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

Lachlan hated that darkness in him. He hated what it told him, what truths it laid bare. “I already know what I’m capable of—what I could be capable of. We’ve seen it play out right in front of us.”

Catriona only shook her head, as if he made her sad. “If you only let fear talk, baby brother, fear is all you’ll ever hear. Soon enough, it’s all you’ll have. And at that point, you might as well have gone down with them.”

“Jesus Christ, Catriona.”

But all his older sister did was smile at him then, as if all this was worth it. As if it was heading somewhere.

“I have a better idea, Lachlan,” she said softly. “Fear has taken up enough of your time. Try love.”

CHAPTER NINE

BRISTOL HAD MADE it her official policy over the years to return to her hometown in Ohio as seldom as possible.

She and Indy made an appearance over the holidays, of course, when both of their schedules—meaning, Bristol’s academic schedule and Indy’s utter lack of any schedule at all—allowed them to spend at least a week in their childhood home. The week was the baseline. Sometimes their mother got them to stay longer, but the week was nonnegotiable.

Bristol had always considered a week in frigid Amish country more than enough time back home.

So she couldn’t really understand why, when she woke up that first morning back in her Murphy bed in Brooklyn, she was seized with the urge—or, really, the sudden and all-encompassing need—to go home.

Maybe it was because it was the first feeling she’d had in a long while that she didn’t have to shove down and hide. No serene smile was necessary, there in her bed, staring up at the ceiling with its leftover telltale signs of water damage from years and tenants past. Whatever the reason, Bristol embraced it.

She flew back into Cincinnati, wedged into a middle seat at the very back of the overcrowded commercial flight. It felt a whole lot like penance after the way she’d been traveling lately. No leather seats and gilded edges in the dregs of economy. She was lucky to get a minuscule bag of stale pretzels and her elbows ached after a quiet, vicious fight with her neighbor over the armrest.

At least I won, she thought darkly.

And chose not to think about why that felt like a far larger victory than it was.

She rented a car at the airport once she landed, put on some music, and then drove out into the countryside on roads she would have said she hardly remembered.

But she didn’t have to look at a map. The southwestern Ohio landscape she remembered so well rolled out before her once she headed east out of Cincinnati. Green hills undulated in all directions from roads that gave her endless views of tidy farmhouses, red barns, and Amish buggies.

Maybe it was simply because her whole summer so far had been spent in cities. With the exception of her time on Lachlan’s private island, it had all been skyscrapers, the crowded electric beat of Hong Kong, the proud stone chic of Paris. After all her years in New York, Bristol had come to think of herself as a city person. She would have said she longed for the concrete canyons, the snarl of traffic, the exhilaration that was always an undercurrent in big, sprawling cities.

But for some reason, the sunshine drenching all the green hills in gold seemed to soothe her today.

She didn’t need a map to find her way to the small town she’d always stoutly hated when forced to live there. But when she arrived, she forced herself to slow down, look around, and ask herself why.

Why are you so driven? Lachlan had asked.

Bristol had thought she knew the answer, but it was impossible not to think that there was a clue here. In this place that had made her who she was, whether she liked to admit that or not. Much as she liked to pretend she’d sprung forth, fully formed at eighteen when she’d relocated to New York, it wasn’t true.

She’d had to decide to leave this quiet little town, then make it happen. She’d had to commit to hard work to leave it in the way she wanted. And while she couldn’t remember what had started those particular dominoes toppling, there was no getting around the fact the push had come from right here in Ohio. New York was the result, not the impetus.

And as she drove into town, Bristol found she couldn’t quite remember why she hated this place so much.

She also couldn’t remember the last time she’d been home in the summertime. All the green, the bright and happy flowers, the sunshine. She rolled down her windows and breathed in deep as the afternoon heat washed over her. She heard cicadas and crickets, lawnmowers and birds. It was so different from the intense chill of her Decembers here, all barren trees and stark storefronts. There was a lushness here today. A deep sweetness.

And to her astonishment, Bristol found herself feeling something like...nostalgic.

Her childhood home looked just as she remembered it, tucked away at the end of a dead-end street on the far side of town. As she drove toward it, she realized, with a little jolt that felt like recognition, that here on a bright July afternoon the house she’d grown up in looked the way she remembered it from her childhood.

Instead of the picture she’d superimposed over it since. The dreary, high snowbanks and barren trees like desolate exclamation points, marking the life she didn’t want.

Today she drove more slowly and found that she remembered every inch of this quiet road. She’d learned to ride a bike right here. She and Indy had played elaborate games of pretend and battle in and out of the trees that lined the way. Her parents’ house stood as it always had at the end, the cheerful