Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (6 page)

Over the packed heads at the party, one man
stared back at her.

He stood against the wall near the windows
that overlooked the city sparkling in the night. His jet black hair
fell silky-smooth over his shoulders, and his hot blue eyes locked
on hers. His black suit did nothing to slim his muscled body,
though the fabric clung to his rounded shoulders and moved like it
was from a high-end designer. Lizzy had learned a few things about
expensive men’s fashions while working at a club with a six-figure
initiation fee.

When the guy shifted his weight, Lizzy could
tell from across the room that he was musclebound under his
clothes. His cheekbones and jawline were sharp slashes, and his
broad shoulders cut a stark inverted triangle out of the white wall
behind him. One tendril of a black tattoo reached out of his white
collar and up his tanned neck.

He was still staring at her.

Wow.

Even from fifty feet away and over the crowd
of heads, Lizzy could see that his fiery eyes were the color of
blue-hot stars.

Lizzy bet that guy could distract her from
her current Dom-obsession. She could practically see heat mirage
lines coming off him because that man
smoldered.

Mr. Smolder’s skin didn’t look fake-orange
tan, more like real-tan bronze, so he probably wasn’t the Jersey
shore kind of guy who went straight from the gym to the tanning
booth.

Mr. Smolder nodded to her from across the
room. He hadn’t taken his blue eyes off her.

Lizzy felt distinctly like prey, so she
swiveled back around and set her martini on the bar. A clump of
sugar fell off the rim onto the shining wood.

Medium Guy, still sitting beside her, set his
beer on a coaster and wiped foam off his lip with a napkin. He had
one of those light stubble-beards that was manly without looking
unkempt, also light brown and glistening with gold. His neck and
under his chin were clean-shaven, and his beard was manicured to a
straight, cut line. His white shirt collar was unbuttoned and open,
baring his smooth throat.

The dance music was still soft, so she heard
him say, “Quite a party.”

“They always are,” Lizzy said. She swore that
she could feel Mr. Smolder’s eyes lingering on her back.

Medium Guy asked, “You come to these
often?”

“Yeah.” She stirred the sugar off the bottom
of her martini with the swizzle stick.

“With your Dom?”

“Nope.” Lizzy tried to ignore a remembrance
of The Dom’s fingers trailing down her bare spine. “I’m not into
Doms.”

If she told herself that about a thousand
times and maybe tattooed it backwards on her forehead, she might
begin to believe it.

“Here with your boyfriend?”

From the side, Medium Guy’s cheekbones seemed
cut enough to be interesting, but between The Dom waltzing back
there and Mr. Smolder running his eyes down her spine to her ass,
she wasn’t interested in Medium Guy, but it was a Devilhouse party
so she had to be nice. “Nope. I’m all alone.”

“What’re you doing here, all alone?” He
glanced at the posing crowd like one of them might kidnap sweet,
little Lizzy, as if she didn’t carry her Taser in her purse
everywhere she went.

“I’m bait,” she said.

“Bait?” He smiled a little, and the smile
seemed warmer in his eyes than on his full lips.

“Yup. I work at The Devilhouse. Where’s your
sub?”

“No sub.” He swirled his beer to wash the
foam down the sides. “I’m not into subs.”

“Why are you here, all alone?”

“Dragged,” he said and sucked down some
beer.

“Your girlfriend trying to turn you into a
Dom?”

“No girlfriend, no wife,” he said. “Broke up
with the last girlfriend six months ago and haven’t found another
one.”

“Have you been looking for one?”

“Not really. Work has kept me busy. You have
a vanilla guy waiting for you at home?”

“Hell, no,” Lizzy said. “I’m single, too.
Dumped a God-awful dork from back home a couple months ago.”

And the one man she was really interested in
might flay her alive with a few words, probably Russian words.
Lizzy could feel him on the dance floor, dancing with her friend,
like he was the sun that warmed her back.

She glanced past Medium Guy’s back at
Georgie, who was flirting with some other dude. Lizzy didn’t even
bother to see what Georgie’s dude looked like. Georgie adhered
strictly to the use-’em-and-lose-’em code. On the slim chance that
this new guy made the grade, he would do something to screw it up
with the Ice Princess soon enough.

