Page 23 of The Pleasure Contract

“No one’s the marrying kind until they marry,” Catriona replied serenely. “I think you’ll find that’s pretty universal.”

This was his sister, his favorite human on the planet, so Lachlan couldn’t end the conversation the way he would have if it was anyone else. He stayed where he was, in her favorite room of this old, rambling villa, filled with pictures of their family. From their fierce grandmother right down to their father as a bright, happy-looking boy in the sunlight.

A far cry from who he’d become.

Catriona followed his gaze and sighed.

“Your trouble is, you insist on imagining that he was a monster.” She shook her head. At Lachlan. “When the truth is that he was only a man. Like all men, he made choices. You can make choices, too, Lachlan. Different ones.”

But Lachlan already had.

As far as the world was concerned, Alister and Annalisa Drummond had been unfortunate victims of a freak accident. Alister had gotten his pilot’s license in his twenties and had flown from New York City to one of the family’s preferred hideaways by the sea in Maine without incident hundreds of times. But that day a sudden storm had cropped up off the coast of Boston, the plane had gone down, and their bodies had never been found.

The public take on the accident was that the storm was to blame. It was a terrible tragedy, but what could have been done? Even a Drummond couldn’t beat the weather, they’d said.

But Lachlan and Catriona knew better. They’d known the truth behind the placid exterior their parents liked to show to the world. He could remember, too clearly, the shouting and the drinking. Annalisa got sloppy. Alister got cruel.

Together, there was nothing they wouldn’t destroy—especially each other.

Lachlan couldn’t quite believe that his father had truly lost control of that plane. Not by accident, anyway.

He and Catriona had always believed that the crash hadn’t been an accident, but their parents’ usual game of one-upmanship taken to its logical, horrible conclusion.

It was one more reason the two of them were so close. They were the only ones left, sure—but they were also the only ones who knew.

“But what makes a man into a monster?” he asked his sister lightly, now. “I have a pretty good idea. They were toxic for each other and should have kept their distance. We wouldn’t exist, but I bet they would.”

“You always say that,” Catriona replied with another sigh. “Yet I’ve managed to love Ben quite happily and without incident for the past ten years. There’s no curse. There’s no secret Drummond gene that turns on and makes me act like either one of them, no matter how much wine I’ve had. Those were choices they made, Lachlan.”

“Ben isn’t a Drummond,” was all Lachlan said in reply. “Momwasn’t flying that plane.”

The way he always did.

Catriona only looked at him as if he was breaking her heart. He thought she practiced it in the mirror before they saw each other. And he didn’t know what she might have said then, but he was saved from having to hear it when her children came roaring in, in either high-pitched glee or murder.

While his sister sorted them out, Lachlan slipped away.

He walked through the villa, feeling the press of his family and his history on all sides. Even in the desperately chic, off-puttingly modern parts of the house, because he knew whose fingerprints were all over each room.

He’d spent so much of his childhood here. But his grandparents had both been alive then, meaning his parents had been forced to behave when they visited, at least some of the time. He had spent idyllic days in the sun, but come nightfall when the family was all together and his parents put on their act, all he’d ever seen were the lies beneath.

Lachlan didn’t know if he loved this island or hated it.

By the time he made it down the long hallway to the wing he thought of as his these days, sleek and modern and scrubbed free of ghosts, there was a kind of agitation inside him. It beat at him, bright and hard.

It was nothing as simple as lust, but he called it lust all the same.

He found Bristol outside, clinging to the edge of the eternity pool. Her hair was wet and slicked back, and her gaze was trained on the horizon.

Lachlan didn’t speak. He didn’t know what he would say, or how.

Not when that drum in him beat like that. Jarring. Impossible.

Too much history and too much truth and he should never have let this woman come here.

She must have heard him approach, though he thought he’d been silent. Still, she turned, and he thought the sight of her slick, wet skin and the bikini halter top tied around her neck might be the undoing of him.

“Do you—” she began, but stopped.