What He Wants (3 page)

“What’s your name?” he whispered.

“Charlotte,” I said.
 
“Charlotte Holloway.”

“Charlotte,” he repeated the word, and my
name, which had always sounded old-fashioned and plain, now sounded sexy and
dangerous.

A second later, he was gone.

***

I could still feel his lips on the back
of my neck as I walked toward the subway.
 
The air felt suddenly colder as I stepped onto the platform.

People crowded around me, talking and
laughing, most of them in good moods after a night out.

But all I could think about was him.

My face flamed, thinking about what I’d
let him do to me.
 
I wondered what
everyone on the subway car would think if they knew I’d just let a stranger
take me in a back alley.
 
It was so
dirty, so bad, so out of character from what I would usually do. It wasn’t even
a one-night stand!
 
A one-night
stand had to take a whole night.
 

When I got home, I paused outside my
apartment door and said a quick prayer that my roommate wouldn’t be home.
 
Nicola was an actress and a dancer, and
it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to be out at night.
 
Her and her theatre friends liked to
sleep all day and then stay out all night.

Her schedule suited me fine.
 
I liked having the apartment to myself,
liked not having to battle for the bathroom or worry about noise when I was
trying to fall asleep.
 
I’d lucked
out when I’d found this apartment – a lot of my law school classmates had
ended up with four roommates or an apartment in a bad part of town.
 
My apartment was tiny, but it was clean
and it was close to campus.

I heated up some ramen noodles and ate
them in front of the tv, trying to keep my mind on an episode of Bill
Maher.
 
But I could still only
think about him, about what I’d done, his hands on me, the way he’d branded
me.
 
I took a shower but made sure
not to wash the X off my wrist.
 
It
was the only memory I had a of him, and I knew it was silly, but I wanted to
keep it.

It was midnight when I got into bed, and
I tossed and turned for a while until finally falling into a fitful sleep.

My cell phone woke me a few hours later.

I groped for my phone, my heart
pounding.
 
There were only two
people who would be calling me at this time of night – my mom, or Josh.

It was Josh.

“Worthington’s here,” he said.
 
“His office.
 
Seems big.”

“I’ll be right there.”
 

***

 
Thirty minutes later, at three-thirty in the morning, I was
rushing up the steps of Hinton Hall, heading for Professor Worthington’s
office.

When I got there, Josh was sitting on one
of the wooden benches that lined the hallway.

“Nice outfit,” he commented wryly.

I was dressed in a black pencil skirt and
a silky white blouse.
 
Worthington
was a bit sexist, and if you wanted to get ahead in his class and you were
female, you had to try harder.
 
Which meant you didn’t show up looking like a slob, not even at
three-thirty in the morning.

“What’s the situation?” I asked, ignoring
his comment.

“He came in right before I called
you.
 
Seemed agitated
 
He had a coffee.”

I nodded.
 

Worthington taught our intro to torts
class, but he was a hotshot lawyer in his own right.
 
He would sometimes use law students for research or to run
grunt work for him on his cases.
 
The experience was irreplaceable.
 
Worthington was notorious for picking whoever was closest to him to help
– he had his own practice and didn’t seem to have time to choose students
based on their merits.

So Josh and I sometimes took turns
sitting in the big chairs in the lobby of Hinton, where Worthington had his
office.
 
We’d study and hope that
maybe we’d run into Worthington when he had something going on.

“Was he –”

The door to Worthington’s office flew
open.

He saw us standing there, and his face
set into a wry smile.
 
“You two,”
he said, pointing to us.
 
“I need
you both.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.
 
My heart sped up and my palms felt
twitchy.
 
After just a few weeks in
law school, I was finally going to see some action.
 
I pulled out a notebook and got ready to take notes.

“There’s been a murder,” Worthington
said. He drained his coffee then crushed the empty Starbucks cup in his hand
and tossed it toward the trash can in the hallway.
 
It bounced off the rim and onto the floor.
  
“We have a client, an important
one.
 
He hasn’t been arrested yet,
but for reasons I won’t get into, he’s going to be a suspect.”
 
He stared both of us down, and I forced
myself not to move.
 
Worthington
was a hotshot lawyer – the kind of lawyer who commanded hundreds of
thousands in fees.
 
Whatever this
case was, it was big.
 

“The client is high profile,” Worthington
went on.
 
“He’s insisted on meeting
whoever it that’s going to be working with him.”
 
He stared us all down again, his gaze icy.
 
“Of course I’ll have people at my
office on this.
 
But if he is
charged, we’re going to need all the help we can get.
 
Above all, I need to be assured of your discretion.”

“Of course,” Josh and I said.

“Noah Cutler,” Worthington said,
 
“is the client.”

I forced myself not to have a
reaction.
 
But of course I knew who
Noah Cutler was.
 
He was a lawyer
in his own right, but not the kind you’d find listed in the white pages.
 
He was a certain kind of lawyer –
the kind of lawyer you called when you were in a lot of trouble, the kind of
lawyer you could count on to take care of things for you, on many different
levels.

