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

me, forevermore.” He studied her. “Like all the exes they decided to mention today.”

“Then I’m going to require combat pay,” she retorted, as breezily as possible.

“Don’t worry,” Lachlan said lazily enough, his blue eyes glittering and his jaw still tense. “You’ll be adequately compensated.”

And normally conversations like this, threaded through with so much left unsaid, were solved in bed. Vigorously.

But Catriona was calling from out on the lawn, and her kids were suddenly there to demand their uncle’s attention. Lachlan held Bristol’s gaze a beat or so longer than he should have, and they were swept into the charming chaos of it all.

Bristol told herself it was a welcome break.

But her head was spinning, like it or not. Because it had been one thing to decide to do this thing. She couldn’t deny that there were benefits. There was not having to decide what she planned to do now that she finally had her doctorate, sure. There was also the true and real freedom of surrendering herself entirely to Lachlan’s sexual demands. She didn’t have to think about anything. All she had to do was feel.

Feel and want and come back for more.

She didn’t understand how she could love that as much as she did, yet still feel a stark sense of pure fear at the idea that this private thing of theirs was now public.

Not to mention that hollow thing, always there, where she stored the emotions she would sort out in the fall.

She’d been warned. Bristol knew that.

But being warned about the very real price of being seen with such a famous man was different from it actually happening. It was different from knowing that people she knew could see her in that dress, smiling brightly up at Lachlan. And it hadn’t occurred to her to worry about the fact she would be reduced to just...one more woman gracing his arm for the moment, soon to be discarded.

They would use her name, or they wouldn’t, but it didn’t really matter. He was right—soon enough she would be relegated to the lower paragraphs. Sometimes with a photograph, sometimes not, but always just another footnote in the broader story that was Lachlan Drummond.

If she, a lowly academic instead of the actresses and socialites, even rated a footnote.

Again, none of that should come as a surprise. It was precisely what she’d signed up for.

But it was different now.

Maybe you’re what’s different now, a voice inside her suggested.

Later, he led her back to their room and she thought he would take her in a fury, the way he often did. Maybe she yearned for it.

That obliteration. That immolation.

But instead, when he stretched out over her, his gaze was intense and he kept it locked to hers.

And she found herself moving beneath him slowly. Deliberately.

Because that was what he gave her.

A slow, deep rending.

So there was no explosion, there was only this...deepening.

Until they both broke apart, together, and Bristol felt as if he’d scraped her soul raw.

Worse, that he’d meant to.

After, he held her tight against him and pushed her hair back from her face to look at her much too intently. She was afraid she knew what he could see written all over her, all too plain and obvious.

And unacceptable, given the papers she’d signed. The deal they’d made.

That hollow place inside her that only seemed to grow. All the parts of her he’d scraped raw tonight and every night.

All the things she couldn’t say to him.

He’s going to fire you, something in her warned.

And she couldn’t tell if she wanted that desperately or if the very idea made her want to cry.

Both, she acknowledged.

“Bristol,” Lachlan said. His voice was low and dark and so beautiful it hurt, and she promised herself she would remember that part. She would remember how beautiful he was and how he shined brighter than the Spanish summer outside, even at night. “I want to renegotiate terms.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

BY THE TIME they made it to Hong Kong, everybody knew Bristol’s name, as predicted. They not only knew it, they used it. She had to get a new phone with a private number and monitor who she gave it out to, because the old number had found its way into the hands of the tabloids. She had to suffer the indignity of “friends” she hadn’t spoken to since they’d sat near each other in a high school class claim to be some kind of authority on who she was now.

Bristol no longer belonged to herself alone.

It was a remarkably strange and vulnerable feeling.

She learned quickly not to read comments sections on internet posts. And to avoid the carrion crows of Twitter like the plague.

But it was still disconcerting. Real friends and colleagues texted her, some in disbelief. Others in what seemed to her like not-so-concealed jealousy, or even condemnation.

Interesting postdoc you’re doing there, one of her fellow PhDs texted. He had shared that office with her for years and yet Bristol knew, from that alone, that he was exactly the kind of man who would never take her seriously again. Because now when he looked at her or thought about her, he’d be thinking about her having sex with a man far more rich and powerful than he’d ever be.

Once again, she felt lucky that she’d actually signed binding nondisclosure agreements. Because knowing she was legally barred from commenting on what was going on between her and Lachlan made it easy to avoid telling anyone anything, even by mistake. It was a useful weapon. It also made it easy to gauge people’s reactions to what little she said, and it was always illuminating.

Luckily enough for Bristol, it wasn’t very surprising. Because the truth was, the years she’d spent as a doctoral student had already distanced her from old, so-called friends. To say nothing of the years she’d spent studying to get into that doctoral program in the first place. She’d always been single-minded and devoted—some might say anal—and her preference for studying too much and following research notions