Always & Forever: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection, Books 1 - 4)

by Brenna Jacobs

  They were discussing a fictional person. “Do you think we sound crazy to normal people?”

  “Abso-freaking-lutely. Because we are. Embrace it.”

  “I guess I should.”

  “Also Aidan Maxwell. You should embrace Aidan Maxwell.”

  Emma picked up a sweetener packet and threw it at her. “Knock it off.”

  “On one condition: if you get writer’s block again this morning, instead of staring blankly at your screen, read Aidan’s book. Then give me a writer’s book report. Don’t tell me what happens in it. Tell me what you learn from it as a writer.”

  “Except I don’t have his book. And also, I don’t want to do that. Actually, that’s the main problem,” Emma said. “That second part.”

  “Hang on.” Maggie disappeared into her room and returned bearing a hardback. She waved the cover in front of Emma. “I’m going to motivate you. I got this as part of a swag bag from the agency because it’s my name on the reservation. Give it a try. If not,” she flipped it over where an author photo of Aidan took up nearly the whole back, “I’ll follow you around and periodically flash this picture at you and offer helpful tips for how to flirt with him.”

  “I know how to flirt,” Emma said.

  “Do not. You think it’s beneath you. But it’s fun and you should do it. For example,” she held Aidan’s picture in front of her face and deepened her voice, “I’m sexy Aidan standing in front of you, and now you need to muss up your hair a little and say, ‘Hi, you’re a welcome distraction from the writing grind.’ Then he’ll kiss you.”

  Emma placed her hand on top of the book and pressed it down so she was face to face with Maggie. “That is assault.”

  “Not if you want the kiss. Also, if you don’t like my advice and would like to stop hearing it, you should just agree to the deal. Next metaphor you get stuck on, you read this for a brain break. Otherwise,” she raised the book in front of her face and changed to her man voice, “flirting lesson.”

  Anything to get Maggie’s nonsense to stop. Emma snatched the book from her. “Fine. I’ll read it if I get stuck. Never use that voice again.”

  She walked into her room to get started again, but Maggie’s laugh followed her. “I notice you didn’t argue that he’s sexy!”

  Emma shut the door on her laugh.

  She tossed the book on the bed and sat at her laptop, determined to crack the metaphor that would perfectly capture the way Victoria saw the world and how it was closing in on her.

  A half hour later she still hadn’t found it.

  “Metaphors are the worst!” she shouted. But only loud enough to make herself feel better, not loud enough to summon Maggie. She pushed her chair back and stood to pace, hoping the movement would shake something loose in her brain.

  Instead, her eyes landed on Aidan staring up at her from her bed.

  His book had landed with his author photo face up in the middle of her bedspread. It was a black and white shot, so it didn’t capture the warmth of his brown eyes when he was genuinely smiling as he had over dinner. But it did do justice to that strong jaw line. She leaned over to touch the picture, then jumped back when her finger grazed his chin. She could almost hear the jokes Maggie would make about this.

  She also heard herself promising to quit torturing her metaphors if they didn’t want to cooperate.

  Ugh.

  She grabbed the book and curled up on her bed then immediately climbed off it again. Maggie’s playacting with his photo had suddenly made it weird to read in bed with his face right there on the cover. She almost went out to the sofa in the living room but didn’t want to give Maggie the satisfaction of seeing her with the book. She glanced outside. It was blue enough, and she should be able to find somewhere quiet to read. It would be a good mental exercise to take apart where his narrative wasn’t working. She often learned more about writing from reading bad books than good ones.

  Several minutes later she found herself comfortably settled in an Adirondack chair on the lakeshore, tucked beneath a light blanket provided by a thoughtful hotel attendant.

