“Yes, yes,” she said merrily. “I’m late.” She turned to the man Lachlan was standing with, who she recognized along with the woman beside him thanks to the dossiers she pretended she hadn’t studied when Stephanie had handed them to her at the hotel when they’d checked in. Because she was petty like that. “Ambassador, Mrs. Hargrove, I hope you’ll forgive me. I lost myself in the British Museum and really, if left to my own devices, I think I could stay there forever.”
“And who could blame you?” said the ambassador.
“I go there whenever I get the chance,” said the ambassador’s wife.
Much later, after drinks had turned into dinner and a round of after-dinner drinks besides, Bristol was feeling positively inclined toward all things British—even though it was still raining. Lachlan handed her into the car waiting for him outside the fortress and then regarded her—severely, she thought—as the driver eased into the London traffic.
“You do know you’re not supposed to be late, don’t you?” Lachlan asked, his voice...a dark thread between them.
Bristol could hear the warning in it. But she could also feel that warning in her clit. And though she had always been a rule follower, always a straight-A student who asked for extra projects so she could gain greater honors and distinguish herself further, Bristol couldn’t seem to keep herself from smirking at him.
Maybe because she didn’t like being sniped at by the assistant he’d sicced on her. Maybe because she really, really didn’t like being treated like a trophy. Maybe because she still hadn’t settled into how she thought she was going to do this.
Maybe because she knew that if she poked at him, he would do something about this addiction it seemed she already had to the things he could make her body do.
Or she hoped he would.
Especially with the partition between them and the driver shut tight and opaque for privacy.
“Then by all means,” she said, “fire me for tardiness.”
His blue gaze went taut, intense. His mouth curved. She could feel both like his hard mouth on her pussy, eating her alive.
“I’m not going to fire you. Yet.”
“That’s a tremendous relief. I don’t need to set any records for longevity here, but it would be nice to last longer than a single evening.” She was still smirking at him. “I can’t help it if I’m competitive.”
“But I’m going to need you to make it up to me, Bristol.”
It was like a chain between them, this heat. She felt it snap tight, and then could think of nothing at all but that blue demand in his gaze.
She found she was holding her breath as he reached down and freed his cock from his trousers, one hand wrapping around the great, thick length of it.
“Your mouth, Bristol. It’s so clever, isn’t it?” She wisely decided that didn’t require an answer. “Use it.”
Later, she promised herself, the weather would turn and she would resume her real life. And that would be an excellent time to question why it was she found these commands so hot. So delicious it was as if they were wired straight into her clit.
Her mouth was already watering. She slid to her knees on the floor of the car and braced herself against his rock-hard thighs. She looked up at him, letting that fierce blue fill her. Set her on fire. Make her shiver.
She was already slippery with want.
And then, holding that gaze of his, she angled herself forward and sucked him deep into her mouth.
Lachlan settled back, his eyes fierce and his magnificent body lazy. Telling her without words that this was going to take a long time.
A long, long time.
Bristol settled in and lost herself in the rhythm of it. The taste of him. He was hot and tasted male, so raw and primal it made her mouth water all the more.
She tested her own reflexes, seeing how far she could take him into her mouth and flirting with the back of her throat. Every groan he let out felt like a victory and made her ache. Her nipples were so tight they stung. Her pussy was wet and needy.
But she concentrated on the long retreat, the deep swallow. She licked her way up one side of his shaft, then down the other. She teased the wide head of his cock, sucking on it until he muttered something beneath his breath.
He wrapped his hand in her hair and took control, gently fucking her face, and that was even better.
For an endless while, she felt stretched out between the wildfire ache in her pussy and the sheer, fierce joy of taking his cock exactly the way he gave it to her. The thrust, the repeat, until she could feel moisture at the corners of her eyes from the sheer joy of it.
And when he finally came, pouring himself down her throat, the way he groaned made her clit throb.
So hard she almost came.
And in case she’d forgotten that this was a punishment for her tardiness, he did not do a single thing to ease the need she was sure was written all over her. She could hear her own breathing come perilously close to panting. She thought that she might even be able to smell her own arousal.
It only made her hunger that much sharper.
Lachlan gazed at her impassively, though his blue eyes glittered. He tucked his cock back into his trousers and zipped up, then lounged there looking faintly disheveled and with the hint of a smirk on his face.
Leaving Bristol with nothing to do but climb back into her seat.
And question, again, why she wasn’t outraged. Why, instead, she felt as if this show of his, his seeming indifference with that hint of amusement at her plight, made her shiver ever closer to simply...coming, there and then.
All she would have to do was press her thighs together—but she didn’t.
Because, she admitted to herself, you want your orgasms to be his.
Because he’d paid for them.
A notion that only there, in the dark of the car with the taste of him in her mouth, could she accept made it all so much hotter.
She had the feeling he knew it.
