The Pleasure Contract by Caitlin Crews (best books to read in your 20s txt) 📕

a punishment for her tardiness, he did not do a single thing to ease the need she was sure was written all over her. She could hear her own breathing come perilously close to panting. She thought that she might even be able to smell her own arousal.

It only made her hunger that much sharper.

Lachlan gazed at her impassively, though his blue eyes glittered. He tucked his cock back into his trousers and zipped up, then lounged there looking faintly disheveled and with the hint of a smirk on his face.

Leaving Bristol with nothing to do but climb back into her seat.

And question, again, why she wasn’t outraged. Why, instead, she felt as if this show of his, his seeming indifference with that hint of amusement at her plight, made her shiver ever closer to simply...coming, there and then.

All she would have to do was press her thighs together—but she didn’t.

Because, she admitted to herself, you want your orgasms to be his.

Because he’d paid for them.

A notion that only there, in the dark of the car with the taste of him in her mouth, could she accept made it all so much hotter.

She had the feeling he knew it.

Back at the hotel, Bristol was left to her own frustrated devices as Lachlan was corralled by his people, then disappeared into the penthouse suite’s offices for some or other important phone call.

She waited for him to come back out, but he didn’t. It took her longer than it should have to understand that he wasn’t going to.

That he had likely stepped into that office and forgotten all about her.

And she didn’t want to have any more conversations with Stephanie—or any other assistant lurking about—so she took herself off to the expansive bedroom, the bed itself about twice the size of the apartment she shared with her sister. And that wasn’t addressing the terraces all around with stunning views over London.

Her body was still flooded with hunger and adrenaline, her pussy still ached, but now there was something hollow inside her, besides.

Bristol didn’t want to deal with that either, so she made a production out of bustling around and getting out of the outfit that had been laid out for the evening’s festivities. Then she took herself into the shower stall that was the size of her neighborhood coffee shop and busied herself with the four hundred showerheads and bath products arrayed along one stone wall.

But there was only so much bustling and lathering a person could do. Soon enough she was simply standing there in a decidedly opulent shower stall in England, finally coming face-to-face not only with what had happened in his car tonight—but what she’d signed up for in the first place.

Not that he’d bought her. Not even the fact she liked that part of it, and the idea that her pussy itself was on loan.

How had she not understood the rest of it? She knew the answer to that. The last fifteen days had been a cascade of sensory input, disbelief that she was doing this in the first place, and the strangely formal practicalities of arranging a life around sex with a very busy man.

But tonight, at last, she fully understood why it was that Lachlan hired women to fill this position. Because a real girlfriend would react to what had happened tonight—that he could act as he had in the car and then ignore her when they got back to the hotel. A real girlfriend would lean into that hollow feeling inside and take it out on him.

She would not like being ignored on the flight and abandoned all day. She would argue about his rules. She would refuse to have rules, maybe, and certainly she wouldn’t take his cock in the car as some kind of punishment for not catering to his demands for punctuality.

Bristol could see, clearly, all the many things she would feel if she were actually in a regular relationship with Lachlan right now.

But her feelings were exactly what he was paying not to deal with.

She stood in the water for a long time. She let the steam billow all around her, let her skin prune up, and she didn’t know how much time had passed when the shower door, steamy and glassed, finally opened to show Lachlan standing there.

Her heart kicked at her, hard. And she thought she could see a certain wariness in his expression. As if he was waiting to see what her move was going to be here. Because they didn’t know, did they, whether or not she could handle the job he’d hired her for.

It had all been theoretical until now.

Bristol pulled in a breath, as uncertain as he seemed to be. Was she going to yell at him? It seemed possible for a moment. She might find the way he ordered her around hot, like it or not, but she didn’t like the feeling afterward—

But even as she thought that, a sense of peace settled over her.

Because she didn’t have to decide what to feel. All the decisions were already made. He was the one who made them, because she’d agreed to let him. She’d literally signed papers to that effect.

Bristol felt something like liberated at that notion.

It didn’t matter what she felt. She’d decided that when she’d decided to do this. She didn’t have to attach her feelings to anything. She didn’t have to stand up for herself or assert herself or any of the other things she might feel she had to do here if this was something else.

She could smile at him instead. She could watch the heat flaring his gaze.

She could surrender to what she wanted without worrying what it might say about who she was, or what this was.

That was already decided. They’d already agreed.

Lachlan was on her then, lifting her up as the water pounded into them, the steamy water not nearly as hot as he was. His cock was big and hard and took the same few moments it