The Pleasure Contract, Caitlin Crews [epub e ink reader txt] 📗

structures he liked to put around sex, but it was still about the sex.

And that need in him, white-hot and intense.

He made rules so that he could have exactly what he wanted, precisely when he wanted it, from a woman he’d made certain, in advance, was also what and who he wanted.

And he’d never wanted a woman as much as he wanted Bristol.

“I don’t have a strategy,” she said quietly. Her pulse was drumming wildly in her neck. Her hand was hot in his. “I still don’t know why I’m here.”

“I do.”

Heat poured through him, shooting out from where their hands were joined and finding its way straight to his cock. What he really wanted was to take a bite out of her. But that would come.

He was sure of it.

“Tell me, then,” she invited him. Her voice was husky. “If you know.”

“I have a better idea,” Lachlan said. And later, maybe, he would remember this moment and worry about how far he was straying from the usual script. But right now, all he could see was Bristol. And all he could think about was getting a taste of her the way he’d wanted to do since he’d seen that video. “Why don’t I show you?”

CHAPTER THREE

BRISTOL FELT AS if she was in a dream.

Though her dreams were never this exciting. She dreamed of showing up naked to her seminars. Of looking through her notes only to discover she could no longer read them. Sometimes she had very long dreams that seemed to involve a lot of travel between never-quite-identified points.

This felt a lot more like the sex dreams she’d always wished she had.

Except it was real.

Lachlan had her hand in his, and that was extraordinary all on its own. His hand was big and hard, and held hers with a matter-of-fact possessiveness that made her entire body feel as if it was melting.

Especially between her legs.

He ushered her through the restaurant again, but this time he didn’t take her down the grand steel stairs. Instead, he took a different door from the second floor, leading her past the busy kitchen and then out a back entrance she hadn’t known existed. There were steps and an awning, indicating that this wasn’t simply the route out back for emptying the garbage and so on. It served as a subtle reminder that Lachlan Drummond wasn’t like other people—not even the people who ate at a swanky place like this and delivered their status vehicles to the waiting valet, an unusual luxury in New York City.

Of course he used private entrances, Bristol thought. Because if he didn’t, the paparazzi would catch him far more often than they did. She tried to imagine the measures she would have to take if she was as recognizable as he was—as famous whether she liked it or not. She probably wouldn’t walk to the university. She probably wouldn’t be able to teach, for that matter, if anyone could turn up. She would need significantly more security, which meant she wouldn’t be able to live in her current apartment.

It had never occurred to her to wonder if the wildly famous congregated to the same secure, discreet places because those places protected them. She’d never given much thought to the idea that the wildly famous were...regular people with regular concerns, but with the money to handle those concerns differently.

Like Lachlan, who nodded at the man beneath the awning whose sole purpose appeared to be standing guard over a sports car out in the alley. Bristol knew less than nothing about sports cars of any variety, but even she could see quite clearly that whatever make and model this one was, it was exquisite beyond the telling of it. If only because the man who’d been guarding it eyed it as if it was the Holy Grail before he nodded at Lachlan and walked back into the building.

It gleamed in the lights that lit the way over the stairs, spilling over the vehicle’s sleek, low lines and sultry curves.

Sultry curves? she asked herself. You really do have sex on the brain.

But maybe that was because the back door of the fancy restaurant slammed shut. And that left only her and Lachlan, standing alone in the dark night settling around them. A kind of foreboding—or longing—danced through her then, and Bristol had to move. Or the electricity would fry her where she stood, she was sure of it.

She tugged her hand from his and moved down the stairs, trying to hide the clamoring inside her. It was so loud. It was shivery and bright and she had to figure out how to breathe through it.

Then she thought of the feel of his hand in hers and had to start all over again.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked when she’d cleared the stairs.

The streets seemed far away. Light and noise streaking past, all that life and commotion, while here in the alley they were practically cocooned in the kind of hush that shouldn’t have been possible in New York. But brick and concrete rose high all around, hemming them in.

It should have felt claustrophobic. But instead, Bristol thought it felt like an embrace.

Her eyes adjusted to the darker stretch of alley, away from the lighted stairs—and just in time, because Lachlan was moving toward her, a look on his face that made everything inside her go still.

He backed her across the width of the alley, smiling down at her when her back came up hard against the far wall.

“Careful,” he said, a hint of laughter in his voice.

But Bristol didn’t want to be careful. Or she couldn’t remember how.

Because the only thing she could seem to focus on was that wildfire heat that raced through her. It seemed to start in his bright blue gaze, then hum its way into her, making her flush all over. Making her bones ache.

Making her pussy melt.

And she had said, repeatedly, that she didn’t know why she’d gone to that absurd panel today. Or