He decided not to tell her, then, that he was going to spend the rest of his life hungry and only she was ever going to make a dent in it.
If he was lucky.
And Lachlan was a lot of things, but luck had never played a part before.
He was back on that high wire, holding on to hope.
Try love, Catriona had advised him.
It was the one thing even Lachlan Drummond couldn’t command.
“Dr. Bristol March,” he said, very carefully and deliberately, his eyes on hers like his life depended on her answer. Because it did. “Will you go on a date with me? I hear there’s a great Vietnamese place nearby.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BRISTOL HAD NO intention of going out to dinner with Lachlan that night. She didn’t want to play games with him.
And yet after saying no, with a scowl on her face while her heart galloped too wildly in her chest, she found the look on his face unbearable.
“You can call me tomorrow,” she found herself saying, like a moth to the flame. “And you can ask me if I’m free next weekend. And maybe not assume that I can drop everything to please you at any instant.”
He was still holding her hands and he looked down at them, his mouth curving into a smile that might almost have been bashful, had he been anyone else.
But he was Lachlan Drummond, so that curve took on a different shade altogether when she saw the look in his too-hot blue gaze.
“I can do that,” he said. “But Bristol. Are you hungry?”
And that was how she found herself on her first date with Lachlan Drummond, more than two months after the first dinner they’d had in that overly precious restaurant in Manhattan. A lifetime, it seemed, since that scene in the alley and everything that came afterward.
A lifetime, maybe, but she could still remember every detail of the first time she’d tasted him.
“I’m going to call you tomorrow,” he told her, almost formally, as he walked her back to the door of her apartment building. Almost formally, that was, except for the glint in his gaze that made her wet and shivery, though she would die before showing him that. “Like a gentleman.”
“I may or may not take that call,” she replied loftily, though what she was really doing was obsessing over whether or not he was going to kiss her. Or whether she was going to kiss him. Or if there was even going to be kissing at all after she’d quit. And he’d held her hands like that in the tiny living room that seemed to close in around him, he was so big and bright and him. And then he’d taken her to dinner at her favorite hole-in-the-wall place where they sat in the corner and were resolutely ignored by every other person there.
After he’d said he loved her.
More than once.
And when he didn’t kiss her, or even try, Bristol couldn’t decide if she was furious or grateful.
She settled on grateful sometime later that night, when midnight was a distant memory and she was once again staring at her ceiling. Lying on top of the sheets with a wet washcloth over her fan because the apartment’s questionable air-conditioning was never enough in the full sweat of August.
You’re lucky he didn’t kiss you, she told herself sternly.
Because if Lachlan had kissed her, she really didn’t know if she would have had the necessary fortitude to keep herself from kissing him back.
All the berry crumble in the world hadn’t prepared her for Lachlan’s...declarations.
Or the fact he apparently wanted to date her.
When she woke up the next morning, hot and cranky and feeling raw after a night of dreams—each and every one starring Lachlan and the many magical things that man could do with his cock—she told herself not to get her hopes up.
“You shouldn’t even have hopes,” she scolded herself as she made coffee. “You don’t need to be a vanity project for a bored billionaire.”
“But what if it’s not his vanity?” Indy asked idly when she called from an undisclosed location in Europe. Bristol was too overwrought about her situation to adequately express her feelings about the term undisclosed location. “What if our tin-man billionaire just discovered he has a heart?”
Her own heart galloped at that. She pressed her hand to her chest and, for once, was glad her sister was across an ocean and couldn’t see her do it.
“He won’t,” Bristol said with a brisk confidence she didn’t quite feel. Or didn’t want to feel. “He doesn’t like not getting what he wants, that’s all. Soon enough, probably before next weekend, he will grow bored and move on. He’ll convene his panel and, this time, pick a more appropriately biddable woman to appear at his next function. The end.”
“That’s definitely his pattern,” Indy agreed.
Even though she’d just said the same thing herself, Bristol found herself bristling at her sister’s confirmation.
Suddenly, she could remember all the other times she’d brooded over Indy’s seemingly careless comments when they were teenagers, or her tagging along to things, or her copying Bristol—the very worst sin of all. She found herself looking at the picture on their wall of the two of them at around eight and ten years old, giggling over something marvelous in a pile of fallen leaves beneath their favorite oak tree.
Her mother was right. She wrapped her heart in layers upon layers of armor and only grudgingly let anyone in.
Even her little sister, who adored her.
What if you controlled the earthquake for a change? she asked herself.
But Indy was still talking.
“Then again,” Indy was saying, laughing softly as if she’d never been more personally delighted—which felt a lot like another indictment of Bristol’s spiky, mean heart. “The whole world saw the way he was looking at you. I made sure to look at literally every angle in every possible tabloid, so I can confirm that the man looks fully smitten in every one of them.”
Smitten, Bristol thought, and that word seemed to catch at her.
Indy sighed happily. “This might be a new era for our favorite tin man.”
“Does this make me Dorothy?” Bristol asked, trying her best to sound brisk and faintly unamused and certainly not smitten. “Because I’m fresh out of ruby slippers.”
She didn’t say that she’d left all the fancy trappings of life with Lachlan behind. Dramatic shoes included. It needed to be over, she knew that, and yet she still couldn’t bring herself to come out and say it. To make it real.
“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 im
agined 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 into dating the 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.”
She told herself that hadn’t been a kind of vow, no matter what it sounded like.
And so they told each other stories as August fell inexorably toward September. First it felt like they were filling in the gaps. But then, as Bristol kept going on another date and another date after that, it became something else.
Less filling in gaps, more talking about who they really were. What they thought and felt. What her mother had told her in Ohio. What his sister had told him in Vermont.
But it wasn’t all old paths and new beginnings. Bristol learned that the best-dressed man in New York had always hated dressing up for formal events. If it was up to him, he told her, he’d spend his life in jeans and a T-shirt far away from the public eye.
“Then why do it?” she asked, leaning in close over a rickety little table in the Vietnamese place. They kept coming back. “You can do whatever you want, can’t you? I thought that was the entire point of being you.”
“In order to get the kind of backing I want for my various projects, I have to know how to play the game,” he replied. He shrugged. “I don’t mind it as much anymore.”
“But surely—”
“And besides,” he said, his expression intent, “it’s my responsibility to not be my father. I can’t do exactly as I please. I have an obligation to use the money he made and squandered for good. If I have to wear a suit to do it, that feels like a small price to pay.”
Bristol reached across the table and took his strong hands in hers. She held his gaze.
“You could never be your father. You never, ever will be.”
And it was tempting to say she would be right there to make sure of it, no atom bombs in the vicinity, but she swallowed it back.
She took him to a baseball game. She took him to a crowded, raucous movie theater to see the summer blockbuster hit and to enjoy all the patrons on their phones, people talking back at the screen, and an impromptu popcorn fight.
“That was an experience,” Lachlan said when they left, slinging an arm over her shoulders as they walked out into the warm, dense streets. “But I’m 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.
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