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

his waking that same old Drummond monster inside him as an opportunity. He started walking himself back into Manhattan, hoping the city would speak to him and maybe even soothe him as he moved.

It was a long walk. And a good one, even on a sweaty evening like this. He’d just crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan when the thunder started.

He could relate. It growled and rumbled up above while the air grew thicker.

By the time he made it to his building, he was soaking wet, but it still hadn’t rained. The humidity was so intense it soaked him straight through, and no matter how fast he’d walked, or how furiously he let his feet eat up the blocks, Lachlan was no better off.

He was in no way soothed.

His head was full to bursting with Bristol March even while he had the sinking, lowering sensation that she was tucked up in her bed in that closet-sized apartment, sleeping blissfully and sweetly without him.

His home in Manhattan had been in his family for even more generations than that town house in Murray Hill. It was an old, much-renovated house on a cobbled street in Greenwich Village that was usually clogged with tourists snapping pictures.

But even the tourists were sheltering inside on an evening like this.

Lachlan stripped as he went inside, tossing his soaked-through clothes aside. He headed up the stairs, making his way to the roof that had long ago been converted into a private garden. My oasis in the middle of the city, his mother had always called it.

And for all Lachlan prided himself on his lack of sentimentality, he’d always found he could exhale better here.

Which was exactly what he did the moment he stepped outside. He could smell the flowers. He could lose himself in the potted trees and bright blossoms. The thunder muttered all around him, but he was deep in the green.

And he understood, after all these years, that the roof garden reminded him of the island. He could feel his grandparents here. He could remember those bright, brief stretches in between his parents’ wars that had always smelled like this, green and sweet.

How had he missed that until now?

But that was another question he shouldn’t need to ask himself, because he knew the answer. It was Bristol. He had visited that island a thousand times, but now when he thought of it, he pictured her. He’d stood at the window in his office, too many dreary voices in his ear, and had watched her pick her way through the olive trees. The sun in her dark hair and a smile on her face that she would have contained if she knew he was watching.

He even saw her here, where she’d never been. Distance in her dark eyes and that wicked twist to her mouth.

As if she knew how futile it was for him to look for some kind of clarity no matter where he went.

Even if it was to this hidden patch of green surrounded by so much concrete.

But that was where he stood, stripped down to his boxer briefs with his head tilted up, as the rain finally began to fall.

That was where he stayed, arms open as if the storm could wash him clean.

But it didn’t help.

And the next morning, Lachlan got in his car, left Manhattan behind him, and drove himself north.

Catriona and Ben lived in the Vermont countryside, closer to Canada than New York City—by design. Ben’s ancestors had once farmed these rolling acres miles away from any neighbors, but now Ben, a world-renowned architect, used the converted old barn as his studio. He’d used the barn as his base for years, while Catriona had quietly made the old farmhouse into a happy, rambling, picture-perfect home for her family.

Lachlan thought about his sister’s choices as he turned down the long drive that wound in and around the woods and the rolling hills and eventually ended up in front of the old farmhouse. There were no photographers here. No paparazzi waiting to sell every sighting to the tabloids. Catriona and Ben guarded their privacy. And their children got to grow up with two parents who not only doted on them but who, better still, also cared for each other.

It was nothing short of revolutionary, given how Catriona and Lachlan had grown up.

And in case he’d had any doubts about that, he saw them both come out together from Ben’s barn-turned-office, holding hands as they came to see who’d pulled in.

He’d never seen his parents touch, Lachlan realized. Not casually. They’d either performed affection in public or beat on each other in private, but there had never been what he saw between his sister and her husband. Intimacy, he thought. Two bodies that knew each other so well, two hands clasped together because clearly that was their default position.

How had he not understood what this was? Or that he’d longed for it all this time?

“Are you all right?” Catriona asked sharply, scanning his face as she drew closer. “You look...”

“A little edgy,” Ben supplied.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Lachlan said, even though his grin felt forced.

“We don’t have a neighborhood,” Catriona retorted. “Deliberately.”

Ben looked back and forth between them, then smiled at his wife. A thousand messages passed between them in another display of intimacy that really, Lachlan thought, he ought to celebrate. Given it was something neither he nor Catriona had ever witnessed in their youth.

“I think I’ll leave you to it,” his brother-in-law murmured, then headed back toward his office.

Catriona slid her arm through Lachlan’s. Then she steered him away from the barn and the house, toward a well-worn trail toward the woods that Lachlan had taken with her before.

“Why don’t you walk with me,” she murmured.

This was obviously what he’d wanted or he wouldn’t have come here.

And for a long while, they simply followed the trail. The path meandered in and out of the woods, gradually making its way up the side of the nearest hill. But it wasn’t