Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (11 page)

She landed hard. A spike of pain cracked up
her shins.

She stopped. No one would probably notice or
ask why she had a twenty-inch vertical jump, if she cut it the hell
out right now.

Georgie cocked her head to the side and said
to Rae, “You have to teach me how to be a Domme. I’ve been trying
to work into that for six months, and I’ve gotten no traction.”

“I’m just figuring it out. I’m kind of in
training,” Rae said.

“Who’s training you? Sonya?” Lizzy asked. She
reached down and rubbed her shin.

“No,” Rae said. “The Dom is.”

The
Dom?
Her Dom?
Lizzy’s mouth
fell open.

Georgie’s voice sharpened. “The Dom is
training you? The tall, blond guy you waltzed with at the
party?”

Rae glanced over their heads, clearly
uncomfortable. “Um, yeah. I didn’t know who he was at the party. I
just kind of called him The Blond Hottie in my head.”

Lizzy’s breath whooshed out of her chest, and
she covered her mouth with one hand. She wasn’t going to cry, damn
it. She was just so damned
shocked.

Rae saw Lizzy’s ridiculous expression, and
the creases between her eyebrows seemed pained. “Lizzy, I’m so
sorry. I don’t know why he’s doing this. I think it’s just a
casting decision, because I’m tall and stuff. I look the part of a
Domme.”

Lizzy swallowed hard. “How is he training
you?”

“He’s just telling me stuff. Like what to do
in a session. What to say.”

Tears burned Lizzy’s eyes. She shouldn’t ask
and there was no need to ask and yet she couldn’t shut up. “Are you
sleeping with him?”

Rae’s eyes widened, and she blinked hard,
ever the ingenue. “He just shows me what to do. How to use a riding
crop. What to say. That sort of thing. I’m not anything special to
him. Like Georgie said, he likes women, lots of women, and he’s
nothing but a shiny shell. And I opted out of the arrangement.”

Lizzy nodded, even though The Dom never
trained people. Something else was going on. It was as obvious as
the sun glaring laser beams off a mirror.

Lizzy reassured Rae that it was no biggie and
work was work, but she strode down The Devilhouse’s wide and
twisting corridors on her way to her meeting with the new guy,
“Thomas Hobbes,” wiping her wet cheeks.

She stood as straight as she could outside
the door to Vanilla Room Six and breathed.

Lizzy was
fine.
She had no claim on
The Dom. Indeed, no one had a claim on him. This was
stupid.
She was being
stupid.

Maybe she should quit The Devilhouse. Maybe
it was too much for her to handle.

If she quit, she would have to drop out of
college.

If she quit, she would still have no skills
to speak of, and she would be back to when she was a
sixteen-year-old runaway, homeless, scared and hungry, and
alone.

Better to work. Better to keep making
progress, even if it was incremental progress, toward a new life, a
better life, one that didn’t all fall apart with a single momentous
failure.

Besides, pain was weakness leaving the
body.

Not all pain was physical. The Dom had shown
her that.

All right.
Time to meet the new
client, “Thomas Hobbes.”

She took a deep breath and flung open the
door, posing in her bright blue cocktail dress with her leg
extended, as sexy as a tiny house elf can be. Vanilla Room Six
looked like a fussy Victorian parlor, complete with bosomy
furniture, crocheted doilies cobwebbing the arms and heads of the
chairs, and miles of ruffles, fringe, and lace edging every pillow
and cushion.

“Thomas Hobbes” slouched in an armchair,
staring into his beer. His long legs stretched out in front of him
and were crossed at the ankles.

Lizzy knew even before the man looked up that
he would have light caramel eyes and a strong jaw.

She forgot to be welcoming and geisha-like.
“Theo? What the
fuck
are you doing here?”

Lizzy stared at Theo, who was lounging in a
wingback chair and staring into his beer like it was a piss-colored
crystal ball that reflected the depths of his tormented soul, and
considered how best to throw him the hell out of The Devilhouse.
Head-first seemed good. On-his-ass sounded fine, too.

Theo settled his beer on an end table and
strode across the rose-embossed rugs to her in three strides of his
long legs. His intensity suggested anguish instead of desire. “Look
into my eyes again. Do you still think I have a soul?”

