Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (14 page)

Theo leaned down and said right next to her
ear, “So how do you get a drink around here?”

Lizzy yelled, “Shove your boobs together and
scream at the bartender.”

“I’ll have to try that.” Theo leaned over the
bar, and a smiling woman bartender appeared like she had sparkling
magic around her. Her corset-like vest was laced tight like an
actual medieval serving wench with huge boobs overflowing her
cups.

Lizzy was less than thrilled.

Theo called out, “A beer, please. Whatever’s
on tap.”

She jiggled as she bustled away.

Theo said, “Hey, it worked. I shoved my boobs
together and beer is on its way.”

“Moobs. Girls have boobs. Guys have moobs,”
Lizzy corrected. “Short for man-boobs.”

“Moobs, huh?” He smiled that ready smile, a
perfect half-circle. He had straight, white teeth, normal-sized
teeth, not Chicklets nor choppers. He leaned on the bar, smiling at
her.

Theo might be just a normal guy, but he had a
really nice smile, and she liked it when he smiled at her, like he
could direct all that smiley happiness at her. Smiley happiness was
not something she was used to, and it felt like a caress.

Lizzy couldn’t help herself and ran her hand
up his tee shirt, feeling the ripples of his abs and his rounded,
very nice moobs. “Yep, moobs.”

Theo’s sharp inhale reached Lizzy’s ears even
above the wailing music and yammering crowd, and his chest inflated
under her hand.

His tight smile seemed forced. “If I did that
to you, you’d be justified in pepper-spraying me.”

“No pepper spray. Just a Taser.” Lizzy
dropped her hand.

“I didn’t say you had to stop. I was just
surprised as all hell. I don’t have pepper spray or a Taser, so I
guess I’m defenseless.”

If that wasn’t an invitation for more, Lizzy
would turn in her flirt card.

Lizzy started at his shoulder this time and
trailed her fingers down. His heavy, round biceps strained the dark
blue tee shirt’s sleeve like he might burst out of it. He didn’t
curl his arm to show off or say something asinine like
Welcome
to the gun show.
He just let her touch him.

He was more fit than he had looked in those
business suits, a lot more. He wasn’t juiced like he had fake
steroid muscles, but his arm looked like an anatomical model with
every heavy muscle delineated under his skin. Under his clinging
tee shirt, his deltoid was a thick triangle that curled around his
shoulder and tucked into the slot between his round biceps and
triceps.

Impressive.

He cleared his throat, and Lizzy looked up.
His caramel eyes were a little sharper. “Would you like another one
of those?”

Yes, she would.

Oh,
he was talking about her drink.
“Maybe an appletini this time.”

He leaned over to grab his beer and handed
the woman a bill, waving away the change. “And an appletini for the
lady, if you would?”

The woman didn’t glance at Lizzy, just
grinned at Theo and mashed her boobs together for a second before
she turned to get the liquor from the back wall. She must be trying
for a good tip.

God, it was like boobs versus moobs in here,
and Lizzy was unarmed.

Warmth settled on her bare shoulder beside
the strap of her red dress, and Lizzy glanced down.

Theo’s tan hand hovered near her pale
shoulder, and he turned his wrist so that his knuckles grazed her
skin from her shoulder down to her elbow, sending shivers through
her. Her skin tightened into goosebumps despite the heat in the
club from the dancing bodies and hot stage lights above the dance
floor.

“
Quid pro quo.
Turnabout is fair
play,” he said near her shoulder, so she could hear him over the
beat and the bomp and the screaming crowd.

Did that mean he would do whatever she did to
him? Boundary games could make for a very interesting night. She
bet she could make him violate his three-date rule or whatever the
hell it was. “We can play that.”

They shouted over the other screaming people
at the bar for a few minutes, drinking.

Lizzy trailed her fingers across his hand,
and then left her hand on the bar while they talked about her exams
the next week. Theo reciprocated, resting his warm palm on hers,
pressing. Shivers ran up Lizzy’s arm.

Oh, yeah. She could play that game.

He probably thought he was obtaining tacit
permission for sexual advances, the sweet guy. He didn’t realize
who he was dealing with.

She leaned in, pressing her meager boobs
together with her upper arms. She had meant to gap open her top and
give him a glimpse of cleavage, but she had no cleavage. Even duct
tape couldn’t give Lizzy cleavage. Still, any peek was better than
no peek to most guys.

