Page 50 of The Pleasure Contract

“And bonus,” Indy said, as if she already knew. “You’re already home, so no need to rely on the shoes for that.”

After their call ended, Bristol couldn’t get that out of her head. It was what Indy did. She seemed flighty and silly, and then she said things that should have been easily dismissed...that then lingered around instead.

You’re already home,Bristol told herself.No need to rely on the things Lachlan gave you. You’re whole as you are.

She didn’t need his shoes or the wardrobe she’d been promised to do what she needed to do, which was get her life back on track. And she certainly didn’t need him and his rules and his boxes.

But God help her, she missed him so much it hurt.

Lachlan called later that morning and asked Bristol out on a date, as expected.

And Bristol shocked herself when she opened her mouth to refuse, then accepted instead. Even though, when she hung up the phone, she couldn’t have said why.

Why was she doing this when she already knew what would happen? How it would play out exactly as she’d told Indy it would?

In the days that followed, she tried her best not to think about Lachlan Drummond and her weakness for him. It was time to move on with her life. And while she’d felt adrift back in May, she no longer did. The kinds of meetings and conversations she’d been privy to when she was with Lachlan had given her a taste for more than the sedate academic life she’d imagined for herself.

Which was a good thing, she discovered quickly, when she reached out to some of her contacts and found almost universal disdain.

“Back from gallivanting about with Mr. Wonderful?” asked her old adviser, with a snide note in her voice that Bristol adamantly did not like. “Must be nice. And as much as we would have loved to have had you before, I can’t say that the department is looking for that sort of...notoriety.”

It turned out that none of her stuffy academic contacts was interested in her notoriety.

Bristol would have reveled in even being considered notorious in the first place, but she needed to find work. Not because she needed the money—she’d been paid exorbitantly for her service to Lachlan, after all—but because... She needed to work.

And while she hadn’t understood why she was so driven, the end result was the same. She was an expert in social policy and she had every intention of using her expertise, right along with those letters she’d worked so damn hard to put behind her name.

She went on that first date with Lachlan, all on her terms and on her turf. Then it seemed she was seeing him almost every night, though she refused to think too hard about that. He was playing a game. He got to dress down like he was anyone, sneaking in and out of Brooklyn restaurants that would never make it into the pages of the tabloids. Sooner or later, she told herself, he would tire of this and go back to his penthouses and sports cars and jets.

All their dinners ended the same way. On the doorstep of her building in the hot August night, no kissing, her pussy melting and her heart beating—so hard and so long she sometimes thought it might kill her.

Maybe she only wished it would.

But a week intodatingthe man she’d already been hired to be with, she was still getting no traction whatsoever, within her academic context. So it finally occurred to her to use his.

“Do you have a problem with me reaching out to people I met only because of you?” she asked abruptly, cutting off the story he was telling her about how he was, happily and deliberately, a bad influence on Catriona’s children.

They had been standing at her front door for coming up on thirty minutes, where she already knew they would stay until she tore herself away and went inside.

It took her longer and longer to do that every night.

“Not at all,” he replied, so quickly that she thought he had to mean it. “Most of the people we met with would be elated to hear from you. Your résumé speaks for itself.”

Bristol blinked. “How would you know what my résumé says?”

“Because I studied it,” he said, grinning. “I like facts.”

But she realized, as August descended into its dregs—too hot and too humid and filled with days spent in and out of interviews and nights still full of Lachlan—that it wasn’t facts he was going for here.

It was details.

Every last, possible detail.

He asked her all the questions he hadn’t before. He asked about her childhood in Ohio, and she found she had a lot more to say on the topic of where she’d grown up than she would have before. He asked about her sister. About every phase of her life, leading her straight on to the doctorate that had, somehow, led her to him.

“Does this go both ways?” she asked one night as they walked back from a terrible bar where they’d had to shout to be heard yet had still missed most of the conversation, there in the exhilarating press of the deliberate grimness. She’d promised him a real dive and had delivered, even though it might have deafened them both. “Do I get to ask you questions about your real life?”

“You, Bristol,” Lachlan said, his gaze very blue in the dark, “can ask me anything you like.”