Lizzy looked at his light caramel eyes, but
she shook her head. “That was bar talk, Theo, drunken bar talk.
Maybe some flirting. I can’t really see souls.”

He wasn’t laughing at all. His hazel eyes
slanted with anger. He kept rubbing his hand across his mouth. “Go
on.
Look at me.”

“Hang on a sec.” Lizzy turned pressed the
intercom button on the unit beside the door. “Glenda? My seven
o’clock appointment was a mistake. Cancel it on the schedule, and
don’t bill him, okay?”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” Theo said. He
reached as if he wanted to hang up the intercom, but he didn’t
touch it.

Over the phone, Glenda agreed to cancel
it.

“Okay, thanks, honey.” Lizzy turned back to
Theo. “I don’t know how you got in here. I don’t know how
the
hell
you got on my schedule. It’s been locked for months.”

“Evidently, your boss likes having
prosecuting attorneys as members. My membership was approved in an
hour.”

Yeah, Lizzy could see how The Dom’s
machinating mind would work like that.

Theo was calming down as he talked fast,
explaining. “After that, I knew your first name, so I asked to get
on your list.”

“I don’t want you on my list. You are hereby
banned from my list.”

“You’re the only reason I’m here,” he said.
“I just need to talk to someone about this.”

“So you joined The
Devilhouse?
That’s
nuts, Theo. There’s a pro-rated membership cancellation refund. You
can get all of your money back.” Georgie had read the Terms of
Service and all the contracts in The Devilhouse last year while
working on an independent study project for her law school
professor, and she’d read the most shocking parts aloud to Lizzy,
who had smiled and nodded at the time, but she had evidently
retained some of it.

“I just want to talk to you,” he said.

“If you’re on my client roster here, I can’t
see you outside of business hours. Cancel your space on my list,
and you should sure as hell cancel your membership, too.”

“I’d really like to talk to you
now.”

“I have an hour free.” Lizzy walked over to
the other armchair. “So let’s talk.”

He paced. “Have them bill me. I owe you that.
I took one of your time slots.”

“I don’t want them to bill you. It will nail
you to the TOS.” Lizzy tugged her short skirt down around her
thighs and swung her feet in the blue shoes that weren’t
particularly near the floor.

“It would be unethical for me to renege on
that. It’s a contract.”

“You’re in a place called The Devilhouse.
Don’t talk to me about what’s ethical. You’re not getting
billed.”

“It’s lawyer ethics. It’s a billable
hour.”

“I don’t do lawyer ethics. I’m a philosophy
major. I do real ethics.”

“And that’s why I’m here. That’s why I need
to talk to
you.”
Theo ran his hands through his hair in one
heartsick gesture, mussing it further. He looked better with his
hair a little wild, like he might play rough. “Lawyer ethics are
fucked up.”

Lizzy cocked her head to the side. “Tough day
at work?”

He gestured to the security camera with it’s
red Cyclops light, slowly blinking. “Can you turn that thing
off?”

“Sorry. Devilhouse rules.” That was true,
plus, like hell Lizzy was turning off the cam in a soundproofed
room with a guy she had met once in a social, public area. She
didn’t have her Taser with her.

Theo sat in the other armchair. His head fell
forward into his hands, and a snow-white doily slipped to the
floor. “I can’t tell you. It’s privileged. I certainly can’t tell
you while we’re being taped.”

Oh, well, okay then. Sure, she would just
turn off her only protection, in that case. “I don’t think they can
be shut off. If you shouldn’t tell me, then you should stop
talking.”

His hands tightened in his hair. “I did
something terrible today, because I had to. The alternatives were
worse, I think.
I don’t know.
I don’t know which wrong was
worse, and I need someone to tell me whether I made a huge mistake.
The other attorneys are all giving me lawyer advice, but I think I
did the most wrong thing out of all the possible wrongs.”

He sounded like he was coming apart at the
seams. “We can talk in generalities.”

Theo nodded, still clutching his hair in his
hands.

Lizzy scooted her armchair closer to his and
laid her hand on his back. Heavy muscle layered his back, too. She
stroked his warm spine, soothing him. “So talk.”