Instead of looking down her top and then
having to give her a peek at his moobs, Theo leaned in, too, coming
closer to her lips. His caramel eyes—and she thought of them as
creamy caramel, even though green tints flared around his
pupils—didn’t stray from her eyes, and he tilted his head.

His gaze lowered to her lips, like he might
be aiming.

Wow, he was going in for a kiss, at a bar, in
public, with a thousand people bopping to the blaring music around
them.

His eyes flicked up, and he looked into her
eyes. She had forgotten how gorgeous his eyes were, with those dark
gold irises and double row of thick, black lashes. His breath
feathered over her lips.

He-was-going-to-kiss-her-he-was-going-to-kiss-her-he-was-going-to-kiss-her.
Her heart did a little tripping thing like a set of triplet
notes.

Just loud enough to be heard over the music,
Theo asked, “Want to dance?”

“Wha-at?” Her breath was caught in her
throat.

He took the empty martini glass out of her
hand, shoving it and his beer stein to the far edge of the bar, and
he took her hand and led her through the crush of the crowd toward
the dance floor.

Damn.

Brightly lit squares tiled the dance floor,
flashing patterns under the dancers’ feet. The block under Lizzy’s
feet flashed neon blue, turning her red pumps black.

Theo’s hand warmed her fingers. His skin felt
almost hot around her hand, and she bet that he had a high
metabolism, the lucky jerk. Lizzy ate like a hamster and had to
keep to her off-season training schedule or else she chubbed up
quickly.

Theo found or created a space on the dance
floor for them, and he tugged Lizzy’s hand to drag her to his
chest. Even in her red stripper pumps, her head could rest on his
heart. They must look ridiculous or obscene. She almost got
embarrassed and refused to dance, but his hands found her
waist.

His fingers gripped her hips and almost met
around her waist, and she slid her hands up his chest. She swayed
to the beat, letting her hips free, and danced.

He was as good a dancer as she remembered,
just enough contact so that she knew she had his full attention,
not so much that it looked like a lap dance. Even though Lizzy had
grown up in New Jersey, too much grinding made her feel like a dock
whore.

She turned around, wiggling her ass, and Theo
stepped in for just a moment, rocking against her. His breath
brushed her bare shoulder, but he backed up almost immediately.

Damn, he was tease.

She grabbed him at one point, pulling his
body against hers. Pressing herself against him felt like rubbing
up against a Grecian marble statue, hot from the sun, and
alive.

Every time his fingers brushed her arms, her
breath rushed into her. Every time his breath brushed her sweaty
neck or shoulders, she wanted to go home with him. Every time his
hands found her hips, the image flashed in her head of her above
him, his hands guiding her down onto himself.

Lust swam in her head, raising entirely wrong
ideas about the level of groping appropriate for a public dance
floor. Her cheeks stung with desire, and her pulse throbbed in her
throat and chest as she danced.

At the end of a song, she found herself
pressed full-length against his chest, his stomach, and his strong
thighs. Every bit of her skin fought to get closer to him, and his
hands on her spine and the small of her back pressed her closer.
His clothes felt like a layer of soft paint because she could swear
she could feel every muscle flowing under his skin.

“Let’s go someplace,” she whispered, trying
to breathe.

Theo leaned down and said right beside her
ear, “Let’s go out on the balcony. I can’t hear a damned word
you’re saying.”

Lizzy nodded, and Theo took her hand and
broke through the crowd for her.

His warm hand fit over hers like she was a
freaking Lilliputian. For the millionth time, she regretted every
choice that she had made as a teenager and every one that had been
made for her.

Outside on the balcony, overlooking the city
that glittered like mica in black sand, Theo ordered new drinks
from the outside bar, which was much less crowded. He got himself a
scotch and water this time and turned to Lizzy for her order. She
repeated the appletini, just in case the sour lemon drop wasn’t a
mistake. Lizzy’s ears rang an E-flat above high C from the loud
music inside the nightclub, but the whine subsided in the cool
night air and comparative silence.

Theo pinched his nose and held his breath,
popping his ears.

“It’s loud in there,” she said.

