The Pleasure Contract

by Caitlin Crews

  Bristol couldn’t tell, as she gazed into those electric-blue eyes of his, if maybe she was flying after all.

  “How did your meetings go?” she asked, because it only seemed polite. If a shade too domestic, maybe, for what was meant to be such a purely business arrangement.

  But he didn’t answer. His hair was that dark blond that she never tired of running her fingers through. They itched to do it now. He was dressed in another one of those exquisite dark suits that seemed to draw attention to the fact that he was a physically powerful man, built to move mountains, not play around with theoretical money like so many of the people they met with at these functions.

  Nothing about Lachlan was theoretical. He was all action.

  And the way he was looking at her made everything inside her hum.

  “What made you how you are?” he asked, idly, as if there were no contracts between them. As if there was only heat.

  Inside her, it felt like an open flame.

  She tried smiling it away. “My understanding is that it’s a mix of genetics and an aggressively bland childhood.”

  “Does aggressively bland mean...happy?”

  Bristol wanted to look away, but she didn’t. Why hide here when she was already wide open to him in so many other ways? Who was she kidding? “Sometimes I wonder if happy childhoods are myths we tell ourselves. It’s hard to be happy if you’re a child, isn’t it? Your body is always changing without your input. The world around you is always changing as you become more aware of it. And no, nothing terrible happened to me. But I wouldn’t say I was happy.”

  “Then you’re lucky,” he said, his eyes darker than before. “Because if you were unhappy, you’d know.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. “I’ll give you that. I’m very lucky that what I had to complain about was mostly that I had nothing to complain about.”

  “And yet you’re still so driven. Why?”

  Bristol wished she’d gotten a stronger drink. She swirled the dregs of her soda and lime around and around, and didn’t look at the man who seemed to surround her so easily. As if he was holding her in the palm of his hand.

  Maybe sex was easier after all. It could feel like all of these conversations without actually having to have them.

  “Pot, meet kettle,” she murmured.

  “My childhood had its advantages.” Lachlan laughed, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I would not call it lucky. Or happy.”

  “I know your parents died. I’m sorry.”

  “In some ways the accident was a relief,” he said quietly.

  And Bristol was gripped by that stark look on his face. That faint hint of what might have been surprise. She knew, somehow, that this was not something he said very often.

  Maybe he never had.

  She whispered his name and his mouth curved, though it wasn’t a smile. “I try not to say that out loud. My sister hates it when I forget and say it anyway.”

  “Because she feels the same...or because she disagrees?”

  Lachlan shook his head as if he couldn’t answer that. “Some people bring out the worst in each other. My parents started off tragic and toxic and only got worse from there. They liked to pretend, but behind closed doors, it was an endless competition to see who could cause the most damage. Catriona and I were spared the worst of it because their focus was only and ever on each other. They fought like it was to the death every time, and one day, it was.”

  “Lachlan. I’m so sorry.”

  His gaze moved over her face. “You didn’t do it. They did.”

  “Is that what drives you?” she asked. “Losing them?”

  “Not losing them.” He ran a hand over his lean jaw. “Living with them. I guess you could say that after they died, that left me with a whole lot to prove. Mostly that no matter what, I wasn’t going to turn into the same kind of monster. You asked me once if I was a kind billionaire.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “My father certainly wasn’t. And I try, in every way I can, to be nothing like him. Starting with the fact that I’m not actually a billionaire any longer, because most years I give away too much money to maintain that status.”

  Bristol’s heart was beating too fast. She could feel it thundering in her chest and pulsing through her. As if she was running up a long set of stairs. As if Lachlan was deep inside her.

  As if she was afraid.

  Or alive, something in her whispered. At last.

  “Why are you so driven, then?” he asked again. “What did you have to prove if your life was so bland?”

  And her heart didn’t slow, but she fell anyway. Not out the window to the busy streets so far below, but into his steady gaze.

  Maybe she’d always been falling and only realized it now.

  And the realization was like the hard thud of landing, and the impact reverberated through her, making it impossible to do anything but tell him the truth.

  “I wanted to make sure they saw me,” she whispered.

  Her hair was tied back in a knot tonight, but a tendril fell forward on her cheek. Slowly, intently, Lachlan drew it back and tucked it behind her ear.

  It made her shudder.

  “Who?” he asked, hardly making a sound.

  But she heard him.

  And somehow, Bristol smiled, an ache made real. Right there on her face. “Everyone.”

  The next morning, she woke up naked and alone in the huge bed that took up the better part of yet another astonishingly vast bedroom. She was sure she would find Lachlan’s fingerprints all over her but was disappointed when she looked in the nearest mirror and saw nothing.

  Nothing to mark how he had held her through the night, how he had made her cry and beg.

  Over and over again, until the sky behind all that light and neon began to brighten.

