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

No matter how many times he tried to renegotiate, Lachlan only saw her as a clause. A business item to be handled—or replaced.

It turned out that she found the reality of that less comforting the more intense things grew between them. Or in her, anyway. Less of a lovely, soothing tide.

More of a scary riptide, hauling her out to sea.

And leaving her there to drown.

Her mother shifted next to her, and Bristol looked over. At the face she knew better than her own and that solid hand on her leg, marked with the lines and dents and years that Bristol imagined would score her own hands one day. Holding her steady, always.

That was what Margie did.

“Lachlan isn’t the guy, Mom,” she said softly, and was surprised how hard it was to say out loud. When she’d known that all along. “He’s only temporary.”

She expected an argument from the woman who had never been averse to a little matchmaking in her day, between elderly widowed neighbors and some of the high school students who found themselves in the principal’s office too often.

But all Margie did was smile.

Bristol spent the rest of her week off from all things Lachlan back home in Ohio and shocked herself by loving every moment of it. She stuffed herself with all of her mother’s cooking. She went fishing with her dad in the long, slow, mellow evenings down by the river. She got her feet dirty and she jumped off the old rope swing into the pond out in the woods. She let the sun make her a little crispy, she ate entirely too much hearty food, and she reconnected to the simple joys she’d long since cast aside in her pursuit of bigger and better.

When she got back to Brooklyn, she felt as if she’d taken the first real vacation she’d had in... Well, maybe since the last summer she’d spent in Ohio before she’d gone off to college.

The flight east had been crowded and delayed thanks to thunderstorms in the Midwest. By the time she landed, Bristol was heartily sick of the jeans and T-shirt she’d worn to fly in. Not to mention, it was not exactly the best choice for traipsing all over the city.

Though it did allow her to continue to feel as incognito as she had in her parents’ backyard and the woods. No one was looking for Lachlan Drummond’s latest girlfriend there. Or out wandering the New York streets, disheveled and anonymous.

They were looking for the elegant academic, as one tabloid had called her. Not an anonymous Brooklyn-bound girl in dirty, ripped jeans and a sunburned nose.

Bristol had been half-afraid that when she made it home, New York would seem as ill-fitting as everything else did these days. But instead, she felt that same rush of exhilaration she had when she’d first come here. The energy of the city, chaos and noise and soaring heights. The rush of it, the mix of drama and practicality on every street corner, in every outfit the locals wore to walk the streets, live in them, and flourish here.

And she could admit that she felt a rush of relief at that. She’d been unexpectedly moved to rediscover the place she came from—but that didn’t mean she wanted to pack up and go live there.

You’ve always been ambitious, her mother had said.

And even on its worst and hardest day, New York City felt like an ambition realized.

Bristol rounded the corner of her block, vaguely wondering how it was that she could feel so content when she’d solved precisely nothing. But maybe that was what she’d learned. Life didn’t need to be solved. All she had to do was live it.

It’s time to live, not hide, she told herself. At last.

And maybe it was inevitable, then, that when she made it to the door of her walkup, she heard a car door open behind her, then slam shut. Something about the sound made her turn, and like magic, he was there.

As if she’d conjured him up, the way she had night after night tucked up in her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house.

But this time, he was real.

Lachlan Drummond. The man she knew so well and didn’t know at all.

And if she wasn’t mistaken, he was in a temper.

She was surprised to find her own—so long shoved aside and buried beneath research or sedate smiles—surge to life.

“Lachlan.” She ordered herself to hold on to the mellow, happy feeling that a little taste of her long-forgotten childhood summers had brought out in her. Not to jump straight into the conclusions she’d reached after her week at her parents’ house. A week of remembering who she’d been long before she’d decided to become Dr. March. A week of reconnecting with the real Bristol, not the persona she’d apparently created to spite Indy. A week where she’d been a whole lot more than this man’s clause. “I wasn’t expecting to see you until tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, when she’d intended to put an end to this.

Before it swallowed her whole.

Lachlan took the distance between his car, parked illegally at the curb, and her front door like a challenge, moving fast and low.

And the look in his blue eyes made her breath catch.

The way it always did, but this was worse. This was something much different than drowning.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.

CHAPTER TEN

IT HAD BEEN a very long week.

Lachlan had been forced to face some things about himself that he couldn’t say he liked. He was not accustomed to being kept waiting. He had driven down from Vermont the following day in a self-congratulatory haze of purpose and determination, at last, and had gone straight to Bristol’s apartment to tell her all about it.

But she was nowhere to be found.

He’d tried both of the phone numbers he had for her, repeatedly, but they always went straight to voice mail. Until he was forced to conclude that