“Ladies?” Rae asked. “Can I have some privacy here?”
“Why? You gonna puke again?” Georgie asked.
“I just want to sleep this off.”
Lizzy felt a little pity for Rae and fed her some more green sports drink, but pain was weakness leaving the body. Rae should be a little stronger, or at least a little wiser, after this rufie migraine passed.
Georgie checked the time on her phone and asked Rae, “Don’t you have class in an hour?”
“I’m not going to class.” Rae clutched the left side of her head, which was probably the side where the pain was worst.
“You never miss class.” Lizzy prepared to stand up and rip the blankets back. Rae had gone to class with all manners of maladies the last two years, from walking pneumonia to butt-clenching diarrhea. There are no secrets when you share a bathroom.
Rae closed her eyes. “I don’t care.”
“Rae, what’s up with you?” Georgie asked.
“I have a hangover. A really bad one.”
Lizzy’s gaze met Georgie’s worried stare across the bed. Georgie’s brown eyes were twitching with concern.
Georgie was so right. It was odd. Rae didn’t state the dreadfully obvious, and she wasn’t a wuss. Lizzy touched Rae’s hand that was lying her stomach.
“What is really up with you?” Georgie pressed.
“Yeah, Rae.” Lizzy tried to keep her voice light. Was Rae sick? Had she been so naive that some guy had talked her into getting smushed without a dickwrap? “We’re your friends. You can tell us.”
She opened her eyes enough to squint. “Nothing.”
Lizzy glanced up at Georgie, and she could see all the panic on her own face written in Georgie’s brown eyes.
Georgie turned back to Rae and said, “No bullshit, Rae. What’s up with you?”
“All right. I’m failing statistics.”
That was it? A class? A freaking class? Lizzy looked up to Heaven to give thanks and to pray for the strength to not choke the shit out of Rae for scaring them so much.
Lizzy hopped to her knees, jostling the bed and causing Rae to moan. “So drop it and take it over next semester!”
Rae whined, “Drop-date is way past, and it’s a core class. If I fail stats, I lose my scholarship. My parents can’t and won’t pay for college. I’m done. I’m out. I’m just partying away my last couple of weeks before I go home at spring break, get a dead-end job, and probably marry some guy in the same circumstances and pop out a couple kids who won’t have a chance to do better, either.”
Okay, so it wasn’t just one class. It had real repercussions. Time to suck it up.
Lizzy said, “And you’re just going to lie down and let all that happen to you.”
Rae winced at Lizzy’s sarcasm, but someone had to kick her ass. Rae said, “I had one chance, and I blew it.”
Surely there was a way around this. “Can’t you get a tutor or something so you could ace the final?”
“Nope,” Rae said. The hoarseness in her voice sounded like the vodka vomit had scalded her throat. “Final’s only worth fifteen percent. Even if I aced it, I would still fail the class. I need at least a B in core classes to keep the scholarship, anyway.”
“Damn,” Lizzy and Georgie said together.
Rae needed money for college. Lots of it. She had shown them her plans for her autism clinic, A Ray of Light, a year before. That kind of ambition had sparked a little jealousy in Lizzy, but watching Rae push for it this year had been incredible. Every time Rae talked about it, she lit up with happiness, and Lizzy felt that glow take hold in herself.
Lizzy and Georgie had plenty of money for college. Lizzy had a nest egg of almost fifty thousand dollars. Georgie had almost half her law school tuition saved.
For her autism clinic, Rae needed more money than that, a lot more, seven figures more.
Lizzy looked at Georgie across the bed again, seeking permission with her eyes, but Georgie tilted her head and pursed her lips, advising restraint.
Rae was watching them from below her arm that she had thrown across her face. Her bloodshot eyes tracked their unspoken conversation. “What?”
She might be hungover, but she wasn’t oblivious.
Georgie turned to Rae. She sucked in a deep breath, an against-her-better-judgment type of breath. “Your parents won’t help? You really don’t have any other way to stay in college?”
“Nope.” Rae’s deep brown eyes swiveled between them, watching them both.
