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

drink she’d ordered from the bar on her way in. This was what happened when it turned out she might have leaned too far into that separation between emotion and action that had given her comfort, at first.

She’d thought she could hide there and unpack it all later.

Bristol suspected she’d made a terrible mistake, but the only way to fix it was to leave.

And it was already July. She had so little time left with Lachlan as it was.

She thought of the tides again, the changing of the guard, her inevitable replacements. The ebb and flow of it all. The stack of contracts she’d signed, almost merrily, in what seemed like a different life.

When she’d thought she could...just have a lot of sex with a beautiful man for a little while.

Because wasn’t that what people did?

Why had she thought she could be like other people when she never had been before?

You’re fine, she told herself, while outside the window, the falling dark was cut through by neon light shows all around. You have a week off when you get back to the States and then it will be August. Why are you acting like this is a hardship?

If it was so onerous, she’d told herself as she’d gotten ready tonight, she could always stop doing it. She and Lachlan had agreed on the summer, but she could walk away anytime she liked. As could he.

She could walk away right now and find her own way back to New York.

But she didn’t move. Bristol knew that no matter what she told herself—no matter the hollowness that expanded inside her, wrecking her more and more by the day—she wasn’t ready to go.

Sometimes she worried that even when September came, she still wouldn’t be ready.

She sensed movement at her shoulder and knew that it was Lachlan even before she lifted her gaze to find him standing there. He was looking down at her in the way he always did now. His mouth grave. His gaze intense.

As if that hollow feeling wasn’t truly hollow after all, but overfull. And both of them were stuck right there in the middle of it.

“Are you ready?” he asked, his voice that low rumble she thought she would dream about, later. When she slept alone again. When it was cold outside and she had nothing but memories to heat her up. “There’s no particular rush. We’re not expected for at least an hour.”

He stood too close to her at that table, so it seemed as if there was a wall of him on one side and nothing but a freefall into Hong Kong’s epic commotion on the other.

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