Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (9 page)

He had a rocking body under that suit and
crisp, white shirt.

He smiled a lot, and he laughed at her stupid
jokes.

He kissed better than most guys fucked.

No matter what he quipped, he had a soul
behind those pretty caramel eyes.

He seemed like a nice guy, maybe even a great
guy.

Most women would be all over him.

Theo was exactly the opposite of what Lizzy
needed.

Lizzy needed The Dom, who could break her
until the cracks reached down past the scarring around her heart
and she
felt
something.

As she fell asleep, The Dom’s cold, blue eyes
watched her, judged her, and a whip flicked out of the
darkness.

Two days later, Sunday afternoon, Georgie
drove Lizzy and Rae in her white Lexus through the crowded suburb
traffic to The Devilhouse. Lizzy rode shotgun, hogging the air
conditioning vents. The girls’ perfumes steamed in the heat
radiating from the windows like baking flowers.

Rae rode in the back seat, still too quiet.
She was usually a bit of chatterbox, and yet she hadn’t said a
goddamn word about her interview with The Dom yesterday. Not a
single word.

Jesus, Rae was going for an interview at The
Devilhouse two days in a row. She must not have fucked up her first
interview yesterday too badly.

Lizzy waited for Rae to broach the subject,
even though she was dying to hear anything,
anything,
about
The Dom.

She didn’t like this stalker side of herself.
Stalkers made her skin crawl.

The desert sun blazed through the windshield,
stinging Lizzy’s Easterner skin. She and Georgie giggled and
gossiped about clients while the squat, beige strip malls undulated
past the car. The spiky desert plants were finally beginning to
flower a little, flecks of color in the unrelenting brown and gray.
Sometimes, Lizzy missed watching the four seasons roll by.

Tired of listening to the unrelenting silence
of Rae brooding in the back seat, Lizzy finally wrenched herself
around in the front passenger seat. Muscles in the small of her
back tightened, threatening to spasm. She pulled, stretching and
holding onto the leather headrest, working through the pain.
Anything that hurt must make her stronger.

Tall, zaftig Rae was crunched in the back
seat with her legs stretched across the floorboards back there.
Lizzy asked, “So what exactly did The Dom say to you
yesterday?”

“What?” Rae said, obviously stalling. A dozen
emotions flickered over her face. “He was nice.”

Lizzy and Georgie looked at each other and
cracked up.

“Oh, yeah.” Georgie glanced at Rae through
the rear-view mirror. “He’s
very
nice.”

Lizzy said, “He must have liked you if you
had an interview yesterday and are going back today. Are you
working today? Are you official?”

“I don’t think so.” Rae fiddled with her
purse.

“Have you filled out the tax forms and
stuff?”

“No.”

Lizzy turned back around to look out the
front window again. Traffic was heavy today, which meant it was a
like a holiday Sunday at midnight on the Turnpike. “Must be a
second interview, then. I had three interviews before he hired
me.”

“What’s a second interview like?” Rae
asked.

“Oh, you know,” Lizzy said. “He asked a lot
of questions about my sexual history and relationships. Afterward,
I felt like I had no secrets from him at all, like he knew more
about me than my mom and my first lover and God, all put together.”
Except that Lizzy had had secrets, lots of them. She had lied her
ass off as necessary to get the damned job, and he had known them
all anyway.

“Yeah.” Georgie nodded and drove. “I think he
makes sure you’re psychologically healthy enough to work there. A
sex addict or substance abuser would be a disaster in that
place.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lizzy said. “A few Daddy issues
help, though.”

Good God, had she fucking said that out
loud?

Rae blurted, “Did you have sex with him
during your interview?”

Lizzy turned slowly and stared at Rae, who
looked wide-eyed scared. “No. Did you?”

“No.” Her strangled voice sounded
petrified.

“Ah,” Georgie said. “But you want to.”

“No!” Rae protested.

Lizzy laughed at Georgie needling their
sweet, little Rae.

“Don’t worry,” Georgie said. “He never has
sex with the girls unless they’ve opted in to having him as a
client. Did The Dom explain that whole opt-in thing to you?”

