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

by Brenna Jacobs

  “Emerson Lindsor, as I live and breathe,” he drawled in a fake Southern accent as he read her name off the list. Well, well, well. He couldn’t have written a better plot twist himself—and he was known for great plot twists.

  She’d come here knowing full well he’d be here too. She must want to go a few more rounds with him. He was looking forward to it.

  But her presence represented a different kind of opportunity too. If he could deliver the kind of keynote address that reached even Emerson Lindsor, then it would surely be the words the other writers there needed too.

  He downloaded her book to his phone and opened it to page one, a dedication to her father. Interesting. He’d have expected it to be to her famous mother, the writer she’d grown up with and presumably her biggest influence.

  He grimaced before swiping to the next page. He’d read Arianna Lindsor’s memoir for a college literature course, and while she had an incredible grasp of language, her pain had been icy, and it had left him cold. Not that he hadn’t pitied her, losing her husband so young. He cast back through his memory for the details. If he remembered correctly, Emerson had been eight when her father died.

  That was a tough age. He’d seen it often enough in victims’ families. How had her father died again? That often made a difference too. He closed his eyes and dug further into his memories, pulling up the details of the book. Oh, yes.

  Oh, no. It had been sudden. A head injury after he’d fallen from a ladder in their home library while searching for a book.

  Man.

  He leaned back and began reading. From the first page he could see that Emerson had inherited her mother’s brilliant command of language.

  An hour later, he set down his phone. It was a short novel, almost more of a novelette, and he’d read more than half. It was spare and unflinching. And sad.

  He opened his laptop. He knew exactly what to say to Emerson, and to the rest of the writers there. She might not realize he was speaking directly to her, but he was, and the words poured from his fingertips for the first time in weeks as he found the words he wanted, exactly the way he needed to say them.

  Chapter Five

  “I will give you a million dollars if you let me out of this one.” Emma sat at the edge of the suite’s living room sofa and clasped her hands in front of her, making her face look dog-in-the-Humane-Society-commercial sad.

  “I already have a million dollars.” Maggie turned to examine her reflection in the mirror over an accent table holding a vase of flowers courtesy of Muses. She appeared utterly indifferent to Emma’s plea.

  “I’ll give you another million. Don’t make me go.”

  “You don’t have a million.” Maggie checked her reflection from another angle.

  “I’ll rob a bank.”

  “No, thanks.” She turned to face Emma. “But I’ll give you fifty-fifty odds that if you tell me why you suddenly hate Aidan Maxwell, I might let you off the hook.”

  Emma already knew how that would go. Maggie would be so delighted by the story of their ill-fated panel together that she would drag Emma down to the main lodge early to get a front row seat for the action.

  “Never mind,” she muttered. “I’ll just go.”

  “You’re really not going to tell me?”

  Emma answered by wandering from the comfortably appointed shared living area to her own room to decide on a dress. It couldn’t be anything that looked like it should also be paired with a beret, because Aidan would—

  Hmphf. Who cared? What she needed was a dress that made her look approachable but also professional in case Luther was already here.

  Maggie followed her into her room, watching as she laid out her choices on her bed. “It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me. I’ll get Aidan to.”

  Emma whirled. “You know him?”

  Maggie’s eyebrow rose. “Is that fear on your face? What an interesting reaction. This must be a very, very good story.”

  Uh-oh. She’d activated Maggie’s storytelling antennae, and like any writer, she would be relentless in ferreting out the details. Better give her a sanitized version and kill her curiosity early.

  “It’s not that big a deal. We appeared on a local author library panel together and didn’t see eye-to-eye.” She debated whether she should tell her about the run-in at the coffee shop, but she dithered a second too long because Maggie’s eyes narrowed.

  “There’s something else.”

  “Not really. He showed up at the coffee shop where I write, and we didn’t get along much better.”

  “So you’re saying there were sparks?” Now Maggie looked absolutely elated.

  “No! More like a distinct chill in the air. Really,” Emma said, picking up a dress to study it. “It was nothing.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said, wandering off toward her room.

  Emma breathed a sigh of relief. She’d known Maggie would find chilly disdain boring, but she’d lost interest even faster than Emma had hoped.

  Emma had just decided on her navy and white pinstripe shirt dress when Maggie’s muffled voice called her from the other room.

  “Maggie?” she answered.

  “In my bathroom.” Maggie’s voice filtered through the door. “I feel like an idiot, but I forgot to bring a razor, and I’m already in the shower. Will you run down super fast to the lobby and get one from the concierge? I’ll love you forever.”

  “No problem.”

  It took less than ten minutes, and when she returned, she knocked on the bathroom door and cracked it open. “I’m setting it on the edge of the tub,” she called over the sound of the shower spray.

  “Thanks!”

  She returned to her own room to get dressed but stopped short inside the doorway. The shirt dresses she’d laid out had all disappeared. Instead, there was a knit dress in a soft shade of coral. She checked the closet, but it was empty.

  “Maggie?” she yelled, storming toward her friend’s bathroom.

  Suddenly, Maggie’s loud and off-key singing drifted over the sound of the spray. Emma grabbed the door handle, but it was locked now. “Maggie.” She knocked loudly. Maggie’s singing grew louder.

