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

of the eternity pool. Her hair was wet and slicked back, and her gaze was trained on the horizon.

Lachlan didn’t speak. He didn’t know what he would say, or how.

Not when that drum in him beat like that. Jarring. Impossible.

Too much history and too much truth and he should never have let this woman come here.

She must have heard him approach, though he thought he’d been silent. Still, she turned, and he thought the sight of her slick, wet skin and the bikini halter top tied around her neck might be the undoing of him.

“Do you—” she began, but stopped.

Her eyes went wide.

And Lachlan felt it like her mouth, wet and hot while she sucked him in deep.

He prowled over to the side of the pool, bent, then hauled her up and out of the water. He didn’t care in the least that holding her against his chest soaked him, too. Maybe he liked it. He felt half-blind with lust and longing, and that deeper, greedier thing that pulsed deep inside and held him in a tighter, more vicious grip.

His mouth was on hers, hard and wild, seeking and desperate.

He carried her inside, somehow finding the bed and taking her down with him, letting loose the only monster he ever allowed to take him over.

And never so out of control as with her.

He skimmed his mouth over the line of her neck, pulling the wet bikini top away from her breasts and growling a little as they were exposed to his view. Maybe it was the ceiling fan above that made those goose bumps prickle all over her skin, or maybe it was simply the same beating thing in the both of them.

Either way, Lachlan planned to devour her.

He found her stiff, hard nipples with his mouth, teasing her until she moaned. It was a broken, greedy sound and she arched up against him, offering herself in that same slick rush of surrender that he couldn’t seem to get enough of.

He couldn’t get enough.

Lachlan wanted to take his time, but he couldn’t. He wanted her naked and took care of that, pulling the stretchy, soaked, irritating bathing suit bottoms off her. Only then did he find her just as he wanted her.

Wet.

Swollen with need already.

And when he set his mouth to her hard little clit, all he had to do was suck once, hard, and she screamed as she shattered.

He moved back, kneeling up to rid himself of his own clothing. Then he flipped her over in front of him, wrapping his forearm beneath her hips and hauling her into position.

Lachlan knew her body so well by now. He knew how she would brace herself, her arms flung over her head and her forehead pressed into the mattress. He knew she would arch her back and flex her hips so that he had easier access.

And when he slammed inside her, he knew the greedy, glorious little sounds she made. He reveled in how she angled herself to meet him so that each thrust was perfect.

He’d had her so many times, but it was never enough. He’d taken her in the back seat of almost every car they’d traveled in. He kept her naked on one long flight, curled up beside him on one of his jet’s couches, open and longing and his for the duration. The hotels they’d stayed in blurred and the view of this or that famous city outside blended one into the next, but he remembered every sharp cry she made. The husky way she breathed his name.

The way she whispered yes in his ear when he lost his rhythm entirely.

Or the way she dug her nails into his back.

He could feel the way she shook, the way she stiffened, the tension radiating out from her splayed thighs and moving all over her sleek, lush body. He knew exactly how to keep her on that edge, throwing her off as he pleased and then throwing her right back into it.

Only when he couldn’t take it for another moment did Lachlan follow her over.

And this time, after she’d screamed and he’d shouted, he rolled them over and pulled her to his side. Then he held her there while the ceiling fan rotated above them, washing them both with that faint breeze.

Letting the ghosts in with every turn of the blades.

He knew that as soon as he caught his breath, he could have her again. That she was always ready, always greedy.

He knew her body, but he didn’t know Bristol at all.

And the more time he spent with her, the less he seemed to know himself.

It was that sharp truth that seemed to pierce him then. Straight and true while his heart kept up that drumming beat.

Until Lachlan was forced to wonder if Bristol was the one in control of the monster in him, after all.

CHAPTER SIX

“DID YOU KNOW that you’re on the front page of every single tabloid there is?” Indy asked one afternoon.

Bristol had spent yet another morning in the Spanish island paradise that was entirely too easy to forget wasn’t hers...at all. It was Lachlan’s and she was simply aggrandized staff—but that proved difficult to remember in the most beautiful place she’d ever seen.

The villa was a patchwork of different time periods and aesthetics, jumbled altogether in a way that was somehow charming. The island itself boasted a craggy coast with limestone cliffs on one end, and gleaming white sand coves on the other. There were palm trees and pines, what was once a citrus grove, almond and olive trees. The villa was surrounded by trellises awash in violet flowers, and the soft sunshine danced over everything, as if conducting the orchestra of birdsong on the sea breeze.

Every day was the same, so achingly beautiful it should have hurt her. But didn’t.

Lachlan’s version of a family vacation involved waking Bristol before dawn, no matter how much of the night they might have spent driving each other mad with desire. He drove into her with what