What He Believes Read online

  Al l signs of the Noah who had been soft and sweet with me since he’d saved me that night at Force were gone, replaced with the ferocity of an animal who’d been caged and finally released.

  He slid his hands up under my shirt and grabbed at my breasts roughly, his fingers probing my nipples through the sheer fabric of my bra.

  “Noah,” I gasped, tipping my head back. “Noah, please,” I said. “There will be cameras.”

  “You think I give a fuck about cameras?” he growled, and then his mouth was back on mine, silencing me, his tongue swirling against mine, keeping up its assault until my legs trembled under me. He pulled back, but held his hand on the back of my neck, keeping me close, like he was afraid I would try to stop him.

  His dark eyes scanned the corridor, and then he was pushing me through a door that led into one of the buildings, a door that, surprisingly, opened right away.

  We were in some kind of loading dock – it must have been an entrance for deliveries that were too big to go through the normal channels. There was a metal staircase heading up to another floor, and a row of pipes spanning the ceiling.

  Noah still held the back of my neck and he used his grip to push me up against the wall, facing away from him.

  “Hands over your head,” he demanded, and then I heard the familiar whoosh of his belt being pulled out of its loopholes, and then he was tying me up to the pipes above me.

  I felt him step back, could hear his breath coming in uneven gasps.

  Then his body was back up against mine, unyielding and hard, his chest pressed up against my back. He pulled my shirt up and yanked the cups of my bra down, exposing my breasts. My nipples instantly hardened.

  “Noah,” I groaned. “Noah, I don’t think – ”

  He grabbed my chin and pulled my mouth back toward his, silencing me with another probing kiss.

  His hand slid down over the front of my jeans and then he was unbuttoning them, tugging them down just enough so that my ass was bared to him.

  His hand moved from my mouth, skimming down my side before pushing my shirt up even more, yanking it so far up it was covering my eyes. I was effectively tied and blindfolded now as his hands, strong and steady, took their time roaming over my body, fondling my tits and squeezing my ass.

  I arched my back as he grabbed my hips, and he lowered his mouth to my back, his tongue licking a searing trail down my spine. Goosebumps broke out over me at the helpless situation I was in, powerless to his whims.

  Panic rose inside of me. He wouldn’t just leave me here, would he? The way he’d been known to do in the past?

  But then I heard him unbuttoning his pants, and then a beat later, he reached down and grabbed my panties, seized the delicate material in his hands and ripped them until they tore. The warm humid air hit my bare pussy, and I groaned at how exposed I was.

  Sizzling need vibrated through me, his dominance causing my body to completely to surrender to his. The deep throbbing between my legs intensified and I groaned.

  He pushed the head of his cock up against me.

  Feeling him there, behind me, stoked my want and caused it to heighten. I’d already been turned on at the rough way he was handling my body, at the thrilling bite of fear and excitement caused by where he was doing this to me, by the idea that we could be caught at any moment.

  I needed to feel him inside of me.

  I needed him to fuck me senseless.

  So I did what he knew he wanted

  I started to beg.

  “Please, Noah,” I pleaded. “Please, sir, I need you to fuck me.”

  He paused, his dick still poised at the entrance to my opening, which was slick with desire.

  But he didn’t push inside of me.

  So I begged harder.

  “Please,” I whimpered. “Please, Noah, fuck me.”

  Still, nothing, just the sense of him behind me, and the exquisite torture. I tried to push back against him, but I couldn’t move. He’d tied me too tight with his belt, so tight that my wrists would be marked. He’d tied me before, but never this tight.

  “Fuck me hard,” I pleaded. “I want to feel your cock in my pussy.” I’d used the words strategically – I meant them, but I was hoping the raw dirtiness would excite him and cause him to give me what I wanted.

  But I should have known better.

  If there was one man who couldn’t be manipulated, it was Noah Cutler.

  Instead, I felt his body on top of mine, hard as granite, his weight pressing into me.

  His finger probed my mouth, and he slipped it past my lips. I sucked on it hungrily, hoping my enthusiasm would hasten him putting me out of my misery.

  Instead, I felt him push his body harder onto mine, and then his lips were at my ear.

  “Resist me,” he whispered gruffly.

  “What?”

  “Resist me.”

  My heart pounded in my chest, fear and excitement pooling dark and deep within my soul.

  Resist me. Did he mean to struggle against him? I thought about that woman at Force, the one on the stage during the medical scene, how her struggle had excited me, the idea that she was railing against something she was helpless to resist serving to turn me on in a way I’d never felt before.

  I wiggled my hips experimentally in an attempt to pull away from him.

  It got me what I really wanted, which was for Noah to push into me.

  And he did, in one long thrust, no pretense, just one long stroke, filling me with his thickness.

  I groaned and squirmed again, but he held my hips firmly and smacked my ass hard. “Stay still,” he demanded.

  But this time, I didn’t listen.

  I tried to get away from him, even going as far as to take a step forward.

