, followed
by a glass – or a bottle – of wine before crawling into bed.
 

But I had reading for tomorrow’s classes
that I was behind on from spending my weekend with Noah, and I needed to get it
done.
 
And then there was the
matter of my stepfather’s birthday party.
 
I still hadn’t bought him a present.
 

This is why I usually kept to a
meticulous schedule, and why there was no room for anything else in my
life.
 
Distractions needed to be
minimized.
 
It was imperative that
I stay focused, because as soon as one thing slipped, it was like dominos.

“Josh,” Professor Worthington said.
 
“I’ll need you to go through Noah’s
email, line by line, mail by mail.
 
Any emails with Katie should be deleted.
 
Any mention of Katie to anyone else should be deleted.”
 

My attention snapped back to the
conversation.
 
“Should we really be
doing that?” I asked.
 
“Isn’t that
destroying evidence?”

“There is no case yet,” Professor
Worthington said.
 
“So none of this
is evidence.
 
And
we’re not destroying them
,
we’re deleting
them
.
 
If the prosecutor’s
office is that determined to find the emails, they can access the back up
files.
 
Which reminds me, we’re
going to need access to Katie Price’s work email account.”
 
He made a note on his legal pad.

“Yeah,” I said.
 
“But if they find out we – ”

“We’re not doing anything wrong,” Josh
said, shrugging.
 
“It’s a gray
area.”

My phone buzzed with a text before I
could reply, and I looked down.

Noah.

“Come back to my apartment.
 
Immediately.”

God, he was so arrogant.
 
What gave him the right to think he
could just demand where I went or what I did?
 
It was barbaric, when you really thought about it.

You like it.
 
It turns you on, how demanding he is,
how he wants to take control of you.

This was how he roped women in.
 
He got them all confused, caught up in
a whirlwind of sex and lust and hormones, so they couldn’t see what was really
going on.
 
Well, I wasn’t going to
be another Katie.

I picked up my phone to text him back and
tell him to leave me alone, but before I could, the screen died again.
 
Lovely.
 
The cheap charger I’d gotten was already worthless.

“We have bigger problems than the emails,
anyway,” Professor Worthington said.
 
“There’s also the matter of Noah’s juvenile record.”

“His juvenile record?” I asked, frowning.

“Yes, Charlotte, have you not read the
file I gave you?”

“I’ve read it,” I lied.
 
“But I must have missed that part.”

“Noah has a juvenile record,” Josh piped
up helpfully.
 
“But it’s been
sealed.
 
And he won’t tell anyone
what’s in it.”

“Which is going to be a problem, because
the first thing the prosecutor is going to do if Noah is arrested is ask for it
to be unsealed and admitted.”
 
Professor Worthington sighed and rubbed his temples.
 

Great.
 
On top of everything else, now Noah had a secret sealed
record from when he was a juvenile.
 
It was so absurd I almost wanted to laugh out loud.

A moment later, Professor Worthington
dismissed us.

“See you in class tomorrow, Charlotte,”
Josh said happily as I walked out.
 

I ignored him.

When I got back to my apartment, there
was no sign of Julia.
 
I breathed a
sigh of
relief,
happy I wouldn’t have to deal with her
yet.
 
I peeked into my room, my
eyes taking a quick inventory to see if anything had been messed with after I’d
left last night.
 
But everything
seemed like it was in its right place.
 
Of course, there was still the matter of the panties Josh had defaced,
the ones he’d placed back in my top drawer.