  Emma spun on her heel and marched back to her room, where instead of getting dressed, she set up her laptop and sat down to write.

  “Why aren’t you dressed?” Maggie asked from the doorway fifteen minutes later.

  “Someone took my clothes.”

  “But there’s a pretty dress right there that would look perfect with your coloring.”

  “It’s not my dress.”

  “Looks like your size. You should probably wear it.”

  “No. I’m not going.”

  “Then I’ll have to pry all the details you’re not telling me out of Aidan Maxwell.”

  “Go ahead.” Emma wasn’t going to be manipulated anymore. “But if you want me down there, you’ll give me my own dresses back. Otherwise, I’ll stay here being productive while you run around trying to sniff out the details of a non-story.”

  Maggie growled and disappeared, returning two minutes later with Emma’s dresses. She dropped them on the bed and walked out muttering about not being able to help those who won’t help themselves.

  Emma changed into her dress and smiled at her reflection. With the tailored dresses, she had an elegant coolness about her. She was right, Maggie was wrong. End of story.

  Maggie seemed to have gotten over her irritation when they both emerged into the suite’s living area a few minutes before Aidan Maxwell’s keynote. “Ready?” Maggie asked, her tone bright as she adjusted a red sandal to go with the turquoise romper she’d chosen.

  A romper. Only Maggie could pull it off at an event like this. She looked sexy and confident while her choice communicated that she didn’t give two cents for anyone else’s opinion about how she was dressed. She’d dressed to please herself, unlike Emma, who had dressed to project an image.

  Emma shook her head. She probably should have just put on the coral dress.
“Let’s go.”

  They made their way down to the conference room, which was really more like an enclosed sun porch with a gorgeous view of the lake. About fifty chairs had been set up in front of a podium, and they slid into two open seats near the back with a few minutes to spare. Maggie greeted everyone around them, but Emma nodded and offered polite smiles until she broke into a real one at the sight of a familiar face. “Valeria!”

  Their agent wore a chic white linen tunic and black capri pants, looking as if she’d walked straight out of an ad for the Chanel spring collection.

  Well, possibly. Emma didn’t follow fashion that closely, but the outfit’s crisp simplicity is what she imagined Chanel clothes looked like.

  “Emma, Maggie! So happy to see you!” Valeria swept in for a lightly jasmine-scented hug and took the empty seat beside Emma. The seats were almost all filled, and after only a quick exchange of pleasantries, a middle-aged man stepped up to the podium and introduced himself as Gary Reznick, the president of the Muses Agency.

  He received a loud round of applause, and he gave the “simmer down” gesture with his hands. “Save that for our first keynote speaker, a guy whose book sales make it easy for Muses to put on a retreat like this and spring for the good champagne.” That met with appreciative laughter. Emma stifled a yawn. “In all seriousness,” he continued, “Aidan Maxwell is a dream client, not just because his books are constantly at the top of the bestseller lists, but because he models the concept of creating art with integrity. It’s not something people outside of our industry realize. In fact, it’s something many of you might not recognize, but as an author, he’s a model of how to make your moment count in the ways it really matters.”

  “Must be a different Aidan Maxwell,” Emma joked to Valeria, who shot her a vaguely confused look.

  But no, it was the same insufferable Aidan who’d smirked at her across her favorite café table the week before. He strode up to the podium to shake Gary’s hand, and then settled in behind it, looking perfectly at ease. He’d ditched the stupid leather jacket for a gray blazer over a black shirt, open at the collar, no tie. He’d kept the jeans.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” he said. “When Gary asked me to speak, I worked up a rehashed version of the talk I give at writing conferences everywhere, trimmed it to twenty minutes, and called it good.” He scanned the crowd, and his eyes rested on Emma for a few seconds.

  “I’m really going to need the whole story,” Maggie murmured, following his gaze.

  Emma shifted in her seat and wondered if it was too soon to fake a bathroom break.

  Aidan broke her gaze and held up his phone. “I have that speech here, ready to go. But it didn’t seem right for today, so I’m putting this away and speaking from here,” he said, tapping his chest. “None of you needs to be told to make time in your life to write, to practice what you do, to seek out opportunities to learn from the best. The fact that you’re here means you already know that. What I want to talk about is how very bad people can make good art, and how good people can make bad art, but how if we learn to approach our work the right way, we can always make real art. True art. And that is the best art because it’s the art that matters.”

  Emma blinked. She hadn’t expected him to talk about art at all. “Art” was a word critics reserved for giddy use about the writers she could only dream of joining in the most exclusive literary reviews. Writers like her mother.

  He continued on for several minutes, talking about how the best stories were the ones that came from the realest places inside each of them. How people needed stories that came from the heart, not from their minds where the work was too often sanitized and polished but lacking the pulse that drew people to it and left them changed.

  She looked around the crowd, all of them listening intently. “This is the weirdest thing to hear coming from the mouth of a guy who writes his lead detective as a blonde bombshell,” she whispered to Valeria.

  Valeria’s expression reflected surprise again. “Have you read any of his books?”

