Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (7 page)

He said, “Having a soul is a liability when
you’re an attorney. It would screw everything up.”

“How do you know right from wrong if you
insist that you don’t have a soul or whatever?”

He raised one eyebrow at her, but he was
still smiling. “Or whatever?”

“Yeah, all models are wrong, but some models
are useful.”

“All right, then getting your soul sucked out
your left ear must be a useful model, too. Ethics in the law mostly
deal with money. In general, you owe your loyalty to whomever you
took the money from.”

“So to whom do you owe your loyalty, Mr.
No-Soul?”

“The county, I guess. My boss, the County
Attorney. I thought it was to the law, the courts, and the ideal of
justice, but that’s not how it works.”

Lizzy sipped her drink and realized that she
was getting buzzy. Even though she had trained her liver hard, she
was still eighty-two pounds, and the alcohol just had nowhere to
go. “Do you really believe that you have no soul? That’s what the
really creepy guys say, like the psychos.”

His quick shrug made it look like he was
kidding. “I prosecute those guys. They were born without souls. I’m
just a lawyer.”

She glanced over at Theo while the crowd
chattered around them and the DJ played the waltz. His ironic
expression looked like it covered some serious gloom. Lizzy reached
over with one finger, touched his chin, and turned his face toward
her.

It was an intimate gesture, far too intimate
for two people who had just met at a bar, but all this no-soul crap
was poking Lizzy’s soft, well-hidden heart.

Theo startled at her touch but allowed her to
turn his head. Wariness fluttered in his eyes, but his full lips
curved up like he was preparing to smile. He didn’t pull away.

Yes, his gold-flecked honey eyes held humor,
but gentleness lived there, too. “I think you have a soul.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“I can see it in your eyes.”

Theo blinked a couple times, and his very
long, dark lashes touched his cheeks. That was why his honey-hazel
eyes were so startling: those dark, lush eyelashes practically
rimmed his eyes with kohl, like actors in old movies. She had seen
plenty of guyliner smudged on Guidos wearing colored contacts at
clubs, but she was so close to him, almost nose-to-nose, that she
could see Theo’s eyes were perfectly natural, no contacts, no
guyliner, just gorgeous.

Wow.

Blond little Lizzy would kill someone to have
eyelashes like that. Even tonight, she had crusted two coats of
mascara on her pale, stubby lashes just to make them visible.

“What else can you see?” The inflection
around his question was neutral, allowing her to make it a joke or
not.

“A lot.” Her fingers still held his chin. His
light stubble-beard was soft under her thumb and finger.

All he had to do to break their contact was
lift his head, but he didn’t.

If she leaned in, she could kiss him, but she
didn’t.

One of his eyebrows flicked up, beginning to
take this into the realm of joking around. “Everything?”

“No one can see everything.”

“I can see something in your eyes,” he said.
“I see that you’re just about to tell another dirty joke.”

She had been thinking about kissing him,
because what the hell, but she couldn’t after that.

His lips were pinker, flushed. He might joke
that he wasn’t getting turned on, but his body told her that he
was. That was interesting.

Lizzy dropped her fingers away from his face
and rolled her eyes in mock exasperation, leaned over again, and
pressed her tiny boobs together with her arms, nearly making
cleavage. “What’s six inches long, in a guy’s pants, that women
love to blow?”

Theo had grabbed his beer stein and was
sipping, and he choked. “Pray, tell.”

Lizzy licked her lips, and in a voice
brimming with sex and sin, said, “Money.”

He laughed a full-throat laugh. “That’s
terrible. I shouldn’t laugh.”

She licked her upper lip in a truly slutty
manner. He laughed harder and leaned back on the barstool.

“So you tell me a joke,” she said.

“All I know are lawyer jokes, and they all
end with ‘Professional courtesy’ or ‘One is scum-sucking
bottom-dweller, and the other is a fish.’ What do you do when
you’re not telling jokes or being bait?”

“College.” She leaned back, collapsing her
dress against her chest, and picked up her drink.

“Major?” He was still breathing a little
harder, like he was calming himself down.
So very
interesting.

Lizzy dredged the sugar off the bottom of her
glass and stirred it back into the vodka cocktail. “English and
philosophy.”