“Out here is nice,” he said, breathing in the
dark air and leading her over to the balcony’s stone rail. His
blue-glowing highball glass led them through the night.

“We’re out here in the quiet, so talk, or
else let’s go back in and dance some more,” she said.

“I’d like that.” His light eyes glittered in
the floodlights above the balcony. “Let’s finish our drinks
first.”

With that commitment from him to shove his
body up against hers again, Lizzy leaned against the railing. Below
the balcony, the line snaked down the sidewalk, probably a hundred
people all waiting to have their IDs checked.

“How was your week?” Theo asked.

“Better than yours, evidently. Did that guy
get out?”

Theo nodded. “It was probably the best of the
bad choices. I still don’t like it, and I don’t want to talk about
work. Tell me anything about your week.”

“Finished my papers. They’re done.”

“Good. That one on Nietzsche seemed
interesting.”

“You’re a fucking terrible liar. I’ll email
you my stultifyingly boring paper on Nietzsche. If you have
problems sleeping, it’ll knock you out like a sledgehammer. I fell
asleep editing it.”

He smiled, glancing to the side. His thick
eyelashes swept over his honey-gold eyes. “Surely it’s not that
bad.”

“Oh, it’s worse. I don’t want to talk about
school, either. Tell me anything else, like where you grew up.
Anything.”

Theo shrugged. “I was raised mostly here in
the States, mostly in the Southwest, but my mother and I spent
summers in Colombia, so I speak the language and know the culture,
at least some.”

She wasn’t going to speak her embarrassing
college Spanish to him unless it was absolutely necessary. “You
have any brothers or sisters?”

“Only child. It was just my mother and I when
I was growing up.” He shook the ice in his glass. “Yes, I’m a
little attached, but she lives in Colombia to be near her sisters
and her mother and grandmother. She visits three times a year:
Christmas, Easter, and in the fall for my birthday. She doesn’t
come here in the summer.”

“Of course not. It’s too goddamn hot. She
sounds smart.”

“We talk on the phone.” His expression got a
little shy and like he wasn’t sure what Lizzy was going to say,
though he grinned. “She’s always after me about women.”

“Oh, I see how it is. You can’t ever get
married because your mommy thinks no woman alive is good enough for
you.”

“No,” Theo sighed. “That’s not it. She wants
grandchildren. She only had one baby, and she wants me to make lots
of grandbabies for her to spoil. She tells me that I’m wasting my
life because I’ll be thirty in six months, and I haven’t had kids
yet. She wants grandbabies
yesterday
. Every time she calls,”
his voice rose a half an octave and took on a Hispanic accent, “Are
you
seeing
anybody? Do you
know
any women? When are
you going to ask
Wendy
out? When are you going to ask
Rama
out?” His voice dropped back to normal. “Those are the
only two women whose names she knows. Wendy has a steady boyfriend,
and Rama is getting arranged in India next year.
Mi madre
is
desperate, and she is driving me batshit crazy.”

Lizzy laughed.

“I don’t dare tell her about Rama getting
arranged. She would show up here with five prospective brides in
tow for me to pick one out.”

“That sounds fucking awful, five beautiful
women parading in front of you, asking you to choose one.”

He rolled his eyes and sipped his drink.

“So do you want kids, or are you going to
spite her?” Evidently, Lizzy’s brain had flown into the night sky,
because marriage and kids are two things that no one should ask
about for at least a year.

“Someday,” he said. “Eventually. One or two.
Not yet.”

Change the subject.

Oh, her brain had come back online.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
“How about your dad?”

“He wasn’t in the picture, and he died a few
years ago.” Theo said. “My uncles raised me and my male cousins
when we were in Colombia during the summers. I never met my father
until I was in high school. He lived Back East, in New York. When I
was born, he hung around just long enough to convince my mother to
give me a French first name, which was a subject of great amusement
on playgrounds in the US and Colombia, and then he went back to his
family. When I was in college in Jersey, we met once a month or so
for coffee. It was odd, talking to this guy who had taken an
intense interest in me. He sent my mother generous support my whole
life, but he didn’t even phone until I was sixteen. I don’t look
much like him. He was a blue-eyed blond. I look like a
standard-issue Colombian, maybe on the pale end. My mother is
blonder than I am.” Theo sipped his drink some more. “You have any
sibs?”