Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1)
Read Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) Online
Authors: Blair Babylon
Tags: #comedy, #humor, #rich, #billionaire, #love triangle, #wealthy, #female protagonist, #racy, #mood, #new adult
Episode 1: Falling Hard
Episode 2: Playing Rough
Episode 3: Breaking Rules
Episode 4: Burning Bright
by Blair Babylon
Lizzy has been drifting, trying to make
a life for herself after failing at a life goal decided for her
when she was just five years old. She’s been having a good time in
college and working at The Devilhouse, but something is missing in
Lizzy’s life, a very obvious something. At a Devilhouse party, she
meets Theo, a handsome, bright lawyer who wants to takes things
slowly, too darn slowly, and Mannix, an ex-pro-football player with
a taste for the disturbing. When someone starts shooting at both
men, Lizzy struggles to figure out if the would-be murderer is
someone from Theo’s work as a prosecutor, someone from Mannix’s
background in the seedier side of pro sports, or someone who is
gunning for her. Romantic and suspenseful,
Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy
sizzles with sex
and explores the power of love to heal the deepest
wounds.
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~~~~~~~~~~~
Published by Hot Rocks Publishing
Copyright 2014 by TK Kenyon
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents are either
products of the author’s wild and naughty imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights
reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
without permission from the author or publisher.
1st Edition: April, 2014
Smashwords Edition
Sticking Together at the Frat
Party
The Wages of Sin Are About Two Hundred Bucks an
Hour
A Different Kind of Cocktail
Party
Every Call Worse than the Last
An Illuminated Parchment from the Middle
Ages
Other Billionaires in Disguise Books
The first-class
airplane seat dwarfs me, and I feel like an eight-year-old stealing
a nap in grandpa’s leather recliner. The jet roars like a freeway
full of traffic, flying eastward toward Paris and casting a shadow
from the full moon onto the dark ocean far below.
The coiffed stewardess asks with her thick
German accent if I need anything, and I tell her no, I’m fine,
which is a huge lie. I might never be fine again. Georgie sleeps in
the seat beside me, her wide seat fully spread into a twin bed with
soft sheets. The television screen that flipped out of my armrest
feeds the sound into my ear buds, something about tigers.
I’ve screwed three guys in the last month and
a half, which is a gold-medal, Olympic record for me that equals
all my previous efforts combined.
The first guy was The Dom of the Devilhouse.
I guess he counts, even though it wasn’t, you know, the full monty.
I need his help, or else Georgie and all my friends are going to
get fired and The Devilhouse is going to fall into ruins.
The second guy, I’m running away from. I was
in love with him, or I thought I was. He told me that he loved me,
and no one had ever told me that before. I believed him. I wanted
so much to believe him.
The third guy is the love of my life. I’ll
probably never see him again. His last text to me said goodbye.
Plus I stole his car.
Delta Chi guys and every woman whom they could convince to come to
the frat party stood around the rec room of the frat house,
swilling beer and cheap cocktails. Stinky pot smoke drifted above
the crowd like ghosts of frat parties past. Lizzy’s nose stung from
the fumes.
Lizzy drank her beer out of the bottle. She
had uncapped it herself with her key chain bottle opener because
Delta Chi had a reputation for playing dirty, not that she was
particularly worried. She had two friends there, Georgie and Rae,
and they had planned to stick together.
Lizzy and Georgie were regaling one of the
Delta Chi guys with stories of
real
parties. His black skin
was so dark he looked like he was dusted with good cocoa. Georgie
was flirting with him, so Lizzy was playing wing-woman and
chaperone. The beer was malty on her tongue, the music was good,
and this was not a bad way to spend a Thursday night.
Georgie told the frat guy, “So there’s this
place—No, I’m not going to tell you the name because if you have
enough money and connections, it will find you,—this place where we
work. This frat party is nothing compared to the parties there on
Saturday nights. Saturday nights, it turns into a nightclub, a very
high-end nightclub.”
Lizzy stretched her arms over her head,
working the stiffness out of her back. She had strained some of the
lumbar muscles working out that morning—those were always a weak
point—but she had pressed on through the three-hour workout anyway.
Pain was weakness leaving the body. A bunch of weakness had gotten
the hell out of her ass that morning. It still hurt, though. She
would have to pop some more pain-killers. Buying stock in whoever
made her ibuprofen would be sound financial advice.
Some sorority girls behind her were speaking
Russian, badly. Lizzy wasn’t tempted to join in the conversation.
Most college students had such broad American accents that they
couldn’t understand Lizzy when she talked to them, which was why
Lizzy met her foreign language requirements by taking Spanish. The
last thing that Lizzy needed was some tongue-tied TA from Alabama
telling her that her Petersburgian accent was wrong.
