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

employee she had no grounds whatsoever to feel...anything.

Accordingly, she assured herself that she felt nothing at all.

She felt so much nothing, in fact, that she couldn’t sit still. The open, airy terrace suddenly felt too close. Too claustrophobic. She found herself charging away from the villa for a nice long walk through the old citrus groves, down to the far cliffs and back.

Not to clear her head, which would suggest that there was some clutter in there. Which there couldn’t be, because this wasn’t a relationship. She wasn’t involved with Lachlan in that way and no matter what the tabloids said, neither were any of those other women.

“I’m outside to be outside,” she chanted to herself as she walked. “I’m out here to breathe deeply, that’s all.”

But she admitted to herself on the walk back that maybe, just maybe, she didn’t know what she was doing. She saw Lachlan’s sister and her oldest child from a distance and ducked back into the olive trees, pretending she wanted solitude. When what she really wanted was to avoid Catriona, with her too-direct gaze and casually incisive questions that Bristol couldn’t answer.

Not the way she would have answered them if this was real.

What she did know was that she was sweating a little while she marched around the island and hid behind olive trees. And more, there was a great big ball of mess inside her, no matter how she tried to pretend there wasn’t.

There was nothing to do about any of it but keep walking.

She’d lapped the whole island twice by the time she could finally breathe normally again. At which point it was easy enough to find her practiced smile and make her way back into the villa. And right back into her role.

The one she’d agreed to play. Legally.

“Where have you been, Bristol?”

Lachlan’s voice came out of nowhere when she stepped through the ancient gate, strewn with morning glories and buzzing with cheerful bees. It made her...not quite jump, though her pulse instantly kicked into high gear. She blinked against the brightness as she looked around, eventually finding him standing in one of the wide-open arched doorways that allowed each room in the villa to flow into the next, then straight on into the sea and sky.

“I didn’t see you there,” Bristol said, and didn’t give in to the urge to put her hand against her belly. She didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that her own skin no longer seemed to fit. That she was buzzing and hollowed out and the only thing left was that same want.

Always that want, like a fire in her blood.

Sometimes when she looked at him, all she could think was that she’d let her pussy take her over. All she could do was melt, and moan, and say more.

It didn’t help that he was even more beautiful and sensually formidable in casual clothes. Surely it should have diminished him not to be prowling around in his desperately chic corporate suits, too Wall Street to breathe. He should have looked like any random guy in his clearly very old and worn cargo shorts, a T-shirt with an obscure band on the front, and bare feet.

He did not.

His blue gaze was shadowed, but the light caught at his dark blond hair and made him gleam like gold. The rest of him was a pageant of wide shoulders, that ripped abdomen, and his narrow hips. Even his legs made her feel like swooning, when Bristol didn’t think she’d ever noticed a male leg before in her life.

God help her, even his feet were sexy.

She was so busy trying not to drool over the biceps that strained against the frayed edge of his blue T-shirt sleeves that she almost missed the hard line of his mouth. The set to his jaw.

But his voice, stern and dark, reminded her where she was. And what she was here to do—which was not simply flutter about, admiring him.

Even if he did look like a dressed-down Greek statue.

Bristol reminded herself that Greece was quite a ways off to the east, give or take a few seas. And Italy.

“I came to find you, but couldn’t,” Lachlan said.

This was how it was now. Or maybe this was how it had always been, but Bristol hadn’t realized it. This pulsing sort of undercurrent beneath whatever words they used. This dark thing inside her while she fought to keep her voice light and that smile on her face—because that was the professional thing to do, surely.

Was she only imagining it was the same for him?

“I’m sorry,” she said, because apologizing was always the right move. She’d been using it on her advisers and committee members and professors for years. Coming out of the gate with an apology always put them on the back foot. “I didn’t expect you to have any free time today. I would have made myself available.”

There was something taut in his face then. It took her a moment to understand he was clenching his teeth enough to make a muscle flex in his jaw. “I don’t think that’s true, Bristol. I think you went for a walk. Catriona said she saw you down near the olive groves more than an hour ago.”

“And here I thought we’d left Stephanie behind for a while. Is your sister keeping tabs on me? You really do have eyes everywhere.”

“I asked her if she’d seen you.”

Bristol felt that buzzing, wanting thing shift then. Into the other thing she felt most often around him—the need to push his buttons. Hard.

Because she knew what happened when she did. He didn’t betray a temper. Not Lachlan.

He fucked it out instead, and took his revenge that way.

And she loved every minute of it.

She pulled her phone out of the pocket of the flowy skirt she was wearing, then made a show of looking at it for missed calls and messages she already knew weren’t there.

“I expected you to be here,” he growled.

“And I’ve agreed I should have been.