Lizzy knew what Georgie wanted to hear before they spilled the beans. She asked, “No rich uncles who can lend you the money? Loans? Grants?”
Rae’s suspicious look at her kind of hurt because Lizzy was the one trying to get her on board. Rae said, “No one in my family who I could ask for help is rich or even middle-class. It’s too late to apply for loans for next year, and the government has cut grants to the bone anyway. I can’t even go back to community college for a semester because I’m done with my general education credits.”
The front door in the study room slammed, rattling the thin walls and fluttering the awful posters.
Well, that shot this moment all to shit. Lizzy rolled her eyes, but Georgie’s wary gaze meant that she viewed this as a chance to discuss and regroup.
Just because her best friend wanted to be a lawyer didn’t mean that Lizzy wanted to present an annotated argument for every decision they made.
Rae’s roommate-slash-cousin Hester the Repressor walked into the dorm bedroom. Hester glanced at Georgie and Lizzy, who were comforting Rae in her time of suffering, and snorted her indignation. Hester swept out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, trailing disdain.
Rae closed her eyes and groaned. “When you guys leave, she’s going to rag on me about this. That’s another reason I went to Delta Chi, to get out of this dorm room. Yesterday afternoon, she got all ‘The wages of sin are death,’ on me when I was trying to study for my abnormal psych test.”
Fuck it all. When you have the key to rescue someone from misery, you hand it over with joy in your heart. “Actually,” Lizzy leaned down and whispered very softly, very near Rae’s pink ear, “the wages of sin are about two hundred bucks an hour.”
“Yeah. Right.” Rae’s closed eyes clenched like she was trying to hold back tears.
Over Rae’s chest, Georgie caught Lizzy’s eye. Her wide eyes held trepidation. “Are you sure about this?”
Lizzy wasn’t going to let Rae fall. “It wouldn’t hurt to see if things might work out for her.”
“Okay, then.” Georgie leaned down, pulled her long, brown braid behind her, and whispered in Rae’s other ear. “My parents don’t help me out with money, either. I work ten hours a week, and I pay my own way. Everything. Tuition. Dorm. Meal plan. Books. Plus extra money left over.”
Lizzy smiled. Sometimes, doing the right thing meant taking a chance.
Rae’s voice lightened with wonder. “That’s, like, two thousand dollars a week.”
Lizzy whispered, “And the perks are fantastic. You should see some of the parties we go to. We only went to the frat with you last night because you seemed all nuts.”
Rae admitted, “I was nuts.”
Georgie’s voice lowered until it was her come-hither voice that Lizzy knew from work. “Come with us to a party tonight. We want you to meet someone.”
Rae groaned and tried to roll over in the bed. “I am in no condition to meet anyone.”
Lizzy grabbed the cup and held it near Rae’s face again. “You’ll be fine by tonight. Drink the green stuff.”
Rae winced, but she took a good, long suck of the sports drink.
Georgie jerked her head toward the bathroom, meaning that they needed to talk in private.
As the girls cut through the shared bathroom back to their own bedroom, shimmying past Hester, Lizzy asked Georgie, “Does she have anything to wear? She’s a lot taller than we are.”
“We can get her something from the costume racks. I’ll chec
k her closet for her size.” Georgie called back to Rae, “Be ready at seven with your make-up and hair done like you’re going to a high society wedding.”
A groan creaked from the bed. Georgie rifled the closet for a second as they passed by.
In their own bedroom, Georgie shut the bathroom door behind them. Their rooms had framed art nailed to the walls, not tacked-up tacky stuff. Georgie flipped on their stereo system with a click from the remote. Music cascaded from the tiny Bose speakers screwed into the corners of the ceiling, covering their voices.
Georgie stood right next to Lizzy, demanding in a harsh whisper, “What in the name of all that is holy did you just do?”
There was no freaking way that Lizzy was backing down from this. “I’m helping her.”
“You’re getting her hopes up when you have no right to. It’s unkind.”
“Not if we prepare her. We’ll have a Devilhouse cram session in the car. We can turn her into a first-rate courtesan in an hour. It’s not frickin’ rocket science.”