“So what do you girls do at this supposed
club?” Georgie’s frat guy asked, sipping his beer.
“We’re hostesses,” Lizzy lied. “We take
people to the BDSM rooms, clock them in, take their clothes, and
leave them alone.”
The frat guy frowned. “And they do what?”
Georgie said, “Makes those guys look Amish.”
She flipped her fingers at the couple sitting in the chair behind
Leo, who were necking hard.
The guy’s hand groped under the woman’s tee
shirt, getting to a very rough second base. A Golden Devil, the
university’s mascot, was laminated on the woman’s shirt, and his
fumbling made the Golden Devil look like it was writhing in
pain.
Lizzy glanced over at Rae, tracking where she
was amid the drunk frat guys and drunker co-eds. Rae had gone off
by herself, talking to some white loser who could use a box of
tooth whitening strips. She had been messed up for a couple days,
so Lizzy planned to make sure that she didn’t grow a pair of beer
goggles and pork some ugly guy, or any guy, because Rae would
regret it in the morning.
Rae saw Lizzy looking at her from across the
room through the air heavy with cigarette and sweet pot smoke and
lifted her drink in salute.
Lizzy and Georgie toasted back with their
beer bottles.
Good God, Rae was drinking out an open red
plastic cup. She could be so naive at times. They had better keep
an eye on her.
Georgie continued talking to the frat guy.
“So Saturday night is amateur night. We just sit back and watch the
live sex shows on the main stages.”
“Nuh-uh,” he said. His derisive tone made
Lizzy giggle.
“Oh, yeah. Check these out.” Lizzy scrolled
through some pictures on her phone from a few months before and
found one of a hooded man and a naked woman. She handed him the
phone.
The guy’s casual glance popped with a
startled gasp and he juggled the phone, nearly dropping it. “Holy
crap! I did not expect that!”
Lizzy and George laughed at him. “That’s
tame. The second show gets kinky.”
“But that’s so anti-feminist,” he said. “It’s
repression by the patriarchy.”
Lizzy rolled her eyes and chimed in. “When a
sixty-year-old investment banker comes in and offers you fifty
grand to play a drinking game with him while cuddling and watching
the Red Sox game for a couple hours, define exactly
who
is
being exploited.”
“The woman,” the frat guy said. “The woman
has less power. In those Dominant and submissive relationships, the
woman is always the submissive.”
Georgie’s offhand shrug signaled to Lizzy
that Georgie was going into purebred-pit-bull lawyer mode. Lizzy
wished she had some popcorn to crunch while she watched the
carnage.
“Most of the time, that’s true,” Georgie
said, winding up slowly, “but patriarchal Western culture has
always repressed women’s sexuality. ‘Lie still and think of
England,’ kind of stuff.”
Lizzy grinned behind her beer because here
came Georgie’s fastball pitch.
Georgie continued, “Dominance and submission
games,—and they are
games,
even when people deny that they
are so,—allow women to experience sexuality, even taboo sexuality,
which subverts the spirit of the repression while maintaining the
veneer of adherence to social norms.”
The guy’s grip had loosened on his red party
cup, and it tilted toward them, threatening to spill. Lizzy stepped
backward.
Lizzy watched the metaphorical baseball of
social philosophy and realized the Georgie was throwing chin music,
which meant that she was pitching fastballs at the guy’s face to
scare him into backing off the plate.
Georgie leaned in and licked her bright red
lips, staring deep into the guy’s dark brown eyes. “Wanna find out
what I’m talking about?”
The guy’s cup tipped, and his bright blue
cocktail splashed on the floor. Lizzy hopped back, avoiding the
booze spray.
She was already bored with this guy’s
conversation. Georgie wasn’t interested in him either because she
had eye-rolled him twice, the kiss of death. Lizzy glanced around
the room, looking for Rae again.
Undergraduates shimmied to the music and
ground against each other, a sweet little imitation of the things
that went on in good clubs in New Jersey. God, Westerners were such
pitiful party animals.
Frat guys and sorority pledges swarmed the
bar where Rae had been talking to the sallow guy.
Lizzy raised farther up on her toes, trying
to see over the college students.
Rae was so tall that she stuck up out of a
crowd like a red, lanky thistle in an autumn lawn, but this bobbing
field of straw and brown waved like a flat sheet.
Lizzy rested her hand on Georgie’s arm. “Hey!
You see Rae?”
Georgie looked around. “You don’t suppose she
went off with that guy?”
“She was drinking out of an open cup.”
“Shit. Let’s check the bedrooms.” Georgie
pushed through the crowd without excusing herself from the
conversation with Mr. Easily Shocked.