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

adviser, with a snide note in her voice that Bristol adamantly did not like. “Must be nice. And as much as we would have loved to have had you before, I can’t say that the department is looking for that sort of...notoriety.”

It turned out that none of her stuffy academic contacts was interested in her notoriety.

Bristol would have reveled in even being considered notorious in the first place, but she needed to find work. Not because she needed the money—she’d been paid exorbitantly for her service to Lachlan, after all—but because... She needed to work.

And while she hadn’t understood why she was so driven, the end result was the same. She was an expert in social policy and she had every intention of using her expertise, right along with those letters she’d worked so damn hard to put behind her name.

She went on that first date with Lachlan, all on her terms and on her turf. Then it seemed she was seeing him almost every night, though she refused to think too hard about that. He was playing a game. He got to dress down like he was anyone, sneaking in and out of Brooklyn restaurants that would never make it into the pages of the tabloids. Sooner or later, she told herself, he would tire of this and go back to his penthouses and sports cars and jets.

All their dinners ended the same way. On the doorstep of her building in the hot August night, no kissing, her pussy melting and her heart beating—so hard and so long she sometimes thought it might kill her.

Maybe she only wished it would.

But a week into dating the man she’d already been hired to be with, she was still getting no traction whatsoever, within her academic context. So it finally occurred to her to use his.

“Do you have a problem with me reaching out to people I met only because of you?” she asked abruptly, cutting off the story he was telling her about how he was, happily and deliberately, a bad influence on Catriona’s children.

They had been standing at her front door for coming up on thirty minutes, where she already knew they would stay until she tore herself away and went inside.

It took her longer and longer to do that every night.

“Not at all,” he replied, so quickly that she thought he had to mean it. “Most of the people we met with would be elated to hear from you. Your résumé speaks for itself.”

Bristol blinked. “How would you know what my résumé says?”

“Because I studied it,” he said, grinning. “I like facts.”

But she realized, as August descended into its dregs—too hot and too humid and filled with days spent in and out of interviews and nights still full of Lachlan—that it wasn’t facts he was going for here.

It was details.

Every last, possible detail.

He asked her all the questions he hadn’t before. He asked about her childhood in Ohio, and she found she had a lot more to say on the topic of where she’d grown up than she would have before. He asked about her sister. About every phase of her life, leading her straight on to the doctorate that had, somehow, led her to him.

“Does this go both ways?” she asked one night as they walked back from a terrible bar where they’d had to shout to be heard yet had still missed most of the conversation, there in the exhilarating press of the deliberate grimness. She’d promised him a real dive and had delivered, even though it might have deafened them both. “Do I get to ask you questions about your real life?”

“You, Bristol,” Lachlan said, his gaze very blue in the dark, “can ask me anything you like.”

She told herself that hadn’t been a kind of vow, no matter what it sounded like.

And so they told each other stories as August fell inexorably toward September. First it felt like they were filling in the gaps. But then, as Bristol kept going on another date and another date after that, it became something else.

Less filling in gaps, more talking about who they really were. What they thought and felt. What her mother had told her in Ohio. What his sister had told him in Vermont.

But it wasn’t all old paths and new beginnings. Bristol learned that the best-dressed man in New York had always hated dressing up for formal events. If it was up to him, he told her, he’d spend his life in jeans and a T-shirt far away from the public eye.

“Then why do it?” she asked, leaning in close over a rickety little table in the Vietnamese place. They kept coming back. “You can do whatever you want, can’t you? I thought that was the entire point of being you.”

“In order to get the kind of backing I want for my various projects, I have to know how to play the game,” he replied. He shrugged. “I don’t mind it as much anymore.”

“But surely—”

“And besides,” he said, his expression intent, “it’s my responsibility to not be my father. I can’t do exactly as I please. I have an obligation to use the money he made and squandered for good. If I have to wear a suit to do it, that feels like a small price to pay.”

Bristol reached across the table and took his strong hands in hers. She held his gaze.

“You could never be your father. You never, ever will be.”

And it was tempting to say she would be right there to make sure of it, no atom bombs in the vicinity, but she swallowed it back.

She took him to a baseball game. She took him to a crowded, raucous movie theater to see the summer blockbuster hit and to enjoy all the patrons on their phones, people talking back at the screen, and an impromptu popcorn fight.

“That was an experience,” Lachlan said when they left, slinging an arm over her shoulders as they walked out into the warm, dense streets. “But I’m