Page 25 of The Pleasure Contract

“DIDYOUKNOWthat you’re on the front page of every single tabloid there is?” Indy asked one afternoon.

Bristol had spent yet another morning in the Spanish island paradise that was entirely too easy to forget wasn’t hers...at all. It was Lachlan’s and she was simply aggrandized staff—but that proved difficult to remember in the most beautiful place she’d ever seen.

The villa was a patchwork of different time periods and aesthetics, jumbled altogether in a way that was somehow charming. The island itself boasted a craggy coast with limestone cliffs on one end, and gleaming white sand coves on the other. There were palm trees and pines, what was once a citrus grove, almond and olive trees. The villa was surrounded by trellises awash in violet flowers, and the soft sunshine danced over everything, as if conducting the orchestra of birdsong on the sea breeze.

Every day was the same, so achingly beautiful it should have hurt her. But didn’t.

Lachlan’s version of a family vacation involved waking Bristol before dawn, no matter how much of the night they might have spent driving each other mad with desire. He drove into her with what she would have called desperation, had it been anyone else. It was always a silent cascade of overwhelming need, a blistering rush of sensation and passion.

She would be half-asleep and then he would be inside her, and her dreams seemed to focus only on him anyway, so the shift always felt like coming.

And then she was.

Bristol loved it.

He went off to conduct his business while she slept more and recovered, something Lachlan never seemed to need to do. She usually met up with him later in the morning, after he’d had a few rounds of business in different time zones. And aftershe’dwoken up, had fresh fruit out on the terrace with only the sea as company, and then sipped at coffee so strong and dark it made her feel like a superhero.

Sometimes she imagined she was one. Especially given the amount of sex she was currently having.

She often had more sex in a night than she’d had in the previous few years, combined.

Night after night.

Bristol loved that, too. She loved how her body felt. She loved what he did to it. She loved knowing that every need, every desire, would be explored—over and over. She loved how she felt settled into her bones and limbs in a new way, as if she was as ripe and as lush as she felt when his mouth was on her skin or his cock was deep inside her.

It couldn’t be more different from her old life, which had been all about her brain and never about her body. It might as well have been night and day.

Sometimes Lachlan talked to her, always about his work. Only rarely about his sister and her family, but then, they all gathered together in the evenings for communal dinners and the polite sort of conversation that Bristol would have found difficult, had this not been a job.

Had this been a real relationship, the hollowness she sometimes felt inside might have consumed her whole.

It was better to concentrate on the flowers, the trees. The calls of the birds and the ocean breeze.

She was free from all the emotional clutter of real relationships, and that was a good thing. She could enjoy whatever Lachlan did, because none of it mattered. Their arrangement was temporary, summer could only last so long, and so she didn’t need to worry if it was setting a precedent that, should she ask him why he seemed so distant when his sister spoke of family things, he replied by changing the subject.

A real girlfriend might object, but that wasn’t Bristol’s job.

She wasn’t here to get closer to him, or get to know his sister, or do anything at all but exist in the role he’d carved out for her. Sex and conversation, one dark and deep, the other light and easy.

You can be easy, too,she liked to tell herself when she floated in the calm water of her favorite cove.You have these few, sweet months to let someone else do the thinking.

As a holiday for her brain, she couldn’t think of anything better.

And as the days passed, Lachlan talked to her less and less when he came to find her in the bright light of another perfect Spanish morning. He preferred to pull her over his lap and move inside her again and again, letting her arch back into all that endless blue.

That didn’t matter either.

If that was what he wanted, that was what she gave.

But somehow, today, the idea of this odd, breathless vacation from reality making it into the tabloids made it all feel less like a job and more like...a problem.

One she ought to have been solving, surely.

“What you mean byeverytabloid?” she asked Indy. “I’m not comfortable withonetabloid.”

“Then I have some bad news for you,” her sister replied.

Bristol scowled at her phone. Indy liked to call and check on her older sister when she woke up. And since she’d decided New York was boring without Bristol about a week after Bristol had left, she was currently oversleeping in Europe.