That was when he came to the unpleasant realization that for all the details he knew about her, all the facts laid out in a thousand files and all the time they’d spent together naked or at public events, it was possible he didn’t really know her at all. Sex was telling. It was a tool—but it wasn’t a personality. And cold, hard facts weren’t alive and contradictory and capable of making unpredictable decisions.
Facts told him only that. Facts.
They didn’t let him predict what Bristol might do when she wasn’t following his schedule.
When she wasn’t in the box he’d made her inhabit.
And once that got into him it rubbed viciously, like sand in his shoe, until he could think of nothing else.
Bristol was the only one of the women he’d ever dated in his own particular fashion who he’d never suspected of acting like someone she wasn’t. And yet it had never occurred to him that the fact she wasn’t acting like the rest had...didn’t mean he knew any more than what she’d shown him.
And he had himself to blame for that, not her.
Lachlan was the one who’d set up this system, never imagining that he would also be the one to tear it down because it didn’t work any longer. He understood he had no one to blame but himself—but he needed her to come home so he could burn that contract she’d signed and start over.
He’d had to talk himself down from engaging in any truly desperate behavior—like staking out her apartment. The only reason he’d come here tonight was because this was the last day of her week’s break. And he’d rationalized that, having allowed her the privacy he could grudgingly accept she was entitled to this whole long week, it made sense to come over and make sure she actually planned to return to the job.
So he could fire her and offer her something else entirely.
Lachlan was trying his best to ignore the voice inside him that told him it was all too possible that Bristol was done with him, little as he wanted to accept that. Given that she had also distinguished herself by being the only woman who had ever wanted the break he insisted upon.
He was inside out.
Lachlan had been contemplating the depths to which he’d fallen and what that made him when he’d seen her swing around the corner. Charging down the street as if she was anyone, as anonymous as anyone else in New York.
As if she’d never been his.
It...rankled.
“Where have I been?” she asked. And she laughed. At him, he was fairly sure, but he couldn’t care about that. Not when she was laughing again. Because he could lose himself in Bristol’s laughter. “On a vacation. You know this.”
“Where?”
He recognized that her whole face had been open in a way it normally wasn’t when it changed. When she disappeared, right in front of him.
“I don’t remember agreeing to share my private life with you, Lachlan,” she said, her voice cool and her eyes distant. That distance he couldn’t stand. “My body, sure. But my private life was never part of the deal.”
“Fuck the deal,” he growled.
And for a moment, all she did was study him. But not the way he had grown accustomed to her doing. This reminded him, again, of the woman who had turned up to dinner with him that first night. The woman who’d walked out of his panel. The woman who wasn’t convinced by him or this process or anything else.
The woman who wasn’t his in any conceivable way.
“Is this really a conversation you want to have on my doorstep?” she asked in that cool tone that he’d used to like, surely. It had made her seem so...containable. Now he wanted to blow it up. “Were you lurking in your car, waiting for a confrontation? Because as far as I’m aware, I’m not required to deal with you until tomorrow.”
“Is that all this is to you?” he demanded, feeling unhinged. Off-balance and completely outside himself. “A requirement?”
“Yes,” she said, but her voice was too matter-of-fact. Her eyes too dark. “As laid out in the documents you insisted we sign.”
“Bristol,” he said, trying to pull himself back together. Trying to remember that he wasn’t his father, just as Catriona had said. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t feel. It wasn’t the feeling that was the issue, it was the execution. “Don’t you understand? This isn’t about contracts. I think...”
Her face was so perfect it made his heart skip a beat. Wherever she’d been, she’d spent time in the sun and it made her eyes seem brighter. Her cheeks were rosy and she’d burned her nose. Her dark hair looked careless, tossed back in a messy bun.
She wasn’t dressed to impress a soul and he had never seen anything more beautiful.
He doubted it could exist.
“I don’t think,” he corrected himself before she could say anything. Because he needed to say the words that had been charging through him this whole week. He needed her to hear them. “I know.”
“Lachlan,” she began, her tone far too measured.
And he had to get it out. He had to say it. “I’m in love with you.”
For a moment then, he felt suspended in thin air. New York City was on one side, and perfect, beautiful Bristol was on the other, and the wire that stretched out between the two was hope. A wild, heart-pounding hope.
But when she smiled, it was sad. She reached over and brushed her fingers over his jaw, and he had the terrible, sickening feeling that what he saw in her eyes then was pity.
“Oh, Lachlan,” she said softly. “No. You’re not.”
And that sounded like finality.
All he could do was stare.
Bristol sighed, then fumbled in the bag over her shoulder, eventually pulling out