“Interesting. Are you pre-law, too?”

“Nope.”

“Good. So what are you going to do with an
English and philosophy degree?”

That
question again. “Damned if I
know.”

He drained his beer and used the napkin to
sop the condensation ring off the wood. “There are a lot of things
that you could do. You can get an MBA, go to grad school, or go to
law school. It’s a stepping stone to a lot of options.”

“Yeah, I’ll figure something out.”

“Are you independently wealthy to where you
don’t need to work?”

Lizzy snorted because she was careful to have
not sipped her drink. Lemon juice burns the crap out of sinuses.
“Nope. Never got my million dollars.”

“Were you supposed to get a million dollars?”
His expression was a little too amused by that statement.

“Never in the cards for me. My parents own a
small business. I’m just a middle-class nobody.” She didn’t need to
tell him the rest of it.

“Yeah. Me, too. What do you want to do?”

What did Lizzy want? To never be hungry or
cold or have to sleep in a doorway or a shelter or eat out of the
garbage bin behind a restaurant again.
Ever.
“Oh, I don’t
know.”

“If you had enough money to do anything, but
not enough so that you could do nothing, what would you do?”

Lizzy stirred her drink, stalling. “Not work
with kids or anything. Most kids are lazy butts who don’t earn
their borscht. Maybe,” she stirred the sandy sugar in the drink,
“I’d want to do something with,” and she tried to make it sound
like she had just thought it up, “old farts.”

“With that attitude, who wouldn’t want to be
your patient?”

“Not a doctor. Old people see too many
doctors as it is. More like a cruise director or camp counselor.
Someone to make sure they’re taken care of and healthy, but that
they also have something to do, something to look forward to, every
day. What a terrible thing it is, to be stuck somewhere with people
who don’t really know how to take care of you or are too busy to do
stuff, and you’re stuck in a room for years because you can’t get
down the stairs. People deserve better.”

“Yeah, they do. My mother and her sisters
take care of my grandmother, but she’s only in her seventies. She’s
perfectly capable on her own. It’s going to get tougher.”

“Yeah, it gets tougher,” Lizzy said.

He turned and checked her glass, noting that
it was empty. “You want to dance?”

Lizzy glanced at the dance floor, where Rae
and The Dom were still waltzing. The Dom inclined his head to one
side, smiled that professional smile, and blinked, as close as he
ever got to emotion.

Lizzy lied, “Not tonight. I turned my ankle
this morning.”

“Let me see your leg.” Theo’s gold eyes were
still light with laughter.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Give me your ankle.” He held his hands
between his knees, waiting.

Foot fetish? She saw weirder things at The
Devilhouse than that. Luckily, she had had a mani-pedi that
afternoon. Her legs were so short that she slowly raised one leg,
careful to keep her knees together so she wouldn’t flash him her
pantiless pussy, and lifted her black high-heeled pump toward him.
Her tiny, bare leg looked like a doll’s limb in his large
hands.

His strong fingers massaged the bare skin of
her ankle, stroking the tendons and muscles halfway to her knee,
milking the stress away. An old break ached in the bone.

She looked up at him, surprised. “That feels
really
good.”

“I took a gap year between high school and
college and got a certification in sports massage therapy.”

“Oh, wow.” His hands stole the tension from
her leg and sucked the rest of the crazy out of her body. “You’re
like a stress vampire.”

He smiled. “That’s a new one.” His fingers
reached down her ankle. “Can I take off your shoe?”

Yeah, he probably had a foot fetish.
“Sure.”

He plucked her shoe off her foot and handed
it to her. His fingers caressed down her heel and kneaded her
instep. Relaxation feathered up her skin.

Maybe
Lizzy
had a foot fetish. God
Almighty, his warm hands felt good.

He palpated the top of her leg and ankle,
then stroked down to the ball of her foot, sore from the insanely
high pumps, and her crooked little toes.

“You used to do ballet?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then why can you do this?” With two fingers,
he gently pressed her foot flat on his thigh. Her toes pointed
straight out from her leg. If his leg hadn’t been underneath her
foot, it could have gone farther.

