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

Did he like Bristol?

Lachlan didn’t like that word, that was for sure. It didn’t get anywhere near the complexities and layers that made up his Bristol March problem.

But that wasn’t a conversation he planned to have with his older sister. “If I didn’t like her, I wouldn’t be with her.”

Catriona rolled her eyes. “That’s a charming nonanswer that I’m sure plays well at all your very important business meetings, Lachlan.”

There was the sound of a bloodcurdling scream, wafting in through one of the wide-open doors that led out toward the sea that felt like part of the decor here. The house was a sprawling, vaguely Mediterranean affair with upgrades that had been implemented when and if the current owners had felt up to it. Some parts of the house could have been lifted directly from an English manor. Others had the modern edges and crisp approach to art that reminded him more of city-based condos. Altogether, it was an eclectic monument to the passage of time and his family.

He had no idea what he’d been thinking, bringing Bristol here. Of all the women he’d dated, she was the most likely to see each and every ghost that lurked in these halls and hung on to each and every exposed beam.

Catriona was listening intently, her head tilted toward the rolling lawn outside, but waved a dismissive hand in the direction of her maniac children when the follow-up scream was less bloodcurdling and more aggrieved. “They’re fine.”

“Yes, I like her,” Lachlan said when she fixed that gaze of hers on him again. He disliked the fact that it took effort to sound indifferent. “If you’re tempted to start getting ideas, don’t. I told you a long time ago, I’m not the marrying kind.”

“No one’s the marrying kind until they marry,” Catriona replied serenely. “I think you’ll find that’s pretty universal.”

This was his sister, his favorite human on the planet, so Lachlan couldn’t end the conversation the way he would have if it was anyone else. He stayed where he was, in her favorite room of this old, rambling villa, filled with pictures of their family. From their fierce grandmother right down to their father as a bright, happy-looking boy in the sunlight.

A far cry from who he’d become.

Catriona followed his gaze and sighed.

“Your trouble is, you insist on imagining that he was a monster.” She shook her head. At Lachlan. “When the truth is that he was only a man. Like all men, he made choices. You can make choices, too, Lachlan. Different ones.”

But Lachlan already had.

As far as the world was concerned, Alister and Annalisa Drummond had been unfortunate victims of a freak accident. Alister had gotten his pilot’s license in his twenties and had flown from New York City to one of the family’s preferred hideaways by the sea in Maine without incident hundreds of times. But that day a sudden storm had cropped up off the coast of Boston, the plane had gone down, and their bodies had never been found.

The public take on the accident was that the storm was to blame. It was a terrible tragedy, but what could have been done? Even a Drummond couldn’t beat the weather, they’d said.

But Lachlan and Catriona knew better. They’d known the truth behind the placid exterior their parents liked to show to the world. He could remember, too clearly, the shouting and the drinking. Annalisa got sloppy. Alister got cruel.

Together, there was nothing they wouldn’t destroy—especially each other.

Lachlan couldn’t quite believe that his father had truly lost control of that plane. Not by accident, anyway.

He and Catriona had always believed that the crash hadn’t been an accident, but their parents’ usual game of one-upmanship taken to its logical, horrible conclusion.

It was one more reason the two of them were so close. They were the only ones left, sure—but they were also the only ones who knew.

“But what makes a man into a monster?” he asked his sister lightly, now. “I have a pretty good idea. They were toxic for each other and should have kept their distance. We wouldn’t exist, but I bet they would.”

“You always say that,” Catriona replied with another sigh. “Yet I’ve managed to love Ben quite happily and without incident for the past ten years. There’s no curse. There’s no secret Drummond gene that turns on and makes me act like either one of them, no matter how much wine I’ve had. Those were choices they made, Lachlan.”

“Ben isn’t a Drummond,” was all Lachlan said in reply. “Mom wasn’t flying that plane.”

The way he always did.

Catriona only looked at him as if he was breaking her heart. He thought she practiced it in the mirror before they saw each other. And he didn’t know what she might have said then, but he was saved from having to hear it when her children came roaring in, in either high-pitched glee or murder.

While his sister sorted them out, Lachlan slipped away.

He walked through the villa, feeling the press of his family and his history on all sides. Even in the desperately chic, off-puttingly modern parts of the house, because he knew whose fingerprints were all over each room.

He’d spent so much of his childhood here. But his grandparents had both been alive then, meaning his parents had been forced to behave when they visited, at least some of the time. He had spent idyllic days in the sun, but come nightfall when the family was all together and his parents put on their act, all he’d ever seen were the lies beneath.

Lachlan didn’t know if he loved this island or hated it.

By the time he made it down the long hallway to the wing he thought of as his these days, sleek and modern and scrubbed free of ghosts, there was a kind of agitation inside him. It beat at him, bright and hard.

It was nothing as simple as lust, but he called it lust all the same.

He found Bristol outside, clinging to the edge