  “No. You have?” Valeria only represented highbrow literary fiction, so it would surprise Emma to no end to hear that her agent curled up with pulpy crime thrillers.

  “He knows what he’s talking about.”

  Emma turned her attention back to Aidan. He was talking about empathy now, about how they didn’t each have to live the exact stories they told, but that the spirit of empathy would animate their work for readers if writers were willing to dig into hard places.

  She listened more attentively, drawn in despite herself. The words were good, but she wished the message were coming from someone she could believe, someone who understood the kind of writing she did. The one thing she had to give him total credit for was not mentioning a word about his own success. He didn’t make a single reference to the phenomenal sales of his series, and when he talked about working hard and putting the time in to get things right, she believed him. No amount of money could save him from having to show up to his laptop and putting in the time. Heck, she’d seen him at work with her own two eyes in the café. There was no question he did the work, even if she didn’t like the result.

  He took a long pause, one that suggested he was gathering his thoughts again before concluding. His eyes met hers once more, and when she looked away again, she thought she caught a slight flicker of a smile.

  “What we do is hard, but it’s important,” he said. “And looking for the right words, that’s important too. But painting the most beautiful word picture in a reader’s mind isn’t going to matter if we don’t first learn how to make them care about the picture we’re painting. Always we must stay rooted in empathy and write from our hard places even as we make up beautiful ones for the readers. Thank you.”

  He was met with loud applause. Almost a quarter of the audience rose to its feet. Emma shook her head at Maggie who was clapping hard. “Must be the genre writers,” she said. Maggie shook her head at her and kept clapping.

  The resort had laid out a light afternoon snack buffet of cheeses, fruits, and breads as well as some craft beers and the promised champagne. When the applause finally died down, Emma drifted toward the food, lured by the bread. Valeria and Maggie joined the small crowd that had gathered around Aidan to congratulate him on his talk. A few minutes and two onion rolls later, Valeria found her on the edge of the patio, eating some brie and watching the other authors mingle.

  “I’m not going to ask you how your book is coming, so if you’re hiding over here to avoid me, don’t worry.”

  Emma smiled. “Thank you. And I promise I’m working on the book during every spare minute of this retreat. I’m trying to stay long enough to be polite then I’m diving back into it.”

  “You don’t like Aidan Maxwell, hmm?” the agent asked.

  “Not really. Had a bad run-in on a panel several days ago.”

  “Bad how?”

  “He was super condescending, kept taking shots at literary fiction, was just in general a . . . windbag,” she concluded after a pause as she searched for the politest way to say it.

  “That surprises me,” Valeria said. “He’s widely known as one of the nicest guys in the industry. Maybe even too nice.”

  “Not that day.”

  Valeria shook her head as if she couldn’t reconcile it. “You should give him another chance. Read his books. I have a feeling they’re going to shock you.”

  “It’s not my thing. It looks like he has enough adoring fans already.”

  “That’s not his fault. Not unless you want to also blame him for writing excellent books. But also, one of the things I respect most about him is the way he uses his platform for good. He’s done an astonishing amount for charity,” Valeria said, also turning to watch the crowd. “ He’ll almost never let his name be associated with any of it because he doesn’t want the credit.”

  “What kind of charities?” Emma asked. People’s causes said a lot about them.

  “Some victim’s assistan
ce and domestic violence survivor organizations. I think those are his prosecutor roots. But what’s even more interesting is where he spends his time. He mentors at-risk young men.”

  “Wow.” Emma was genuinely impressed.

  “Don’t tell him I told you,” Valeria said. “I only know about it because he’s reached out to me to get some of my clients to come help at the mentoring program. I think it’s called Write It Out. That’s to help them with healthy self-expression. But then he does other mentoring, trying to connect them to sports leagues or job training.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the guy I met at the library panel.”

  “I don’t know him well,” Valeria said. “He could have terrible interpersonal skills. But his efforts to make a difference, they’re not for show. I can sniff out inauthenticity like an airport drug dog with a pallet of pot. Aidan’s charity work isn’t a stunt.”

  Emma had to admit that none of this fit with the guy she’d met in the Coupeville Library or the cafe. She turned to study him as he listened to one of his well-wishers, his head tilted toward the other man, his expression thoughtful. Valeria excused herself to speak to another client, but Emma kept watching Aidan. He gave the same attention to each of the next three people too.

  Huh. Maybe Aidan Maxwell had some layers beneath his ridiculous leather-jacket-charm-the-ladies persona after all.

  Chapter Six

  Aidan spoke with each author who approached him after his keynote, either accepting their thanks or listening to them as they shared their own mindset breakthroughs. He didn’t mind being the center of attention—no former prosecutor ever did—but he preferred these moments, where the connections were about craft and storytelling, not fans, but colleagues.

  Or he usually did. Today he’d been far more vulnerable than he normally would. Catherine had taught him to keep that side of himself guarded, and it had been a long time since he’d been so honest about his own writing process and how much it mattered to him to connect with his readers. He hadn’t been so open about that since their marriage. He’d learned the hard way that she didn’t get it, and she definitely didn’t respect it.