Page 32 of The Pleasure Contract
“There’s no chance of that,” she said quietly, forcing herself not to clear her throat. Because it would be much too telling. “I suspect you’ll have your job for a long time to come.”
And she made herself sit there for the rest of the ride across the city, imagining all the future women who would be sitting right where she was. It wasn’t torture—on the contrary, she found it soothing. They would come and go like the tide. They would take up space beside her in the lower paragraphs of those tabloid articles while above, the new girlfriends would wear lovely dresses in Paris, one after the next. And she would look back on this one, long, impetuous and out-of-character summer from the safety of her ivy tower and smile.
She hoped that no matter what happened, she would smile.
Later, as the breathlessly humid day edged toward a thick, hot evening, she waited for Lachlan in the bar of the hotel where they were staying. It was a quiet place, dark and inviting, but she didn’t choose one of the booths. She went instead to the dizzying sweep of windows, all offering astonishing views of the city, and found a high table there.
She almost felt as if she, too, was plump with neon and light and bursting at the seams with all the commotion far below.
The outfit that Stephanie had chosen for her tonight—and that Bristol had decided to actually wear, only partly because she thought she ought to extend an olive branch to the woman who was, like her, just doing her job—was the kind of pantsuit she’d seen famous women wear with ease and flair, but had never attempted herself. Because she’d never understood how they made what she took to be a rather dowdy bit of work attire into elegance in the first place.
Now she knew. Everything was different when it came from instantly recognizable fashion houses and was furthermore tailored to her precise measurements. And then paired with shoes that might as well have been works of art. Shoes so high they should have hurt her feet, but that, too, was apparently only a concern at her usual price points.
She’d seen her reflection in the elevator when it had hurtled down from another opulent penthouse suite and had thought she might as well have been a stranger.
This was what came of playing games with sex, she acknowledged now, smiling faintly when the waiter brought her the drink she’d ordered from the bar on her way in. This was what happened when it turned out she might have leaned too far into that separation between emotion and action that had given her comfort, at first.
She’d thought she could hide there and unpack it all later.
Bristol suspected she’d made a terrible mistake, but the only way to fix it was to leave.
And it was already July. She had so little time left with Lachlan as it was.
She thought of the tides again, the changing of the guard, her inevitable replacements. The ebb and flow of it all. The stack of contracts she’d signed, almost merrily, in what seemed like a different life.
When she’d thought she could...just have a lot of sex with a beautiful man for a little while.
Because wasn’t that what people did?
Why had she thought she could be like other people when she never had been before?
You’re fine,she told herself, while outside the window, the falling dark was cut through by neon light shows all around.You have a week off when you get back to the States and then it will be August. Why are you acting like this is a hardship?
If it was so onerous, she’d told herself as she’d gotten ready tonight, she could always stop doing it. She and Lachlan had agreed on the summer, but she could walk away anytime she liked. As could he.
She could walk away right now and find her own way back to New York.
But she didn’t move. Bristol knew that no matter what she told herself—no matter the hollowness that expanded inside her, wrecking her more and more by the day—she wasn’t ready to go.
Sometimes she worried that even when September came, she still wouldn’t be ready.
She sensed movement at her shoulder and knew that it was Lachlan even before she lifted her gaze to find him standing there. He was looking down at her in the way he always did now. His mouth grave. His gaze intense.
As if that hollow feeling wasn’t truly hollow after all, but overfull. And both of them were stuck right there in the middle of it.
“Are you ready?” he asked, his voice that low rumble she thought she would dream about, later. When she slept alone again. When it was cold outside and she had nothing but memories to heat her up. “There’s no particular rush. We’re not expected for at least an hour.”
He stood too close to her at that table, so it seemed as if there was a wall of him on one side and nothing but a freefall into Hong Kong’s epic commotion on the other.
Bristol couldn’t tell, as she gazed into those electric-blue eyes of his, if maybe she was flying after all.
“How did your meetings go?” she asked, because it only seemed polite. If a shade too domestic, maybe, for what was meant to be such a purely business arrangement.
But he didn’t answer. His hair was that dark blond that she never tired of running her fingers through. They itched to do it now. He was dressed in another one of those exquisite dark suits that seemed to draw attention to the fact that he was a physically powerful man, built to move mountains, not play around with theoretical money like so many of the people they met with at these functions.
Nothing about Lachlan was theoretical. He was all action.
And the way he was looking at her made everything inside herhum.