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

she would have called desperation, had it been anyone else. It was always a silent cascade of overwhelming need, a blistering rush of sensation and passion.

She would be half-asleep and then he would be inside her, and her dreams seemed to focus only on him anyway, so the shift always felt like coming.

And then she was.

Bristol loved it.

He went off to conduct his business while she slept more and recovered, something Lachlan never seemed to need to do. She usually met up with him later in the morning, after he’d had a few rounds of business in different time zones. And after she’d woken up, had fresh fruit out on the terrace with only the sea as company, and then sipped at coffee so strong and dark it made her feel like a superhero.

Sometimes she imagined she was one. Especially given the amount of sex she was currently having.

She often had more sex in a night than she’d had in the previous few years, combined.

Night after night.

Bristol loved that, too. She loved how her body felt. She loved what he did to it. She loved knowing that every need, every desire, would be explored—over and over. She loved how she felt settled into her bones and limbs in a new way, as if she was as ripe and as lush as she felt when his mouth was on her skin or his cock was deep inside her.

It couldn’t be more different from her old life, which had been all about her brain and never about her body. It might as well have been night and day.

Sometimes Lachlan talked to her, always about his work. Only rarely about his sister and her family, but then, they all gathered together in the evenings for communal dinners and the polite sort of conversation that Bristol would have found difficult, had this not been a job.

Had this been a real relationship, the hollowness she sometimes felt inside might have consumed her whole.

It was better to concentrate on the flowers, the trees. The calls of the birds and the ocean breeze.

She was free from all the emotional clutter of real relationships, and that was a good thing. She could enjoy whatever Lachlan did, because none of it mattered. Their arrangement was temporary, summer could only last so long, and so she didn’t need to worry if it was setting a precedent that, should she ask him why he seemed so distant when his sister spoke of family things, he replied by changing the subject.

A real girlfriend might object, but that wasn’t Bristol’s job.

She wasn’t here to get closer to him, or get to know his sister, or do anything at all but exist in the role he’d carved out for her. Sex and conversation, one dark and deep, the other light and easy.

You can be easy, too, she liked to tell herself when she floated in the calm water of her favorite cove. You have these few, sweet months to let someone else do the thinking.

As a holiday for her brain, she couldn’t think of anything better.

And as the days passed, Lachlan talked to her less and less when he came to find her in the bright light of another perfect Spanish morning. He preferred to pull her over his lap and move inside her again and again, letting her arch back into all that endless blue.

That didn’t matter either.

If that was what he wanted, that was what she gave.

But somehow, today, the idea of this odd, breathless vacation from reality making it into the tabloids made it all feel less like a job and more like...a problem.

One she ought to have been solving, surely.

“What you mean by every tabloid?” she asked Indy. “I’m not comfortable with one tabloid.”

“Then I have some bad news for you,” her sister replied.

Bristol scowled at her phone. Indy liked to call and check on her older sister when she woke up. And since she’d decided New York was boring without Bristol about a week after Bristol had left, she was currently oversleeping in Europe.

She was also maddeningly vague about where, exactly, in Europe she happened to be.

And because Bristol knew Indy desperately wanted her to ask, she didn’t.

“You know you have a little something called the internet at your disposal, Bristol,” Indy was saying now, with so much laughter in her voice that Bristol could practically see her accompanying eye roll. “You can access this exciting new invention with the newfangled handheld computer you’re using to talk to me, in a totally different country, right now.”

“I access the internet all the time, asshole,” Bristol replied. “And yet, oddly enough, it’s not the tabloid newspapers I look for when I do.”

“Well, good news, then,” Indy said brightly. “You look amazing. What else matters?”

Bristol could think of a great many things that mattered, but she had to pretend she wasn’t interested for the rest of the call. For reasons. But the moment Indy hung up—after making airy comments about where she was that managed to sound detailed without actually imparting any information—she went looking.

And sure enough, there she was.

It was the same picture on a number of tabloid covers, from one of the balls they’d been to during that first, long cycle through the capitals of Europe. Paris, she thought, if she remembered the progression of her formal dresses correctly. It was a lovely picture of the sweeping fairy tale of a dress, which she recalled had been surprisingly comfortable for a garment so fussy that it had taken two other people to get her into it.

But she wasn’t named.

Lachlan Drummond and his latest date, as one tabloid identified her. There were several female friends. And a few unnamed companions. All featured several gushing, pseudo-journalistic paragraphs about Lachlan’s philanthropic contributions to the world before segueing to several far more salacious paragraphs about all the other women he’d been seen with before Bristol.

The word Lothario was used. Unironically.

And Bristol congratulated herself on being his employee, not his actual girlfriend, because as an