  The man needed no sleep, as far as she could tell. She’d always thought that she was tenacious and determined, but Lachlan was a breed apart.

  Especially when he was clearly trying to show her why she should let him in.

  By stripping her raw. By making her sob.

  Until it felt as if she was incomplete when he wasn’t buried deep inside her.

  As if she might never be whole again.

  When her phone chimed she knew it was her sister, and ignored it. She didn’t think she had it in her to talk—because once she started, she wasn’t sure she would stop.

  But when it beeped again, indicating a message, she swiped it up from the table where she’d left it.

  Romantic, Indy had texted.

  And the picture she’d sent along with her text made everything in Bristol go still.

  Too still.

  How had she not seen a photographer in that bar last night? But she knew the answer to that. She’d been completely swept up in Lachlan. Completely consumed.

  The picture was of Lachlan tugging that dark lock of her hair back from her face and securing it at her ear. She almost couldn’t bear to look at the image, but she couldn’t bring herself to look away.

  It was too tender. Too raw.

  The look on Lachlan’s face was almost too intense. And the look on her face...

  Bristol looked like a woman in love.

  And if that wasn’t the kiss of death in this situation, she didn’t know what was.

  She heard herself make a small, broken sound and she tossed the phone aside, but how could that help? If Indy had seen that picture, so had the world. So would he.

  Her heart was beating again, too fast. Too jarring.

  Lachlan wanted her to let him in, but she knew better than to let him. She wasn’t protecting herself because it was her job to maintain her distance. She was doing it because she was afraid.

  She would fall in love, and much too easily. Maybe she already had.

 
; Heedlessly. Hopelessly.

  Bristol already knew the symptoms. She’d felt the same way about her research, her dissertation, and she didn’t love anything by half. She threw herself in deep, losing herself completely. She disappeared into the grip of it.

  That was what she was good at, loving like that, to the exclusion of all else.

  But she already knew it would end the same way.

  Maybe not badly, but inevitably. She would be left empty. All that focus, all that dedication, and all she would become was a footnote to a scandalous article about his next purchased girlfriend.

  Last night he had held her beneath him as he’d driven them both crazy. He’d kept her on the edge as he held her face between his hands and whispered the same thing again and again.

  What do you want? he’d gritted out, rough and raw. What do you want, Bristol?

  And now she knew.

  All she wanted was the one thing she couldn’t have. Not for the world to see her. It turned out, she didn’t like that at all.

  What Bristol wanted was for Lachlan to see her, really and truly. She wanted to give him everything he’d asked for and more.

  And then not just see her.

  But let her stay.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEY RETURNED TO New York on a muggy summer’s day near the end of July, swollen with the threat of a thunderstorm that couldn’t quite bring itself to break. A lot like the weather they’d left behind in Hong Kong, in fact, as if they were personally delivering oppressive, gray summers around the world.

  It suited Lachlan’s mood perfectly.

  “I have you down for a few days’ break,” he said, almost idly, as the car took them back toward the city. Too quickly for his liking. “But you don’t have to take it.”

  Bristol smiled at him the way she always did now, with all that distance in her gaze. Lachlan wanted to break things, but they were in an enclosed space. And also he wasn’t his father.

  “No, thank you,” she said. Far too serenely. “I’ll take it.”

  “Bristol...”

  Her smile widened yet gave him nothing. “I’ll see you in a week, Lachlan.”

  Though he raged and punched walls internally, externally there was nothing to be done about it. He knew what was in the contracts he’d been so insistent she sign. He’d long ago insisted on including these small, mandatory breaks following any international tour like the one they’d just taken. And it had never been for the girlfriend in question, it had always been for him. Lachlan liked the convenience of his arrangements, but he also liked his solitude. He usually needed to regroup, get his head back on straight, and deal, privately, with how the women he hired fell far short of the thing he really wanted.

  But with Bristol everything was inside out.

  He insisted they take her back to Brooklyn first. And he didn’t simply drop her off and continue on his way. He helped her with her bags, personally. Her bag, that was, because she’d only brought one, single personal item with her.

  And she was leaving him the same way she’d come to him, something in him acknowledged. Leaving nothing of herself behind.

  She isn’t leaving, he assured himself. She’s taking the mandatory break, the way they all do after a long trip. There’s still August.

  But that didn’t keep him from standing there in what he supposed passed for a living room, glaring at Bristol. Who, he couldn’t help but notice, looked more at home in this crappy little apartment than she had in any of the spectacular five-star accommodations they’d stayed in on the road. Or even his own private island.

  Why did that get under his skin? But he knew.

  He didn’t want her to belong anywhere but with him.

  “Take a good look,” she invited him, meeting his glare steadily. “I know it may come as a shock to you, but this is how real people live in New York.”

  “Two of you live here?” He didn’t have to feign his astonishment. “You and your sister?”

