Lizzy waited for Rae to broach the subject, even though she was dying to hear anything, anything, about The Dom.
She didn’t like this stalker side of herself. Stalkers made her skin crawl.
The desert sun blazed through the windshield, stinging Lizzy’s Easterner skin. She and Georgie giggled and gossiped about clients while the squat, beige strip malls undulated past the car. The spiky desert plants were finally beginning to flower a little, flecks of color in the unrelenting brown and gray. Sometimes, Lizzy missed watching the four seasons roll by.
Tired of listening to the unrelenting silence of Rae brooding in the back seat, Lizzy finally wrenched herself around in the front passenger seat. Muscles in the small of her back tightened, threatening to spasm. She pulled, stretching and holding onto the leather headrest, working through the pain. Anything that hurt must make her stronger.
Tall, zaftig Rae was crunched in the back seat with her legs stretched across the floorboards back there. Lizzy asked, “So what exactly did The Dom say to you yesterday?”
“What?” Rae said, obviously stalling. A dozen emotions flickered over her face. “He was nice.”
Lizzy and Georgie looked at each other and cracked up.
“Oh, yeah.” Georgie glanced at Rae through the rear-view mirror. “He’s very nice.”
Lizzy said, “He must have liked you if you had an interview yesterday and are going back today. Are you working today? Are you official?”
“I don’t think so.” Rae fiddled with her purse.
“Have you filled out the tax forms and stuff?”
“No.”
Lizzy turned back around to look out the front window again. Traffic was heavy today, which meant it was a like a holiday Sunday at midnight on the Turnpike. “Must be a second interview, then. I had three interviews before he hired me.”
“What’s a second interview like?” Rae asked.
“Oh, you know,” Lizzy said. “He asked a lot of questions about my sexual history and relationships. Afterward, I felt like I had no secrets from him at all, like he knew more about me than my mom and my first lover and God, all put together.” Except that Lizzy had had secrets, lots of them. She had lied her ass off as necessary to get the damned job, and he had known them all anyway.
“Yeah.” Georgie nodded and drove. “I think he makes sure you’re psychologically healthy enough to work there. A sex addict or substance abuser would be a disaster in that place.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lizzy said. “A few Daddy issues help, though.”
Good God, had she fucking said that out loud?
Rae blurted, “Did you have sex with him during your interview?”
Lizzy turned slowly and stared at Rae, who looked wide-eyed scared. “No. Did you?”
“No.” Her strangled voice sounded petrified.
“Ah,” Georgie said. “But you want to.”
“No!” Rae protested.
Lizzy laughed at Georgie needling their sweet, little Rae.
“Don’t worry,” Georgie said. “He never has sex with the girls unless they’ve opted in to having him as a client. Did The Dom explain that whole opt-in thing to you?”
Lizzy said, “Makes it sound like we’re an email list.”
“Yeah, he explained it,” Rae said. “Did you guys opt in?”
“Yeah,” they both said.
Lizzy added, “He’s a boss with benefits.”
“Really?” The horror in Rae’s voice filled the car with judgment.
Georgie answered, “Hell, yes. Besides the fact that he’s an extra client and you make your usual rate off him, he’s fun, and it’s just a blow job.”
Rae said, “Lizzy said they had sex for three hours.”
“Oh, no!” A zing sparked up Lizzy’s back at the thought. “That was a date, not a consulting appointment in the office, and he didn’t go for three hours straight. We went back to The Devilhouse after dinner and the concert and did all kinds of stuff for three hours.” Lizzy licked her lips, trying to moisten her dry mouth. “All kinds of stuff.”
Lizzy’s hands started shaking. She pressed them to her knees, willing the trembling to stop. She was stronger now. Pain was weakness leaving the body.
Georgie added, “But it isn’t always just a blow job.”
“Yeah,” Lizzy said. “But you discuss it first, and if it isn’t just a BJ, you leave with a smile, too.” Her voice didn’t shake even a little. She relaxed.
