Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1)

by Blair Babylon

  BILLIONAIRES IN DISGUISE: LIZZY

  Episode 1: Falling Hard

  Episode 2: Playing Rough

  Episode 3: Breaking Rules

  Episode 4: Burning Bright

  by Blair Babylon

  Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy

  Lizzy has been drifting, trying to make a life for herself after failing at a life goal decided for her when she was just five years old. She’s been having a good time in college and working at The Devilhouse, but something is missing in Lizzy’s life, a very obvious something. At a Devilhouse party, she meets Theo, a handsome, bright lawyer who wants to takes things slowly, too darn slowly, and Mannix, an ex-pro-football player with a taste for the disturbing. When someone starts shooting at both men, Lizzy struggles to figure out if the would-be murderer is someone from Theo’s work as a prosecutor, someone from Mannix’s background in the seedier side of pro sports, or someone who is gunning for her. Romantic and suspenseful, Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy sizzles with sex and explores the power of love to heal the deepest wounds.

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  ~~~~~~~~~~~

  Published by Hot Rocks Publishing

  Copyright 2014 by TK Kenyon

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s wild and naughty imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the author or publisher.

  1st Edition: April, 2014

  Smashwords Edition

  Table of Contents

  I, Lizzy

  Sticking Together at the Frat Party

  The Wages of Sin Are About Two Hundred Bucks an Hour

  Limousines and Sunsets

  A Different Kind of Cocktail Party

  Mannix at the Cocktail Party

  Theo the Non-Guido

  After the Cocktail Party

  Riding to The Devilhouse

  Texting Not Sexting

  Every Call Worse than the Last

  The Dom-Date: 1

  Lizzy in Love

  Theo’s First Session

  The Dom-Date: 2

  Mannix Stalks

  Theo at Home

  Lizzy, Dancing

  The Dom-Date: 3

  Mannix Stalks, Again

  Lizzy in Love, Again

  The Dom-Date: 4

  A Sapphire-Eyed Cobra

  I Am Not A Sadist

  Lizzy’s New Dom

  Pain Is Weakness

  Sub Space

  The Fatal Flaw

  An Illuminated Parchment from the Middle Ages

  The Pain Vampire

  Triumph

  A Blur into the Past

  Breakfast

  Mannix, Free

  Russian for Love

  An Offer Mannix Can’t Refuse

  Brothers

  Financing the Deal

  Newsletter Information

  Other Billionaires in Disguise Books

  Frequently Asked Questions

  I, Lizzy

  The first-class airplane seat dwarfs me, and I feel like an eight-year-old stealing a nap in grandpa’s leather recliner. The jet roars like a freeway full of traffic, flying eastward toward Paris and casting a shadow from the full moon onto the dark ocean far below.

  The coiffed stewardess asks with her thick German accent if I need anything, and I tell her no, I’m fine, which is a huge lie. I might never be fine again. Georgie sleeps in the seat beside me, her wide seat fully spread into a twin bed with soft sheets. The television screen that flipped out of my armrest feeds the sound into my ear buds, something about tigers.

  I’ve screwed three guys in the last month and a half, which is a gold-medal, Olympic record for me that equals all my previous efforts combined.

  The first guy was The Dom of the Devilhouse. I guess he counts, even though it wasn’t, you know, the full monty. I need his help, or else Georgie and all my friends are going to get fired and The Devilhouse is going to fall into ruins.

  The second guy, I’m running away from. I was in love with him, or I thought I was. He told me that he loved me, and no one had ever told me that before. I believed him. I wanted so much to believe him.

  The third guy is the love of my life. I’ll probably never see him again. His last text to me said goodbye.

  Plus I stole his car.

  Sticking Together at the Frat Party

  Delta Chi guys and every woman whom they could convince to come to the frat party stood around the rec room of the frat house, swilling beer and cheap cocktails. Stinky pot smoke drifted above the crowd like ghosts of frat parties past. Lizzy’s nose stung from the fumes.

  Lizzy drank her beer out of the bottle. She had uncapped it herself with her key chain bottle opener because Delta Chi had a reputation for playing dirty, not that she was particularly worried. She had two friends there, Georgie and Rae, and they had planned to stick together.

  Lizzy and Georgie were regaling one of the Delta Chi guys with stories of real parties. His black skin was so dark he looked like he was dusted with good cocoa. Georgie was flirting with him, so Lizzy was playing wing-woman and chaperone. The beer was malty on her tongue, the music was good, and this was not a bad way to spend a Thursday night.

  Georgie told the frat guy, “So there’s this place—No, I’m not going to tell you the name because if you have enough money and connections, it will find you,—this place where we work. This frat party is nothing compared to the parties there on Saturday nights. Saturday nights, it turns into a nightclub, a very high-end nightclub.”

  Lizzy stretched her arms over her head, working the stiffness out of her back. She had strained some of the lumbar muscles working out that morning—those were always a weak point—but she had pressed on through the three-hour workout anyway. Pain was weakness leaving the body. A bunch of weakness had gotten the hell out of her ass that morning. It still hurt, though. She would have to pop some more pain-killers. Buying stock in whoever made her ibuprofen would be sound financial advice.

