The Pleasure Contract by Caitlin Crews (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

“He is not.” Indy laughed. “But he doesn’t have relationships in the classic sense. He hires his girlfriends.”

There was no rational reason that a notion like that should wind around inside Bristol the way it did, making her feel suddenly breathless.

And suddenly, shockingly wet between her legs.

You have spent way too much time lost in your books, she chided herself. When was the last time she’d gotten naked with someone? That she couldn’t remember offhand was...worrying. Surely she should know.

“You mean escorts?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t call them that. They’re more long term.” Indy shrugged. “He prefers to hire a woman so he gets exactly what he wants, when he wants it. No trawling around in bars. No swiping left or right. It’s not like he can go out like a regular person anyway. How is he supposed to get laid?”

“So he buys it?” That did not fit with Bristol’s image of Lachlan Drummond. “I wonder if there’s an agency for that.”

“I’m glad you asked,” Indy said smugly. And there was a light in her eyes, then, that made Bristol frown. “There is. It’s not an agency so much as a panel of three of Lachlan’s personal assistants. They narrow down the applicants—and my friend tells me there are always way too many applicants—and then put the finalists through. Meaning, the finalists actually get to meet him.”

“This sounds like the kind of reality show I don’t watch.”

“You watch. You just pretend you don’t.” Indy rolled her eyes. “He’s looking for a very particular woman. She has to be beautiful, obviously, but she also has to be smart, because he doesn’t want to be bored. Or embarrassed when he’s out there chitchatting with kings and statesmen, like he does.”

“This woman sounds like quite the paragon,” Bristol muttered.

“She has to be able to travel with him and keep up with his crazy schedule. And she has to understand that while he doesn’t want a doormat, he makes the rules. All the rules. In bed and out.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that people apply for this?”

“A lot of people. All it takes for the first round is a few pictures and a résumé. They weed all that down before offering interviews with the panel. And then there’s even more weeding from there.”

Bristol started to feel okay about how overwhelming she’d found the very idea of dating or dating apps or setups or anything else lately. At least she didn’t have to resort to panels or weeding like poor Lachlan Drummond.

“Well,” Bristol said philosophically, “if anyone can not only meet that questionable list of requirements, but actually find them exciting, it’s you.”

Indy laughed again, this time so hard that the silky dark hair she’d piled on top of her head fell down around her shoulders. Looking gorgeous and deliberately tousled, naturally.

“I didn’t apply,” she said. She smiled innocently, which set off alarm bells immediately. Bristol scowled, but that only made Indy look more holy. “But you did. I submitted your photos and résumé myself. You’re welcome.”

Bristol was outraged. Incandescent with it.

Because it was all well and good for Indy to waft through her life from party to party, sexual partner to sexual partner. Her sister had spent two years backpacking around Europe after college, had only returned after what she darkly called her one night in Budapest, not Bangkok, but it was humbling all the same, and liked to claim that her current lifestyle was basically still backpacking, but without the trouble of a pack.

Bristol admired her sister in many ways. Truly she did. But she’d taken an entirely different approach to life.

Their parents, Margie and Bill March—who still lived in the deeply boring Ohio town where they’d met, married, and raised their girls—had used up whatever spontaneity they possessed in naming their daughters. Though Indy liked to argue that a pair of Midwesterners naming a child Indiana was perhaps less an act of spontaneity than a cry of abiding sadness.

A comment their mother had never found amusing, no matter how many times Indy said it over the years.

Margie and Bill had not exactly approved of Indy’s quest to do as little as possible with herself and her life, though neither one of them was much for confrontation. Bill quietly sent a weekly clippings packet to his youngest daughter, filled with job listings from all over the country, which Indy called his pistols at dawn.

They did not send Bristol any clippings collections, but they’d never been entirely thrilled with her obsessive need for academic achievement, either.

They were supportive, but...befuddled, really, at this child of theirs with so much drive to achieve, achieve, achieve. They’d never stood in her way, but Bristol knew that if she’d woken up one morning and announced that she was tossing it all in to live in her hometown and find a nice guy to marry, they would have found that much more understandable. But Bristol had no intention of living like that. She wanted a life of ideas, not Ohio. She’d gotten her scholarship to the school of her choice, had gone straight on into her master’s, and had zipped through her PhD in record time. As if she had a race to win.

Now she had decisions to make. She’d been offered a postdoctoral position, which would be very prestigious and allow her to lean further into her research. Or she could pursue a position at one of the universities she’d been interviewing with.

For the first time in her life, the way forward wasn’t clear.

Bristol March had no idea what to do with herself.

Something she kept trying to think her way through, though for once, thinking didn’t seem to work. She’d finished up teaching the last of the classes that she was a teaching assistant for last week. Now there was nothing left but exam grading, and she’d long ago developed a system for that.

She was done and she didn’t want to be, but that didn’t make her any less done.

So when her phone