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

blue shutters against the clapboard white outside, the wide front porch festooned with her mother’s latest planting experiments.

Bristol pulled up out front and got out, breathing in deep. She walked toward the front door, marveling at all the summer sounds around her. At the scent of her mother’s flowers, which she’d somehow forgotten bloomed so riotously this time of year, making not just the porch but the whole front lawn a pageant of bright colors.

It made her wonder if this was why she had amnesia every year and imagined that she could grow things when she couldn’t.

She wasn’t at all surprised when the front screen was thrown open wide, and then her mother was there.

In all her state.

“Bristol! Is it really you? Or am I having a stroke?”

“Well, I really hope you’re not having a stroke, Mom,” Bristol said, grinning despite herself. “That would be very upsetting.”

Margie March was a literal ball of energy. She was round and bouncy and in all her days, Bristol had never met a single soul who didn’t adore her. As a sulky preteen, Bristol had found that annoying. As she’d gotten older, however, she’d come to depend on her mother’s ability to light up every room she entered. Even on a summer afternoon, her smile was brighter.

At Christmastime, Margie transformed herself into Santa’s most dedicated elf—the day after Thanksgiving. Literally every moment of the time Bristol and Indy spent here each year was crammed full of what Margie considered unmissable holiday activities.

To be clear, Margie considered all holiday activities unmissable.

But the fact that it wasn’t the holidays today didn’t slow Margie down any. She charged down the steps, swooping Bristol into a huge hug and enveloping her the way only she could. And would, Bristol knew, hold her until she was satisfied that her child was in one piece.

And not just in one piece, but a piece she approved of.

“I know it’s the fashion in New York City, but you and your sister are far too skinny,” she was already declaring, as if the red oaks were conferring with her. “At least you’re not always on this or that bizarre diet the way Indy always is.”

“Mom. You know she just makes up random diets to drive you crazy. I’ve never seen her actually go on one.”

But there was no getting a word in edgewise. Not at first. When the hug ended, Margie was marching her up the steps, then bustling her inside, depositing her in the very same place she’d always sat at the kitchen table.

“I know what will make you feel better,” Margie said then.

“I feel fine.”

Margie didn’t appear to hear that. She busied herself cutting Bristol a huge helping of the berry crumble she’d clearly made earlier today and fixing one for herself, too. With huge dollops of homemade whipped cream, because ice cream was saved for the evening.

Bristol had missed that, too. Crumbles and handpicked berries and Margie’s belief that dessert was neither a sin nor an indulgence, but good, solid, Midwest medicine.

“Now,” she said after Bristol had taken her first big bite and drifted off into a cinnamon-sugar-berry coma. Of sheer delight. “Tell me what the matter is.”

Bristol pulled herself back from the bliss of her mother’s crumble with great reluctance. “What makes you think there’s something wrong?”

Margie laughed. “I may be a simple woman, Bristol, but I know my own child. It would have to be the end of the world for you to come home of your own volition. So. Tell me what world ended.”

“You make it sound like I hate it here,” Bristol said, frowning. When she would have proclaimed that she did, in fact, hate Ohio and all its works a mere twenty-four hours ago. Even twelve hours ago. “Or that I hate you. When really, it’s just that—”

“Bristol.” And would her name in that tone ever not make her shut her mouth? And sit up a little straighter? She hoped not. Margie was eyeing her with that particular Mom glint in her gaze. “It’s not your job to make me feel secure. I’ve got that covered, thank you. I know who I am. But I also know who you are. And I would love nothing more than to feed you crumble and fatten you up until the cows come home, but since the day you left for college you’ve never turned up on the front porch out of the blue. As much as I love seeing you, we both know you would never decide to come here on the spur of a moment without a reason.”

And to her great astonishment, Bristol felt that hollow cache inside her, the one she’d thought she had such a great handle on, begin to swell. It grew bigger and bigger, and more precarious as it grew, until she thought, oh no—

But then there was nothing to be done about it. It was happening. She broke down, right there at her mother’s table, and sobbed.

For a long, long time.

Until even the crumble tasted a bit soggy when she finally ate her share.

She and her mother moved out to the backyard that rambled this way and that until it ended up in the woods. They settled down in the shade of the biggest, most majestic of the old oak trees where, Bristol could remember so clearly now, she’d spent many a long, lazy summer’s day peering up at the branches thick with leaves and had tried to imagine who she would be when she grew up.

Was that where it had started?

What made you how you are? Lachlan had asked.

“I guess you probably know that I’ve been...dating someone,” Bristol said awkwardly.

Eventually.

“No, honey,” Margie murmured, her gaze up in the branches, too. “Living in Ohio is actually a kind of fugue state in which tabloids don’t exist and no one ever calls to say they’ve seen my daughter plastered all over them.”

“Ouch.”

Margie only smiled serenely. Until that moment, Bristol hadn’t realized where she’d gotten her version of that same smile.

It was amazing the