Page 26 of The Pleasure Contract
She was also maddeningly vague about where, exactly, in Europe she happened to be.
And because Bristol knew Indy desperately wanted her to ask, she didn’t.
“You know you have a little something called the internet at your disposal, Bristol,” Indy was saying now, with so much laughter in her voice that Bristol could practicallyseeher accompanying eye roll. “You can access this exciting new invention with the newfangled handheld computer you’re using to talk to me, in a totally different country,right now.”
“I access the internet all the time, asshole,” Bristol replied. “And yet, oddly enough, it’s not the tabloid newspapers I look for when I do.”
“Well, good news, then,” Indy said brightly. “You look amazing. What else matters?”
Bristol could think of a great many things that mattered, but she had to pretend she wasn’t interested for the rest of the call. For reasons. But the moment Indy hung up—after making airy comments about where she was that managed to sound detailed without actually imparting any information—she went looking.
And sure enough, there she was.
It was the same picture on a number of tabloid covers, from one of the balls they’d been to during that first, long cycle through the capitals of Europe. Paris, she thought, if she remembered the progression of her formal dresses correctly. It was a lovely picture of the sweeping fairy tale of a dress, which she recalled had been surprisingly comfortable for a garment so fussy that it had taken two other people to get her into it.
But she wasn’t named.
Lachlan Drummond andhis latest date, as one tabloid identified her. There were severalfemale friends. And a fewunnamed companions. All featured several gushing, pseudo-journalistic paragraphs about Lachlan’s philanthropic contributions to the world before segueing to several far more salacious paragraphs about all the other women he’d been seen with before Bristol.
The wordLothariowas used. Unironically.
And Bristol congratulated herself on being his employee, not his actual girlfriend, because as an employee she had no grounds whatsoever to feel...anything.
Accordingly, she assured herself that she felt nothing at all.
She felt so much nothing, in fact, that she couldn’t sit still. The open, airy terrace suddenly felt too close. Too claustrophobic. She found herself charging away from the villa for a nice long walk through the old citrus groves, down to the far cliffs and back.
Not to clear her head, which would suggest that there was some clutter in there. Which there couldn’t be, because this wasn’t a relationship. She wasn’tinvolvedwith Lachlan in that way and no matter what the tabloids said, neither were any of those other women.
“I’m outside to be outside,” she chanted to herself as she walked. “I’m out here to breathe deeply, that’s all.”
But she admitted to herself on the walk back that maybe, just maybe, she didn’t know what she was doing. She saw Lachlan’s sister and her oldest child from a distance and ducked back into the olive trees, pretending she wanted solitude. When what she really wanted was to avoid Catriona, with her too-direct gaze and casually incisive questions that Bristol couldn’t answer.
Not the way she would have answered them if this was real.
What she did know was that she was sweating a little while she marched around the island and hid behind olive trees. And more, there was a great big ball ofmessinside her, no matter how she tried to pretend there wasn’t.
There was nothing to do about any of it but keep walking.
She’d lapped the whole island twice by the time she could finally breathe normally again. At which point it was easy enough to find her practiced smile and make her way back into the villa. And right back into her role.
The one she’d agreed to play. Legally.
“Where have you been, Bristol?”
Lachlan’s voice came out of nowhere when she stepped through the ancient gate, strewn with morning glories and buzzing with cheerful bees. It made her...not quite jump, though her pulse instantly kicked into high gear. She blinked against the brightness as she looked around, eventually finding him standing in one of the wide-open arched doorways that allowed each room in the villa to flow into the next, then straight on into the sea and sky.
“I didn’t see you there,” Bristol said, and didn’t give in to the urge to put her hand against her belly. She didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that her own skin no longer seemed to fit. That she was buzzing and hollowed out and the only thing left was that samewant.
Always thatwant, like a fire in her blood.
Sometimes when she looked at him, all she could think was that she’d let her pussy take her over. All she could do was melt, and moan, and saymore.
It didn’t help that he was even more beautiful and sensually formidable in casual clothes. Surely it should have diminished him not to be prowling around in his desperately chic corporate suits, too Wall Street to breathe. He should have looked like any random guy in his clearly very old and worn cargo shorts, a T-shirt with an obscure band on the front, and bare feet.
He did not.
His blue gaze was shadowed, but the light caught at his dark blond hair and made him gleam like gold. The rest of him was a pageant of wide shoulders, that ripped abdomen, and his narrow hips. Even his legs made her feel like swooning, when Bristol didn’t think she’d ever noticed amale legbefore in her life.