What He Fights (What He Wants, Book Ten) (An Alpha Billionaire Romance)

WHAT HE FIGHTS (What He Wants, Book Ten)

By Hannah Ford

Copyright 2015, Hannah Ford, all rights
reserved.
 
This book is a work of fiction,
and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

NOAH

She looked so innocent.
 
Her hair fell in a soft wave over her
forehead, her cheeks flushed.
 
She
sat down with the folder I’d given her and took a deep breath, the way I
imagined she would before she was getting ready to take a particularly hard
test.

Then she opened the folder.

And I saw it.

I saw her face cloud with confusion, and
then panic.
 

I struggled to keep myself calm.
 
I’d been through hundreds of these
hearings -- they didn’t have any bearing on what was actually going to
happen.
 
The prosecution would pull
out their big guns, would rush around throwing evidence at the wall, hoping
something would stick.
 
It was an
intimidation tactic.
 
Whatever was
said at an evidentiary hearing almost didn’t matter.

The state would never bring charges
against someone unless they were certain they had enough evidence to get a
trial – they did not want to look foolish.
 
But evidence presented at an evidentiary hearing was just
that.
 
It had no bearing on a
trial.
  
No one could be sent
to jail because of what was presented at an evidentiary hearing.

That’s what I would have told a
client.
 
That’s what I was telling
myself.
 
But telling myself was the
easy part.

Something foreign pulsed through me.
 

Fear.

Not about the case.

Not about being found guilty or about
going to jail.

But about Charlotte, about her not
believing me.

She turned to look at me, and I opened my
mouth to speak, to tell her all the things I would tell a client to keep them
calm.
 
It’s just an evidentiary hearing, it does
not mean anything, this is not what we will see at trial.

I stopped when I saw the emotion in her
eyes.
 
It wasn’t doubt.
  
It wasn’t fear.
 
It was something else.
 
Something far more powerful, more
intense.

It was anger.
 
Accusation.
 
Not
burning bright, on the surface, but bubbling slowly, underneath, the kind of
emotion that was far more serious.
 
Emotions that exploded off of people tended to burn themselves out
quickly.
 
Once the fuel of that
emotion had been exhausted, there was nothing left.
 
But emotions that simmered under the surface were much more
dangerous.
 
They had the ability to
boil and roll, so slowly that you were somehow able to convince yourself you
didn’t even feel them.
 
Until one
day you woke up and realized they’d ruined everything.

Charlotte turned to me.
 
Her eyes were watery.

“Who did…” she trailed off.

She said it at a normal volume, but to my
ears, it sounded as if she was whispering.

“What?” I asked.
 
“What is it?”
 
I was struggling to keep calm, struggling to keep the panic
out of my voice.
 
It was a strange
feeling. For the first time in a very long time, I felt the first tiny bit of
my control start to slip from my grasp, the first crack in a carefully
controlled existence.

“Who did you tell about us?” she
demanded.
 
“Who knows?”

“No one. Why?”

“Because I’m on the witness list.”

The crack suddenly got wider.
 
It wasn’t slow, the way a crack in a
carefully built foundation would split over time.
 
It was immediate, deep, devastating.

They would call her to the stand.

They would ask her about us.

They would ruin her.

I’d seen it happen, over and over.

They’d take a fiancé or a girlfriend
– never a wife, since spouses had spousal privileges – put her on
the stand, try to trip her up, to make her say something incriminating.
 
If the person decided to be stupid and
lie, the prosecution would threaten them with a perjury charge, only to swoop
in later and offer them a deal – testify against your boyfriend and that
pesky little perjury charge will go away.

They were going to try to play with her.

And there was nothing I could do to stop
it.

CHARLOTTE

My whole body was shaking.
 
Thoughts swirled through my head,
impossible to untangle.
 
My heart
pounded, sending blood whooshing through my veins so loudly I was afraid I was
going to have a heart attack.

“Charlotte,” Noah was saying, but he
sounded like he was talking to me from a tunnel, his voice echoing off the
walls.
 
“You’re having a panic
attack.”

“No,” I shook my head.
 
I didn’t have panic attacks.

My fingers and toes were numb, and I felt
Noah’s hand on the back of my neck.
 
I was shaking, and my entire body felt cold, the way you would after
coming inside after a long day out in the snow.
 

“Lie down,” he commanded, and I felt him
guiding me down on the bed gently, my head sinking into the pillow.
 

As soon as I was lying down, my stomach
stopped rolling, and my fingers and toes started to tingle, as if they were
waking up.
 
I flexed them over and
over until they began to feel normal.
 
My heart rate started to slow.

Noah disappeared for a moment and then
returned with a glass of water, made me take a sip.

He walked to the other side of the bed,
lied down next to me and pushed my hair off my forehead.
 
His touch was calming, safe.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Good.”

I clung to him, holding his shoulders
tight.
 
