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

always did to fit inside her. But once he had buried himself to the hilt, he dug his fingers into her hips, tilted her back against the wall, and set up an intense, bone-rattling rhythm as he pounded into her.

It was like magic.

It really was a liberation, she thought, with what little part of her was still capable of thinking when everything else was that ache in her clit, the glory of his possession, and one fierce punch of an orgasm after the next.

All of them his.

For once she didn’t have to make decisions. For once she didn’t have to feel—or more to the point, she didn’t have to act on her feelings.

All she had to do was this.

Again and again.

Because Lachlan was never satisfied. And all she had to do was indulge his every whim.

Finally, she thought—as he finally roared out his release and they hurtled together over the edge—something she was not only good at, but actually wanted to do.

CHAPTER FIVE

BRISTOL WAS COMPLETELY different from his previous women.

And Lachlan wasn’t the only one to notice.

The staff member who handled the day-to-day concerns of his girlfriends complained about her constantly. Something he might have acted upon, but he didn’t find Bristol’s refusal to slot herself into the usual role as arm candy upsetting.

“She refuses to listen, Mr. Drummond,” the woman said at almost every staff meeting. Officiously, Lachlan thought. “She insists on doing as she pleases.”

“She listens to me, Stephanie,” he’d replied this morning. “Maybe it’s how I ask her.”

There had been other women who antagonized his staff, but all of them had also proved themselves unequal to the job. And soon enough, had antagonized Lachlan, too.

Not Bristol.

Diplomats found her charming—the minimum requirement to appear on Lachlan’s arm—but they also found her engaged. An interesting extension of Lachlan himself and, better still, his agenda. She had an uncanny knack of appearing not to pay attention only to be able to recite everything that had been said to her, usually while talking to exactly the right person at whatever party they happened to attend. More than once, over the course of that long June spent flying from city to city all over the globe, Lachlan found himself in a meeting only to have the person across from him reference a conversation they’d had with Bristol as having changed their thinking on some or other key point.

He hadn’t expected that.

The question she’d asked him at that first dinner seemed to haunt him the more time passed. His previous choices had never been bimbos. That wasn’t his style. But they’d tended to be either spoiled heiresses who’d relied a little too heavily on their prep school polish or sharper, more feral women who could more than hold their own but were always out for themselves. The former had always been angling for a wedding ring. The latter were more interested in the payday.

And whatever they were or wanted, none of them had ever been able to spend hours debating the finer points of contention in an initiative to bolster education in certain Third World countries with a literal think tank.

Dr. Bristol March, he realized with a measure of pride that he told himself wasn’t personal but professional, was a formidable force.

“I heard that your conversation with the UN delegation grew heated,” he said one early evening.

He had to check the view outside his window to figure out what country they were in. Greece, it turned out. Athens, to be precise, though it could have been anywhere. There was another black-tie function this evening and he was already dressed. Bristol, who had shrugged off the usual fawning attendants his women usually considered a perk of their position weeks back, was fastening a necklace around her neck, standing in front of a mirror so he had all the time in the world to contemplate the way the dress she wore left her lovely back open to his view.

Almost too open, he thought, with a surge of that possessiveness that had marked his response to her from the start.

But Lachlan didn’t get possessive.

He told himself he was tired, that was all.

“I wasn’t the least bit heated.” She turned to face him, a wry expression on her clever face. “I’ll concede that the delegation left our interaction unhappier than when they arrived. But then, they should think through the sweeping generalizations they like to make regarding their initiatives. Every wave of a hand is a life. That’s all I said. If that’s contentious, so be it.”

“And is that up to you to decide, do you think?” he asked, lazily enough.

For a moment, she didn’t respond. Her head tilted slightly to one side, but he already knew that she was unlikely to get provocative. Not anymore. And sure enough, she regarded him with that particularly opaque look in her eyes that he hated more and more. Every time he saw it, he hated it all over again as if it was new.

“I’m sure you will tell me what is or isn’t up to me,” she said with perfect equanimity. “I await your ruling.”

Once again, she was...distinct.

The other women who’d traveled with him had responded to rebukes very differently. They would apologize, charmingly or wholeheartedly, and prettily beg his forgiveness. Or they would slink their way over to him and offer apologies in a more physical manner.

It wasn’t that Bristol didn’t apologize when necessary. She did. But she did so in the same forthright manner she did everything else, then looked at him as if the matter ought to have been settled.

Lachlan couldn’t understand why all the ways she continued to set herself apart from the rest...lodged beneath his skin. Not enough to bother him, exactly.

But he couldn’t compartmentalize her the way he’d done with all the rest. He found her on his mind at the oddest times—like in the middle of tense negotiations when he normally would have forgotten he even had a girlfriend.

“It appears that obedience is not your strong suit,” he said because she