Lizzy leaned on the bar and lifted her drink.
Other women might look sophisticated, holding a mixed drink like a
real adult and making sexy eyes at some guy. Lizzy settled for
trying to not look like a tiny circus freak by carefully balancing
the oversized glass in her tiny fingers. Trying to look
sophisticated when you’re the size of a twelve-year-old is a losing
battle.

“So where’s back home?” Medium Guy asked.

“New Jersey.” Lizzy sipped her honey-sweet
cocktail.

“But you don’t have big hair or huge teeth,
and you didn’t say Joy-zee,” the guy said.

She smirked at him. “No one from Jersey ever
pronounces it like that. That’s a Long Island accent or something.
Everybody in Jersey has a different accent, anyway. People from
Hoboken sound like they’re from across the river in New York.
People in South Jersey sound like they’re from Philly, but no one
says
Joy-zee.
It’s
Jurr-zee.
I don’t go to the beach.
I go down the shore, and the traffic jam down there is the goddamn
Bennys fucking up the shore traffic.”

The guy chuckled. It was kind of a refreshing
change from The Dom who so seldom cracked a real smile. She was
pretty sure that Medium Guy was indeed the Chucklehead who had
laughed at her dirty jokes, so he must have a sense of humor.

He asked, “What’s a Benny?”

Talking about Jersey brought out the Jersey
girl in her, and Lizzy felt profanity enrich her vocabulary.
“Bennys are the asshole New Yorkers and North Jersey people who
invade our shore during the summer. It’s from the four far-northern
stops on the shore train line, Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, and New
York. B-E-N-NY.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” he said. “I usually
took the Northeast Corridor Line, but the last four stops are the
same.”

“You’re from Jersey?”

“Lived there for four years.”

She drained her martini. “What exit?”

“One-oh-five, but I usually took eight-A off
the Turnpike.”

“Oh my God! You’re my homie! I was at exit
one hundred!” It felt good to
exclaim
something rather than
mope.

He gestured to her empty glass and then the
bartender. “Then let me buy you another one of those, homie.”

“I’m Lizzy.” She stuck out her hand.

Now that he finally turned and looked at her,
Medium Guy was gorgeous-handsome.

His lips were full and looked soft. His eyes
flicked toward her, and she saw that they weren’t so middling
brown. They were closer to gold, like a predatory lion’s, with a
thick, double-row of dark eyelashes framing them.

In Biology for Non-Majors, the one science
class that Lizzy had ever passed, the professor had said that
double lashes was a rare mutation and that Elizabeth Taylor had it.
No wonder everyone had always talked about Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes.
Those double lashes made his eyes as hot as a fried egg on the
desert asphalt in July.
Damn.

If he tanned, those caramel eyes might turn
lighter than his skin.

Lizzy almost couldn’t breathe for a second
because her heart was beating so hard in her chest that her lungs
fluttered from the force of it.

Medium Guy said, “Theo.”

The way that his tongue flicked into view
between his white teeth when he said his own name was kind of
fascinating.

She sucked in a shuddering breath and went
sarcastic because otherwise she might lean over and lick him.
“Great. Theo the Guido.”

He laughed again. He did that a lot. “I’m not
Italian, though a few people in Jersey kindly overlooked that
deficiency. My mother is Colombian, and my father was French. Are
you Italian?”

“Not even a little. I stuck out like a very
small, blond thumb in Jersey.”

The bartender set fresh drinks in front of
them. Theo lifted his beer. His hair was blonder on top than on the
sides, but it didn’t look streaky like it was bleached. It looked
like the sun had faded his hair, for real. Medium-blond lanks fell
over his forehead in places, not artfully tousled but like he had
been running his hands through it. He said, “Cheers to my fellow
non-Italian Jerseyan.”

“You even know the right term. It’s such a
relief to talk with someone civilized.”

“I only lived there for four years, but it
made an impression. What’s up with these people pumping their own
gas here?”

“Yes!
Yes!
Oh my God. I feel like I’m
on the fricking moon sometimes with the amateurs pumping their gas,
and there aren’t enough trains out here.” She drank deeply from her
sugary drink. “So what do you do for a living, Theo?”

“Don’t hold this against me, but I’m a
lawyer.”