Lizzy said, “Makes it sound like we’re an
email list.”

“Yeah, he explained it,” Rae said. “Did you
guys opt in?”

“Yeah,” they both said.

Lizzy added, “He’s a boss with benefits.”

“Really?” The horror in Rae’s voice filled
the car with judgment.

Georgie answered, “Hell, yes. Besides the
fact that he’s an extra client and you make your usual rate off
him, he’s fun, and it’s just a blow job.”

Rae said, “Lizzy said they had sex for three
hours.”

“Oh, no!” A zing sparked up Lizzy’s back at
the thought. “That was a
date
, not a consulting appointment
in the office, and he didn’t go for three hours straight. We went
back to The Devilhouse after dinner and the concert and did all
kinds of stuff for three hours.” Lizzy licked her lips, trying to
moisten her dry mouth. “All
kinds
of stuff.”

Lizzy’s hands started shaking. She pressed
them to her knees, willing the trembling to stop. She was stronger
now. Pain was weakness leaving the body.

Georgie added, “But it isn’t always just a
blow job.”

“Yeah,” Lizzy said. “But you discuss it
first, and if it isn’t just a BJ, you leave with a smile, too.” Her
voice didn’t shake even a little. She relaxed.

“Yep,” Georgie conceded. “Giving head all day
can get you hot and bothered. Sometimes, I just want to beg one of
the clients to break the Terms of Service.”

“So true,” said Lizzy.

They prattled about silly stuff for the rest
of the short ride. Lizzy did a pretty good job of hiding her
murderous jealous rage that Rae was seeing The Dom two damn days in
a row.

A Dom-Date was a glorified one night stand.
Everyone knew that.

Lizzy had known that, and she needed to get
it through her thick Jerseyan head that it was done, done,
done.

Tuesday morning, Lizzy’s phone buzzed in her
hip pocket, distracting her from the professor’s lecture.

Teetering in a tiny desk because her feet
didn’t quite touch the concrete floor, she tugged her phone out to
check the text because Dr. Pojman was uncommonly cool with texting
as long as she didn’t make a spectacle of herself. Indeed, a guy in
front of her was crabbed over, updating his status on some video
website. Another guy sitting three rows over was holding his phone
at eye-level and quoting off it while he debated with the
professor.

The text was from the long string of numbers
with a local area code, which probably meant it was from Theo the
Non-Guido.

He asked,
Hey — wondering if you’d like to
grab a cup of coffee some evening?

She swiped letters on her phone to text back.
Her teeny fingers made no typos.
Seven midterms this week. Truly
insane. Friday night is first open time.

She wrote notes for a few minutes about
ethical relativism, copying Dr. Pojman’s swooping notes on the
white board with five different colors of marker, color-coded for
each attack on the idea like a wartime battle map, before her phone
buzzed again.

Just checking. How’s your week going?

She waited until class dismissed then hurried
out of the small classroom to sit on the grass under a spreading
tree. A warm breeze blew across her bare arms.
Week is going
fine. Two papers to rough draft tonight, due Friday. Test in 20th
Century Novels plus others on Friday, too. Next week is more sane.
How’s your week?

Lizzy had an hour before her next class, so
she pulled her tablet out of her backpack and tapped to open
Orlando
by Virginia Woolf to study for that test on Friday.
She liked the part about Orlando’s affair with the ship captain,
even though she realized that Woolf was riffing on romance
novels.

Her phone buzzed.
I’m making phone calls.
Need a break. Tell me about your papers.

Lizzy smiled. Some guys who met her through
The Devilhouse got all stalkery, and she had to call The Dom to
enforce the Terms of Service, hard. Just because Theo was cute
didn’t mean that he wasn’t a nutcase, but this text seemed less
obsessive. Coupled with his refusal to shag her against the wall at
the party, he might be normal.

Just a normal, medium guy.

She texted him back anyway about the major
topics she had planned for her paper on Nietzsche and the
Postmodern Condition.

She read twenty pages of
Orlando,
sitting in the cool shade, chewing grass stalks, before Theo texted
back,
Brilliant
.

Theo sat behind his desk with his office door
closed, holding the phone.

