Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (10 page)

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.”

His head tilted, regarding her. “Have you
discussed this with a doctor?”

“Oh,
hell,
no.” Her tone had come out
more acidic than she had meant. Embarrassing conversations pissed
her off. The Dom was just trying to be nice, probably, but Jesus,
they didn’t need to hash out every jackass detail. “Look, I just
didn’t want you to waste time trying to get my body to do something
it’s not wired to do. And please don’t say, ‘we’ll see about that’
or think that you’re the one with the magic dick. You are not a
super special sexual snowflake. It’s not
you.
It’s
me.”

He crossed his arms, and Lizzy worried for a
second that his round biceps were going to bust out of that pretty
suit of his, but the fabric held. “You realize that when you state
it like that, most men will take it as a challenge or a point of
honor.”

“And I’m telling you not to. I’m not a
challenge to be won. I am Sisyphus’s motherfucking rock. No matter
how many times you roll that bitch up the hill, it’s not going over
the top.”

After a moment, The Dom smiled, showing white
teeth and stunning Lizzy, and then he
chuckled.

Lizzy’s fingers went numb, and she almost
dropped her clutch purse. When The Dom smiled, it was a softening
of his lips. He
never
laughed, at
anything.

Lizzy smiled back, tentatively at first, then
she laughed, too. “If you don’t want to get involved with all this,
I understand. I’m all kinds of fucked up.”

He put one arm around her shoulders, and that
time Lizzy’s hands did open in surprise but she caught that little
beaded purse just below her belly button.

He said, “All right. I won’t try. The
pressure is off of both of us. Here’s an option: if physical
pleasure isn’t an option for you,” his eyes took on a steely shine
that made Lizzy step back from his broad chest, “perhaps you would
consider an altogether different experience.”

Thursday late afternoon, Lizzy stood in The
Devilhouse’s costume closet, a cement warehouse of a back room
behind the ladies’ spa area, and changed into a bright blue
cocktail dress and matching pumps, wiggling as she zipped the snug
dress up the side. The racks of other-sized dresses, gorgeous stuff
that would have trailed the ground behind her, hung on six taller
racks. The leather, lace, and snakeskin fetishwear scented the room
with saddlesoap and cowhide under the more common smells of laundry
detergent and dry cleaning chemicals. The shoe racks smelled like
the cedar bags stuffed in all the shoes.

All Lizzy’s outfits matched because she was
the only size zero, short, in the dresses and size five in the
shoes, so the shoppers just matched everything for her. She liked
the blue dress. Lizzy’s eyes were pale blue, almost gray in the
sunlight, and electric blue reflected in her irises and made them
look bluer. Theo’s thick, black eyelashes were so wasted on a guy.
And The Dom’s sapphire blue eyes were so wasted on a guy. And she
could go on.

Sadness trickled down her back again. The Dom
wasn’t ignoring her, just busy.

Maybe she should make an appointment with
him, just to talk about nothing in particular.

Or get him alone in a play room.

She rolled her eyes at herself. That canny
coyote wouldn’t be so easily tricked.

Lizzy snagged her printed schedule from the
bench and glared at it again: Two guys, which was one more than she
usually saw on a weeknight.

The second name on the list, her eight
o’clock appointment, was a name she recognized, “Bruce Lee.” He had
started off as a skinny, painfully shy guy but had gained thirty
pounds of hard muscle working out over the last year. He liked her
to marvel at his katas for their hour. She played the adoring fan
for him, giggling and hopping in elation. He was a nice guy, just
lonely and desperate for approval like most scientists.

Like most of her clients, “Bruce” had thought
that he wanted blow jobs when he had signed up at The Devilhouse,
when he had actually needed a cheerleader. Most people would
probably be shocked and pretty disappointed at how little sex
occurred in The Devilhouse.

“Bruce” had asked her to attend his brown
belt test in a couple weeks, and she was seriously considering
going even though it was a breach of The Devilhouse’s Terms of
Service. The TOS was to keep them safe, but she felt safe meeting
“Bruce” at his dojo and providing some moral support. She had to
make sure he understood the continuing limitations of their
relationship, and she was pretty sure that he did. He was almost at
that point that two of her previous clients had reached, when she
told them that they didn’t need her anymore and to go out in the
world and knock ‘em dead.

The first name on her schedule in the seven
o’clock time slot was new: “Thomas Hobbes,” like the English
philosopher.

God, what a dorky fake name. Lizzy was really
hoping that the name didn’t mean that the guy reveled in being
nasty, brutish, and short. Well, it was a just an initial meeting,
which meant that she was interviewing him to see if he got a
provisional place on her roster, and that was all.

A new guy appearing on her schedule was
weird. She had closed her list months ago because she was making
plenty of money and didn’t want to overbook herself. Maybe it was
an emergency. Some contractors had been quitting lately, just
natural turnover, nothing unusual. She could clear it up later.

Georgie was waiting around the corner, also
studying her schedule. She was wearing a long, black formal and a
tiara.

“What’cha got for today?” Lizzy asked
her.

“An English tea service and restrained
flirtation with ‘Lord Alfred,’ then a drinking game with ‘Boston
Bob.’ Every time the Red Sox hit a homer or catch a pop fly, we do
a shot.”

“Guess it’s a good thing I drove.”

“Hell, yeah. Good thing that tomorrow’s
sociology test got postponed. I already watered down the bourbon so
I won’t end up barfing my guts out.”

Clicky footsteps clattered like someone
hurrying in high heels. They looked up.

Someone barged around the corner and
high-heeled-skidded to a stop in front of Lizzy and Georgie.

Lizzy looked way, way,
way
up at
Rae.

Rae wore a corset-style black bustier and
matching tight skirt that clung to her curves. Her skirt was short
enough that just a strip of her white thighs showed over the tops
of her thigh-high boots. In those stiletto boots, Rae was well over
a foot taller than Lizzy. It was amazing that she didn’t get
nosebleeds in the thin air up there.

“Um.” Rae ducked her head, swinging her dark
auburn hair to cover her face. “Hi.”

Lizzy and Georgie gawked as the spa music
tinkled in the air and the waterfall burbled. Georgie asked,
“Rae?”

Rae looked down at her shiny boots standing
on the polished wooden floor. “Yeah?”

Lizzy’s brain went on the fritz at seeing Rae
in that fetishwear, considering that only a year and a half before,
Rae had been wearing Hester-the-Repressor long skirts and white,
high-necked blouses.
“What
are you
wearing?”

Rae’s cheeks and nose flushed pink. “I got it
from the costume closet.”

Georgie asked, “Rae, are you dressed like a
Domme?”

Lizzy grinned. “So you’re hired? So you can
stay at school?”

Rae said, “Yeah. Um, that guy? Um, The Dom?
The Dom
hired me. I signed the contract and nondisclosure
agreement just now.”

Yes!
Lizzy threw a fist up to Heaven
because she had saved Rae from that stupid hometown of hers and she
could have her autism clinic.
“All right!”

Georgie, ever the one for details instead of
celebration, asked, “Did he hire you as a Domme?”

“Yeah. As a Domme.” Rae’s voice seemed
subdued.

“That’s great! That’s great!” Lizzy chanted.
She held her pumps in her fingers and bounced, popping a couple of
quick jumps to burn off some exuberance. She jumped high,
forgetting for a moment that she was on a hard floor, and looked
over Rae’s shoulder to the make-up area beyond.