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

by Blair Babylon

  Damn.

  Brightly lit squares tiled the dance floor, flashing patterns under the dancers’ feet. The block under Lizzy’s feet flashed neon blue, turning her red pumps black.

  Theo’s hand warmed her fingers. His skin felt almost hot around her hand, and she bet that he had a high metabolism, the lucky jerk. Lizzy ate like a hamster and had to keep to her off-season training schedule or else she chubbed up quickly.

  Theo found or created a space on the dance floor for them, and he tugged Lizzy’s hand to drag her to his chest. Even in her red stripper pumps, her head could rest on his heart. They must look ridiculous or obscene. She almost got embarrassed and refused to dance, but his hands found her waist.

  His fingers gripped her hips and almost met around her waist, and she slid her hands up his chest. She swayed to the beat, letting her hips free, and danced.

  He was as good a dancer as she remembered, just enough contact so that she knew she had his full attention, not so much that it looked like a lap dance. Even though Lizzy had grown up in New Jersey, too much grinding made her feel like a dock whore.

  She turned around, wiggling her ass, and Theo stepped in for just a moment, rocking against her. His breath brushed her bare shoulder, but he backed up almost immediately.

  Damn, he was tease.

  She grabbed him at one point, pulling his body against hers. Pressing herself against him felt like rubbing up against a Grecian marble statue, hot from the sun, and alive.

  Every time his fingers brushed her arms, her breath rushed into her. Every time his breath brushed her sweaty neck or shoulders, she wanted to go home with him. Every time his hands found her hips, the image flashed in her head of her above him, his hands guiding her down onto himself.

  Lust swam in her head, raising entirely wrong ideas about the level of groping appropriate for a public dance floor. Her cheeks stung with desire, and her pulse throbbed in her throat and chest as she danced.

  At the end of a song, she found herself pressed full-length against his chest, his stomach, and his strong thighs. Every bit of her skin fought to get closer to him, and his hands on her spine and the small of her back pressed her closer. His clothes felt like a layer of soft paint because she could swear she could feel every muscle flowing under his skin.

  “Let’s go someplace,” she whispered, trying to breathe.

  Theo leaned down and said right beside her ear, “Let’s go out on the balcony. I can’t hear a damned word you’re saying.”

  Lizzy nodded, and Theo took her hand and broke through the crowd for her.

  His warm hand fit over hers like she was a freaking Lilliputian. For the millionth time, she regretted every choice that she had made as a teenager and every one that had been made for her.

  Outside on the balcony, overlooking the city that glittered like mica in black sand, Theo ordered new drinks from the outside bar, which was much less crowded. He got himself a scotch and water this time and turned to Lizzy for her order. She repeated the appletini, just in case the sour lemon drop wasn’t a mistake. Lizzy’s ears rang an E-flat above high C from the loud music inside the nightclub, but the whine subsided in the cool night air and comparative silence.

  Theo pinched his nose and held his breath, popping his ears.

  “It’s loud in there,” she said.

  “Out here is nice,” he said, breathing in the dark air and leading her over to the balcony’s stone rail. His blue-glowing highball glass led them through the night.

  “We’re out here in the quiet, so talk, or else let’s go back in and dance some more,” she said.

  “I’d like that.” His light eyes glittered in the floodlights above the balcony. “Let’s finish our drinks first.”

  With that commitment from him to shove his body up against hers again, Lizzy leaned against the railing. Below the balcony, the line snaked down the sidewalk, probably a hundred people all waiting to have their IDs checked.

  “How was your week?” Theo asked.

  “Better than yours, evidently. Did that guy get out?”

  Theo nodded. “It was probably the best of the bad choices. I still don’t like it, and I don’t want to talk about work. Tell me anything about your week.”

  “Finished my papers. They’re done.”

  “Good. That one on Nietzsche seemed interesting.”

  “You’re a fucking terrible liar. I’ll email you my stultifyingly boring paper on Nietzsche. If you have problems sleeping, it’ll knock you out like a sledgehammer. I fell asleep editing it.”