Back at the hotel, Bristol was left to her own frustrated devices as Lachlan was corralled by his people, then disappeared into the penthouse suite’s offices for some or other important phone call.
She waited for him to come back out, but he didn’t. It took her longer than it should have to understand that he wasn’t going to.
That he had likely stepped into that office and forgotten all about her.
And she didn’t want to have any more conversations with Stephanie—or any other assistant lurking about—so she took herself off to the expansive bedroom, the bed itself about twice the size of the apartment she shared with her sister. And that wasn’t addressing the terraces all around with stunning views over London.
Her body was still flooded with hunger and adrenaline, her pussy still ached, but now there was something hollow inside her, besides.
Bristol didn’t want to deal with that either, so she made a production out of bustling around and getting out of the outfit that had been laid out for the evening’s festivities. Then she took herself into the shower stall that was the size of her neighborhood coffee shop and busied herself with the four hundred showerheads and bath products arrayed along one stone wall.
But there was only so much bustling and lathering a person could do. Soon enough she was simply standing there in a decidedly opulent shower stall in England, finally coming face-to-face not only with what had happened in his car tonight—but what she’d signed up for in the first place.
Not that he’d bought her. Not even the fact she liked that part of it, and the idea that her pussy itself was on loan.
How had she not understood the rest of it? She knew the answer to that. The last fifteen days had been a cascade of sensory input, disbelief that she was doing this in the first place, and the strangely formal practicalities of arranging a life around sex with a very busy man.
But tonight
, at last, she fully understood why it was that Lachlan hired women to fill this position. Because a real girlfriend would react to what had happened tonight—that he could act as he had in the car and then ignore her when they got back to the hotel. A real girlfriend would lean into that hollow feeling inside and take it out on him.
She would not like being ignored on the flight and abandoned all day. She would argue about his rules. She would refuse to have rules, maybe, and certainly she wouldn’t take his cock in the car as some kind of punishment for not catering to his demands for punctuality.
Bristol could see, clearly, all the many things she would feel if she were actually in a regular relationship with Lachlan right now.
But her feelings were exactly what he was paying not to deal with.
She stood in the water for a long time. She let the steam billow all around her, let her skin prune up, and she didn’t know how much time had passed when the shower door, steamy and glassed, finally opened to show Lachlan standing there.
Her heart kicked at her, hard. And she thought she could see a certain wariness in his expression. As if he was waiting to see what her move was going to be here. Because they didn’t know, did they, whether or not she could handle the job he’d hired her for.
It had all been theoretical until now.
Bristol pulled in a breath, as uncertain as he seemed to be. Was she going to yell at him? It seemed possible for a moment. She might find the way he ordered her around hot, like it or not, but she didn’t like the feeling afterward—
But even as she thought that, a sense of peace settled over her.
Because she didn’t have to decide what to feel. All the decisions were already made. He was the one who made them, because she’d agreed to let him. She’d literally signed papers to that effect.
Bristol felt something like liberated at that notion.
It didn’t matter what she felt. She’d decided that when she’d decided to do this. She didn’t have to attach her feelings to anything. She didn’t have to stand up for herself or assert herself or any of the other things she might feel she had to do here if this was something else.
She could smile at him instead. She could watch the heat flaring his gaze.
She could surrender to what she wanted without worrying what it might say about who she was, or what this was.
That was already decided. They’d already agreed.
Lachlan was on her then, lifting her up as the water pounded into them, the steamy water not nearly as hot as he was. His cock was big and hard and took the same few moments it always did to fit inside her. But once he had buried himself to the hilt, he dug his fingers into her hips, tilted her back against the wall, and set up an intense, bone-rattling rhythm as he pounded into her.
It was like magic.
It really was a liberation, she thought, with what little part of her was still capable of thinking when everything else was that ache in her clit, the glory of his possession, and one fierce punch of an orgasm after the next.
All of them his.
For once she didn’t have to make decisions. For once she didn’t have to feel—or more to the point, she didn’t have to act on her feelings.
All she had to do was this.
Again and again.
Because Lachlan was never satisfied. And all she had to do was indulge his every whim.
Finally, she thought—as he finally roared out his release and they hurtled together over the edge—something she was not only good at, but actually wanted to do.
CHAPTER FIVE
BRISTOL WAS COMPLETELY different from his previous women.
And Lachlan wasn’t the only one to notice.
The staff member who handled the day-to-day concerns of his girlfriends complained about her constantly. Something he might have acted upon, but he didn’t find Bristol’s refusal to slot herself into the usual role as arm candy upsetting.
“She refuses to listen, Mr. Drummond,” the woman said at almost every staff meeting. Officiously, Lachlan thought. “She insists on doing as she pleases.”
“She listens to me, Stephanie,” he’d replied this morning. “Maybe it’s how I ask her.”
There had been other women who antagonized his staff, but all of them had also proved themselves unequal to the job. And soon enough, had antagonized Lachlan, too.
