Looking as if it caused him physical pain, he rolled to his feet, leaving her sprawled out on the floor with the taste of him in her mouth, her nipples so hard they hurt, and her pussy soft and ready.
Damn him.
“I’m not having sex with you again, Bristol,” he told her, looking something like feral. His eyes were blazing and she’d knocked that hat off, then had her hands all up in his blond hair. She’d been the one to make him look so disheveled, and that notion rocked through her like his mouth at her neck. “Not if it’s just sex.”
Bristol’s heart kicked at her, hard. She remembered what her mother had said about earthquakes, and that was what it felt like. As if every fault line related to this man that she’d gathered up inside her was ripped wide open.
“I beg your pardon?”
He moved all the way across the room, which wasn’t far at all. But it felt like an immeasurable distance. She forced herself to stand.
“I told you I want all of you, Bristol,” he gritted out. “I meant it. I want everything. And I know you don’t believe me.”
She had never been so tempted to lie and tell him whatever he needed to hear—but she didn’t.
Judging by the way his eyes narrowed, he probably knew how close she’d come.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” she hedged. “I believe that you believe it. I’m aware of your pattern, that’s all.”
She did not say, and so is the world, and felt virtuous.
“In other words, you don’t believe me.” He smiled then, broad and confident as if she couldn’t see with her own eyes how big and hard his cock was behind his fly. “No worries, baby. I can wait.”
Baby.
Her heart kept going at her, harder and harder by the second. She couldn’t tell what sort of pulse it was that rattled through her, lighting her up in her temples to her pussy, only that it was driving her wild.
He’d called her baby.
“What do you think you’re waiting for?” she managed to ask. “I hate to break this to you, Lachlan, but I’ve already pretty much ruined you for other women.”
“I’m waiting, Bristol,” he said, his eyes brilliant and his tone dead serious, “for you to admit that you’re in love with me, too.”
That pulsing thing in her felt more like a shudder then. Her chest was so tight she was afraid she might break out in sobs, and never stop. “And if I’m not? What if what I want from you are dive-bar dates and a hot one-night stand every once in a while?”
“You can have all the dates you want.” Lachlan’s mouth looked particularly hard as it curved. “But the hot nights are off the table.”
“That sounds suspiciously like an ultimatum.”
“An ultimatum would be me insisting that you do something,” he countered, almost lazily, when she could see the white-hot heat in his gaze. “But you don’t have to do anything. I will be saving my virtue and my body for love, that’s all.”
Bristol laughed.
Because this was Lachlan Drummond, king of the sexual demands. She assumed, though she didn’t really like to think about it, that even though he hadn’t appeared anywhere with a new woman he must be doing something with that appetite of his. Because the last she’d counted, it was a solid month since he’d had sex with her.
No way had he actually gone that long.
Her stomach cramped and yeah, she really didn’t want to think about it.
“This is specific to me, right?” she asked. “Because I know you don’t think that I’m going to stand here and believe for one second that you’ve been abstinent for twenty-four hours. Much less, what is it? A month?”
“Thirty-three days,” he said gruffly. “Actually.”
And no matter how she stared at him, she couldn’t see the faintest hint of a lie.
“But...” Bristol cast around, not sure she could find the words for something like this. For the way she was shaking apart where she stood. “You have no idea if I’ll ever... I didn’t even kiss you until tonight!”
“Because it’s not about me.” Lachlan held her gaze, and it undid her. “Someone pointed out to me that I’m used to everything being about me, and that’s true. But not this. I’m not playing a game, Bristol. The only question is when you’re going to see that.”
And she was torn in two, just like that.
She wanted, so badly, to run to him. To let all the words she dared not speak out loud pour off her lips, because wasn’t this what she’d wanted all along?
But she didn’t. She couldn’t.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, though her voice shook.
Though she could see it hurt him. It hurt her, too.
She didn’t believe him—not until all he did was smile at her, then turn to go.
She expected him to argue, mount a defense, something, but he didn’t. Lachlan opened the front door and then shut it quietly behind him.
And for a moment Bristol stood there, shaking, trying to make sense of what he’d told her. Trying to make sense of any of this.
Trying to keep her footing when the ground was buckling beneath her feet.
