Dating the Devil

by Lia Romeo

  Table of Contents

  Dating the Devil

  Dedication

  – 1 –

  – 2 –

  – 3 –

  – 4 –

  – 5 –

  – 6 –

  – 7 –

  – 8 –

  – 9 –

  – 10 –

  – 11 –

  – 12 –

  – 13 –

  – 14 –

  – 15 –

  – 16 –

  – 17 –

  – 18 –

  – 19 –

  – 20 –

  – 21 –

  – 22 –

  – 23 –

  – 24 –

  – 25 –

  – 26 –

  – 27 –

  – 28 –

  – 29 –

  – 30 –

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Promo Page

  Her new boyfriend is rich, gentle, charming and devilishly handsome, but he may be too hot to handle. He’s hiding a secret . . . and she’s in for one Hell of a surprise.

  LUCY O’NEILL is a plain-Jane New York PR exec with a tiny apartment, a dead-end job, and a pair of annoyingly perfect roommates. Nothing exciting ever happens to her, until one night at a neighborhood pub . . .

  Lewis Mephisto is tall, handsome, and hot. Very hot. He meets her gaze through the crowd, a wicked grin on his lips, an irresistible invitation in his eyes.

  He’s Mr. Right Times Ten. Sophisticated, wealthy, sexy, and completely devoted to her, body and soul. So what’s her problem?

  Can’t she handle dating the Devil?

  LEWIS LOOKS at me hard for a moment in the darkness, then nods. “So you’ve figured the whole thing out,” he says ruefully.

  “You’re—”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Say it,” I say in a trembling voice. “I want you to say it.”

  He reaches over and switches his bedside lamp on, and suddenly the room is flooded with warm light. Then he looks back at me and shrugs. “I’m Satan,” he says.

  He looks so boyishly vulnerable, sitting there shirtless amidst the rumpled sheets, one sock on and one off, blinking sleep out of his blue eyes, that I want to laugh. Of course, I also want to cry. I can feel the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes, but I manage to keep my voice steady. “And you’ve been—all this time, you’ve been—trying to steal my soul?”

  “Not steal it, exactly,” he says. “Just . . . lead you into temptation.”

  Dating the Devil

  by

  Lia Romeo

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-270-5

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-252-1

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2013 by Lia Romeo

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Pitchfork (manipulated) © Jiripravda | Dreamstime.com

  Cocktail (manipulated) © Oblachko | Dreamstime.com

  :Mddf:01:

  Dedication

  To my friends, who’ve been there for me through all the adventures that inspired Lucy’s adventures,

  And to my family, who’s been there for me through everything always,

  And to Dan, love of my life

  – 1 –

  MY FRIENDS and I play a game sometimes called “What’s Your Personal Hell?”

  If there were a Hell . . . and you were unfortunate enough to end up there . . . and the punishments were designed to be the worst possible thing for each particular person . . . what would yours be? What’s the worst thing you could imagine suffering for all eternity?

  For my friend Natalie, it would be a world without men.

  Natalie likes meeting men almost as much as she likes crushing their dreams of settling down in a cute little house and making babies . . . dreams which she seems to inspire in every man she meets, though she has no intention of doing any such thing.

  She’s stunning—over six feet in her perpetual three-inch heels, with green eyes, black hair, and a wardrobe of minis and micro-minis and even-smaller-than-micro-minis by obscure Italian designers. Plus, she’s what they call “independently wealthy” . . . meaning she doesn’t really have to have a job. She does a bit of modeling, but mostly devotes herself to seducing the city’s most eligible bachelors—and the city’s least eligible bachelors—and pretty much all the bachelors in between. I’d definitely hate her if she weren’t my best friend.

  For my other best friend, Melissa, her personal Hell would be a messy apartment that never got clean.

  Melissa was the valedictorian of our graduating class at Cornell, earned her MBA at Columbia, and now works as a management consultant. She puts in eighty hour weeks, and still manages to find time to keep the apartment we all share spotless (Natalie and I tend to throw our clothes on the floor and leave half-empty containers of Haagen-Dazs melting on the kitchen counters), train for the New York City Marathon—oh, and spend time with Brandon, whom she met in the MBA program. He’s now a V.P. at a successful software company, and he recently put a sparkling three carat diamond on her perfectly manicured finger.

  Mel’s beautiful too—blonde and petite and impeccably put together, from her pencil skirts to her blazers to the string of pearls that never leaves her neck. Needless to say, when the three of us go out, I don’t get a lot of attention.

  Me? My personal Hell would be spending eternity dating in New York.

  When I first moved to the city after college, I had things all figured out. I had the perfect job as an account executive at a boutique public relations firm, and the perfect adorable apartment in Chelsea with my perfect boyfriend, Ben.

  Ben was tall, with blond curls and ruddy cheeks, and we’d been together since freshman year of college. We’d met on a volunteer trip over spring break, building houses for Habitat for Humanity down in Georgia. He looked good swinging a shovel, and even better over beers at the dive bar we used our fake IDs to sneak into that night. He was the first boy I ever loved, the first boy I ever slept with, the first . . . everything.

