Free What He Needs (What He Wants, Book Four) (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) by Hannah Ford Page B

embarrassing to have to be Noah’s alibi, but I couldn’t have
been the only one who’d seen him there, and if it was a matter of proving
Noah’s innocence, well, then, I’d just have to deal with it.
    If Katie had been killed this morning,
well… my breath caught in my throat. Noah had gone out for a jog.   Maybe right through this park.   He could have been in the vicinity of
the murder right when it had happened. Katie’s body hadn’t looked like it had
been there for a long time, but it was hard to tell
from the quick glace I’d gotten.
    And then I remembered.   Katie couldn’t have been killed last
night.   Because I’d seen her name
on Noah’s caller ID when his phone rang.   My heart began to race, my pulse pounding in my ears.   What was it he’d said when he’d hung
up?   Something about how Katie had
been having a problem but that he was taking care of it?
    It had been pretty late – so unless
Katie had decided to head out for a run in the middle of the night, it was most
likely she’d been killed this morning.
    The taste of bile filled my mouth and my
stomach turned inside-out .   The thought of Noah killing someone made me want to wretch
again.   I started to feel queasy,
and I forced myself to take deep breaths.   I remembered Noah coming home this morning, in his running clothes,
taking a shower and then dressing in his suit before leaving for work.   Could he have killed Katie in that
time?   Killed her and then just
come home and gone to work like it was nothing?
    I thought about last night, how he’d held
me close, how his lips had felt against the back of my neck, how his arms had
felt around me.   Heat flooded my
body as I remembered how he rushed over to my apartment as soon as he’d heard
what had happened with Josh.
    The thought that I could have been
sleeping next to a murderer, that I could have been falling for a murderer, made me sick.
    You’re not falling for him, Charlotte, I told myself.   You barely even know the guy.   He took you to a BDSM club and gave
some vague excuses about how he couldn’t let you get close to him because of
his emotional barriers.   Don’t
confuse that for real intimacy.
    But it did feel like real intimacy.
    It felt so intimate that I let the girl
part of me take over, the part of me that was a woman who was falling for a
man.   I ignored the law student
part of me, the part that was at an active crime scene, the part that was
supposed to be listening to Professor Worthington.
      I knew it was wrong, but I texted Noah.
    Your secretary’s dead.   They found her in the park.   Any idea who might have done it?
    It probably wasn’t the best way for him to
find out.   I could have been more subtle .   But I needed to know what he knew.
    Where r u? came the reply.
    In the park.   Answer the question.
    “Charlotte,” Professor Worthington was
saying.   “I’m going to need you to
meet with me this afternoon.   We’re
going to have to start going over the police report, and find out when the
autopsy is scheduled.   We’ll have
to meet with Mr. Cutler, we’ll have to find out exactly where he was during the
time of Katie’s death.”   I wanted
to point out that was exactly what I’d just said, but I resisted.   Professor Worthington ran his fingers
through his hair and then looked over at me, his eyes sharp.   “Are you taking notes, Charlotte?   Or am I to assume that you have a
photographic memory?”
    “Oh, um, yes... I mean, no, I don’t have
a photographic memory.   I’ll take
notes.”   I rummaged around in my
bag, pulling out a legal pad and a pen.   It was all I could do not to pull my phone out and hold it in my hand
possessively, waiting for Noah to text me back.   I had it on vibrate, but sometimes I wouldn’t hear it if it
was in my bag.
    “We’re going to need to put in an
information request for Katie’s computer, find out if there’s anything on it
that could be helpful.”
    I was scribbling