His arms were loose around
my waist, and I had a moment of panic, thinking that maybe he was going to do
what he’d done before– leave me, thinking he was protecting me.
 

The calm I was feeling began to
dissipate, but my panic didn’t come back – instead I was filled with a
reckless feeling.
 
This was only
the beginning.
 
My name on the
witness list was just the first surprise in whatever else was waiting inside of
that folder.
 

There would be evidence.

Evidence tying Noah to Katie’s murder,
evidence I probably hadn’t heard about until now.

They have nothing,
a voice in my head whispered.
 
They have absolutely nothing.
 
He would have told you.
 
He’s not a murderer.

I wanted to show him I believed him,
wanted to show him that I trusted him, that this wouldn’t tear us apart.

So I pushed my leg up onto his, letting
the robe I was wearing fall open slightly in the front.

I moved my lips toward his neck, inhaling
his scent, brushing my cheek against his skin.
 
I kissed him softly on the chin, then reached out and traced
the lines of his collarbone.
 
He
was so goddamn beautiful.
 
His
body, his face, his cock, his heart, his soul.
 
Everything about him was beautiful.

I felt like I was standing on a cliff,
looking down into a dark abyss.

Once I looked in that folder, everything
was going to change.

I pushed my body into his.

“Charlotte…” he said.

“What?” I asked, moving my hand down over
the smooth planes of his stomach.
 
He was dressed in just his boxers, and when I got to the waistband, I
slid my hand underneath.
 

But Noah grabbed my wrist.
 
“Don’t.”

“Why?” I breathed.
 
“Don’t you want me?”
 
I pushed my robe open more, exposing my
breasts to him.

“Not like this.”

“Not like what?”

“Not like you trying to fuck so you don’t
have to face the truth.”

I climbed on top of him.
 
It the first time I’d ever been on top of
him, and I loosened my robe completely so that he had full access to my
body.
 
I felt him harden underneath
me.
 

“That’s not why I’m doing it,” I
said.
 
It was a lie and he knew it.

It seemed to anger him.
 
He grabbed my hips and pushed me off,
flipping me over so that I was on my back.
 
He straddled me, holding my arms down on the bed.
 
“Don’t lie.”

“Please,” I begged.
 
I tried to push my pelvis against his
hard cock, tried to make him see how badly I wanted him, needed to feel him
inside of me, to feel our bodies tangled together.

I saw the struggle on his face.
 
He knew exactly why I was doing
this.
  
He knew I was avoiding
whatever was in that folder, knew I was using this as a way to connect with
him.
 

He shook his head and released my hands,
moved off the bed.
 
He stood there,
staring down at me.
 
“Get up,
Charlotte.”

He moved away from me and walked into the
bathroom, where I heard the sound of the tub being turned on.

He returned to the room a moment
later.
 
“Get in the bath.”

“No.”
 
I crossed my arms over my chest, defiant.

But he reached down and scooped me off
the bed, handling me like it was nothing.
 
He carried me into the bathroom and set me down on the floor.
 
Then he pulled my robe off me and hung
it on the shower door.
 
He picked
me up again and set me down in the tub.

Steam rose from the water, enveloping
me.
 

“You need to calm down,” he said.
 
“Relax.
 
And then we can deal with whatever is in that folder.”

“I’m not a child,” I said.

“Then stop acting like one.”

He left the bathroom, closing the door
behind him.

**

I tried my best to do what I’d been told.

I tried to relax.

But my body was wired with energy.

I made it ten minutes in the bathtub
before I climbed out, and I still didn’t feel ready to face whatever was in
that folder.
 

You have to, Charlotte,
I told myself.
 
Denying it exists won’t make it go away.

It’s what my dad had done when he’d first
gotten sick, slipped into the hazy comfort of denial, and it was this thought
that propelled me forward.

I knew if I came back into the room after
just a few minutes, there was no way Noah was going to let me see those
documents.
 
I’d already been acting
crazy – a panic attack followed by an attempt to throw myself at him
didn’t exactly inspire confidence that I could handle whatever was in that
file.
 

So I forced myself to stay in the
bathroom, to dry my hair and put on some make up – foundation, a slick of
lip gloss, a swipe of mascara.
 
I
dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweater, then returned to the suite.

Noah was sitting at the desk, on the
phone.

“Yes,” he said.
 
“That sounds fine.
 
I’ll see you then.”

He ended the call.
 
He’d put on a pair of tracksuit buttons
and a long-sleeved white t-shirt.
 
He must have kept clothes here in the room for himself.
 

“Good,” he said.
 
“There you are.”
 
His voice was all business, his tone
brusque as if I’d just run to do an errand instead of carried to the bath by
him after he’d rejected my advances.

“Yes,” I said.
 
“Here I am.”
 
My
heart was sinking, because I could tell his walls were back up.
 
Last night, and even this morning, how
he’d held me, talked to me, comforted me -- that was gone, replaced with this
version of him, the version that was in control and showed no emotion.