Not Bristol.
Diplomats found her charming—the minimum requirement to appear on Lachlan’s arm—but they also found her engaged. An interesting extension of Lachlan himself and, better still, his agenda. She had an uncanny knack of appearing not to pay attention only to be able to recite everything that had been said to her, usually while talking to exactly the right person at whatever party they happened to attend. More than once, over the course of that long June spent flying from city to city all over the globe, Lachlan found himself in a meeting only to have the person across from him reference a conversation they’d had with Bristol as having changed their thinking on some or other key point.
He hadn’t expected that.
The question she’d asked him at that first dinner seemed to haunt him the more time passed. His previous choices had never been bimbos. That wasn’t his style. But they’d tended to be either spoiled heiresses who’d relied a little too heavily on their prep school polish or sharper, more feral women who could more than hold their own but were always out for themselves. The former had always been angling for a wedding ring. The latter were more interested in the payday.
And whatever they were or wanted, none of them had ever been able to spend hours debating the finer points of contention in an initiative to bolster education in certain Third World countries with a literal think tank.
Dr. Bristol March, he realized with a measure of pride that he told himself wasn’t personal but professional, was a formidable force.
“I heard that your conversation with the UN delegation grew heated,” he said one early evening.
He had to check the view outside his window to figure out what country they were in. Greece, it turned out. Athens, to be precise, though it could have been anywhere. There was another black-tie function this evening and he was already dressed. Bristol, who had shrugged off the usual fawning attendants his women usually considered a perk of their position weeks back, was fastening a necklace around her neck, standing in front of a mirror so he had all the time in the world to contemplate the way the dress she wore left her lovely back open to his view.
Almost too open, he thought, with a surge of that possessiveness that had marked his response to her from the start.
But Lachlan didn’t get possessive.
He told himself he was tired, that was all.
“I wasn’t the least bit heated.” She turned to face him, a wry expression on her clever face. “I’ll concede that the delegation left our interaction unhappier than when they arrived. But then, they should think through the sweeping generalizations they like to make regarding their initiatives. Every wave of a hand is a life. That’s all I said. If that’s contentious, so be it.”
“And is that up to you to decide, do you think?” he asked, lazily enough.
For a moment, she didn’t respond. Her head tilted slightly to one side, but he already knew that she was unlikely to get provocative. Not anymore. And sure enough, she regarded him with that particularly opaque look in her eyes that he hated more and more. Every time he saw it, he hated it all over again as if it was new.
“I’m sure you will tell me what is or isn’t up to me,” she said with perfect equanimity. “I await your ruling.”
Once again, she was...distinct.
The other women who’d traveled with him had responded to rebukes very differently. They would apologize, charmingly or wholeheartedly, and prettily beg his forgiveness. Or they would slink their way over to him and offer apologies in a more physical manner.
> It wasn’t that Bristol didn’t apologize when necessary. She did. But she did so in the same forthright manner she did everything else, then looked at him as if the matter ought to have been settled.
Lachlan couldn’t understand why all the ways she continued to set herself apart from the rest...lodged beneath his skin. Not enough to bother him, exactly.
But he couldn’t compartmentalize her the way he’d done with all the rest. He found her on his mind at the oddest times—like in the middle of tense negotiations when he normally would have forgotten he even had a girlfriend.
“It appears that obedience is not your strong suit,” he said because she was standing there, waiting for him to say something with that unreadable expression on her face. But she wasn’t like the others, so he hardly knew what his point was here. The truth was she was correct in her assessment of the delegation. He agreed completely with her take on the situation. Lachlan might not have any idea what went on in her head, but everything she did in her role as his girlfriend, in public anyway, was wholly supportive of him and his aims. Why wasn’t that enough? “Did you know that about yourself?”
“I suspected it,” Bristol replied drily. “Hence my choice of career.”
“I thought the academic life is filled with rules.”
“Every life is filled with rules.” She shrugged in that way she did that always made her seem more graceful, somehow. “But as knowledge is its own reward, thinking in new ways is always encouraged. The minutiae of a university faculty meeting aside, that part always feels...less obedient.”
“But this is not an academic exercise.”
He was hard again—always—when all he was doing was sitting in a chair, studying her. The dress she wore transmitted a certain hushed elegance, but as always, Bristol undercut it by deliberately falling short of the kind of polished veneer that was expected. It should have irritated him. He knew it made the perpetually sniffy Stephanie apoplectic.
Instead of following the usual script, Bristol’s manicure was clear polish only. It was such a subtle thing, but it lent her an air of capability. The understated earrings she wore, no matter how many far more riotous selections were presented for her consideration, suggested practicality. Tonight she’d pulled her hair back into a low, sleek tail instead of the dramatic sort of updo he might have expected for a dress like this, and that, too, made her look serious and even a bit determined. As if her beauty was an afterthought.
The Pleasure Contract Page 6