Rumors had swirled about him for
years—that he wasn’t afraid to break laws, that he was going to be
disbarred, that he took bribes and was in bed with the mob.
 
He was constantly getting reprimanded,
constantly getting held in contempt of court.
 
But he wasn’t sleazy – in fact, he was a legend.

“Why aren’t his own people working on this?”
Josh asked.

He was rewarded with a smoldering look
from Worthington.
 
“Because it’s a
conflict of interest,” Worthington said.
 
“He’s not going to have his own office handling his affairs.”
 
He sighed.
 
“Listen, the less you two know about the details the
better.
 
I don’t need you asking a
bunch of dumb questions.”
 

“What do you need from us?” I asked.
 
There was no way I was going to let
Josh ruin this for me by trying to play Mr. Bigshot Lawyer.

“Right now, I’m going to need you to go
to Mr. Cutler’s office in midtown and meet with him.
 
He wants to meet each of you in person to make sure he’s
comfortable working with you.”

“Now?” Josh asked.

“Yes, now,” Worthington said, shaking his
head like he couldn’t believe our stupidity.
 
“I’ll text you the address.”

***

Ten minutes later, Josh and I were in the
back of a black town car, speeding toward Midtown.
 
Josh was on his iPad, making notes and highlighting
articles.
  
He wasn’t sharing
any of it with me.
 
Josh and I
weren’t exactly close friends.
 
In
fact, we weren’t really friends at all.
 
We had a business arrangement.
  
Once we’d realized we’d both been spending all our
free time studying in the lobby of Hinton, we’d come up with an
arrangement.
 
If either one of us
saw something going down with Worthington, we’d call the other.

It was nice of Josh to call me
tonight.
 
He could have gone back
on our deal and just kept the information to himself.
 
But now that he’d done that, it was every man for
himself.
 

Which meant I needed to find out everything
I could about Noah Cutler.

I pulled up his bio on Wikipedia.

Not much about his early life, except
that he grew up in Camden, New Jersey.
 
Single mother.
 
Scholarship
to Rutgers, then Harvard law school.
 
He started his own firm as soon as he graduated, even though he’d
fielded offers from most of the big firms.
 

I scrolled down, making mental notes,
wondering what he was like, if he was going to grill me, ask me stupid
questions like “How many buses are in the United States?”
 
Interviewers loved to ask questions
like that.
 
They said it was
because they wanted to see how your thought process, figure out how your brain
worked.
 
But I suspected they just
liked to see you squirm.

I scrolled further down the screen.

And then I gasped.

Out loud.

There was a picture of Noah Cutler on the
Wikipedia page.

I recognized him immediately.
 
The cool blue eyes, the dark hair, the
smoldering gaze, the tiny little smile that made you think he was amused by
something.

Noah Cutler was Mr. X.

***

I wanted to leave.
 
I didn’t want to go in, I didn’t want
to come face to face with him.
 
How
could I?
 

“Are you coming?” Josh asked.
 
He was standing in front of the
gleaming building, waiting for me.
 
I glanced up.
 
The building
was dark except for a light in one of the windows around the tenth floor.
 
I imagined Noah Cutler in there,
waiting for these two stupid law students to come in and meet him.
 
What would he do when he realized he’d
had sex with one of them just hours earlier?

I needed to make up an excuse.
 
I needed to say I was sick, really
sick, that I was going to puke or faint or have some kind of panic attack.
 
But to do that would be career
suicide.
 
This was my chance to
make an inroads in Worthington’s class, to make my mark in an otherwise so far
unremarkable law school career.

So I squared my shoulders and followed
Josh into the building.

We road the elevator to the tenth floor
in silence.
 

My stomach flipped as we stepped out onto
the crushed red carpet, and the floor moved under me.
 
I stumbled.

“Whoa,” Josh said, grabbing my
elbow.
 
“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

I forced myself forward.

There was a receptionist sitting at the
desk, a beautiful girl with shiny dark hair falling in a perfect curtain down
her back.
 
I wondered what she
thought when she’d been called into work at three in the morning, if she knew
her boss was a suspect in a murder.

A murder!
 
The man I slept with might be a murderer.
 
My legs felt shaky, and I sat down in
one of leather chairs in the reception area without being told I could.

Thankfully, Josh got called in first.

He returned ten minutes later, flashing
me a huge smile and a thumbs up.
 
It was a good sign.
 
If Josh
was coming out so quickly and so happy, it must mean that Noah Cutler wasn’t
much of a hard ass.

“Charlotte?” the receptionist asked.
 
“You can go in now.”

I stood up and made my way slowly down
the hallway.

There was a light shining out of an open
door at the end of the hall, and I forced myself to walk toward it.
   
When I got to Noah Cutler’s
office, he was sitting at his desk.
 
His desk was huge and made of expensive-looking cherry.
 
I expected him to be in a frenzy, to be
going through papers or making phone calls – the normal chaos you’d
expect from someone who may have been about to be charged with murder.
 
But either Professor Worthington had
exaggerated the seriousness of the situation, or Noah Cutler had nerves of
steel.