  He smiled, glancing to the side. His thick eyelashes swept over his honey-gold eyes. “Surely it’s not that bad.”

  “Oh, it’s worse. I don’t want to talk about school, either. Tell me anything else, like where you grew up. Anything.”

  Theo shrugged. “I was raised mostly here in the States, mostly in the Southwest, but my mother and I spent summers in Colombia, so I speak the language and know the culture, at least some.”

  She wasn’t going to speak her embarrassing college Spanish to him unless it was absolutely necessary. “You have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Only child. It was just my mother and I when I was growing up.” He shook the ice in his glass. “Yes, I’m a little attached, but she lives in Colombia to be near her sisters and her mother and grandmother. She visits three times a year: Christmas, Easter, and in the fall for my birthday. She doesn’t come here in the summer.”

  “Of course not. It’s too goddamn hot. She sounds smart.”

  “We talk on the phone.” His expression got a little shy and like he wasn’t sure what Lizzy was going to say, though he grinned. “She’s always after me about women.”

  “Oh, I see how it is. You can’t ever get married because your mommy thinks no woman alive is good enough for you.”

  “No,” Theo sighed. “That’s not it. She wants grandchildren. She only had one baby, and she wants me to make lots of grandbabies for her to spoil. She tells me that I’m wasting my life because I’ll be thirty in six months, and I haven’t had kids yet. She wants grandbabies yesterday. Every time she calls,” his voice rose a half an octave and took on a Hispanic accent, “Are you seeing anybody? Do you know any women? When are you going to ask Wendy out? When are you going to ask Rama out?” His voice dropped back to normal. “Those are the only two women whose names she knows. Wendy has a steady boyfriend, and Rama is getting arranged in India next year. Mi madre is desperate, and she is driving me batshit crazy.”

  Lizzy laughed.

  “I don’t dare tell her about Rama getting arranged. She would show up here with five prospective brides in tow for me to pick one out.”

  “That sounds fucking awful, five beautiful women parading in front of you, asking you to choose one.”

  He rolled his eyes and sipped his drink.

  “So do you want kids, or are you going to spite her?” Evidently, Lizzy’s brain had flown into the night sky, because marriage and kids are two things that no one should ask about for at least a year.

  “Someday,” he said. “Eventually. One or two. Not yet.”

  Change the subject.

  Oh, her brain had come back online. Fan-fucking-tastic. “How about your dad?”

  “He wasn’t in the picture, and he died a few years ago.” Theo said. “My uncles raised me and my male cousins when we were in Colombia during the summers. I never met my father until I was in high school. He lived Back East, in New York. When I was born, he hung around just long enough to convince my mother to give me a French first name, which was a subject of great amusement on playgrounds in the US and Colombia, and then he went back to his family. When I was in college in Jersey, we met once a month or so for coffee. It was odd, talking to this guy who had taken an intense interest in me. He sent my mother generous support my whole life, but he didn’t even phone until I was sixteen. I don’t look much like him. He was a blue-eyed blond. I look like a standard-issue Colombian, maybe on the pale end. My mother is blonder than I a
m.” Theo sipped his drink some more. “You have any sibs?”

  “Nope. Only kid, too.”

  “Your parents alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Still live in Jersey?”

  “I suppose.”

  Theo glanced over at her. “You don’t know?”

  Lizzy toyed with the stem of her glass, a fragile stalk on the balcony rail high above the cement. “We don’t talk, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “All right.” Theo looked back over the glittering city, pondering. “There is something you should know.”

  “Oh my God, I knew it! You were born a woman!”

  Theo cracked up and, laughing, nearly spilled his drink on the line of people waiting to get into the nightclub far below the balcony. “What gave me away?”

  Lizzy grinned up at him and his very masculine bone structure, all hard cheekbones and strong, square jawline softened by his golden, trimmed beard. He had obviously been a victim of testosterone poisoning his whole life. “Your eyelashes. No guy should ever have such lush eyelashes.”