“You know how she grew up,” Georgie said. “She’s barely twenty-one. The Dom is going to chew her up and spit her out. Actually, I don’t think he’s going to get that far. If she manages to get an interview, he’s going to take one look at her application and laugh her out of that office. We have some experience in life. A girl like Rae, and I do mean a girl, can’t handle what we do.”
“She has dreams. She has ambitions beyond what she can pay for. She’s exactly the kind of person that The Dom hires, other than the weirdly sheltered thing.” Lizzy said. “She deserves a chance.”
“It’s not kind,” Georgie repeated. “We should march in there right now and tell her that we are indeed heartless bitches, that we were kidding her, and that there is no job that pays two thousand dollars a week.”
“Give her a chance,” Lizzy said. “We’ll do this one step at a time. Let’s talk to The Dom about getting her into the party tonight and get her some clothes.”
“You know that if she screws up, it reflects badly on us. I need this job. There is no way that I could pay for undergrad or law school without it. Getting fired would be the end for me, and for you, too.”
Lizzy knew. “She just needs some money to finish college. That autism clinic of hers is a pretty cool idea.”
Georgie scowled. “We could just give her the money.”
“Do you really think she would take it?” Rae insisted on paying for her own drinks when they went out, calculating tax to the penny, even though they all knew that she was scrimping and they weren’t.
Well, they were, but they were scrimping to save their money.
Georgie rolled her eyes. “No.”
“And if she works at The Devilhouse, she could actually save enough seed money to start it. There’s no way in Hell that we could give her that much.” It wouldn’t be even close, even if Lizzy and Georgie drained their accounts.
“Yeah. There’s no way we could do that,” Georgie admitted.
“So yank that stick out of your butt and let’s help her.”
Georgie smoothed her hair back to her braid. “Okay. Fine. If we’re going to do this, then we need to do it right. I’ll talk to The Dom. You’re still too weird around him.”
Lizzy nodded. “I’ll get a dress.”
Georgie’s lips were pressed thin. “She’s a size eight. There isn’t much in those middle sizes. Do your best.”
Just before the girls walked out their front door, they both kissed their fingers and smacked their bank statements pinned to the wall beside the door for luck.
Limousines and Sunsets
Lizzy stood on the street corner with her black pumps dangling from two fingers. The university’s auditorium, a round building like a giant’s grandiose wedding cake with sloppy loops of frosting, spilled its shadow at her. She edged toward the street, staying in the sunlight and keeping her feet on the warm cement and out of the cold shadow. Even in the middle of the Sonoran desert and far from the Nor’easter snowstorms where Lizzy had grown up, it was still the last week of February and quite cool in the shade.
A black town car with deeply tinted windows pulled into the parking lot and stopped in front of Lizzy. She grabbed the handle and leaned back to open the heavy door.
“Thanks!” she called to the driver, some white guy she didn’t know, as she slid into the car and hauled the car door shut. She yanked her short gold skirt down over her thighs and slipped her shoes on.
Georgie was already in the back seat, as she had been picked up first in the shopping center’s parking lot. A little subterfuge was necessary to keep things quiet. Lizzy’s night-blooming jasmine perfume mixed with Georgie’s sexy spices and lady musk.
“Where’s Rae?” Lizzy asked.
“She’s next.” Georgie tugged the long skirt of her crimson dress that flowed onto the floor. “Still time to tell her to take a hike.”
“It’s on my head,” Lizzy said. “I’ll slip away and talk to The Dom and tell him it was all my idea.”
“Too late,” Georgie said. “I already took credit for this fiasco.”
“If it goes south, I’ll tell him that I roped you into it.”
“Or we can make sure that it doesn’t go south.”
“Even better idea,” Lizzy said. “Plan?”
“I’ll prep her and feed her all the information we have on The Dom. We’ve got to make her wary of him. She can’t go into this all giggly. We can’t let her get toasted, no matter how depressed she is about stats.” Georgie chucked her chin at Lizzy. “You sex her up.”
Lizzy’s mouth dropped open. “No way. Rae?”
“Yup. Put on your Lezzy Lizzy act for her tonight. Rae needs a good head of steam heading in there. She can’t be under the influence of Hester the Repressor. Get her going. You don’t have to do anything with her, just get her feeling sexy.”
