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

not love me back, Bristol,” he gritted out. “But don’t stand here in front of me and pretend you haven’t enjoyed every single second we’ve spent naked together. Because I know better.”

“And you think that’s all there is, don’t you?” She let out a sound that might have been a laugh, but not a happy one. “Naked feels a lot like vulnerability, Lachlan. But it’s not. Not if sex is the only place you show it.”

He didn’t like that, but he couldn’t let himself get caught up in how much he didn’t like it. Not when there was so much at stake.

“Tell me what you want.”

She laughed again, and it sounded even less happy than before. “I have spent so much time trying to answer that question. But it turns out it was right in front of me all the time. I want everything.”

“You’re in luck, then. Because I can give it to you.”

“Can you?” He saw that she was trembling, slightly, and wanted to go to her—but the fierce look on her face stopped him. “This isn’t a transaction, I’m afraid. I don’t want to be in a box. I don’t want contracts and rules. I want to be a whole person, and we both know that’s not something you value.”

Lachlan felt winded. “Bristol—”

“I quit, Lachlan,” she hurled at him. “Effective immediately.”

It was meant as a blow, he could see that. And it landed.

But he could take a hit.

He stayed where he was, studying her. He watched as her belligerent chin lowered. As the fists on her hips relaxed.

“You’re looking at me like you didn’t hear me,” she said, and she sounded...less sure, suddenly.

Lachlan didn’t want her less sure of herself. He wanted her to be every part of herself, whatever that was.

She’d said she wanted everything. Well, so did he.

“I accept your resignation,” he said.

Bristol blinked. Then cleared her throat. “Well. Okay. Good.”

“I’ll have my attorneys initiate the termination protocol.” Lachlan pulled his phone out of his pocket and sent a series of texts. He waited a moment for a response, then nodded. “Our contracted relationship is over.”

He could see the way she swallowed. Hard.

“All right. That’s done, then.” She flushed. “I’ll confess I don’t know the appropriate thing to say when ending something like this. Uh...thanks?”

Lachlan moved then. He crossed the room and stood before her. And waited.

Slowly, she looked up at him. Slower still, her eyes dilated, telling him that whatever her reasons were for wanting to end things with him, it wasn’t because the greedy longing between them was gone.

She swayed slightly toward him, because their bodies were that attuned to each other now, but caught herself.

“Is this...” Bristol straightened her shoulders. “Are you saying goodbye?”

Lachlan reached down and took her hands in his. She let him, and when he laced their fingers together, a small sound shuddered out of her.

He thought of his sister and Ben holding hands in all that summer light. He thought about intimacy and how he’d always assumed that any hint of it was a slippery slide to a plane plummeting from the sky.

But Bristol was holding on to him. Her pretty face was tipped up toward his and there was no trace of distance.

And he wanted to tell her all of this. He wanted to tell her what he’d learned and what she meant to him. He wanted her to know all the ways he needed her in his life. He wanted and wanted, but as she’d said already, all they’d talked about so far was him.

“Do you have a favorite restaurant in this neighborhood?” he asked.

She blinked, and he watched that brain of hers start working. “There’s a Vietnamese place on the next block that’s amazing. Why? Did making declarations and dissolving contracts work up an appetite?”

He decided not to tell her, then, that he was going to spend the rest of his life hungry and only she was ever going to make a dent in it.

If he was lucky.

And Lachlan was a lot of things, but luck had never played a part before.

He was back on that high wire, holding on to hope.

Try love, Catriona had advised him.

It was the one thing even Lachlan Drummond couldn’t command.

“Dr. Bristol March,” he said, very carefully and deliberately, his eyes on hers like his life depended on her answer. Because it did. “Will you go on a date with me? I hear there’s a great Vietnamese place nearby.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BRISTOL HAD NO intention of going out to dinner with Lachlan that night. She didn’t want to play games with him.

And yet after saying no, with a scowl on her face while her heart galloped too wildly in her chest, she found the look on his face unbearable.

“You can call me tomorrow,” she found herself saying, like a moth to the flame. “And you can ask me if I’m free next weekend. And maybe not assume that I can drop everything to please you at any instant.”

He was still holding her hands and he looked down at them, his mouth curving into a smile that might almost have been bashful, had he been anyone else.

But he was Lachlan Drummond, so that curve took on a different shade altogether when she saw the look in his too-hot blue gaze.

“I can do that,” he said. “But Bristol. Are you hungry?”

And that was how she found herself on her first date with Lachlan Drummond, more than two months after the first dinner they’d had in that overly precious restaurant in Manhattan. A lifetime, it seemed, since that scene in the alley and everything that came afterward.

A lifetime, maybe, but she could still remember every detail of the first time she’d tasted him.

“I’m going to call you tomorrow,” he told her, almost formally, as he walked her back to the door of her apartment building. Almost formally, that was, except for the glint in his gaze that made her wet and shivery, though she would die before showing him that. “Like a gentleman.”

“I may or