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

may not take that call,” she replied loftily, though what she was really doing was obsessing over whether or not he was going to kiss her. Or whether she was going to kiss him. Or if there was even going to be kissing at all after she’d quit. And he’d held her hands like that in the tiny living room that seemed to close in around him, he was so big and bright and him. And then he’d taken her to dinner at her favorite hole-in-the-wall place where they sat in the corner and were resolutely ignored by every other person there.

After he’d said he loved her.

More than once.

And when he didn’t kiss her, or even try, Bristol couldn’t decide if she was furious or grateful.

She settled on grateful sometime later that night, when midnight was a distant memory and she was once again staring at her ceiling. Lying on top of the sheets with a wet washcloth over her fan because the apartment’s questionable air-conditioning was never enough in the full sweat of August.

You’re lucky he didn’t kiss you, she told herself sternly.

Because if Lachlan had kissed her, she really didn’t know if she would have had the necessary fortitude to keep herself from kissing him back.

All the berry crumble in the world hadn’t prepared her for Lachlan’s...declarations.

Or the fact he apparently wanted to date her.

When she woke up the next morning, hot and cranky and feeling raw after a night of dreams—each and every one starring Lachlan and the many magical things that man could do with his cock—she told herself not to get her hopes up.

“You shouldn’t even have hopes,” she scolded herself as she made coffee. “You don’t need to be a vanity project for a bored billionaire.”

“But what if it’s not his vanity?” Indy asked idly when she called from an undisclosed location in Europe. Bristol was too overwrought about her situation to adequately express her feelings about the term undisclosed location. “What if our tin-man billionaire just discovered he has a heart?”

Her own heart galloped at that. She pressed her hand to her chest and, for once, was glad her sister was across an ocean and couldn’t see her do it.

“He won’t,” Bristol said with a brisk confidence she didn’t quite feel. Or didn’t want to feel. “He doesn’t like not getting what he wants, that’s all. Soon enough, probably before next weekend, he will grow bored and move on. He’ll convene his panel and, this time, pick a more appropriately biddable woman to appear at his next function. The end.”

“That’s definitely his pattern,” Indy agreed.

Even though she’d just said the same thing herself, Bristol found herself bristling at her sister’s confirmation.

Suddenly, she could remember all the other times she’d brooded over Indy’s seemingly careless comments when they were teenagers, or her tagging along to things, or her copying Bristol—the very worst sin of all. She found herself looking at the picture on their wall of the two of them at around eight and ten years old, giggling over something marvelous in a pile of fallen leaves beneath their favorite oak tree.

Her mother was right. She wrapped her heart in layers upon layers of armor and only grudgingly let anyone in.

Even her little sister, who adored her.

What if you controlled the earthquake for a change? she asked herself.

But Indy was still talking.

“Then again,” Indy was saying, laughing softly as if she’d never been more personally delighted—which felt a lot like another indictment of Bristol’s spiky, mean heart. “The whole world saw the way he was looking at you. I made sure to look at literally every angle in every possible tabloid, so I can confirm that the man looks fully smitten in every one of them.”

Smitten, Bristol thought, and that word seemed to catch at her.

Indy sighed happily. “This might be a new era for our favorite tin man.”

“Does this make me Dorothy?” Bristol asked, trying her best to sound brisk and faintly unamused and certainly not smitten. “Because I’m fresh out of ruby slippers.”

She didn’t say that she’d left all the fancy trappings of life with Lachlan behind. Dramatic shoes included. It needed to be over, she knew that, and yet she still couldn’t bring herself to come out and say it. To make it real.

“And bonus,” Indy said, as if she already knew. “You’re already home, so no need to rely on the shoes for that.”

After their call ended, Bristol couldn’t get that out of her head. It was what Indy did. She seemed flighty and silly, and then she said things that should have been easily dismissed...that then lingered around instead.

You’re already home, Bristol told herself. No need to rely on the things Lachlan gave you. You’re whole as you are.

She didn’t need his shoes or the wardrobe she’d been promised to do what she needed to do, which was get her life back on track. And she certainly didn’t need him and his rules and his boxes.

But God help her, she missed him so much it hurt.

Lachlan called later that morning and asked Bristol out on a date, as expected.

And Bristol shocked herself when she opened her mouth to refuse, then accepted instead. Even though, when she hung up the phone, she couldn’t have said why.

Why was she doing this when she already knew what would happen? How it would play out exactly as she’d told Indy it would?

In the days that followed, she tried her best not to think about Lachlan Drummond and her weakness for him. It was time to move on with her life. And while she’d felt adrift back in May, she no longer did. The kinds of meetings and conversations she’d been privy to when she was with Lachlan had given her a taste for more than the sedate academic life she’d imagined for herself.

Which was a good thing, she discovered quickly, when she reached out to some of her contacts and found almost universal disdain.

“Back from gallivanting about with Mr. Wonderful?” asked her old