“Hey! My friend Georgie is pre-law. You guys
should talk. She’s right over there. I’ll just grab her.” Lizzy
slipped off the barstool, intending to snag Georgie for this guy.
Lizzy normally leapt off barstools, but she was wearing her
second-highest hoochie heels, which were black and only slightly
less like stilts than her red pair. Breaking an ankle falling off a
barstool would really suck.

Just as she was about to dodge through the
crowd, Theo touched her bare shoulder. Lizzy looked up at him,
startled, as their skin made contact. He had stepped off his stool,
too, and he was really tall. Her head was nowhere near his
shoulder.

Theo said, “If she wants to be a lawyer, she
shouldn’t talk to me. I’ll tell her to run as far and as fast as
she can in the other direction. I’d rather talk to you about
anything else, anything other than the law.”

“Yeah, Georgie might not want to hear
that.”

He looked off, over and above the crowd. “I
wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.”

“Don’t you wish that someone had told you to
run?”

He shrugged. “I’m a pigheaded bastard. I
wouldn’t have listened.”

She laughed at him. “You sure you’re not from
Jersey?”

His sly grin was lopsided. “I fit in there
abnormally well. I even got the hang of navigating jughandles
within a week.”

“You’re at least an honorary Jerseyan, then.
Anyone who goes right to turn left is certifiable.”

“Thanks, I think.” He sat down on the bar
stool again but did a double-take when he realized how close to the
ground Lizzy was. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Ah. That’s good.” He held out his hand like
he wanted to help her step up into a horse-drawn carriage.

“No thanks. I’m fine.” Lizzy put one hand on
the barstool seat and one on the bar and pressed to lift herself up
onto the stool like doing an iron cross on the rings. She
levitated, hovering in the air, then maneuvered her butt onto the
stool.

He raised his eyebrows, impressed. “You’re
pretty strong.”

She lifted her chin to smile. Showing off
always caught guys’ attention. “Small people have a higher
strength-to-weight ratio. You big people might be able to lift more
net pounds, but you weigh too much to
spin
yourself around
like we can.”

His sultry glance was too quick to be a leer.
“Really?”

“Yeah.” She grinned at him, and her tongue
crept to the side, an absolutely slutty flirt.

Well, Georgie had practically ordered Lizzy
to find someone to hook up with. The more she talked to Gorgeous
Theo the Non-Guido, the more interesting he got, and he had said he
was single.

His lips looked soft, very soft. Lizzy liked
kissing.

She leaned toward him, offering him a view
down her dress. “So why do you hate being a lawyer so much,
Theo?”

He didn’t look down her top and kept his gaze
pinned on her eyes. “I don’t, not really. Professionally, next week
is going to be one of the worst weeks of my life. In law school, I
had a superhero complex and thought I would be putting bad guys in
jail and saving the world.”

“So why don’t you do that?”

“I do. Or I try to. I’m an assistant county
attorney, a prosecutor, in special crimes. It’s not easy to put bad
guys in jail. We cut deals with people we shouldn’t. We put people
away for longer than they should be just because we can, and we
have to do that to keep our statistics up. The really bad guys have
teams of lawyers who hire private investigators and have all the
time in the world to work on their cases.” He wiped a smudge of
beer foam off his full lower lip with his thumb. “I’ve had a rough
day. I’m usually not morose like this.”

“It’s okay. Go ahead,” Lizzy said. Theo was
pretty to look at. With some time in a tanning booth, a dollop of
mousse and an attack by a blow-dryer, maybe some time with a real
hairstylist to turn those gold streaks to platinum, he might be a
looker at a club. Might take an hour to freshen this guy up.

Or that might make him look like every other
poser out there. Maybe he was gorgeous just as he was.

He said, “I keep thinking that I should get
out of prosecuting and go into contract law, write tight documents
and tweak the language to tie up all the loopholes.”

“Sounds soul-killing, sitting at a desk and
typing all day.”

He smirked, but it was good-natured, not
mean. “I don’t have a soul. In your second year of law school, they
bring out the big machine, stick the hose in your left ear, and
suck it out.”

“Oh, come on.” She socked his shoulder, a bit
of rough Jersey affection. His shoulder under her fist was bigger
than she had thought. A lot of muscle hid under that suit jacket of
his.