  He laughed. “All right, and thanks, but no.”

  “Oh, crap. You’re really a drug smuggler, aren’t you?”

  “No, but I almost married one.”

  “Oh. Wow. I did not expect that.”

  “Yeah, well, funny story, there.” The tightness in Theo’s throat sounded like he didn’t find it funny at all. “I took her to an office Christmas party, and my boss about choked to death on a chocolate-covered pretzel when he heard her name. He yanked me into an office and told me I was fired and to clean out my desk that very night. My utter shock must have convinced him that I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “Jesus, Theo.” She had said that several times, right? “Were you serious about her?”

  “We were already engaged.”

  “I’m sorry, man. That sucks.”

  “Monday morning, I did the basic due diligence search that we do on anyone who applies to be janitor in the County Attorney’s office and found out that her dad is a major trafficking kingpin in northern Mexico. Really major. Made the Mafia in Jersey look like an eating club.”

  “And she never told you that she was up to her fucking eyeballs in narcotics smuggling, even though you’re a prosecuting attorney.”

  “Nope. It never came up. When I confronted her about it, she was very cold, colder than I had ever seen her. I think I saw her real self that night. I’m still not sure if she ever had feelings for me or if she was marrying a prosecutor into her family and taking one for the team.”

  “That sucks giant ass. I’m sorry, Theo.”

  “I wasn’t too broken up about it, which is a sad commentary in and of itself. It wasn’t that kind of blazing, brilliant love that blinds you with its intensity, where you can’t breathe for wanting to be with her. Losing that practically kills you.”

  “Your mother must have been suicidal.”

  “Mi mommacita? No, she wasn’t suicidal. When she heard why I broke off the engagement, she offered to send my Colombian uncles after her, and to this day, we pretend that my mother was kidding.”

  Lizzy’s heart twisted for him, a new sensation for tough little Lizzy. “That’s why one-night-stands are better. Avoids that whole getting-engaged-to-narcoterrorists problem.”

  “Yet,” his rueful smile was sweet, “I just don’t like one-nighters.”

  Damn. Her heart squirmed some more. “Do you really think she was just using you?”

  “Her sister is married to the city chief of police. If Juliandra had married me, they would have had inroads in the CA’s office, too.”

  “Wow. The West is just as crooked as Jersey. Shocking. This is my shocked face.” Lizzy shrugged.

  “She was pissed when I broke it off. Someone took a potshot at me a week later. Might have been her family or it might have had something to do with work, but a bullet hit a wall two inches from my head. I heard the air break right beside my ear. Made me homesick for Colombia.”

  “Jesus, Theo. I’ve never had a breakup so bad that someone shot at me.”

  “Yeah.” Theo’s voice had slowed to an embarrassed crawl. “That fiasco changed the rules in my office, so that’s why I did a due diligence background check on you before I called you Tuesday.”

  “What!” Lizzy’s body trembled from her crooked toes to her spiked, blond hair.

  “My boss made a background check mandatory for anyone whom we might date.”

  “You fucking stalked me?”

  “No. Stalking is following you home to see where you live and watching through your curtains or cloning your phone. Cyber-stalking is reading your social networking sites and asking your friends personal stuff. This was a professional background check.”

  “Fucking hell, Theo.”

  “I did a basic background search for employment, arrest records, and tax records.”

  Tremors started in Lizzy’s fingers. The green appletini shuddered in its glass. “How far back did you go?”

  “We have to go back five years. Your records here dried up three years ago, and you said that you were from New Jersey.”

  Lizzy’s heart seized, and she stared at the city lights that looked like a white-hot burning wasteland. “So you looked in New Jersey.”

  “I was just going to check that you went to high school there and check your family’s police records. You said that your parents owned a small business. I thought I’d find a mom-and-pop grocery or tourist trap with commensurate receipts and I could be done with it.”