  Some sorority girls behind her were speaking Russian, badly. Lizzy wasn’t tempted to join in the conversation. Most college students had such broad American accents that they couldn’t understand Lizzy when she talked to them, which was why Lizzy met her foreign language requirements by taking Spanish. The last thing that Lizzy needed was some tongue-tied TA from Alabama telling her that her Petersburgian accent was wrong.

  “So what do you girls do at this supposed club?” Georgie’s frat guy asked, sipping his beer.

  “We’re hostesses,” Lizzy lied. “We take people to the BDSM rooms, clock them in, take their clothes, and leave them alone.”

  The frat guy frowned. “And they do what?”

  Georgie said, “Makes those guys look Amish.” She flipped her fingers at the couple sitting in the chair behind Leo, who were necking hard.

  The guy’s hand groped under the woman’s tee shirt, getting to a very rough second base. A Golden Devil, the university’s mascot, was laminated on the woman’s shirt, and his fumbling made the Golden Devil look like it was writhing in pain.

&nbs
p; Lizzy glanced over at Rae, tracking where she was amid the drunk frat guys and drunker co-eds. Rae had gone off by herself, talking to some white loser who could use a box of tooth whitening strips. She had been messed up for a couple days, so Lizzy planned to make sure that she didn’t grow a pair of beer goggles and pork some ugly guy, or any guy, because Rae would regret it in the morning.

  Rae saw Lizzy looking at her from across the room through the air heavy with cigarette and sweet pot smoke and lifted her drink in salute.

  Lizzy and Georgie toasted back with their beer bottles.

  Good God, Rae was drinking out an open red plastic cup. She could be so naive at times. They had better keep an eye on her.

  Georgie continued talking to the frat guy. “So Saturday night is amateur night. We just sit back and watch the live sex shows on the main stages.”

  “Nuh-uh,” he said. His derisive tone made Lizzy giggle.

  “Oh, yeah. Check these out.” Lizzy scrolled through some pictures on her phone from a few months before and found one of a hooded man and a naked woman. She handed him the phone.

  The guy’s casual glance popped with a startled gasp and he juggled the phone, nearly dropping it. “Holy crap! I did not expect that!”

  Lizzy and George laughed at him. “That’s tame. The second show gets kinky.”

  “But that’s so anti-feminist,” he said. “It’s repression by the patriarchy.”

  Lizzy rolled her eyes and chimed in. “When a sixty-year-old investment banker comes in and offers you fifty grand to play a drinking game with him while cuddling and watching the Red Sox game for a couple hours, define exactly who is being exploited.”

  “The woman,” the frat guy said. “The woman has less power. In those Dominant and submissive relationships, the woman is always the submissive.”

  Georgie’s offhand shrug signaled to Lizzy that Georgie was going into purebred-pit-bull lawyer mode. Lizzy wished she had some popcorn to crunch while she watched the carnage.

  “Most of the time, that’s true,” Georgie said, winding up slowly, “but patriarchal Western culture has always repressed women’s sexuality. ‘Lie still and think of England,’ kind of stuff.”

  Lizzy grinned behind her beer because here came Georgie’s fastball pitch.

  Georgie continued, “Dominance and submission games,—and they are games, even when people deny that they are so,—allow women to experience sexuality, even taboo sexuality, which subverts the spirit of the repression while maintaining the veneer of adherence to social norms.”

  The guy’s grip had loosened on his red party cup, and it tilted toward them, threatening to spill. Lizzy stepped backward.

  Lizzy watched the metaphorical baseball of social philosophy and realized the Georgie was throwing chin music, which meant that she was pitching fastballs at the guy’s face to scare him into backing off the plate.

  Georgie leaned in and licked her bright red lips, staring deep into the guy’s dark brown eyes. “Wanna find out what I’m talking about?”

  The guy’s cup tipped, and his bright blue cocktail splashed on the floor. Lizzy hopped back, avoiding the booze spray.

  She was already bored with this guy’s conversation. Georgie wasn’t interested in him either because she had eye-rolled him twice, the kiss of death. Lizzy glanced around the room, looking for Rae again.

  Undergraduates shimmied to the music and ground against each other, a sweet little imitation of the things that went on in good clubs in New Jersey. God, Westerners were such pitiful party animals.

  Frat guys and sorority pledges swarmed the bar where Rae had been talking to the sallow guy.

  Lizzy raised farther up on her toes, trying to see over the college students.

  Rae was so tall that she stuck up out of a crowd like a red, lanky thistle in an autumn lawn, but this bobbing field of straw and brown waved like a flat sheet.

  Lizzy rested her hand on Georgie’s arm. “Hey! You see Rae?”

  Georgie looked around. “You don’t suppose she went off with that guy?”

  “She was drinking out of an open cup.”

  “Shit. Let’s check the bedrooms.” Georgie pushed through the crowd without excusing herself from the conversation with Mr. Easily Shocked.

  Lizzy shrugged at him and followed Georgie, shoving her way through the elbows that all seemed to be aimed at her nose or the side of her head.

  The first bedroom was empty of people but stank of vomit. Georgie shut the door and moved on.

