WHAT HE BELIEVES (What He Wants, Book Sixteen)
by Hannah Ford
Copyright 2015, Hannah Ford, all rights
reserved. This book is a work of
fiction, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
PLEASE NOTE: The end of this book contains an excerpt
from Hannah Ford’s new book, BECAUSE HE OWNS ME.
CHARLOTTE
My mouth went dry
and my stomach twisted into a tight knot.
“Who is this?” I
asked, my hand gripping the receiver so hard it hurt.
“My name isn’t
important.” The voice on the other
end of the line, just a second ago intimidating and scary, now sounded almost
nervous, like whoever it was hadn’t planned on what they were going to say
beyond ‘I have a secret to tell you.’
“Why are you
calling me?” I asked, emboldened by the caller’s change in tone. “What do you want?”
“I know about the
girls,” the man said.
“Charlotte?” Noah
demanded from the other side of the office, where he stood with his hand on the
doorknob, ready to leave. “Who is
it?”
I hesitated. I’d liked to think I’d learned my lesson
about keeping things from Noah – after all, anytime I’d kept things from
him in the past I’d ended up in trouble.
But if Noah knew what
the person on the other end of the line was saying, he would insist I hang
up. I knew the chances were slim,
but if this caller knew anything about Mikayla and the other girls at Force,
then I needed to listen.
Still.
Noah was my fiancé.
I couldn’t
completely shut him out. It
wasn’t fair. If we were ever going
to make this work, we needed to stop with the secrets. They were like a devastating cancer,
determined to destroy our relationship.
“Who is this?” I
asked again.
“I told you, no
names.” His voice was low and
gritty, nothing like the voice of Anonymous, who had turned out to be Professor
Worthington. In those phone calls,
Professor Worthington had used some kind of voice disguiser. This man sounded normal. Well, as normal as you could sound when
you were placing an anonymous call to someone.
But I wasn’t going
to fall for that crap anymore. If
someone wanted to talk to me about something, they needed to tell me who they
were.
“I’m sorry,” I
said, making sure my tone conveyed that I wasn’t sorry at all. “But if you have something to tell me,
if you need help with something, then I’m going to need your name.”
“Charlotte,” Noah
said, his voice gruff. He crossed
the room to me in two long strides, grabbed the phone out of my hand and put it
to his ear. “Who the hell is this?”
he demanded.
I reached down and
hit the button for the speakerphone, not willing to let Noah cut me out of this
completely.
“Who the hell is this?” the guy on the other end of the line demanded right back. His voice cracked slightly at the end,
betraying his false bravado.
“This is Noah
Cutler.”
“Put Charlotte
back on the phone.”
“You called my law
office. If you have something to
say, say it to me, asshole.”
There was a pause.
And then the line
went dead.
I grabbed for the
phone. “Hello? Hello?” I said
desperately. But the person was
gone. I scrolled through the caller
ID, but all that showed on the screen was the taunting and familiar “BLOCKED
NUMBER.”
“Shit,” I swore
softly as I replaced the receiver.
When I looked up,
Noah was staring at me, his dark eyes searing into mine. “What the fuck was that about?”
“What was what
about? The phone call?” I shook my head. “I have no idea. It seemed like he had some information
about Force, about the girls who were being held there.”
“No, I meant what
the fuck were you doing?”
“Me?”
“Yes. You refused to give me the phone, you
tried to keep the call going even after I’d taken over.”
“No,” I said, but
then I realized everything he’d said was right.
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