She looked straight into his light, laughing
eyes and prayed that she didn’t look screaming-inside terrified.
“I’m just a bendy mutant, I guess.”

“Everything people do is written on their
bodies. You’ve broken your toes many times,” his hand slid around
to the meat of her calf on the back, “and your gastrocnemius is
impressive. These scars feel surgical.” He glanced up at her, and
his warm eyes seemed curious. “If not ballet, then what?”

She swallowed. “Nothing to speak of.”

“All right.” He stroked her bare leg for a
few more minutes, reaching a little farther toward her knee every
time, but just before his next excursion would have meant stroking
the inside of her thigh, he patted her foot. “Better?”

“Oh, yeah.” Lizzy seemed to have forgotten
how to breathe. She tucked her foot behind her to slip her shoe
back on. “Much better. I think you fixed me.”

“I’m not very good at fixing people. Care to
dance?”

Sometime while Lizzy had been stoned by the
foot massage, the slow song had ended, and the DJ had started
spinning bump-and-grind club music.

She glanced over the field of heads and hair
at the dance floor, looking for two tall people, one with hair like
bright sunlight and the other, like glowing bronze.

All the heads on the dance floor were shades
of mundane wood.

“I guess you’ve got magic fingers and healed
my ankle,” she said. “Let’s dance.”

She was just getting ready to clamber down
from the bar stool when Theo offered her his hand again, and so she
steadied herself by grasping his fingers, still hot from the
friction of his skin on hers, and stepped down. She thought about
tripping accidentally-on-purpose to see if he would catch her and
what his chest felt like, but that was stupid. If she wanted to cop
a feel, the dance floor was the perfect place.

The music throbbed in her bones as he led her
over, and she started dancing while they were still the crowd. He
peeked back at her, watching her bop.

He smiled a lot. At first it had seemed like
some fake Californian plastic surgery grimace, but she liked how
his toffee eyes were amused first, and then he smiled.

Caramel, honey, toffee. Yes, his golden hazel
eyes seemed very sweet.

She wondered if his skin would taste as sweet
under her mouth.

Lizzy’s eyes roamed over the crowd as she
pranced behind Theo, glad that she was dancing, that she felt
great, and that she had found Theo the non-Guido who was gorgeous
and laughed at her dirty jokes.

From the crowd over by the windows, Mr.
Smolder was still watching her. His blue eyes cut through the air
between them. His midnight hair had the slight wave to it, and the
light rolling down the waves shone blue-black on the crests. He
shifted his wide shoulders and rubbed his abdomen, no doubt feeling
the ripples of abdominal muscle there.

Lizzy almost dropped Theo’s hand, so magnetic
was Mr. Smolder’s draw, but she followed Theo to the dance
floor.

The crowd was jamming to better music than
before. At Devilhouse parties, the DJ usually started with the
oldest stuff and meandered up the decades as the old fogies went
home to watch the ten o’clock local news. Lizzy wasn’t sure why The
Dom even invited the geezers. Few of them were ever invited to
membership. It almost seemed like taunting, though most showed up
with subs. Lizzy wasn’t attracted to the cotton swabs. She liked
her men virile, and strong, and young, and exotic.

While Lizzy danced with Theo, her attention
wandered back to Mr. Smolder. He was talking to a young woman, a
brunette with long hair, and he had his hand wrapped in her hair.
His face was serious but not angry.

That was the possessive move of a Dom with
his sub. Mr. Smolder was taken.

Relief washed through her. If Mr. Smolder had
been interested in Lizzy, she would have been tempted by his
glowering and the darkness that she could practically see falling
off of him like a black mist bleeding into the night outside the
windows.

But Mr. Smolder had a sub, and Lizzy was
dancing with Theo.

Beyond Theo, Georgie was dancing with some
other guy, not even the guy she had been talking to when she had
been standing behind Theo. Georgie ran through men like a psychotic
tiger through a herd of paraplegic gazelles. Lizzy doubted Georgie
would ever be able to stand monogamy.

Lizzy stood back from Theo because he was
hugely tall. She hated feeling so shrimpy when she was dancing.
People in the West were taller than in Jersey, she could just
swear.