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

“Do you not know?” Margie’s gaze was as steady as her hand. “Or are you afraid that you do know?”

And it was so like her mother not to ask directly about Lachlan, Bristol thought then. Margie had employed the same strategy when Indy and Bristol were teenagers. She always seemed to know everything already and would simply gaze at them without asking until they dissolved before her, flinging out their troubles and sins and worries with careless abandon.

“I think my...dating situation is a symptom of a larger issue,” Bristol said carefully. Because yes, she’d signed agreements. But this was her mom. “And it’s bright and flashy and overwhelming, yes, but it’s not real. And it won’t last. Sooner or later, like it or not, I’m going to have to figure out what I want to do with my life.”

“Here’s the thing about life,” Margie said after a little pause. “You never do stop thinking that you need to figure it all out. You never arrive at an age or a moment and think, how wonderful, I’m finished now.”

“I don’t believe you.” Bristol heard her voice crack, but she was safely tucked away in her mother’s backyard in Ohio. It felt almost revolutionary to allow herself to do nothing at all to hide it. “You and Dad seem to have your lives all figured out. You’ve been running that high school from the secretary’s desk for as long as I can remember. And he legitimately loves being a salesman. I mean, I guess you’ll both retire soon—”

“Thank you, but we are in our fifties, Bristol. Not our seventies.”

Bristol grinned. “All I mean is that you’re happy. You’re both happy. Aren’t you?”

“Yes, but you would never be happy in a life like ours,” her mother said with such...casual conviction that it threw Bristol a little. Okay, more than a little. “Not the way we are. Your father and I have always been good at appreciating the things we have. And better still, we’ve liked that we get to sink down deep into those things, year after year. There’s a pleasure in a small life.”

“I don’t... I mean I want to be the kind of person who appreciates what she has, and practices gratitude, and sinks deep.”

“Why?” Margie’s voice was placid. “You’ve always been ambitious. I never was. I wanted...this. What I have. The boy who gave me my first Valentine, two little girls, this pretty house in the town where we both grew up. There’s nothing wrong with wanting something different. We can’t all be the same.”

“Sometimes I wish I was happy here,” Bristol confessed. She didn’t say, in a small life, but she suspected her mother knew she meant it. “It would have made things a whole lot easier.”

“But that’s not you.” Margie sighed a little, but in that way she often did, as if she couldn’t find the right words and was finished looking. “I don’t know what you’re going to choose to do with yourself, but I do know this. You will always work hard, because that’s who you are. And you’ll need whatever you’re working at to be meaningful to you, because that’s your heart.”

“Really? I thought you just told me that, actually, my heart is an angry, bitter ember. Plus earthquakes, and oh yeah, my entire academic life was aimed at Indy all along.”

“That’s the New Yorker in you talking,” Margie said. It wasn’t exactly a compliment. “Don’t forget, Bristol. I know your real heart.”

And they sat like that for a long while, while Bristol wondered if that was why it hurt so much. That her real heart had made itself known after these months of hiding. And the years of narrowly focused obsession that had come before. Her mother had somehow managed to strip all the layers away and get to that real heart with a serving of berry crumble and a trip to the backyard.

Leaving Bristol to try to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do with it, now that she could feel it beating too intensely inside her chest.

She’d been kidding herself about that hollow space. All the times she’d assured herself that she could sort it all out come fall had been like playing pretend with her sister up and down this dead-end road. She got that now.

“And not that I pay any attention to gossip, whether it’s my knitting circle or those awful newspapers in the checkout line,” Margie began with studied indifference.

Bristol snorted. “A bold lie from the woman half the county calls for information, Mom. Any and all information, because you gather it all.”

Margie ignored that. “But I’ve always felt that living in a small town gives a person all the attention anyone could ever need, since I haven’t walked through a grocery store without being recognized since the day I was born.” She flashed that sedate smile of hers again. “Then again, you always did have higher standards. It’s part of your charm.”

Bristol laughed, and couldn’t believe that her mother could make that happen so easily. Without even seeming to try.

She looked up at the branches spread out above her and all the green leaves. The sunshine that filtered through and the blue sky high above, filled with summer hope.

As if fall would never come.

When Bristol knew it would.

And more, that there was no point waiting around for a change of season when she already knew that this wasn’t a job she could do without losing herself. Maybe other women could—and had, as tough as that was to think about. Bristol supported anyone who could play that role and be good at it. Hell, she’d march in the street for them.

But the truth she’d been trying to push off to September was that she wasn’t them.

Her heart had gone hollow and she hated it.

Bristol wanted herself back, and she didn’t need her collection of degrees to know that she wasn’t going to find that loving a man who