  A year and a half after we moved to New York, he dumped me.

  He was too young to be in such a committed relationship, he was trying to find himself, he was feeling like he needed to concentrate on his friends and his work. He was also, I found out later, sleeping with one of his coworkers at his hedge fund.

  After the breakup, I couldn’t afford our apartment on my own . . . and Ben could, so he stayed there. Me? I moved in with Mel and Nat. They were sharing a Murray Hill two bedroom which happened to have a giant walk-in closet in the front hallway . . . so out went Nat’s designer outfits, and in went a full-size bed, an IKEA lamp . . . and me.

  Two years later, I’m still here. My makeshift
“room” lacks certain amenities, like, say, windows, or the ability to get out the door without climbing over the bed . . . but I’m only paying five hundred dollars a month, which allows me to afford cute clothes and bar tabs on a PR girl’s salary. And thanks to Mel’s cleaning habits and Nat’s West Elm addiction, the rest of the apartment is beautiful, decorated with tasteful modern furniture in soft browns and tans. I spend a lot of time hanging out in the living room.

  And I spend a lot of time out. Dating. Or at least I have been, though I’m pretty much ready to give up at this point.

  After Ben and I broke up, Nat and Mel took me out to our local wine bar, treated me to bruschetta and a bottle of pinot grigio, and told me I needed to be single for a while. They said I needed to focus on my work, spend time with my friends, concentrate on my hobbies, and give myself time to heal. I told them they were totally right.

  I signed up for Match.com the next day.

  And eHarmony . . . and OkCupid . . . and J-Date, even though I’m not Jewish. I placed a personal ad on Craigslist, in which I described myself as “newly single and looking to have some fun,” and received three hundred pictures of penises within the next twenty minutes. Apparently, “fun” on Craigslist is code for sex. I’d been thinking more in terms of afternoons at the museum and evenings at wine bars.

  And I dated. I dated Chris from Craigslist—one of the few respondents who hadn’t sent me a picture of his penis. I found out three dates later that this was probably because he didn’t have one . . . Chris, née Christine, was a pre-op transsexual. I wanted to be open-minded, but I had to confess that a penis was on my list of non-negotiable requirements.

  I dated Sam from Match. Sam asked me to dinner, then back to his Park Avenue apartment . . . which, it turned out, was actually his parents’ Park Avenue apartment. In which he liked to have threesomes. Which included his dad.

  I dated Stu from eHarmony, who (despite the fact that his name was Stu) I actually thought had potential. We went for coffee and had such a nice time that we decided to go for dinner, at which we had such a nice time that we decided to go for after-dinner drinks. He kissed me goodnight and texted me the next day to ask me to come over and watch a movie. So I did . . . and it was porn. Gay porn. And after insisting for a while that gay porn just helped to get him in the mood, Stu finally allowed me to stammer my excuses and make my escape.

  And I dated Josh and Alex and Mike and Roger and John 1 and John 2 and Evan and Geoffrey and Steve and Ryan and Greg. Some of them I met online, some I met out at bars, some in bookstores or coffee shops or even on the subway . . . but we never managed to make it beyond the third date. And now I’m finally thinking it’s time to give up on the whole thing for a while.

  Nat approves. She’s never had any trouble meeting guys—it’s more that she has trouble getting rid of them—so she doesn’t understand why I’m trying so hard to find someone to date. She wants me to go out to the bars with her every weekend. Even though when I do, she always ends up making out with someone, and I end up sitting at the bar by myself or standing outside bumming cigarettes from the bouncer.

  Ever since Mel got engaged, though, she’s decided that everyone else should too . . . she’s tried setting me up with three or four of Brandon’s friends already. She tells me that I can find the perfect guy and be just as happy as she is, but I’ve started thinking maybe I don’t believe her.

  I’ve started thinking maybe it really is impossible to find the perfect guy in New York . . . at least for a girl from Kansas with brown hair and chubby cheeks and pants from Gap, not Gucci. I’ve started thinking it’s time to stop trying for a while.

  And of course . . . as soon as I decide to stop trying, I meet Lewis.

  – 2 –

  IT’S A SATURDAY night in September. Mel’s fiancé is out of town, and Nat’s finally managed to ditch the latest guy who’s been calling and texting and leaving flowers with our doorman. And because of my new plan—giving up on all the losers in New York and being a strong, single woman—I haven’t scheduled any dates for this weekend, so we decide to have a girls’ night.

  Not only that, but we decide to have a girls’ night at the first bar the three of us ever went to together. It’s a dive in the Village called the Peculier Pub. When we were freshmen in college, Nat’s cousin was a junior at NYU, so one fall weekend the three of us packed our duffel bags full of our skimpiest outfits and took the five-hour bus ride from Cornell down to the city.