  Two hours after that, she looked up from Chapter Eight only because she’d been distracted by the sound of her own stomach rumbling. And somehow, she hadn’t remembered to analyze a single thing about Aidan’s writing. She’d been too engrossed in the story, a hunt for a murderer who had abducted a fifteen-year-old girl after killing her parents. He’d hidden her in his trailer in a rural community an hour away. The abducted girl had been assumed dead until she wandered to a neighbor’s home, barefoot and terrified, to beg for help. At first, the kidnapper seemed to have randomly chosen her, but as Detective Sophia Winder began to dig deeper, she discovered the terrifying threads of a much deeper plot.

  Detective Sophia Winder. She had been a surprise. She was the blonde on all the book covers. Emma closed the book to study the cover more closely. Based on the picture, she hadn’t been at all prepared to find out how tough and smart Detective Winder was. Her picture showed a tall woman with beach curls, a generous chest in a fitted red shirt, long legs in snug jeans and mile-high stilettos, her police badge clipped to her low-slung waistline. But the detective Aidan had written was no nonsense, tough, smart, intuitive and extremely logical. And she never wore heels or tight shirts.

  The cover had gotten one thing right: Sophia Winder should be front and center because she was the driving force in her partnership with Daniel Cruz, her partner who seemed to be there only as a foil for them to crack jokes with each other as periodic comic relief.

  And even the humor hadn’t felt contrived. Aidan’s jokes were funny and on point.

  But what surprised Emma the most was his mastery of emotion—the way he had the ability to make her feel the fear in the community over a sudden evil amongst them.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t have room for improvement. He missed opportunities to ground some of that emotion in the setting where he could create layers of language and thought in the same sentence. But he was much better at bringing the emotions of the story to life than she’d have expected.

  She stared out over the water, noting the swimmers. They all swam with a fast, regular rhythm. Must be training. There was something soothing about watching them cut through the water, and she fell into a light reverie the way she did when she heard a metronome ticking, or her windshield wipers drumming when she idled at a red light. The swimmer closest to her was swimming parallel with the shore rather than out and back. Smart, she thought. Keeps him from getting too far from the shore.

  When the swimmer drew even with her about twenty yards from the bank, his rhythm changed and he angled toward her, eventually rising and pulling off his goggles.

  It was Aidan. He waved before walking toward her through the water, and she ogled him for a minute. He wore a wetsuit, and the neoprene did him some favors, contouring his muscles as he lifted his hands to sluice the water from his hair.

  She pulled herself together enough to tuck his book into the blanket beside her. It would be mortifying for him to walk up to see his author photo staring back at him, propped on her knees as she read. By the time he reached the shore and called a hello to her, she’d found a friendly smile.

  “Hi, yourself,” she said.

  “I almost think your smile is genuine,” he replied, returning it.

  “It is. We’ve made peace, right?”

  He nodded and sluiced more water out of his hair. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Thinking,” she said. “Why are you out here? I didn’t know we had a PE requirement for this retreat.”

  He flashed another grin at her. “I try to keep up with my training.”

  “For . . .?” Triathlons, probably. All Seattle men in their thirties did triathlons. It was slightly clichéd, but nothing she would hold against him. There were worse ways he could spend his time.

  “I’m certified for dive rescue,” he said. “I swim in open water a few times a week no matter what the weather is just to make s
ure I’m ready. Don’t want to freeze up because I’m in a storm or something.”

  Her mouth fell open the tiniest bit as she processed this information. Then her forehead wrinkled. “Wait, are you saying you go out in lightning just to prove you can do it?”

  He shook his head at her. “You just did it again.”

  “Did what?”

  “Assumed that I have the worst possible motive. I’m not a tough guy.”

  “Even though you swagger around wearing a leather biker jacket?”

  “Even though I wear a leather biker jacket. I don’t swagger. Normally,” he amended, when her eyebrow rose. “That one time I did, but I apologized, remember? Also, remind me to tell you the story of that jacket sometime. It might surprise you.”