“Professionally, this has been the worst week
of my life.” He drew in a shuddering breath. “I let a guy walk. The
evidence against him was tainted by procedural violations, which
doesn’t mean he’s not guilty. It just means that some people didn’t
jump through all the legal hoops in the right order while they were
trying to save innocent people’s lives. I called his lawyers, told
them what happened, and asked the judge to dismiss the case. We
didn’t have enough evidence without the tainted stuff to even hold
the guy.”

“And he’s a bad fucker.”

“I know he’s going to kill more people.”

Lizzy recoiled. “Like a serial killer?”

“Not like BTK or the Zodiac killer or
something. It’s just business for him. He’s a thug. He’s in
trafficking.”

Lizzy had heard enough of Rae’s stories about
the Border to ask, “Drugs or people?”

“Both. Plus guns. He prefers people,” Theo
inhaled hard again, “because you can only sell drugs once. You can
sell a woman over and over.”

“
Fuck,
Theo.”

“His lawyers know the names of all our
witnesses who were going to be called to testify while we were
building a case against him. His lawyers are dirtier than shit.
They’ll hand him the list. I convinced every one of those witnesses
to testify, and now he’s getting out.”

“You’ve warned them, though.”

He nodded. “I called every last one of them
and told them that he’s getting out. I’ve been on the phone for
three days, contacting all of them and walking them through their
options. I offered them police protection, but that’s damn near
useless and they know it. Most of them cussed me out. Some cried.
The social contract failed them. Most are leaving the state, which
means that if we ever do manage to build a case against this guy
again, those witnesses are gone.”

She rubbed his back. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I. God, so am I.”

A bad thought formed in her head. “Are you in
any danger?”

Theo shrugged. “He’s got a long list of
people who are actually a threat to him and a business to rebuild.
I imagine I’m pretty low on his list. I’m just a failed assistant
county attorney.”

Lizzy leaned and wrapped her arms around him.
Theo was a far cry from the joking guy at the party. Her unrequited
lust problem with The Dom faded to pastel colors.

Lizzy should attack this like a philosophy
problem. “So if that was the best option, what were the other
options?”

He shrugged. “Go to trial with tainted
evidence. If his lawyers had figured it out, and they would have,
the judge would have declared a mistrial. His lawyers would have
seen how our case was put together. A later trial would have been
harder. The witnesses who testified at the mistrial would still be
in danger, plus they would have already testified so he would know
exactly what they were going to say and how important it would be
to get rid of them. Plus, I might have gotten disbarred, and then I
couldn’t put him or other bad guys in jail. In the worst case, the
judge might have dismissed it in such a way that we couldn’t
prosecute him again.”

With prejudice,
Lizzy thought and
rubbed her hand down his spine. “That sounds even more fucked up.
Any other options?”

His voice dropped, as if the security cam
didn’t have damn good mic on it. He growled, “Kill him myself.”

“I’m going to veto that one,” Lizzy said.
“He’s not worth your soul.”

“They sucked out my soul, and what’s the life
of one scumbag versus the lives of maybe a dozen innocent
witnesses?”

“Then you would go to jail, and then you
wouldn’t be able to put more bad guys in jail.”

“But the social contract failed these
people,” Theo said. “They were supposed to be safe. The villain was
supposed to go to prison. I know this is hopelessly idealistic, but
those people shouldn’t be killed because they were victims of
crimes and then were going to do the right thing and stand up in
court. That’s worse.”

“If this guy is as much of an asshole as you
say, and I assume he is, there’s other evidence out there. You
haven’t burned the other evidence. Double jeopardy shouldn’t apply.
You can build a new case against him.”

Theo glanced at her with a ghost of a smile.
“Double jeopardy?”

She shrugged. “We debate in class. I watch
TV.”

Theo nodded. “I still want to punch
something.”

“Not me,” Lizzy said. She glanced at the
security camera. The red light blinked at her like one of the
winking security guys.

“Oh, hell, no.” Theo frowned at her like she
had said something particularly insipid. “I need a heavy bag and
some gloves. Going to the gym will settle me down. If you wanted to
come along and hold the bag for me, that would be cool.”