  Nat’s cousin Jason, who Mel and I decided was secretly in love with her (but who wasn’t?), told us he’d take us out that night, but first we had to get some fake IDs. They didn’t have to be good, especially since we were girls . . . we just had to show the bouncers something. He took us to a souvenir shop in Times Square, where we ducked down a narrow flight of stairs into the basement, and had our pictures taken and plastered onto “state identification cards” that declared that we were twenty-two years old and from Ohio. Then we each put on about four pounds of makeup (I didn’t usually wear any, but Mel and Nat convinced me that it would help me look older) and headed out to the bars.

  Our first stop was a Union Square lounge called Lemon, where the bouncer took one look at my fake ID, made a shooing motion and shook his head. Then Jason took us to Peculier Pub.

  It was a dark, wooden dive packed with bodies and pulsing music. In high school, I’d been first chair violinist of the local youth symphony and spent all my spare time practicing, so I’d hardly even gone to any parties. Now my violin was tucked away neatly on a shelf in my parents’ house in Kansas, and I was determined to turn myself into a worldly college vixen. The faint smell of vomit wafting from the open doorway suggested that this would be a perfect place to start.

  We made sure Nat stood in line first this time. She was wearing a deep red V-neck shirt that showed off cleavage that could easily belong to a twenty-two-year-old. The bouncer hardly even glanced at her ID, he was so busy staring at her breasts, and once he let her in he waved the rest of us in after her.

  It was Fleet Week, and sailors started buying us shots, and pretty soon Mel and I were dancing on top of one of the wooden tables while Nat was wearing one of the sailors’ hats and making out with another one in the corner, Jason watching her with a look of equal parts irritation and longing.

  That night I smoked my first cigarette and kissed my first stranger. I’d kissed my high school boyfriend, a sweet Chinese boy named Charlie Yang who was a flutist. We’d even indulged in some cautious groping over the summer, reaching furtively up each other’s shirts in the back seat of his parents’ Volvo, parked on dark streets far away from both his house and mine.

  He was going to the University of Kansas, and when I left for Cornell, we’d promised to stay together, but after a month he’d sent me an email saying he was dating Anna Barnett, the pianist who’d beaten me out to win the Lawrence Concerto Competition by one vote the previous year. My resulting despair was part of the motivation for our New York weekend.

  But now Mel and I were up on the table, shaking our hips to AC/DC, and there were boys all around us, and one of them was grabbing my hand and pushing his hips against mine. He leaned in close and shouted in my ear that his name was Philip, and I shouted that mine was Lucy, and then he was shaking a pack of cigarettes in my face, saying “Do you smoke?”

  I didn’t, of course, but I said I did, and then we were outside, and instead of giving me a cigarette he was leaning towards me and putting his tongue in my mouth. We kissed for a while, there on the sidewalk, and then we shared a cigarette, me taking tiny puffs so I wouldn’t cough, and then we kissed some more and he put his hands on my waist under my black silk halter (borrowed from Nat) and told me I was beautiful. And then it was four a.m. and Mel and Nat and I were walking down the street arm in arm, singing “Oh What a Night” at the top of our lungs, and Jason was trailing behind us, looking like he wished he could put us back on the bus to Cornell right that minute.

  I don’t think we’d be
en back to the Peculier Pub since then. The next time we were all in the city together was after we were legal, so we could pick places to go without worrying about how strict they were about fake IDs. And after college, when we moved to Manhattan, Mel decided she didn’t go to dive bars anymore, so we usually ended up sipping saketinis or champagne cocktails at places with vaguely Asian names and leather banquettes.

  But tonight we’d ordered Chinese food and a couple of bottles of wine to go with it (I’ve got my share of problems with living in New York, but being able to have a bottle of wine delivered to your door makes up for a lot), and ended up mostly ignoring the Moo Shu in favor of the pinot. So by ten p.m., when Nat said, “You know what’d be fun?” even Mel was tipsy enough to agree with her.

  Now our cab is making its slow way through the giggling hordes of drunken NYU students on Bleecker Street, and I’m starting to have second thoughts. I’ll be twenty-seven in a couple of months, and most of these girls look like they haven’t even cracked the big two-oh yet. They have blonde streaks in their hair and glitter on their eyelids and it’s clear that no one has ever broken their hearts.

  But I’m wearing a short black Marc Jacobs dress which had been Mel’s until she got tired of it, and which has the remarkable effect of pushing my stomach in while pushing my breasts out, and a necklace of bright coral beads I bought from a street vendor. I’ve blow dried my shoulder length brown hair straight, even bothered to use Mel’s flatiron to smooth the ends of it, and Nat’s lent me her coral lipstick, which matches my necklace. I don’t normally wear lipstick, but I have to admit I like the way it turns my mouth from a very ordinary thing, a thing to use for chewing a pen or taking a bite of a sandwich, into a vivid slash of color meant for kissing or pursing seductively around a cigarette. I look good.