  “I’d like to hear it.” She said it to be polite but was startled to discover she meant it. She was surprised when he settled on the sand beside her instead of suggesting he share it with her over lunch. Although she hadn’t been hinting at it, she felt slightly let down, and she frowned.

  He immediately rose again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to encroach.”

  She waved him back down. “No, it’s fine. Sorry. I was thinking about something else for a minute.”

  He eased back down on the sand. “That happens to me a lot too. Job hazard, huh?”

  “Pretty much. That and carpal tunnel.”

  He laughed. “So what are you sitting out here thinking about?”

  She wasn’t about to say, “Your book I was just reading,” so she picked the first thing that jumped to mind. “Metaphors.”

  He winced. “The worst. Are you stuck?”

  “Always. The answer to that question is that I’m always stuck. Got any great metaphor writing techniques?”

  “I do the spaghetti thing. Throw a bunch into the sentence until I figure out which one is right. It doesn’t really help. So no, no tips.”

  “Same,” she said, settling back against the chair and staring out over the water. “Eventually I do always find the right one, but it’s never the same way twice.”

  “Sounds like the long way to do things.” He hesitated before the word “long,” and spoke it with some delicacy, so she didn’t take offense.

  “It probably explains why it’s taken me five years to write this book,” she agreed. It was definitely the metaphors. And her crippling self-doubt. But the metaphor situation felt more fixable.

  “Let’s make some.”

  She glanced down and found him smiling at her with a glint of challenge in his eye. “Make metaphors? Now? Why?”

  “Same reason I climbed into this wetsuit this morning. Practice.” He pulled at the fabric on his leg. “He squeezed into his wetsuit like it was the murder glove at O.J.’s trial.”

  She smiled. “But yours fits well, so you’d be convicted. Bad metaphor.”

  A pleased smile flickered across his lips, and she realized she’d just admitted that she’d been paying attention to his body. She was glad she didn’t blush easily, but it made her uncomfortable to think that he’d glimpsed her thoughts without her intending him to. She reached for a metaphor of her own to divert him from that confession. She pointed at the opposite bank in the distance. “The treeline was a shaggy unibrow on the far shore.”

  He laughed. “Okay, yeah. You need practice. I’d have to check my schedule, but isn’t there a class on metaphors happening right now? Maybe we should go.”

  “I’m not really here for the classes. That’s not my process.”

  “Studying the lake and waiting for inspiration to strike is your thing?”

  “Basically.” She braced for him to make fun of her, but he surprised her.

  “I get that. I think swimming does that for me. Or basically doing anything repetitive. Washing dishes. Chopping wood. Boring tasks make my brain go to work on my story. I think half the writing I do is in my head when I’m anywhere but at my desk.”

  She pictured him washing dishes and chopping wood and suddenly it made him distractingly attractive. With this easy talk about writing and the soft but growing warmth she recognized as feeling understood, it was both a deeply comfortable and wildly alarming feeling all at once.

  The alarm was winning out. She needed some space to think. To breathe. He had a tendency to steal her attention to the exclusion of anything else. His nearness was jumbling her thoughts, a charged tension drawing her to lean toward where he sat a few scant inches away on the sand. Maybe it had been seeing him in a new light after his keynote. Or maybe it had been seeing him in a new light as he had risen from the lake, water streaming off him. She didn’t have a metaphor to which she could compare the experience. All she knew was that she suddenly craved some space.

  Actually, she didn’t have a metaphor, but she had a memory: she used to get the same soft, warm feeling whenever she’d figured out something important in her work. A character’s motivation. The perfect line to end a chapter. And she used to share it with her ex, David, back when they’d been in the same graduate writing seminar where she’d begun her second novel. They’d started dating and often read each other their work. His always left her awed with his command of language and the intricate ideas he’d tackled. She’d wanted to measure up to that so badly, for him to see the same kind of talent in her work that dripped from his. A few times she’d gotten the feeling of having the words exactly right, but when she’d read the words to him, he’d smile and say, “That’s a pretty good start. I think you’re almost there.” And all the warmth would disappear, leaving her feeling as flat as he found her work.

