Free Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) by Blair Babylon Page B

isn’t always just a
blow job.”
    “Yeah,” Lizzy said. “But you discuss it
first, and if it isn’t just a BJ, you leave with a smile, too.” Her
voice didn’t shake even a little. She relaxed.
    “Yep,” Georgie conceded. “Giving head all day
can get you hot and bothered. Sometimes, I just want to beg one of
the clients to break the Terms of Service.”
    “So true,” said Lizzy.
    They prattled about silly stuff for the rest
of the short ride. Lizzy did a pretty good job of hiding her
murderous jealous rage that Rae was seeing The Dom two damn days in
a row.
    A Dom-Date was a glorified one night stand.
Everyone knew that.
    Lizzy had known that, and she needed to get
it through her thick Jerseyan head that it was done, done,
done.

Texting not
Sexting
    Tuesday morning, Lizzy’s phone buzzed in her
hip pocket, distracting her from the professor’s lecture.
    Teetering in a tiny desk because her feet
didn’t quite touch the concrete floor, she tugged her phone out to
check the text because Dr. Pojman was uncommonly cool with texting
as long as she didn’t make a spectacle of herself. Indeed, a guy in
front of her was crabbed over, updating his status on some video
website. Another guy sitting three rows over was holding his phone
at eye-level and quoting off it while he debated with the
professor.
    The text was from the long string of numbers
with a local area code, which probably meant it was from Theo the
Non-Guido.
    He asked, Hey — wondering if you’d like to
grab a cup of coffee some evening?
    She swiped letters on her phone to text back.
Her teeny fingers made no typos. Seven midterms this week. Truly
insane. Friday night is first open time.
    She wrote notes for a few minutes about
ethical relativism, copying Dr. Pojman’s swooping notes on the
white board with five different colors of marker, color-coded for
each attack on the idea like a wartime battle map, before her phone
buzzed again.
    Just checking. How’s your week going?
    She waited until class dismissed then hurried
out of the small classroom to sit on the grass under a spreading
tree. A warm breeze blew across her bare arms. Week is going
fine. Two papers to rough draft tonight, due Friday. Test in 20th
Century Novels plus others on Friday, too. Next week is more sane.
How’s your week?
    Lizzy had an hour before her next class, so
she pulled her tablet out of her backpack and tapped to open Orlando by Virginia Woolf to study for that test on Friday.
She liked the part about Orlando’s affair with the ship captain,
even though she realized that Woolf was riffing on romance
novels.
    Her phone buzzed. I’m making phone calls.
Need a break. Tell me about your papers.
    Lizzy smiled. Some guys who met her through
The Devilhouse got all stalkery, and she had to call The Dom to
enforce the Terms of Service, hard. Just because Theo was cute
didn’t mean that he wasn’t a nutcase, but this text seemed less
obsessive. Coupled with his refusal to shag her against the wall at
the party, he might be normal.
    Just a normal, medium guy.
    She texted him back anyway about the major
topics she had planned for her paper on Nietzsche and the
Postmodern Condition.
    She read twenty pages of Orlando, sitting in the cool shade, chewing grass stalks, before Theo texted
back, Brilliant .

Every Call Worse
than the Last
    Theo sat behind his desk with his office door
closed, holding the phone.
    Beyond the glass wall in front, admins
scurried, running hard copy files to other offices. Wendy and Rama,
two other Assistant County Attorneys, leaned over a long table,
pointing at a piece of paper like they were stabbing it.
    Theo hung up the phone and walked around his
desk to close the horizontal blinds, blocking everyone out.
    He had twelve more phone calls to make, and
for some stupid reason, he had ordered the list with the low
emotional investment ones at the top, so each call would be worse
than the last.
    The next name on the list was Javier
Perez.
    Theo sighed and