“Yep,” Georgie conceded. “Giving head all day can get you hot and bothered. Sometimes, I just want to beg one of the clients to break the Terms of Service.”
“So true,” said Lizzy.
They prattled about silly stuff for the rest of the short ride. Lizzy did a pretty good job of hiding her murderous jealous rage that Rae was seeing The Dom two damn days in a row.
A Dom-Date was a glorified one night stand. Everyone knew that.
Lizzy had known that, and she needed to get it through her thick Jerseyan head that it was done, done, done.
Texting not Sexting
Tuesday morning, Lizzy’s phone buzzed in her hip pocket, distracting her from the professor’s lecture.
Teetering in a tiny desk because her feet didn’t quite touch the concrete floor, she tugged her phone out to check the text because Dr. Pojman was uncommonly cool with texting as long as she didn’t make a spectacle of herself. Indeed, a guy in front of her was crabbed over, updating his status on some video website. Another guy sitting three rows over was holding his phone at eye-level and quoting off it while he debated with the professor.
The text was from the long string of numbers with a local area code, which probably meant it was from Theo the Non-Guido.
He asked, Hey — wondering if you’d like to grab a cup of coffee some evening?
She swiped letters on her phone to text back. Her teeny fingers made no typos. Seven midterms this week. Truly insane. Friday night is first open time.
She wrote notes for a few minutes about ethical relativism, copying Dr. Pojman’s swooping notes on the white board with five different colors of marker, color-coded for each attack on the idea like a wartime battle map, before her phone buzzed again.
Just checking. How’s your week going?
She waited until class dismissed then hurried out of the small classroom to sit on the grass under a spreading tree. A warm breeze blew across her bare arms. Week is going fine. Two papers to rough draft tonight, due Friday. Test in 20th Century Novels plus others on Friday, too. Next week is more sane. How’s your week?
Lizzy had an hour before her next class, so she pulled her tablet out of her backpack and tapped to open Orlando by Virginia Woolf to study for that test on Friday. She liked the part about Orlando’s affair with the ship captain, even though she realized that Woolf was riffing on romance novels.
Her phone buzzed. I’m making phone calls. Need a break. Tell me about your papers.
Lizzy smiled. Some guys who met her through The Devilhouse got all stalkery, and she had to call The Dom to enforce the Terms of Service, hard. Just because Theo was cute didn’t mean that he wasn’t a nutcase, but this text seemed less obsessive. Coupled with his refusal to shag her against the wall at the party, he might be normal.
Just a normal, medium guy.
She texted him back anyway about the major topics she had planned for her paper on Nietzsche and the Postmodern Condition.
She read twenty pages of Orlando, sitting in the cool shade, chewing grass stalks, before Theo texted back, Brilliant.
Every Call Worse than the Last
Theo sat behind his desk with his office door closed, holding the phone.
Beyond the glass wall in front, admins scurried, running hard copy files to other offices. Wendy and Rama, two other Assistant County Attorneys, leaned over a long table, pointing at a piece of paper like they were stabbing it.
Theo hung up the phone and walked around his desk to close the horizontal blinds, blocking everyone out.
; He had twelve more phone calls to make, and for some stupid reason, he had ordered the list with the low emotional investment ones at the top, so each call would be worse than the last.
The next name on the list was Javier Perez.
Theo sighed and dialed the phone. Rings trilled through the handset.
If Javier didn’t pick up, Theo couldn’t just leave a message and be done with it. Some things, terrible things, needed to be done right. Theo drummed his fingers on the desk, thrumming out a complicated rhythm with his left hand. The wood under his fingers was scarred like a burn victim.
Two more rings, and Javier picked up the phone. “Yell-ow.”
Theo recognized Javier’s voice. They had spoken on the phone dozens of times. “Hello, Javier? This is Theo Valencia, the Assistant County Attorney for the Rojas case.”
“Hey! Theo! Que pasa?”
Theo swallowed the bile that scorched his throat. “I’m sorry, but I have some bad news.”