  She wasn’t going there again, not falling for another handsome but self-absorbed writer.

  “Speaking of writing, I should do some.” She straightened in the chair and gathered the blanket. “I think I’m going to go back to my laptop to work on some real metaphors there.”

  “Did I say something wrong?” he asked, and guilt pricked her for the genuine confusion in his tone. She wanted to reach over and smooth the sudden furrow between his eyes, and the impulse shook her. Instead she reached for words she could put up between them to find her safe distance again.

  “No. It’s just that some of us don’t have million dollar book deals that let us treat work retreats as vacations, and that means writing while other people . . .” she let her glance trace down his wet suit before finishing, “play.”

  His eyes darkened. “You might try reading one of my books before you decide that I don’t work hard at them.”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “Formulas aren’t my thing. No offense. It’s just that I’m obsessed with the craft of writing, not plot points, and I spend my time reading more literary pieces. Hope you enjoy the class,” she said, rising, but she’d only gone two steps back toward the lodge when the copy of his book she’d been hiding slipped from her blanket and plopped onto the sand behind her.

  It was a replay of the beret situation.

  This wasn’t fair.

  It had fallen open to her bookmark, a scene she’d paused at not because she was bored, but because it was so intense that she’d needed to breathe a minute before continuing.

  Aidan didn’t even laugh. He leaned over and picked up the book, skimming the page. The side of his mouth twitched up in the tiniest smile as he closed it again and nodded. “You’re right,” he said, nodding. He rose too, still holding the book. “Since I write by a formula, you won’t need this to see what happens next. I’m sure you’ve already guessed. I’ll take this off your hands so you don’t have to tote it back to the hotel. See you around, Emerson.”

  And he strolled off.

  Emerson watched him go, her hands tightening into frustrated fists as she realized she was about to go back to her room and give him another sale. There was no way she could ask for the book back now, and she had to know what happened next.

  Chapter Eight

  Aidan walked back to his room in the lodge.

  But he wanted to storm back.

  It shouldn’t have bothered him
that Emerson had taken that condescending tone again. He’d heard it often enough in his marriage to Catherine when she’d dismissed his writing as a waste of time, or a hobby as frivolous as golf. We’re supposed to be changing things in substantive ways, she’d reminded him. How does a buddy cop book do that?

  Making big changes. That had been the plan. They’d met their senior year of college at an information meeting for Northwestern Law. They’d begun dating, and when they both got accepted, it had felt like fate. They married the summer before their final year of law school, in between their separate clerkships and the beginning of their final term, and then they’d both applied to and been hired by the Seattle DA’s office.

  It had all felt so . . . destined.

  He snorted as he strode into the elevator and stabbed the button to send it up to his floor. Destined. Ha. Destined to fall apart, he could see now. Catherine had envisioned them rising through the ranks of the DA’s office, and then depending on how their careers went, one of them would run for district attorney, preferably her. But whichever one of them it was would eventually run for—and win—the governor’s office where they could make those real and “substantive” changes Catherine always talked about.

  Aidan had been on board with all of it from the beginning. But the reality had been different once they got into the trenches. They’d both won an equal number of cases. They were good—equally matched, and they’d never felt any competition for each other. A win for her was a win for him and vice-versa. That’s probably why it had taken him so long to notice that the job weighed on them each so differently.

  So much of what they did was cut plea deals. Catherine was good with that, because to her it meant they’d saved the state the expense of a trial and made sure the bad guys served time. But Aidan hated it. He hated cutting any kind of deal that meant the perpetrator didn’t experience the full penalty of his wrongdoing. It didn’t feel like justice to him. And it wore him down from the other side too; he saw so many felons coming through the system who seemed almost doomed to fail because they came out of circumstances that didn’t prepare them to succeed in society or the economy, and so crime made the most sense.