And then she was flinging open her door and racing down the stairs before she knew she meant to move. Her breath was coming too fast, laced with desperation. She heard the outside door slamming shut and made a sound a little too close to a sob as she flung herself down the last flight of stairs, then outside into the night.
The storm had settled in. There were lightning flashes overhead and the rain poured down. Bristol looked around wildly, the panic making her pant. Had he called his driver? Was he already gone? She couldn’t help thinking that if he left now, he wasn’t coming back—
But then she saw his unmistakable body cutting through the rain in the bright headlights of a passing truck.
She ran, seized with a kind of desperation so intense it made her want to scream.
When she reached Lachlan, she dived for his arm. He wheeled around, and the look on his face was so ferocious she actually let out a surprised sort of sound at the sight of it.
And any half-formed notion she had that his expression was for whatever stranger he thought might have grabbed him melted away, because it only intensified the longer he looked at her.
“You better be sure,” he growled at her. “You’re running after me in the rain and it better not be bullshit.”
“How?” she demanded, and maybe she was closer to screaming than she thought. “You say you love me, but how? All we ever did was have sex.”
“We didn’t just have sex, Bristol,” he threw right back at her, his hands on her upper arms to hold her there before him. And there was rain all around them, the commotion of the city, and it was New York. No one paid them the slightest bit of attention. It was like being alone with that look he was giving her. “We never just had sex.”
“Just sex is what you ordered. What you paid for.”
“But it wasn’t us!” he shouted at her.
It was a real shout, and something in her gloried in it. This was Lachlan, uncontrolled. No more acting the part. No more putting on those suits he didn’t even like.
A man, not a monster.
All man.
He gripped her arms a little more tightly, dropping his face close to hers. “I fell in love with you the moment I saw you laugh on that video. And you know it. Just like you fell in love with me long before you signed that contract. You know that, too.”
“Fuck you and fuck your contract,” she threw right back at him, 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 sidewalk, and then he carried her back to her building and up the stairs.
And there, finally—in a Murphy bed that barely fit the both of them in that too-hot and too-small room—they touched forever.
And this time, held on to it. Tight.
Over and over again.
* * *
If you loved The Pleasure Contract,
look out for the next book in Caitlin Crews’s
Summer Seductions miniseries:
Just One More Night
Available soon from Harlequin DARE.
Dare to read more sexy stories! Check out our other Harlequin DARE titles, available now:
Enemies with Benefits by Zara Cox
Bring the Heat by Margot Radcliffe
Exposed by Cathryn Fox
Keep reading for an excerpt from Custom Made by Chantal Fernando.
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PROLOGUE
Three Years Ago
Sliding into the car with nothing but a clear bag of my meager possessions, I look over at my dad and smile. I look like crap, and I know it. I’m not the same woman I was before I walked inside these prison cells.
“Thank you for picking me up,” I say as he reaches over and hugs me. My stiff shoulders relax in his embrace, and I release a deep breath of relief.
I’m out.
After six long months that seemed to go on forever, I’m free.
“I’m just glad that you’re out of there,” he says, looking over me with his kind green eyes, so much like my own. This man has always been there for me, and I will always adore him.
“You and me both. And I can tell you right now, I’m never going back,” I promise.
And I mean that.
Never again.
The second I got locked up, I knew what I needed to do, and that hasn’t changed now that I’m out. I’m not going to associate with my so-called friends anymore, and I’m sure as hell not going back to my ex-boyfriend. I didn’t deserve the way I was treated by him. No woman does.
I’m going to get a fresh start somewhere, and I’m going to turn my life around.
“Where’s Mom?” I dare to ask.
I haven’t missed the fact that she didn’t write or visit me in prison. Dad always made an excuse for her, and I know how hard this must be on her. She’s an art teacher and very well known in our community. She never told me outright, but I know how embarrassed she is of me.
But I’m her only child, and I need her right now.
Dad sighs and hesitates before he answers. “She’s at home. She didn’t want to come. I think she needs some time, Cam. She’s been very upset about the whole thing. Just give her some time.”
I nod, thinking that she’s had six months, which should have been enough time. She’s my mother, and I need her. I wish that she could see that and be here for me right now.
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