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

by Blair Babylon

  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.

  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.”