  Lizzy grabbed the next door and slammed it open.

  The guy’s pants were around his knees, and the pale moon of his bare ass almost eclipsed Rae’s long, auburn hair spilling over the flowered bedspread. Her limp arm didn’t move.

  Lizzy strode across the room, unholstering her Taser from her purse because Lizzy always carried at least one weapon. The red laser dot shined on Dumbass’s fleshy ass cheek. She yanked the trigger.

  The needles flashed, trailing silver wires.

  “Yeeeeargh!” Dumbass screamed. He flopped to the floor, rigid with a seizure. She held the handle, letting the full thirty seconds of excruciating pain run their course.

  Dumbass collapsed.

  Lizzy blew over the barrel of her Taser like she was blowing away gunsmoke.

  An angry burn mark glowed red around the electrodes buried in his white butt.

  Georgie said, “Wow. That Taser left a burn on his ass.”

  Lizzy climbed on the bed beside Rae and shook her. Rae didn’t respond. Her auburn hair covered most of her face, but her lips were slack.

  “Rae?” Lizzy shook her and glanced up again.

  Georgie’s brown eyes were wide with shock. Her hand crept toward her mouth.

  Lizzy said, “Don’t just stand there like a Benny caught in headlights. Help me!”

  Georgie shook her head to shake off her horror. They grabbed Rae’s shoulders and hips and hauled, flipping Rae right-side up. She was nothing but floppy dead weight.

  “Hi,” Rae said. Drugs blurred her voice like her tongue was as floppy as her limp arms. “M’fine.”

  “Rae!” Georgie said, looking down at them both. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Looks like she got rufie’d.” Lizzy shook her head. Surely they had taught Rae better than to drink out of a damned open cup at a Delta Chi party, but maybe they should have spelled it out. They should have stuck closer to her. Shit, they should have knocked the cup out of her hand and dragged her naive butt back to the dorm.

  Georgie glanced back at Dumbass, who was still twitching on the floor. “Rapist asshole. We should let The Dom have his ass. The Dom hates rapists.”

  Dumbass managed to get a shaking leg under him and rubbed his face on the dirty carpeting.

  Lizzy said, “Hey! The rapist asshole is trying to stand up!”

  “Tase him again,” Georgie said. “I’ll get her pants on, and we’ll get her out of here.”

  Lizzy hoisted her Taser and clicked the trigger. A bolt of blue lightning danced across the top of the gun. She jammed the handle right into the Dumbass’s scrotum, and his eyes widened just as she felt her own mouth pull into a violent grin. “Pain is weakness leaving the body, asshole.”

  The Wages of Sin Are About Two Hundred Bucks an Hour

  The next morning, Lizzy and Georgie sat on the sides of Rae’s narrow bed while Rae huddled under the sheets. They were laughing at her for being so hungover from the vodka and rufie cocktail and stalwartly ignoring the tang of orange-juice vomit wafting from the bathroom. Georgie would clean it later. Lizzy had cleaned up after her often enough that Georgie owed the universe a few favors.

  Lizzy held a coffee mug of diluted green sports drink and maneuvered the straw to Rae’s parched lips, betting that Rae wouldn’t drink from an open cup that someone else poured for her at a frat party again. Live and learn.

  Lizzy was damp with sweat from an early morning workout at the university Field House, an hour of strength, an hour of cardio, and an hour
of training. Her back twinged from a back handspring landed wrong, but she had bulled past it and overcome. Pain never stopped Lizzy.

  Rae sucked the green stuff and coughed, grimacing.

  Rae’s dorm room walls were a mish-mash of conservative normal and religious nutcase posters. Lizzy hoped that the banners of rock bands, Broadway shows, and some far-away beaches were Rae’s and that the gaudy cliche Christian crap belonged to Hester the Repressor.

  Georgie told Rae, “Your ass would be as sore as your brain if we hadn’t figured out where he took you.”

  Lizzy grinned and fluffed her shorn hair, a styling accident she was still living with. “I’ll bet Corn-Fed Asshole has a Taser migraine this morning, and toasted nuts.”

  “I cannot believe you tased him on the nuts, Lizzy.” Georgie’s grin was all teeth. She was in full shark-lawyer mode this morning, first insisting that they call the cops last night (overruled), then reiterating her demand this morning (also overruled). Rae had refused outright for some stupid reason, probably embarrassment and worry about an assault charge for Lizzy.

  Lizzy didn’t care about an assault charge. She would thoroughly enjoy fighting a charge and smearing Dumbass’s name all over the internet while she did it. “He so had it coming. I doubt he’ll be able to have kids. You were right, though,” she told Georgie. “We should have called The Dom last night.”

  Her stomach panged at saying his name out loud. Lizzy didn’t flinch, though. She was tougher than that by a long shot.

  Georgie said, “Yeah, we should have called him. Too late, now.”

  Lizzy talked to Georgie right over the top of Rae’s chest. “It’s never too late. Remember when that guy date-raped Sarah last year? The Dom lured him into the club with that special, private invitation and then worked on him for hours. I heard that guy still has a nervous tic on one side of his face.” She hoped he did, anyway.