“Don’t tell me,” Javier said. His voice was clenched like he was holding his own neck.
Theo powered through. “We’re going to release Santiago Rojas, probably Thursday morning.”
A sharp gasp ricocheted down the phone line.
“There was a problem with some of the evidence, and we didn’t have enough physical evidence to keep him without it. I’m sorry. We screwed up. I can offer you police protection.”
“Some fat cop sleeping in front of my house for a couple weeks? That won’t do shit.”
Theo nodded. “We’re planning to rebuild the case as new evidence comes in. I’d like you to keep in contact with the County Attorney’s office in the event that we refile the case.”
“I’m out of this shithole,” Javier said. “I’m not waiting around for him to kill my family.”
“I’m sorry, Javier. We will get this bastard. It’s just going to take a little while longer.”
“You motherfucker. You said that you’d put him away.”
“We will, and I’m sorry.”
Javier slammed down the phone, and Theo pressed the button on his phone’s handset.
That hadn’t gone too badly.
He checked his cell phone, and Lizzy had texted him a couple sentences about Nietzsche. He read them over and appreciated the ambiguity about interpreting the writings of a man who refused to interpret his own writings, a moment of grace in an otherwise shitty day.
He texted back, Brilliant, and rested the landline phone on his shoulder for a moment.
On his ceiling, cracks cut into the plaster like rivers converging into one deep crack leading to his window that overlooked the parking lot. If he sniffed hard, he could smell cigarette smoke liberated from the cracked plaster. This office had seen dozens of previous attorneys call their witnesses to tell them to scram because they had released a murderer. Theo wasn’t special. He was just one more failure of the social contract.
His overall record was stellar, but every failure, especially one of this scale, ripped him up.
Eleven more calls.
Theo dialed the next witness’s phone number.
The Dom-Date: 1
Wednesday night, Lizzy dropped by The Devilhouse to finish up some paperwork. The previous weekend had been so crazy, with first the prospective member party on Friday night and then the usual Saturday night show and mingling at the club itself, she had not managed to finish her timesheets and enter her client notes in their files.
She worked at one of the three computers in the back of the ladies’ locker room, sipping tea. After an hour, she got the munchies, so she wandered out to the lobby to chat with Glenda before she raided the mini-pantry for something salty.
Glenda typed with her long, glittering nails on her computer keyboard, drawing up schedules, and constantly adjusted her black micro-mini skirt over her coffee-colored, bare thighs lest it ride up her trim backside. Lizzy didn’t know why Glenda insisted on wearing subwear to work. The Dom certainly wouldn’t demand it. He liked business suits on people unless they were in character. Glenda nattered on about inconsequential stuff—celebrities and sports figures—while Lizzy stretched her legs and giggled with her. Glenda didn’t gossip about clients or contractors, of course. The Dom hired people who understood what was not to talked about.
Speak of the Devil, a door behind Glenda’s desk opened, and The Dom leaned around the door. He saw Lizzy leaning on the counter and nodded at her in greeting. “Glenda?”
She turned her chair. “Yes, Sir?”
“I’d like a second opinion on a letter. Do you have time to discuss?” His British accent always seemed so out of place in the Southwest.
Glenda was a journalism major. “Sure.”
She hopped up, winked at Lizzy, and trotted over, ready to follow him.
The Dom held the door open for Glenda, then glanced up at Lizzy with that cool smile on his lips.
The Dom smiled often, but his smile looked controlled, like he had a cold pillar of steel at his core.
Almost two weeks ago, on their Dom Date, he had smiled that smile most of the night, amused at her conversation and while enjoying the concert, until they had come back to The Devilhouse.
Then, The Dom’s smile had changed.
~~~~~
Lizzy and The Dom stood outside the massive dungeon door of Play Room One, one of the standard BDSM dungeons, but she laid her hand on his arm. His black suit jacket was so spiderweb soft under her fingers that her writing callus snagged the material. She said, “Before we go in, you should know something.”
