Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (17 page)

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Lizzy said.

“I mean, Monday morning. It’s due Monday
morning, but I need to do it right now.”

It must be something private, an email from
her family, or a phone message from them. Lizzy’s stomach
cramped.

Lizzy and Georgie glanced at each other,
communicating their shared disbelief, and then turned back to
Rae.

Lizzy said, “We’re here for you, if you need
to talk.”

Rae blathered, “I just need to go back to my
room and grab some books before I head over to the library. I think
I’ll study in the library because I’ll need the bigger table to set
out all my books for my homework,” Rae said. “And it’ll probably
take a couple hours, so I probably won’t see you guys at dinner.
Maybe later. Maybe tonight.”

Seriously, Rae was a terrible, awful liar.
She would have been reamed in front of television cameras.

Georgie asked, “Are you going to The
Devilhouse tonight?”

Lizzy would see The Dom tonight. Her skin
chilled, but her core heated.

Rae said, “I’m supposed to.”

Georgie said, “Then you’d better go. Do you
want to ride with us? It’s Lizzy’s turn to be the designated
driver. She can drive my car if you go.”

Lizzy bobbed her head cheerfully, wanting to
know what the hell Rae had seen.

“I think I’d better drive myself, and Lizzy
should go early, anyway. What time are we supposed to show up?” Rae
stared at her phone.

“Like, nine,” Georgie said.

“Okay, like, nine.” Rae fled through their
shared bathroom.

Lizzy said to Georgie, “She was so
lying.”

Georgie rounded on her, her angry face red
and right up next to Lizzy’s. “Are you going to do it? Are you
going to fuck everything up by telling The Dom that you’re all
mushy for him?”

He had given Lizzy pain, and the weakness had
left her body. “Yeah. I’m going to do it. Don’t try to stop me,
Georgie. I am the Rock of Gibraltar and of the company of leaves. I
may fuck myself over, but I have to do this. I don’t want to be
weak anymore.”

That afternoon, Lizzy left early and drove
her red sports car through the afternoon heat to The Devilhouse, on
the verge of turning around and running for the hills the whole
time. Sun streamed in the side window and cooked her pale skin. The
heat stung her arm, but she didn’t move it.

Fear was weakness. Pain was weakness leaving
the body.

She parked next to Georgie’s Lexus in the
parking lot, up by the doors. That was weird. George hadn’t said
anything about getting to The Devilhouse early. She must have
paperwork to do or something.

Lizzy didn’t bother changing her clothes yet
for the Saturday night debauchery. Still wearing little-girl jeans
and a blue tank top, she strode through the white halls of The
Devilhouse, marching fast, not giving herself a chance to turn
around.

Fear was weakness.

Lizzy knocked and walked straight into The
Dom’s office without waiting for him to answer, before she lost her
nerve.

The Dom sat at his desk, spine straight,
studying a tablet that lay flat on his glass desk.

Sunlight from the huge windows overlooking
the garden glared on his golden hair and the right side of his
face, throwing his left side into subtle shadows. His blank
expression suggested nothing.

