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

was five-seven or so in her bare feet. The two-inch heels she was wearing put her chin on level with his chest, and looking down at her was no hardship. He still couldn’t get over that face of hers. As if she’d been built to be wicked but had decided to be studious instead. It stirred him up.

She stirred him up.

Even when she frowned at him as if she was trying to bring him into focus.

Or maybe as if she was processing that same electrical charge.

“Dr. March,” he murmured. “A pleasure to meet you in person.”

He could feel it as she started to release her grip, so he held on. Just for a moment. A breath. Just to keep that electricity pumping, if only for a little longer.

And he liked it when he saw her eyes dilate.

It was a good start. Especially when she flushed slightly.

“Once again, I don’t know why I’m here,” she announced, forthright and to the point. “I walked out of that interview, which is the kindest description I can think of for it, for a reason. The reason hasn’t changed.”

“Is the reason that you find me disgusting? Actively repellent?”

“You, personally? I couldn’t say. That bizarre spectacle, on the other hand...”

Again, she surprised him. Lachlan wasn’t used to that. And he certainly wouldn’t have imagined that, having managed it once, she would do it again. Or...repeatedly.

“You’re here for dinner,” he told her. “That’s all. It’s not a panel or any kind of audition. It’s just dinner.” He laughed when she only studied him, clearly unconvinced. “This is currently the most sought-after restaurant reservation in New York City. If nothing else, surely we can enjoy the experience of one of the world’s most avant-garde chefs. It’s widely held to be spectacular.”

He released her hand, aware that he didn’t want to, and that, like everything else, was new. And all her. Then he nodded at the hovering hostess to seat them at last. Walking behind Bristol, they were led to the table he’d requested. It sat on the second-floor balcony far from any other patrons, looking out over the restaurant, yet private.

So they might be seen by anyone in the restaurant, with its zero-tolerance policy for cell phone usage in a place that catered to so many celebrities, but would not be heard.

Lachlan enjoyed the view as they walked. Unlike the other women he’d dated, Bristol wasn’t putting on a performance. She charged after the hostess in much the same way she’d entered the restaurant, as if she had a great many important things to do. And clearly, nowhere on that to-do list did it occur to her to vamp it up for the man who was trailing behind her.

Notably unlike the hostess, who he had seen walk crisply all over the floor of this restaurant without treating anyone to the metronome-hip action he could see before him now as she climbed the steel stairs to the second floor. It was certainly impressive, but all Lachlan was interested in tonight was the good doctor.

At the table, Bristol waved off the waiting server’s offer to pull out her chair and sat herself down as briskly and matter-of-factly as she’d done everything else so far. She folded her hands on the table and gazed at him when he sat opposite her, and there wasn’t a trace of anything even remotely seductive about the way she studied him.

If he didn’t know better, he might have been tempted to imagine that she was the one who had invited him here. To study him. And not in a particularly flattering fashion, but as a part of her research.

“Explain to me why you do this,” she said the moment the server walked away. Not waiting for him to lead their conversation. Not seeming particularly concerned with him at all, really. It was novel. “You’re Lachlan Drummond. You were famous before you were born. Surely you can get a date without convening a panel.”

He laughed as if winded when really, he was amused. “You seem singularly unimpressed with me.”

“I had no plans to come tonight,” she said, and it took him a moment to realize she was agreeing with him. “I talked myself out of it, repeatedly. But then my curiosity got the best of me, so here I am. After all, I’ve seen you on magazine covers and in all the papers for as long as I can remember, and that’s without ever seeking you out.”

“Perish the thought.”

She looked as if his dry tone surprised her, which shouldn’t have felt like both a rebuke and a caress. “Surely all you have to do is set foot in the street and thousands of women will flock to your side and clamor for your attention. It’s not a Broadway play, so why the audition process?”

“It’s more like a Broadway play than you might imagine.” But maybe this wasn’t the time to go over his list of strict requirements. The public events that he had to attend and the private shows he preferred to enjoy without having to worry about tending to the demands people in regular relationships inevitably had. “I’ve found, over time, that any woman I might meet organically comes with an emotional tax.”

It was her turn to sound dry. “This already sounds healthy.”

Lachlan sat back in his seat, studying her. If this was an act she was putting on, he couldn’t see it and by this point in his life, he could read people all too well. Bristol March was demanding he account for himself, and if he wasn’t mistaken, she actually wanted to know the answer.

She’d come for those answers, not for him.

It was a measure of how fucked up he was, clearly, that even that turned him on.

“It depends how you define healthy,” he said.

“The usual way.” She smiled faintly. “That would probably not involve panels of underlings in a creepy town house.”

“The creepy town house is actually an eighteenth-century brownstone that happens to be on the National Register of Historic Places. As