by Olivia Chase
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.
“Come in,” he said, waving his hand at me.
I walked toward his desk, making sure to place my feet carefully and take tiny steps. The last thing I wanted was to stumble in front of Noah Cutler.
“Your name?” he asked. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together on his lap. I stared at him. Was he really going to pretend that he hadn’t just had sex with me a few hours ago?
I cleared my throat. “Mr. Cutler, I think we… I just want you to know that –”
“What. Is. Your. Name?”
“Charlotte.” I was stunned. Did he really not remember? Or was he messing with me? I had a flash back to the way he whispered in my ear, asked me what my name was before he left. I remembered the way he slid into me, the way he felt buried inside of me, the rhythm of his hips as he fucked me. My face burned.
“Well, Charlotte,” he said. “I’m sure Worthington has briefed you on my case?”
“Not… I mean, he just told us you might be charged with murder.” Maybe he was going to just pretend the whole thing had never happened. Which, honestly, would be a relief.
The thought of being charged with murder seemed to amuse him. “Yes.” He nodded. “And I can count on your complete discretion as it pertains this matter?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Good.” He nodded. Then he stood up and walked around to the front of the desk. He sat down on the edge so that he was mere inches from where I was sitting. He didn’t say anything for a moment. I looked down at the floor and twisted my hands in my lap. “Stop fidgeting,” he commanded. My hands settled. “Look me in the eye.”
I looked at him. The electricity that flowed through me felt all-consuming, a surge that took my breath away. His closeness was intoxicating. I could still feel his hands on me, his dick inside me, his fingers, his mouth, his presence, his dominance.
“I have your discretion?” he repeated again.
“Yes.” I nodded.
“In all things?”
“Of course.” If he was talking about what had happened in the alley, he didn’t have to worry about me saying anything. There was no way I was going to admit that to anyone.
“Good.” He reached out and took my hand, turning it over to inspect my wrist. The X was still there.
I tried to snatch my hand back, embarrassed. But he held me tight. “You left the X,” he said.
“I didn’t have a chance to wash it off.” The pad of his thumb traced a slow circle over my pulse point, and I was afraid he’d be able to tell how fast my heart was beating.
He raised his gaze to mine, looking at me from under lowered lids. “That means you’re still mine.”
“Oh.” I tried to take my wrist back, and this time, he let me. “I…”
“Stand up, please,” he said.
It was automatic. I stood up. He looked me up and down, his eyes stormy, like maybe he was displeased with me. And even though it made no sense, even though I hardly even knew this man, in that moment, all I wanted to do was please him.
“Bend over,” he said.
“Excuse me?” I spluttered.
He stood up from the desk and began to roll up his sleeves. “Bend over the desk, please,” he said.
Fear and excitement pulsed through me. Was he going to fuck me again? I wanted him to so badly. My body was already ready, my nipples hard, my panties starting to get wet. But if I fucked him, there would be no way I could work with him.
“Mr. Cutler,” I said. “I don’t… that wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Now you’re worried about being appropriate, Ms. Holloway?” he asked. He moved close to me, so close I could feel his breath against my cheek. “After what we did earlier?”
“That was.. that was different.” My resolve was melting, and I tried to take a step away from him. He had that same spicy scent of mint and expensive cologne.
“How?”
“That was before I was working for you.”
“You’re not working for me yet,” he said simply. “I still have to call Worthington to let him know I’m comfortable with you.”
I stared at him in shock. Was he seriously saying that if I didn’t sleep with him, if I didn’t let him take me over the desk, that he wasn’t going to hire me? I’d heard about this kind of thing happening, and even though I’d had the sense that my male law school classmates had been taken more seriously than I had, I had never been so blatantly propositioned like this.
And I didn’t care if it meant my law school career was over. I had my boundaries. And no matter how badly I wanted him, I wouldn’t be made to feel like my job depended on my willingness to have sex.
“I won’t be working for you, Mr. Cutler,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “Thank you for your consideration. Good luck with your case.”
I turned and walked out of the room, tears of humiliation burning at my eyes.
When I got to the reception area, Josh was gone, and the receptionist was no longer at her desk.
Maybe Josh had gone downstairs. But when I got outside, there was no sign of him. And no sign of the car that had brought us here.
Great.
As I began to scan the street for a cab, my cell phone started to ring.
“Charlotte,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s Worthington.”
“Professor,” I said, struggling to keep my voice steady. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t trying to –”
“I’m not sure what you said to Cutler, but he raved about you. Great job. He wants you on the case.”
“Oh.” I swallowed. Was it possible Noah Cutler had decided that since I’d stood up for myself that he should hire me after all? “That’s great. I’m so glad. Um, is there anything Josh and I can do tonight?”
“No,” he said. “Josh isn’t going to be working with him. Cutler didn’t get a good vibe.”
“Oh.” My mouth went dry. “So it’s just me then?”
“Yes,” he said. “Just you.”
“Okay. Um, is there anything I should do?”
“No, not right now. He hasn’t been charged. But Noah Cutler is his own worst enemy. We’re going to have to keep an eye on him, make
sure he doesn’t mess up his own case. You got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a call coming in on my other line, so I said a quick goodbye to Worthington and answered the call.
“Charlotte?” It was Noah Cutler. I recognized the voice immediately. Smooth, husky, with just a touch of amusement.
“How did you get this number?”
“I’ve heard you’ve been tasked with the job of making sure I don’t get into trouble.”
“Yes,” I said, deciding to try to be professional. “You need to make sure you stay out of this, that you let Professor Worthington take care of things.” I hoped I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I wished I knew more about the case, but if I’d learned anything these past few months, it was that people thought law students were better seen and not heard.
The door to the office opened, and Noah Cutler came walking out. He hung up his phone and gave me that grin. “Oh, good,” he said. “You’re still here.”
“Did you send the car away?” How was he doing all of this?
“Yes. That other kid was worthless.”
“Well, thanks,” I said, annoyed. “Now I have no way home.”
“You’re not going home,” Noah said. I noticed for the first time there was a long black coat slung over his arm, and he was holding a briefcase.
“Then where am I going? “ I asked.
“With me.”
“Where?”
“To my apartment.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not having sex with you.”
He shook his head at me, like he couldn’t believe I would be so presumptuous. “No one said anything about having sex, Charlotte. But you heard Worthington, I need to be watched. Otherwise I’m going to get myself into trouble.” His eyes blazed, and a heady mix of heat and desire shot through my body. “I’m going to need 24/7 supervision.”
His intent was clear. He wanted me to come back to his apartment. For what, thought? What was he going to be doing that could get him into so much trouble?
Worthington’s words echoed through my head. Noah Cutler is his own worst enemy. We’re going to have to keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t mess up his own case.
