“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.