Lizzy backed up a step, touching the
door.

~~~~~

On the center stage of The Devilhouse’s main
theater, amid the silent and empty warehouse-sized space of the
nightclub, the stage lights’ harsh shadows cut The Dom’s pale face
into disjointed triangles. The last traces of sweat from the
long-gone dancers wafted through the air, and the abandoned
nightclub seemed emptier for it.

“Say your safe word.” The Dom still spoke
that complex, nuanced Russian that terrified Lizzy.

“
Nyet,”
she said.

“Say safe word and I will stop.” The Slavic
words vortexed in her head, sucking her down.

“Never.”

“You have chosen a safe word that you will
never say?” His measured tone threatened her. If she admitted it,
everything would stop, and she wouldn’t ever find the bottom of
this darkness.

“I would say it,” Lizzy said, “if you pushed
me too far, if I couldn’t handle it, but I can take anything. You
can’t hurt me.”

“The stripes on your skin suggest
otherwise.”

“That’s nothing. Go ahead. Try. You can’t
hurt me.” Her breath came in panting gasps, and sweat dripped off
her hair. It splatted on the cement stage and left a damp
circle.

The Dom crouched beside her so that his face
was right in front of her turned head. Small lines around his blue
eyes scared her. “I can hurt you.”

“No, you can’t.”

“You want me to hurt you?”

“You can’t break me. Do your worst. I’ve been
through far worse pain than you ever have.”

The Dom’s eyes, dark blue like the fathomless
ocean, glinted in the darkness. Lizzy had never seen him angry. As
far as everyone knew, when The Dom got mad, he got a little cooler
and more controlled.

His voice rumbled, and his steady blue eyes
were as cold as polar ice. “Your best event was the vault.”

With those six words, The Dom peeled the skin
off her.

He watched every horrified twitch of her face
and raised his head to lay a soft kiss at the top of her spine. His
breath brushed the short hair on her neck.

Her body clenched, tightening from her crotch
to her neck. A cry tore from her throat.

His deep voice was as dark as black velvet
brushing her skin. “It happened in Beijing.”

Lizzy sucked in her breath to scream her safe
word, but The Dom flipped a switch.

Orgasm ripped up her spine, shattering the
agony.

~~~~~

His huge, strong hands were on her for hours,
blurring the boundaries between her past and herself and pain and
ecstasy, until he had finally wrapped her in a blanket and soothed
her, cradled in his arms, exhausted and trembling.

“You won’t tell anyone,” she whispered.

The Dom’s voice was soft, almost kind.
“Never. I would never divulge such secrets.”

She slept in his arms for over an hour, and
then he took her home in the early dawn light.

Lizzy shut The Dom’s heavy office door behind
her and leaned on it, drawing deep, calming breaths. Sunlight
slanted in the long window that overlooked the garden area outside,
where the groundskeepers were mowing the emerald grass. All the
bushes out there was manicured, and the grass was trimmed to green
velvet. The Dom insisted everything be perfect, and now she was
about to splash a huge rock into the proverbial pond of The
Devilhouse, splattering everything with mud.

She asked him, “Can we talk?”

The Dom glanced up at her from scrolling
pages on the tablet, which seemed to be floating in the air on his
clear, glass desk. His blue eyes looked darker than usual, almost
deep-ocean blue. He went right back to scrolling down the tablet.
“Yes. Come in.”

She closed the door behind her and leaned her
head against the hard door for a moment, gathering strength.
Jerseyan sarcasm would derail this.
One chance.

She couldn’t dive right in. She wasn’t strong
enough. Her body held too much weakness. “How long have you known
about Beijing?”

The Dom looked up. Hints of wariness in his
eyes startled her. “Since I saw your name on your application.”

She was stripped all over again. “But that
was
years
ago.”

He nodded.

“You never said anything to anybody?”

“Of course not. You obviously prefer to keep
it private.”

“Were you in Beijing?”

“No.” His easy answer dismissed the idea.

She didn’t need to ask him if he had ever
been a gymnast. First, The Dom was way too big, far too tall to
have ever been a gymnast, and second, she would have known him.
Since she figured that he was somewhere in his middle thirties, he
would have been near his peak when she started competing
internationally when she was eight. They would have had friends in
common, if not coaches. “Do you follow gymnastics or
something?”

“Not particularly.”

“Have you ever been to the Olympics?”

The Dom blinked, and he paused.

Was that too much information to ask of him,
whether he had ever watched a live sporting event?

Lizzy waited. He might refuse to answer, but
she wasn’t going to withdraw the question.

“Once,” he said, finally. “Turin, Italy. For
the winter games.” He glanced up at her, and his hard glance
shredded her cover story. “What do you really want to ask me?”

Here it was, one shot, once chance.

She held herself with pride, chest out, and
she jerked chin up. If she had still had a ponytail, it would have
twitched. “I want to be your sub.”

The Dom flipped his tablet screen-down on his
wide glass desk and leaned back in his chair. His long legs
stretched under the glass. He gestured with one hand toward the
chairs in front of his desk.

Lizzy walked over and sat in the over-sized
chair, a hamster huddling on human furniture. If she had scooted
back, her feet would have stuck out, so she perched on the edge.
His office smelled like chocolate, as usual. The tray with his
afternoon empty cocoa cup still sat on the bar in the back
corner.

