You technically can't, however, if you have fixed text sizes you could use positioning (relative) to move the larger text down and set the line-height to the smaller text (I'm presuming this larger text is marked up as such so you can use that as a CSS selector)
The functionality you are seeing is correct because the default for "vertical-align" is baseline. It appears that you want vertical-align:top. There are other options.
See here at W3Schools.
Edit W3Schools has not cleaned up their act and still, appear, to be a shoddy (at best) source of information. I now use sitepoint. Scroll to the bottom of the sitepoint front page to access their reference sections.