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

not caring if all of Brooklyn overheard her. “Let me tell you something, Lachlan. You might have rules, but I have a heart. And you will not break it. If you want to do this, it’s going to be messy. It’s going to be all-consuming. You’re not going to know where you end or I begin. No beginning, no end. You don’t get to run away to a fancy little island when it gets too much. I want real, Lachlan.”

“You think I can’t do it.” There was a kind of wondering note in the middle of all that ferocity. “You think I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Do you?”

He jerked her closer and she loved it.

She felt it.

She felt lit up and alive.

“I know you wreck me,” he said, there against her mouth. “You make me feel things I’ve never felt. You make me do things I’ve never done. You’re a temptation and a torment, and I’m in love with you, Bristol. I love you.”

He punctuated that with a tighter grip and she wanted to laugh, wild and long and free.

But Lachlan wasn’t done. “I don’t just want to have sex with you, though I want that, constantly and desperately. I want to marry you. I want the whole big, messy deal. Ridiculous fights and screaming babies and asshole teenagers to top it off. Then you and me, in our bed, fucking our way through. All of it.”

Lightning flashed. And what scared her—or thrilled her—was that she could see that. She could see it all too clearly.

“What about what I want?” she threw back at him, and she couldn’t tell at that point if it was only rain on her face or if she’d given in to the sobs she could feel building inside her. She didn’t care. “I want to be more than a dress on your arm. I want my daughters to grow up knowing they can do anything. I want them to do what they love, but not obsessively lose themselves in the only thing they’re good at because they don’t know what else to do.”

“You can do whatever you want. Do you really not know that?”

“How would I know that?” And there was no pretending she wasn’t crying then. “Don’t you understand, Lachlan? I’m terrified that if I tell you I love you, I’ll just lose myself in you all over again, and then what will become of me?”

He framed her face, smoothing her hair back, and her heart seemed to grow three sizes.

“I can have anything on this planet I want, except you,” Lachlan said. “I tried to buy you and I still didn’t get close. You only lost yourself when you weren’t yourself, baby.”

It was that baby. It was going to kill her.

She was gripping the front of his T-shirt like her life depended on it.

Lachlan didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t want that. I want you. I want your wild intellect and your carefree laughter. I want the way you come for me, so greedily, over and over. I want the way you scowl at me, the way you say my name when you don’t agree with me, the way you scream it when I’m inside you. I want the way you wow every person you come into contact with, and I want the way you look back at me, always checking in, whether we’re at a state dinner or a food truck. I’m in love with you, Bristol.”

“I’m trying so hard not to,” she whispered brokenly to him. “But I love you, too, Lachlan. I love you, too.”

“See?” And again, his mouth curved, but it was different this time. His blue eyes blazed, but it was the whole world. “I told you so.”

“I want to be clear about something,” she said, wiping at her eyes even though it was futile, because the rain kept coming down. “If you were only the Lachlan Drummond who robotically fucked the woman he hired and there was nothing else to you, this would never happen. I don’t care about your money. And marrying you was never my goal.”

“Bristol. I know your goals. I know you have offers from three different think tanks already.” He shook his head at her. “Did you think the people I know wouldn’t call me?”

“Maybe not so quickly,” she said. A little grumpily.

“You do know that I have my own think tank, right?”

“Maybe someday,” Bristol said, and she actually allowed herself to smile then. “But first, there are a great many things in social policy to take care of that have nothing to do with being...”

“Mine,” Lachlan finished for her. “You’re mine, Bristol. And I’m yours. As long as that’s clear, who cares about all the rest of it?”

She arched into him then, this whole, mad summer whirling around inside her. She thought of all those cities they’d visited. She thought about that last night on the island, the way he’d driven into her with such slow, hot determination, sweeping away her defenses.

Signing up for sex on demand had seemed fun. Lachlan was gorgeous. It was supposed to be a place to hide and a chance to live a little.

But she understood now that she hadn’t been living. Not really. How could anyone truly live when they were hidden?

And this was far scarier. This was pure vulnerability. Placing herself in this man’s hands and promising that she would hold him just the same.

Bristol looped her arms around his neck and she held his gaze the way she thought she might just keep on doing for the rest of her days.

“Lachlan Drummond,” she said, very solemnly. “I love you. I’m not very good at it, but I’m planning to really take the time and get it right. And I really, really need you inside me. Now.”

His smile was bright and wide and as far as she could tell, stopped the rain and called out the sun.

She would never remember it differently.

Lachlan swept her up into his arms, right there on that Brooklyn