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

not sure I could tell you what that movie was about.”

“The point of actually going to a movie theater to see a movie is the communal aspect,” Bristol informed him. “It’s not to enjoy the film so much as the crowd.”

“Noted.”

“Just think,” she teased him, “we’ll make a New Yorker out of you yet.”

One night they were stuck on the subway somewhere beneath the East River. The Brooklyn-bound train was packed and quiet enough as everyone simply waited to move again. They were standing in the middle of the car and she found herself smiling up at him, up beneath the baseball hat he wore crammed down on his head to hide his face.

He was Lachlan Drummond and he could have flown them to the Maldives tonight if she’d asked but was instead on a stopped subway car like anyone else. Because she’d wanted him to do this. Whatever she asked, he did.

Like they’d flipped their entire relationship upside down.

Her stomach flipped a few times as the truth of that settled in.

But Bristol didn’t want that truth. She pushed up on her toes, overwhelmed with the night they’d spent at a piano bar in the West Village, surrounded then and now by people who didn’t know who he was, and kissed him.

It had been three weeks. Three long, torturous weeks, and she didn’t understand how she’d done it. How she kept herself from tasting him the way she wanted to—so badly she woke up in her hot bedroom already halfway to coming, only to find herself alone.

Lachlan’s hand that wasn’t gripping the subway pole moved to her face as he took control of the kiss, heat and light and that same wild punch jolting between them and making her feel whole again.

How had she not understood? Kissing him—touching him—made her feel whole.

Because when the train rocked to life again, she pulled back and held on to him instead of the subway, and didn’t have to pretend not to feel anything. Her own tumultuous longing or that intent look all over his face.

She just gazed up at him, mute and overwhelmed, and was nothing at all but herself.

And she could feel them both shatter. And shudder.

As if they were the same.

“It was always like this,” she whispered as the conductor said something unintelligible over the loudspeaker. “But I don’t want to hide it any longer.”

“I don’t want you to.”

This time, when they got back to her apartment, she brought him inside instead of leaving him outside where a storm threatened. They climbed the stairs together and she found herself almost giddy with the notion that she was bringing Lachlan home the way she might have any other date.

When he was anything but that.

Inside, she launched herself at him and he caught her, and then they exploded, together.

First he held her against him, high in the air, taking her mouth with his while their hands smoothed and tangled and made everything worse. Or better.

Then they moved to the small couch, only to end up on the floor, everything fierce and hot, because he was far too tall for the couch.

They rolled this way and that, a pageant of hands reaching and bodies yearning.

She sat astride him, pressing herself against the hard ridge of his cock, teasing them both like they were in high school.

It was ridiculous how hot it was to roll around fully clothed with a man she had been naked with too many times to count.

But then she’d had enough. She wanted everything.

And she was astonished when Lachlan held her away from him when Bristol reached for the zipper of his jeans.

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” he said, his eyes that brilliant blue she normally saw only when he was driving deep inside her, fucking her into oblivion.

Her clit ached, but he didn’t let her ease that ache against his.

“I really can’t believe I’m going to say this,” he muttered. “But we can’t have sex.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

IF HE’D ANNOUNCED he was taking holy orders, Bristol could not have been more stunned.

“What? Why not?”

Lachlan rolled with her, depositing her on her back beneath him, and she thought for a moment that it was a joke. That he would laugh and give her what she wanted, but he didn’t.

Looking as if it caused him physical pain, he rolled to his feet, leaving her sprawled out on the floor with the taste of him in her mouth, her nipples so hard they hurt, and her pussy soft and ready.

Damn him.

“I’m not having sex with you again, Bristol,” he told her, looking something like feral. His eyes were blazing and she’d knocked that hat off, then had her hands all up in his blond hair. She’d been the one to make him look so disheveled, and that notion rocked through her like his mouth at her neck. “Not if it’s just sex.”

Bristol’s heart kicked at her, hard. She remembered what her mother had said about earthquakes, and that was what it felt like. As if every fault line related to this man that she’d gathered up inside her was ripped wide open.

“I beg your pardon?”

He moved all the way across the room, which wasn’t far at all. But it felt like an immeasurable distance. She forced herself to stand.

“I told you I want all of you, Bristol,” he gritted out. “I meant it. I want everything. And I know you don’t believe me.”

She had never been so tempted to lie and tell him whatever he needed to hear—but she didn’t.

Judging by the way his eyes narrowed, he probably knew how close she’d come.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” she hedged. “I believe that you believe it. I’m aware of your pattern, that’s all.”

She did not say, and so is the world, and felt virtuous.

“In other words, you don’t believe me.” He smiled then, broad and confident as if she couldn’t see with her own eyes how big and hard his cock was behind his fly. “No worries, baby. I can