His hand pulled back from the iron doorknob. His deep, British voice rumbled, “I’m listening.”
Okay, so she had never told anyone this, so she had trouble stringing all the words together in a way that didn’t sound mortifying and pathetic. “Okay, um, it’s not you. It’s me. I’m not wired right or something.”
He turned and faced her. He was so tall that, even though she was wearing her highest-heeled pumps, the top of her head didn’t reach anywhere near his shoulder, so he bent at the waist to bring his face closer to hers. If there was such a thing as a warm blue, his eyes turned that color, and that was something she had never seen from him before. “Is there abuse in your past that you weren’t forthcoming with?”
“No. Nothing like that.” She looked up at the corner of the ceiling, still formulating words.
His head bobbed toward the play room door, and he smiled his usual, chilly smile with one side of his mouth. His British accent made him seem like an English Earl slumming in America. “Lizbeth, nothing tonight is mandatory or even expected. We could go out for a nightcap or a coffee, or I could just drop you at your dorm, if you’d prefer.”
She glanced at the door and then studied his face again. “This is the whole point, though, right?”
“No. The point was to have a night out, enjoying ourselves. You should see more of the world than college and this place. I enjoyed spending time with you tonight, Lizbeth. Your thesis on Nietzsche will be interesting, and I look forward to reading it. We’ve had a good evening.” The Dom turned away from the door and offered her his elbow like he was a nineteenth century London nobleman. “Shall we go?”
She didn’t take his arm. “You’re not dumping me that easily.”
He dropped his arm and waited, watching her with those bluebird eyes.
She gestured with one hand, palm up, like she was offering something to him. She was offering something, something embarrassing and stupid. “Look, when we’re in there, you don’t have to bother trying that hard.”
His blond eyebrow twitched. “Pardon me?”
“I don’t,—I mean,—I can’t. It’s just that I’ve never, actually,” she flipped her hands around in frustration, “you know.”
That golden eyebrow jerked down though the rest of his chiseled face didn’t move. “You can’t mean you’re a virgin.”
Cahn’t, he had said. Lizzy almost giggled at how very English he was.
“Oh, no. God, no.�
�� She raised her hands and waggled them to fend off that stupid idea. “I was barely sixteen when I cashed in my V-card.” Actually, not quite sixteen. “So, no. Not for a long time. I mean, it’s that I’ve never, um,” she took a deep breath, “finished.”
The Dom never showed much emotion, probably because he was British or Norwegian or whatever he was, but at her admission, she could see traces of disbelief in the bend of his eyebrows and his parted lips. “Never?”
She should have just faked it like usual, but no one ever lied to The Dom, and faking it was too close to lying.
“Nope. Never.” That didn’t seem sufficient. “Never came. Never arrived. Never had the Big O.” His calm demeanor embarrassed her so she spouted off some more. “Never experienced le petit mort. Never have gotten my rocks off. Never busted an ovary. Not even once.” She sighed, and her voice dropped. “Not even a little.”
The Dom waited for her to complete her sarcastic list without so much as batting a golden eyelash. She felt kind of dirty, and not in a good way, for saying all that to The Dom because he rarely even swore, and to a girl from New Jersey that meant he didn’t use half the English language.
Or the American language.
Or whatever.
Lizzy stared at her feet. Her red stiletto-heeled pumps stretched her feet so far that she was nearly on pointe, but they raised her to nearly five-four. Muscle roped her calves below her knee-length skirt. She said, “I think there’s something wrong with me, physically, or hormonally, or something. I’ve torn muscles in my back and stuff, and I’ve had vitamin deficiencies, and I think something just went wrong at some point. Nerve damage, or something. Anyway, something.”
The Dom slipped his hands in his trouser pockets. “And yet you still want to have sex.”
“Oh, yeah,” she assured him. “I like sex. It’s kind of like, um, a good backrub, but not like anything that would make my eyes roll up in my head.”
Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) Page 7