Beyond the glass wall in front, admins
scurried, running hard copy files to other offices. Wendy and Rama,
two other Assistant County Attorneys, leaned over a long table,
pointing at a piece of paper like they were stabbing it.

Theo hung up the phone and walked around his
desk to close the horizontal blinds, blocking everyone out.

He had twelve more phone calls to make, and
for some stupid reason, he had ordered the list with the low
emotional investment ones at the top, so each call would be worse
than the last.

The next name on the list was Javier
Perez.

Theo sighed and dialed the phone. Rings
trilled through the handset.

If Javier didn’t pick up, Theo couldn’t just
leave a message and be done with it. Some things, terrible things,
needed to be done right. Theo drummed his fingers on the desk,
thrumming out a complicated rhythm with his left hand. The wood
under his fingers was scarred like a burn victim.

Two more rings, and Javier picked up the
phone. “Yell-ow.”

Theo recognized Javier’s voice. They had
spoken on the phone dozens of times. “Hello, Javier? This is Theo
Valencia, the Assistant County Attorney for the Rojas case.”

“Hey! Theo!
Que pasa?”

Theo swallowed the bile that scorched his
throat. “I’m sorry, but I have some bad news.”

“Don’t tell me,” Javier said. His voice was
clenched like he was holding his own neck.

Theo powered through. “We’re going to release
Santiago Rojas, probably Thursday morning.”

A sharp gasp ricocheted down the phone
line.

“There was a problem with some of the
evidence, and we didn’t have enough physical evidence to keep him
without it. I’m sorry. We screwed up. I can offer you police
protection.”

“Some fat cop sleeping in front of my house
for a couple weeks? That won’t do shit.”

Theo nodded. “We’re planning to rebuild the
case as new evidence comes in. I’d like you to keep in contact with
the County Attorney’s office in the event that we refile the
case.”

“I’m out of this shithole,” Javier said. “I’m
not waiting around for him to kill my family.”

“I’m sorry, Javier. We will get this bastard.
It’s just going to take a little while longer.”

“You motherfucker. You said that you’d put
him away.”

“We will, and I’m sorry.”

Javier slammed down the phone, and Theo
pressed the button on his phone’s handset.

That hadn’t gone too badly.

He checked his cell phone, and Lizzy had
texted him a couple sentences about Nietzsche. He read them over
and appreciated the ambiguity about interpreting the writings of a
man who refused to interpret his own writings, a moment of grace in
an otherwise shitty day.

He texted back,
Brilliant,
and rested
the landline phone on his shoulder for a moment.

On his ceiling, cracks cut into the plaster
like rivers converging into one deep crack leading to his window
that overlooked the parking lot. If he sniffed hard, he could smell
cigarette smoke liberated from the cracked plaster. This office had
seen dozens of previous attorneys call their witnesses to tell them
to scram because they had released a murderer. Theo wasn’t special.
He was just one more failure of the social contract.

His overall record was stellar, but every
failure, especially one of this scale, ripped him up.

Eleven more calls.

Theo dialed the next witness’s phone
number.

Wednesday night, Lizzy dropped by The
Devilhouse to finish up some paperwork. The previous weekend had
been so crazy, with first the prospective member party on Friday
night and then the usual Saturday night show and mingling at the
club itself, she had not managed to finish her timesheets and enter
her client notes in their files.

She worked at one of the three computers in
the back of the ladies’ locker room, sipping tea. After an hour,
she got the munchies, so she wandered out to the lobby to chat with
Glenda before she raided the mini-pantry for something salty.

Glenda typed with her long, glittering nails
on her computer keyboard, drawing up schedules, and constantly
adjusted her black micro-mini skirt over her coffee-colored, bare
thighs lest it ride up her trim backside. Lizzy didn’t know why
Glenda insisted on wearing subwear to work. The Dom certainly
wouldn’t demand it. He liked business suits on people unless they
were in character. Glenda nattered on about inconsequential
stuff—celebrities and sports figures—while Lizzy stretched her legs
and giggled with her. Glenda didn’t gossip about clients or
contractors, of course. The Dom hired people who understood what
was not to talked about.