  Her brain started shutting down, and she stared at her red, high-heeled pumps on the marble terrace.

  He said, “There weren’t any records of you going to high school there, so I had to look further.”

  “I was home-schooled.” Badly.

  “I figured that out.”

  “Jesus Christ, Theo. I came here to start over.”

  “I’m sorry, Lizzy. Certain nationalities raise red flags. When I heard your last name was Pajari, I knew it was Russian. Back East, that has certain connotations. I’m half Colombian, so I understand that it’s not fair, but sometimes it’s true. When I applied for the CA’s office, they did every search on me except a body cavity search. I took three polygraphs.”

  She wasn’t listening to him blather. The trembling turned to the shakes and rattled every bone she had ever broken, which was pretty much her whole skeleton. “You know about Beijing, don’t you?”

  He had the smallest sense of decency to look down, like he regretted it. “Yeah.”

  Georgie didn’t know about Beijing. Lizzy wanted to evaporate right there.

  “You know that I left the hospital, don’t you?”

  He swallowed hard, and he ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah.”

  “Shit.” Lizzy didn’t throw her appletini glass at the innocent people lined up below, but she set it on the ledge and walked away from that jackass.

  “Lizzy!” he called after her. “Wait. Let’s talk.”

  She kept walking, trying to put as much distance between herself and her old life that was trying to suck her back in.

  The music spilling through the open doors to the nightclub was so loud that she didn’t hear anything behind her until Theo touched her elbow.

  She yanked her arm away. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t get caught blindsided again. I had to do it.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I like you. You’re fun.” His voice dropped a half an octave. “You’re smart and beautiful, and I’d like to get to know you better. If you don’t want to talk about it, I will never ask.”

  “Not good enough. No one knew. ” No one except The Dom. “I don’t want to be tragic little Elisaveta Pajari anymore. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  “I’ll call you in few days. I am sorry.”

  “You just couldn’t make a leap of faith, could you? You couldn’t just let me be me?” She stalked b
ack into the night club and lost herself in the undulating crowd. She texted Georgie—Leaving now. Meet me at the car.—and grabbed her red stripper pumps off her feet so that she could sprint out the front door and into the parking lot.

  The Dom-Date: 3

  Lizzy leaned on her car in the darkness outside the night club, waiting for Georgie to get her skinny ass in gear. The yellow sodium lights darkened her car’s red paint and her red shoes to charcoal gray. Gravel rolled under the platform soles and stiletto heels of her hoochie shoes.

  Damn, but Theo had fucked everything up. He had been nicely distracting her from The Dom, but he had fucked everything except her.

  She wished she still had the stripes that The Dom had laid on her skin a couple weeks before, just so she could feel something. The raw welts had burned for hours, but they were so shallow that they had faded by next morning like the memory of a wet dream. She hadn’t even gotten to show Georgie.

  She burned for him. If nothing else, she had known exactly where she had stood with The Dom. A Dom-Date is a one night stand, but a glorious one.

  ~~~~~

  In the dark of the deserted main ballroom at The Devilhouse, The Dom had paced around Lizzy like a golden lion that was deciding whether to devour her. He had taken off his suit jacket and rolled the sleeves of his white shirt to his elbows. His forearms bulged with muscle. Veins ran blue under his pale skin. Strong cords lined his neck above his open collar. His tie lay on his coat over a bench, a bright red slash on the blackness.

  Lizzy had never thought of The Dom as burly, but he looked juiced. Thick muscles bulked his shoulders under his white shirt, and his shoulders tapered to a muscled torso.

  Those business suits hid a whole hell of a lot.

  She asked, “Aren’t you going to undress?”

  “Nyet.”

  “Why not?”

  He leaned in, close to her face. The wine they had drunk just tinged his breath. “This is not what you want. I am the Dom, and this is what I want. It’s always a little different than you want, a little more, a little farther than you thought I would go. Tonight, I deny you my body.”