Page 2 of The Pleasure Contract
“I’m glad you asked,” Indy said smugly. And there was a light in her eyes, then, that made Bristol frown. “There is. It’s not an agency so much as a panel of three of Lachlan’s personal assistants. They narrow down the applicants—and my friend tells me there are always way too many applicants—and then put the finalists through. Meaning, the finalists actually get to meet him.”
“This sounds like the kind of reality show I don’t watch.”
“You watch. You just pretend you don’t.” Indy rolled her eyes. “He’s looking for a very particular woman. She has to be beautiful, obviously, but she also has to be smart, because he doesn’t want to be bored. Or embarrassed when he’s out there chitchatting with kings and statesmen, like he does.”
“This woman sounds like quite the paragon,” Bristol muttered.
“She has to be able to travel with him and keep up with his crazy schedule. And she has to understand that while he doesn’t want a doormat, he makes the rules. All the rules. In bed and out.”
“Do you really expect me to believe that peopleapplyfor this?”
“A lot of people. All it takes for the first round is a few pictures and a résumé. They weed all that down before offering interviews with the panel. And then there’s even more weeding from there.”
Bristol started to feel okay about how overwhelming she’d found the very idea of dating or dating apps or setups or anything else lately. At least she didn’t have to resort topanelsorweedinglike poor Lachlan Drummond.
“Well,” Bristol said philosophically, “if anyone can not only meet that questionable list of requirements, but actually find them exciting, it’s you.”
Indy laughed again, this time so hard that the silky dark hair she’d piled on top of her head fell down around her shoulders. Looking gorgeous and deliberately tousled, naturally.
“I didn’t apply,” she said. She smiled innocently, which set off alarm bells immediately. Bristol scowled, but that only made Indy look moreholy. “But you did. I submitted your photos and résumé myself. You’re welcome.”
Bristol was outraged. Incandescent with it.
Because it was all well and good for Indy to waft through her life from party to party, sexual partner to sexual partner. Her sister had spent two years backpacking around Europe after college, had only returned after what she darkly called herone night in Budapest, not Bangkok, but it was humbling all the same, and liked to claim that her current lifestyle was basically still backpacking, but without the trouble of a pack.
Bristol admired her sister in many ways. Truly she did. But she’d taken an entirely different approach to life.
Their parents, Margie and Bill March—who still lived in the deeply boring Ohio town where they’d met, married, and raised their girls—had used up whatever spontaneity they possessed in naming their daughters. Though Indy liked to argue that a pair of Midwesterners naming a childIndianawas perhaps less an act of spontaneity than a cry of abiding sadness.
A comment their mother had never found amusing, no matter how many times Indy said it over the years.
Margie and Bill had not exactly approved of Indy’s quest to do as little as possible with herself and her life, though neither one of them was much for confrontation. Bill quietly sent a weekly clippings packet to his youngest daughter, filled with job listings from all over the country, which Indy called hispistols at dawn.
They did not send Bristol any clippings collections, but they’d never been entirely thrilled with her obsessive need for academic achievement, either.
They were supportive, but...befuddled, really, at this child of theirs with so much drive to achieve, achieve, achieve. They’d never stood in her way, but Bristol knew that if she’d woken up one morning and announced that she was tossing it all in to live in her hometown and find a nice guy to marry, they would have found that much more understandable. But Bristol had no intention of living like that. She wanted a life ofideas, not Ohio. She’d gotten her scholarship to the school of her choice, had gone straight on into her master’s, and had zipped through her PhD in record time. As if she had a race to win.
Now she had decisions to make. She’d been offered a postdoctoral position, which would be very prestigious and allow her to lean further into her research. Or she could pursue a position at one of the universities she’d been interviewing with.
For the first time in her life, the way forward wasn’t clear.
Bristol March had no idea what to do with herself.
Something she kept trying to think her way through, though for once,thinkingdidn’t seem to work. She’d finished up teaching the last of the classes that she was a teaching assistant for last week. Now there was nothing left but exam grading, and she’d long ago developed a system for that.
She was done and she didn’t want to be, but that didn’t make her any less done.
So when her phone rang a few days after Indy’s announcement in the cluttered office she shared with two other TAs in the social science building on campus, she didn’t do what she normally did—which was scowl at the offending call and switch it off. The office was empty, she still had no idea what to do with her life now that she couldn’t continue on being a student as she preferred, and the loud ring jolted her out of the same old circles she was tired of traipsing around, over and over, in her head.
“Ms. March?” came the smooth voice on the other end, with the hint of a British accent.
“Dr. March,” she corrected automatically, because she, by God, had earned her title.
“My apologies,” came the voice with no hint of any disruption in all that smoothness. “I’m calling on behalf of Lachlan Drummond. I’m pleased to tell you that your application has been accepted.”
Bristol had forgotten all about Lachlan Drummond and hispussy panel. Dismissed it, more like. Because it was ridiculous, and anyway, there was no possibility that a grubby, newly minted PhD would attract the attention of...a man like him, who routinely fended off the advances of gorgeous celebrities.
“I beg your pardon?” was all she could manage to get out, sounding squeaky and silly and not like herself at all.