Lizzy grunted a laugh. “Or she might jump out of the car.”
“In that case, our problem is solved. I don’t know, though. When she’s out from Hester’s influence, Rae can get a little wild. She’s a little more toward the center of the Kinsey scale than she thinks she is.”
Well, Georgie had such highly developed gaydar that she was a sex psychic. They joked that, if this whole law school thing fell through, she could open up a palmistry shop, spelled The Psex Psychic, of course. “Okay. I’ll try.”
The black town car drove into the parking lot and rolled to stop beside Rae. The silver-spangled mermaid dress hugged Rae’s curves just like Lizzy had thought it would. Her curled auburn hair shone in the setting sun like forge-hot bronze. Lizzy smiled. Rae might catch The Dom’s eye, all right. Now they just had to prep her to catch his interest.
Lizzy shoved open the car door for Rae, but she stepped back toward the dusty cars in the parking lot.
“Come on!” Lizzy peered out of the dark car. The sunlight pouring from the sky and reflecting off Rae’s silver dress dazzled her eyes. “Time to go!”
Lizzy scooted to the middle to make room. As the short one, she always ended up in the middle of the back seat with her feet on the hump. Tall people always looked even more uncomfortable, so she didn’t mind.
Rae stepped into the car and snuggled up tight to Lizzy.
Lizzy snuggled back.
The car pulled away from the curb, pressing Lizzy’s arm against Rae’s chest.
Georgie leaned forward and asked Rae, “Feeling better?”
Rae’s embarrassed smile melted Lizzy’s heart a little. Rae said, “Yeah, I’m better.”
The car drove them out of the university and onto the freeway, speeding toward the party and The Dom. They only had about fifteen minutes to prep Rae.
On the high overpass, the brown desert city spread under the sunset that looked like burning roses. Even the colors were hot in the desert.
Every time Lizzy breathed, her shoulder rubbed the tan skin on Rae’s arm. She would give that a few minutes before she shifted.
Georgie patted her
hair, which looked like a simple twist with curls, but Lizzy had watched her construct it for an hour. It wouldn’t come loose even if she went body surfing down the shore.
Georgie leaned across Lizzy, pressing her against Rae’s arm, and said, “We want you on your toes tonight. This is going to be a great party. Don’t worry about what to do or anything. Just be,” Georgie looked at the car’s black headliner or to Heaven for strength, “vivacious. Be yourself—funny and snarky and little wide-eyed innocent at times,—but more of all that.”
Rae dropped her mouth open in exaggerated offense. “How in the heck am I ‘wide-eyed innocent?’”
Lizzy laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
“Rae, honey, have you met you?” Lizzy shifted a little closer to Rae, practically spooning her.
“I’ve lived with me all my life. Have you met my cousin-roommate? Since when am I the innocent one in my family?”
Georgie dismissed Rae’s protest with a flip of her hand. Her scarlet nails matched her gown. “Oh, we didn’t say in your family. I would say that roommate of yours is practically Amish, but even the Amish aren’t that Amish any more. What cult does she belong to, anyway?”
“It’s not a cult. She’s Baptist.” One of Rae’s eyebrows dipped.
“Southern Baptist?” Georgie asked.
“Oh, no. First Baptist. Those Southern Baptists are going straight to Hell, what with all that singing and shouting out in church and whatnot.”
Lizzy and Georgie laughed. Rae missed a beat but then laughed, too.
Georgie said, “Oh, God. Wait until The Dom hears that crap. He will eat that up.”
Lizzy flinched just a little because when George said The Dom, Lizzy remembered his brilliant blue eyes right next to her face, watching her. Twitching every time Georgie said The Dom’s name, or title, or whatever, was not part of their plan.
The driver took the downtown exit off the freeway and drove them into the desert city. The hot asphalt streets looked too wide, and the pounding sunlight and hot wind had stunted even the buildings from growing properly tall in the desert.
Georgie said, “Rae, honey, you just bat your eyelashes when you say stuff like that. The guys will be all over you.”
Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) Page 2