He asked, “And why would you want that?”

“I need pain. I lived with it for so long
that I can’t live without it. You’re a sadist—”

“Am I?” One blond eyebrow rose a fraction of
an inch.

“Of course. You never could have done all
that to me, said those things, stripped everything away from me and
exposed everything about me, if you hadn’t
wanted
to, if you
hadn’t
liked
it.”

He leaned back, rocking his chair back, just
a small move. His lips opened a bare amount, and he inhaled. If she
hadn’t known better, she would have thought his lips were paler
than usual, almost bloodless. He said, “Continue.”

“I don’t know what you’re hiding, but I’ll
never pry. I will never strip that shiny, mirrored shell away from
you. But listen, sadism is rooted in pain. You need someone who can
take that pain from you. I can do it. I can take more pain than
anyone you’ve ever met. My whole life was pain and deferred reward.
I don’t know any other way to live.”

He said, “Perhaps it’s time to learn another
way.”

“I’ve tried. I’ve tried for
six years,
and I’ve felt
nothing
that whole time. I thought I had
destroyed my pelvic nerves when I ripped out all those muscles in
my back. I thought that the steroids they gave me burned out the
sexual part of me. I thought I was
damaged
. I thought it was
permanent
. You showed me that the
pain
is what I’ve
been missing.”

“You’re sure?”

He sounded like he was relenting. Hope
flared. “Absolutely.”

He leaned on his elbows, resting on the desk.
“Are you sure that it wasn’t the attention? Or because it wasn’t
conventional? Perhaps the emotional component?”

“I want to be a sub. I want to belong to
someone. I want to be
your
sub.”

His head tilted up, and sunlight from the
window glistened on his blond hair. “You just said two different
things. Which is more important to you?”

Lizzy was caught short, so to speak. “I don’t
know.”

The Dom said, “I am not in a position to take
a sub.”

“Oh.” It felt like the ocean withdrawing from
the shore, dragging her under the water.

“But you said that you wanted to
be a
sub.
We could find you your own Dom, someone experienced,
someone who could give you what you need.”

No.
She wanted
him.
“I don’t
know anyone else.”

His gaze at her was as steady as a
sapphire-eyed cobra’s. “It would be a deeply submissive experience,
to allow me to give you to someone else.”

The thought of being given like property
scared her. The pop of fear must have shown on her face, yet she
welcomed the fear because fear was weakness. If she saw it, she
could grab it and destroy it. She needed to break through the
weakness.

Pain was weakness leaving the body.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

The Dom said, “There is someone I would like
to introduce you to.”

“Have I met him?”

“I don’t believe so.” The Dom’s tight smile
chilled her. “He’ll be here in an hour. You might want to change
your clothes. He liked the gold dress you wore at the membership
party last week.”

Panic slammed Lizzy. “You didn’t tell him
about me, about Beijing, did you?”

The Dom’s smiled softened. “I would never
divulge such things. I understand the benefits of concealing one’s
personal history.”

Lizzy was too grateful to be astounded at
what he had said.

Mannix sat in front of The Dom’s glass desk
in his office and had the distinct impression that he was in a
high-level business meeting.

A meeting of Doms was always a pissing
contest, but Mannix felt like The Devilhouse’s Dom didn’t play by
the rules. Every time Mannix brought out evidence of his own
dominance, of his superior alphaness, The Dom flicked one of those
weirdly blond eyebrows and dismissed it, refusing to counter, and
then returned to the subject of Lizzy’s preoccupation with pain and
how to handle her as if he was referring to a meeting agenda.

The Dom of The Devilhouse sat back in his
tall, black desk chair and said, “I don’t believe it’s necessarily
pain, though she thinks it is so.”

Frustration welled in Mannix’s groin. “So
she’s the perfect sub, a true masochist.”

“I’m not convinced she’s a masochist, and she
has never been a sub before. This should be on a trial basis. You
should progress slowly. You shouldn’t even declare your
relationship to be considered training for at least a month. She
should not go to your house tonight.”