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

their focus was only and ever on each other. They fought like it was to the death every time, and one day, it was.”

“Lachlan. I’m so sorry.”

His gaze moved over her face. “You didn’t do it. They did.”

“Is that what drives you?” she asked. “Losing them?”

“Not losing them.” He ran a hand over his lean jaw. “Living with them. I guess you could say that after they died, that left me with a whole lot to prove. Mostly that no matter what, I wasn’t going to turn into the same kind of monster. You asked me once if I was a kind billionaire.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“My father certainly wasn’t. And I try, in every way I can, to be nothing like him. Starting with the fact that I’m not actually a billionaire any longer, because most years I give away too much money to maintain that status.”

Bristol’s heart was beating too fast. She could feel it thundering in her chest and pulsing through her. As if she was running up a long set of stairs. As if Lachlan was deep inside her.

As if she was afraid.

Or alive, something in her whispered. At last.

“Why are you so driven, then?” he asked again. “What did you have to prove if your life was so bland?”

And her heart didn’t slow, but she fell anyway. Not out the window to the busy streets so far below, but into his steady gaze.

Maybe she’d always been falling and only realized it now.

And the realization was like the hard thud of landing, and the impact reverberated through her, making it impossible to do anything but tell him the truth.

“I wanted to make sure they saw me,” she whispered.

Her hair was tied back in a knot tonight, but a tendril fell forward on her cheek. Slowly, intently, Lachlan drew it back and tucked it behind her ear.

It made her shudder.

“Who?” he asked, hardly making a sound.

But she heard him.

And somehow, Bristol smiled, an ache made real. Right there on her face. “Everyone.”

The next morning, she woke up naked and alone in the huge bed that took up the better part of yet another astonishingly vast bedroom. She was sure she would find Lachlan’s fingerprints all over her but was disappointed when she looked in the nearest mirror and saw nothing.

Nothing to mark how he had held her through the night, how he had made her cry and beg.

Over and over again, until the sky behind all that light and neon began to brighten.

The man needed no sleep, as far as she could tell. She’d always thought that she was tenacious and determined, but Lachlan was a breed apart.

Especially when he was clearly trying to show her why she should let him in.

By stripping her raw. By making her sob.

Until it felt as if she was incomplete when he wasn’t buried deep inside her.

As if she might never be whole again.

When her phone chimed she knew it was her sister, and ignored it. She didn’t think she had it in her to talk—because once she started, she wasn’t sure she would stop.

But when it beeped again, indicating a message, she swiped it up from the table where she’d left it.

Romantic, Indy had texted.

And the picture she’d sent along with her text made everything in Bristol go still.

Too still.

How had she not seen a photographer in that bar last night? But she knew the answer to that. She’d been completely swept up in Lachlan. Completely consumed.

The picture was of Lachlan tugging that dark lock of her hair back from her face and securing it at her ear. She almost couldn’t bear to look at the image, but she couldn’t bring herself to look away.

It was too tender. Too raw.

The look on Lachlan’s face was almost too intense. And the look on her face...

Bristol looked like a woman in love.

And if that wasn’t the kiss of death in this situation, she didn’t know what was.

She heard herself make a small, broken sound and she tossed the phone aside, but how could that help? If Indy had seen that picture, so had the world. So would he.

Her heart was beating again, too fast. Too jarring.

Lachlan wanted her to let him in, but she knew better than to let him. She wasn’t protecting herself because it was her job to maintain her distance. She was doing it because she was afraid.

She would fall in love, and much too easily. Maybe she already had.

Heedlessly. Hopelessly.

Bristol already knew the symptoms. She’d felt the same way about her research, her dissertation, and she didn’t love anything by half. She threw herself in deep, losing herself completely. She disappeared into the grip of it.

That was what she was good at, loving like that, to the exclusion of all else.

But she already knew it would end the same way.

Maybe not badly, but inevitably. She would be left empty. All that focus, all that dedication, and all she would become was a footnote to a scandalous article about his next purchased girlfriend.

Last night he had held her beneath him as he’d driven them both crazy. He’d kept her on the edge as he held her face between his hands and whispered the same thing again and again.

What do you want? he’d gritted out, rough and raw. What do you want, Bristol?

And now she knew.

All she wanted was the one thing she couldn’t have. Not for the world to see her. It turned out, she didn’t like that at all.

What Bristol wanted was for Lachlan to see her, really and truly. She wanted to give him everything he’d asked for and more.

And then not just see her.

But let her stay.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THEY RETURNED TO New York on a muggy summer’s day near the end of July, swollen with the threat of a thunderstorm that couldn’t quite bring itself to break. A lot like the weather they’d left behind in Hong Kong, in fact, as if they were personally delivering oppressive, gray summers around the world.

It suited Lachlan’s mood perfectly.

“I have you