  I was rewarded with another stinging slap against my ass and then his hands settled onto my hips, big and strong. I marveled again at how small he could make me feel, how delicate, how his body and his grip and his presence could reduce me to feeling so feminine and wanted. He was the only man who’d ever been able to make me feel that way, so sexy and so desirable.

  His strong hands pulled my hips back into him, pulling his cock all the way out of my pussy before pushing it back in. As he pulled me back, my arms stretched in front of me, pulling taut against his belt. The leather chafed my skin, sending a stinging pain down my arms.

  That pain, coupled with the pleasure of Noah fucking me, hard, maybe harder than he ever had, and the guttural groans he was making as he did, letting me know how much I was pleasing him, tumbled together, swirling into a dark tornado of desire that was confusing and thrilling and so intoxicating it made me helpless to resist.

  “More,” Noah demanded.

  I did as he commanded, struggling against him until he reached around and put his hand on my lower stomach, his fingers spread, his thumb reaching my mound, putting pressure on the outside of my core, right above my clit.

  The sensation was unreal.

  He held me tight, so that I was unable to move as he thrust into me, so deep and hard I could feel his hips hitting my ass cheeks.

  “You want this, baby, don’t you?” he demanded. “You like when I fuck you like this.” He slapped at my ass, harder and harder, and then his hand was back around my neck as he fucked me, his other hand still holding me tight on my stomach.

  I couldn’t take it anymore.

  I came, my pleasure surging and rising until it culminated in a blissful crescendo, one that washed over me like a ground swell.

  As my pussy constricted and pulsed on his shaft, Noah quickened his pace, his hand tightening around my throat. Being at his mercy did nothing but increase the intensity of my orgasm as it built to its peak and then fell.

  I sagged against the pull of the belt, my body wrung out and spent.

  A second later, I felt him pull out of me.

  “Arch your back, baby,” he groaned, and I did, summoning up my last bits of strength to push my buttocks into the air for him. He came
on my ass, shot after shot hitting my skin, warm and sticky, running down my curves in hot rivulets.

  When he was done, he readjusted my bra and shirt around me, then unfastened his belt and released my wrists.

  I did my best to adjust my ruined panties around myself before pulling my pants up and buttoning them.

  Noah kissed my lips softly, brushing my hair out of my face.

  Then he inspected my wrists.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  I looked at them, the raw red marks bright on my skin like rings of fire. I smiled. “Nothing I haven’t been through before.”

  He raised my wrists to him and kissed each one.

  Then he put his hand through mine.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”

  ***

  We were silent on ride back to the city.

  I was still desperate to talk to him, to pick his brain about what Lilah had told us. But Noah seemed brooding and reserved, his eyes contemplative as he stared out the window. I watched him, the curve of his brow, the soft swell of his lips, the outline of his jaw. He was so sexy, so beautiful, so perfect.

  Would I ever get used to him, to his perfection, his moods, the things he wanted to do to me? We were engaged now – by all intents and purposes he was mine, we were to be bound together forever, at least in the eyes of the law. But then how was it that I felt even more confused than ever by him?

  What was that that had just happened between us?

  Him asking me to resist, me getting so turned on by it. Did it mean something was wrong with us? Were the two of us so damaged sexually that we needed to resort to that kind of thing?

  It had excited me, him asking me to resist.

  My thoughts swirled together in a dark tornado of confusion.

  Noah’s mood, however, picked up considerably once we were back at his – our – apartment.

  Docket was excited to see us, wagging his shaggy tail and picking his leash up in his mouth and prancing around the kitchen with it until Noah took him out.

  When they returned, Noah uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured a glass for me, along with a tumbler of scotch for himself, before the two of us retired to the living room.

  Noah sat me down on the couch, pulled the cashmere blanket that was thrown over the back down over me, then pulled my legs up onto his lap and handed me the glass of wine.

  “First impression?” he asked.

  “She’s guilty.”

  He looked at me, his eyebrows raised.

  “What?” I asked. “You’re surprised?”

  “Slightly.”

  “By what?”

  “Your conviction.”

  “You think she’s innocent?”

  “I don’t know what I think.”

  “But you think there’s a chance she’s telling the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “That she forgot what she did with the knife?” I took a sip of my wine, letting the bitter liquid warm my body. I took another sip right away. My body felt tense, wired, and I wanted to something to blur my edges.

  “People do crazy things when they’re in state of stress, Charlotte.”

  “Yes, but this is a whole other level of crazy, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Noah shrugged, took a long pull of his drink, then set it down on the coffee table before reaching under the blanket and grabbing my foot. He began massaging the arch softly, his fingers kneading into my flesh.

  It was like a chain reaction. My feet relaxed, then my ankles, then my legs, my thighs, my stomach. The wine combined with the soft touch of my fiancé’s hands caused the tension to flow from my body.

  I settled deeper into the couch, letting my head fall against one of the burnt orange throw pillows that were strewn about Noah’s couch.

  “I think things aren’t always what they seem,” Noah said.

