Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (15 page)

“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 back
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.

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.”

“I thought you were going to—”

He ran one long finger under her jaw, lifting
her chin to meet his cold blue eyes. “No. You can’t have me, but I
will have you.”

~~~~~

In the parking lot of the night club, Lizzy
glanced at her phone.

The message icon blinked but not the text
one.

Damn it, Georgie hadn’t even texted her back,
the oblivious idiot. She probably hadn’t felt her phone vibrate in
that stupid little purse of hers, which was identical to the one
that Lizzy carried.

Lizzy didn’t want to dive back into the club
because Theo might be lurking in there, waiting to stalk her when
she drove home, but she wasn’t going to abandon her wingwoman to
the rough mercies of alcohol and frat boys, either.

Lizzy sighed and picked her way through the
gravel parking lot back to the club.

Mannix waited, sitting in his low, black car
parked in the back of the nightclub’s parking lot and watching
little Lizzy Pajari help the other girl, drunk again, into her
little red Boxster.

Such a sweet, helpful girl.

He had to have her.

Mannix raised his cell phone again and
snapped a photo, just as Lizzy pushed the other girl into the
passenger seat. In the glare from the overhead parking lot lamp,
against the red liner on the car door, the other girl’s black
high-heeled shoe dangled from her toe-tip, nearly falling off.

The dismay on Lizzy’s face was priceless as
the other girl’s legs kicked and, finally, receded into the
car.

Lizzy said something, which Mannix assumed
was something like, “Don’t hurl in my Porsche.”

She walked around to the driver’s side and
looked around the lot, doubtlessly making sure she wasn’t followed
out of the club.

No, not
out
of the club.

Mannix had been waiting for her the whole
night.

He loved watching the way her lithe, little
legs pranced in those stilt high heels. He enjoyed watching her
pixie form dodge between people.

The Boxster pulled away, and Mannix let the
Gallardo roar to life.

He followed her back to the dorm, just to
make sure that she got home all right.

The next morning, Lizzy breezed into her dorm
room after a three-hour gym workout that had started at four-thirty
in the hot asphalt-black morning and had left her joints aching and
her skin with four new bruises, a good session.

Pain was weakness leaving the body.

It had fucking better be. God, she was
sore.

She needed to step it up a notch to get
stronger. Maybe more weight training.

In the bedroom, Georgie already back from her
early-morning piano practice session. Dark brown scent filled the
air like roasting chocolate.

Excellent.
A couple cups of coffee
would put that manic spring in her step that Lizzy needed to face
the day.

Saturday mornings were always a bitch.
Ditching Theo last night made everything worse.

And Theo said that he was going to call
her?

Fuck him.

And not in the fun way.

To fucking
Hell
with him.

Lizzy inhaled the rich scent of coffee
through her nose, trying to catch a caffeine buzz from the scent
alone. “Is the coffee ready?”

Thin blood vessels criss-crossed Georgie’s
hungover eyes. With her light brown hair, big brown eyes, and
runner’s physique, she looked like a roadkill greyhound. “Yeah. How
did I get hammered in less than an hour?”

“You seriously don’t remember the mescal
shots with the frat boys before I dragged your drunk ass home?”