  “Indeed we do. And, actually, this is considered a very luxurious two-bedroom because we each have our own, genuine room. Not that you would recognize either one of them as an actual bedchamber, since I believe the bathroom on your plane is larger than both of them put together.”

  “Amazing.”

  But he was looking at her while he said it.

  Bristol laughed and it was like a punch to the gut. When had she stopped laughing like that? When had she retreated into distance in those vague smiles?

  But he knew the answer to that, too.

  “Allow me to give you the full tour,” she said. She took one step back and opened her hands wide. “This is...the whole thing. You can view it as a kind of sociological experiment, I guess. Behold, Lachlan. This is how the common people live.”

  “I got the point the first time.”

  “It’s hard to get your head around, I know,” she continued in the same wildly amused tone. “No butler waiting on you. No suite of graceful, pointless rooms, lazily spread out over the top of a building with views to die for.” She moved over to the window and laughed again as she looked out. “That’s not Hyde Park, I’m afraid. That’s my neighbor’s window box and, if I’m not mistaken, that might be an illegal plant. But if you squint, you can pretend.”

  When she turned back toward him, he remembered that first dinner a lifetime ago now. The light in her gaze. Her laughter.

  How different she’d been then.

  How exciting and uncowed and...not trying to impress him at all.

  He’d loved that. He’d had sex with her in an alley, for God’s sake.

  And then what had he done? He taken her and crushed her to fit into the same box he’d been carrying around his entire adult life. The same box where he’d put anyone who might, even accidentally, attempt to stray too close to him. What had he thought would happen?

  “Bristol,” he began. “I wish...”

  Laughter faded from her gaze. She inclined her head toward the door.

  “I’ll see you in a week, Lachlan,” she said with a quiet certainty that made everything in him tense. “As agreed.”

  He wanted to argue. He wanted to impose his will on her with a wave of his hand. Make her change her mind. Make her understand.

  But the rules were the rules. He knew that all too well, because he was the one who’d made them.

  Lachlan saw the choice before himself starkly then. It was moments like this, moments he’d never imagined he’d ever find himself in, that showed him how narrow his path really was. How no matter how he tried, he could never do enough good in the world when inside him, he was still a Drummond.

  Still a monster.

  He could see too well how easy it would be to be like his father, of course. Ignore any rule he didn’t like, do as he pleased, and laugh about it if anyone ever tried to stand up to him.

  That he could see why that was appealing, even after all these years of trying his best to be different, to be better...horrified him.

  Lachlan murmured what he hoped was a neutral enough goodbye. He turned before he lost control of himself and truly became his worst nightmare. Then he let himself out, jogging down the rickety stairs, too disgusted with himself to really register any details except the need to put distance between him and the one woman he actually didn’t want any distance from.

  Because that was what she wanted.

  When he found himself outside on the street, he waved off his driver. Then he took his waking that same old Drummond monster inside him as an opportunity. He started walking himself back into Manhattan, hoping the city would speak to him and maybe even soothe him as he moved.

  It was a long walk. And a good one, even on a sweaty evening like this. He’d just crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan when the thunder started.

  He could relate. It growled and rumbled up above while t
he air grew thicker.

  By the time he made it to his building, he was soaking wet, but it still hadn’t rained. The humidity was so intense it soaked him straight through, and no matter how fast he’d walked, or how furiously he let his feet eat up the blocks, Lachlan was no better off.

  He was in no way soothed.

  His head was full to bursting with Bristol March even while he had the sinking, lowering sensation that she was tucked up in her bed in that closet-sized apartment, sleeping blissfully and sweetly without him.

  His home in Manhattan had been in his family for even more generations than that town house in Murray Hill. It was an old, much-renovated house on a cobbled street in Greenwich Village that was usually clogged with tourists snapping pictures.

  But even the tourists were sheltering inside on an evening like this.

  Lachlan stripped as he went inside, tossing his soaked-through clothes aside. He headed up the stairs, making his way to the roof that had long ago been converted into a private garden. My oasis in the middle of the city, his mother had always called it.

  And for all Lachlan prided himself on his lack of sentimentality, he’d always found he could exhale better here.

  Which was exactly what he did the moment he stepped outside. He could smell the flowers. He could lose himself in the potted trees and bright blossoms. The thunder muttered all around him, but he was deep in the green.

  And he understood, after all these years, that the roof garden reminded him of the island. He could feel his grandparents here. He could remember those bright, brief stretches in between his parents’ wars that had always smelled like this, green and sweet.

  How had he missed that until now?

  But that was another question he shouldn’t need to ask himself, because he knew the answer. It was Bristol. He had visited that island a thousand times, but now when he thought of it, he pictured her. He’d stood at the window in his office, too many dreary voices in his ear, and had watched her pick her way through the olive trees. The sun in her dark hair and a smile on her face that she would have contained if she knew he was watching.