  “If it were a forty-year-old man,” I said, “A huge six-foot-two, forty-year-old man accused of slitting the throat of his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, who then said he couldn’t remember what he’d done with the knife, would you feel the same way?”

  “Why are you asking me that question?”

  “Because we’re supposed to be blind to color, age, sex.”

  “No.” Noah shook his head. “Juries are supposed to be blind to those things. As lawyers, we need to take every variable into account.”

  I tilted my head, thinking. His hands were still moving over the arch of my foot, strong and safe.

  “Admit her story is a little insane,” I pressed.

  “So was mine.”

  “What?” I asked, startled. I took my head off the pillow and propped myself up on my elbows.

  “The murder charges,” he said. “All the evidence pointed to me being guilty.”

  “True,” I allowed. “But there’s a difference between evidence making something look probable, and someone having a story that just makes no sense.”

  “Is there?”

  “Of course! You weren’t intentionally saying you didn’t remember things, you didn’t admit you’d killed someone and had no idea where the murder weapon was.”

  “No. But I wasn’t helping my case any. It was just in a different way.” His face softened, and he got a far away look in his eyes. “That girl, she’s in a horrible situation. She has no one. No family. No money.”

  “How do you know she has no family?”

  “You didn’t see anyone rushing down there to be with her, did you?”

  I shook my head. His hand was still on my foot, but he’d stopped massaging me.

  “She’s alone. I had as much money as I wanted, as much influence as anyone in the city. That girl has nothing. She’s in the same situation as I was, and she’s all alone.”

  My breath caught in my chest. I didn’t like the way he was talking about Lilah, as if the two of them had something in common. They couldn’t have been more different. Lilah had admitted she’d killed someone. Noah hadn’t done anything wrong. Not one thing. He was nothing like Lilah.

  Was Noah so convinced that Lilah could be innocent because she was beautiful and vulnerable? Noah’s instinct to protect, to control, was the strongest thing about him, the thing that drove him.

  Was that why he was so determined to think that she was innocent? Because he wanted to protect her?

  And then another through entered my mind, cutting through my soul like a knife. Was that why he’d taken me in that alley just now? Had he gotten so turned on thinking about Lilah, about protecting her, that he’d needed to take it out on me?

  Resist me.

  Was he trying to recreate what had happened with Lilah, how she’d said her boyfriend had tried to force himself on her? It seemed completely fucked up. But it made a certain kind of sense.

  I hesitated, not sure if I should ask him about it.

  But before I could, there was a vibrating sensation against my foot. Noah’s phone. And then that now familiar, annoying chirping. “You have an important call from… Clementine.”

  “She’s probably calling to see how it went,” he said, standing up and walking out of the room.

  I laid back down, trying to fight the waves of jealousy that were burning inside of me. Why was I so jealous anyway? Noah had never given me any reason to doubt him.

  He had been nothing but clear to me about his intentions. He’d just asked me to marry him for God’s sakes, right in the middle of Times Square, in front of everyone. It was the most romantic thing I could have ever imagined happening to me. No, it was beyond anything I could have imagined.

  So then why did I suddenly feel so insecure?

  Was it because of my own self-esteem issues?

  I’d never been the type to be jealous of other girls because they were thinner or prettier than I was.

  Of course, I’d had flashes of envy if I’d seen someone wearing a dress that looked insane on them, or when I’d flip through a magazine and see celebrities with their perfectly toned bodies and pe
rfect white smiles, even though I knew most of it was fake, a trick of air brushing and plastic surgery.

  I’d been envious of girls who were thin enough to wear tight shorts or crop tops, girls who never felt self-conscious in a bikini.

  But I’d also known that love was about more than what someone looked like, that people cheated not because of their spouse or partner’s physical imperfections, but because they weren’t getting something from them that they needed, or because they had a flaw in their character.

  Noah had no flaws in his character.

  But he was damaged, in ways that hadn’t even begun to be revealed to me.

  And I would always be worried about being enough for him, because those girls in the magazines might have been fake, but Noah wasn’t. He was gorgeous and beautiful and just as attractive as any man you’d seen on the cover of GQ or Men’s Health.

  I hated that I was jealous, hated thinking that those feelings could contribute to me not being able to have a clear head about this case.

  It was disturbing to think that my personal feelings might be interfering with my professional life.

  And then I almost laughed out loud, thinking about how Noah had started out as a client accused of murder and how I’d gotten romantically involved with him anyway.

  I pondered all of this in my mind, wondering if I was destined to be a bad lawyer who couldn’t keep her emotions in check. I was sliding down a black hole of self-doubt when Noah returned to the living room.

  “Clementine was just checking in,” he said.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That we hadn’t found out much. That Lilah was being treated at the hospital and we’d know more in the morning.”

  I nodded.

  “Come on,” he said, reaching his hand out. “Let’s go to bed.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not tired.”

  “Charlotte, you need to sleep. You need to take care of yourself. If things get crazy with this case, you will need to be well-rested.”