Indulgence

by K. A. Berg

  Contents

  Blurb

  Playlist

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by K.A. Berg

  Indulgence

  K.A. Berg

  Copyright © 2021 by K.A. Berg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Visit my website at www.bergbooks.com

  Cover Design: T.E. Black Designs; www.teblackdesigns.com

  Editor: Ashley Williams, AW Editing; www.awediting.com

  Interior Formatting & Design: T.E. Black Designs, www.teblackdesigns.com

  Indulgence

  Something was missing. Deep down, I wasn’t satisfied.

  It all started with dinner and a blindfold. We led each other down a path we didn’t know if we’d be able to return from. We saw a side of each other we’d never seen before. What’s more . . . we liked it.

  Indulging in our sexuality was the best thing we’d done for our marriage, for ourselves.

  Until it wasn’t.

  Some lines couldn’t be uncrossed. Some things couldn’t be undone. What happened when you’ve indulged too much? How could you ever fix it?

  Playlist

  Dangerous Woman

  Ariana Grande

  Hard For Me

  Michele Morrone

  Every Time We Touch

  Cascada

  Adore You

  Harry Styles

  The Bones

  Maren Morris

  Past Life

  Trevor Daniel & Selena Gomez

  It Feels So Good

  Sonique

  Nobody’s Love

  Maroon 5

  Need You Now

  Lady A

  Say Something

  A Great Big World

  Chapter One

  Natalie

  “Mom, have you seen my lacrosse cleats?”

  If I’d told him once, I’d told him a million times. Put your lacrosse stuff in your lacrosse bag in the garage when you come home from practice.

  “Did you put them in your lacrosse bag like you were supposed to?” I called back as I tried to get everyone’s lunches into the correct lunchboxes.

  Turkey for Jackson.

  Ham and cheese for Emma.

  Chicken salad for Matteo.

  And a garden salad for me.

  “Mom, Saturn’s rings fell off,” Emma screeched from the end of the hall. “I need you to help me put them back on. I worked too hard to get anything less than an A.”

  Oh, my little perfectionist. No wonder she was always so stressed. She couldn’t accept anything less than the best. I felt sorry for her future husband.

  “And hurry. The bus will be here in ten minutes,” she added as if I weren’t already aware of the time her bus came every morning or what time it currently was.

  “I still can’t find my cleats, Mom,” Jackson called out again. I felt equally sorry for his future wife as I did for my future son-in-law. That boy was a mess of disorganization and food crumbs. “I need them for practice after school.”

  I took a deep breath and then let it out. In and out.

  His cologne—Curve, the same it had been since college—invaded my senses before he kissed the top of my head and snatched a banana muffin from the plate on the counter.

  “Jackson,” he called out to our son. “Your cleats are in the back of my car. Emma, get the glue gun. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Thank you.” I exhaled heavily. How was I so exhausted already? It was only seven thirty. “It’s as if they are completely incapable of verbalizing the word Dad when they feel the tiniest bit of crisis. It’s always Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom.”

  I loved my children, but from the moments of their births, which happened six minutes apart, they hadn’t stopped. Some days, like this one, I woke up drained.

  Matteo smiled the grin that always grounded me. “They just know who is better at everything.”

  I rolled my eyes as my lips tipped up on one side. “You don’t need to lay it on so thick this early in the morning, babe.”

  His forest-green eyes twinkled. “But it got a half a smile out of you.”

  “Dadddd!” Emma yelled, the inflection of her voice showcasing her panic. “The glue gun is ready. We don’t have much time.”

  Matteo shook his head. “I better go before she has a heart attack.”

  The rest of the day wasn’t any less hectic.

  It was actually a day from hell.

  Metro was a gallery in downtown Seattle that was run by a brother and sister duo from France and featured art from all over the world. Bastien Bisset was an abstract expressionist painter and Annetta managed his career. I managed the gallery.

  “Phillip, how does a painting just go missing?” I asked exasperatedly because, how could a shipping company lose a giant painting? We had a new exhibition starting next week, Emergence, which was a showing of emerging artists, and it would run for two weeks.

  Phillip clicked and typed on his end while I stood on the loading dock in the back of the gallery with a driver who did not have the painting on his truck. “It has not been scanned off the truck, Mrs. Collins.”

  “The only boxes left on this truck are not large enough to house the painting, Phillip,” I told him. “I assure you it is not on this truck. If this is the new standard of service at Echo Logistics, Metro is going to have to move our business elsewhere.”

  If the artist got wind that his painting had gone missing, it could have a catastrophic impact on the gallery’s reputation. No one would want to let us handle their work if we couldn’t guarantee safe arrival.

  I hadn’t wanted to think about the fact this particular piece was Alek Devereaux’s highlight painting in his debut collection. It was supposed to make its rounds up and down the coast over the next three months.

  The threat of moving our business elsewhere, seemed to light a fire under Phillip’s ass. “Give me an hour, and I’ll have your asset located.”

  I sighed. “That would be great, Phillip. Not as great as having the painting here now, like it was supposed to be, but at least we are moving in the right direction. I’ll await your call.”

  As soon as I disconnect the call with him, the driver
’s phone rang. He stepped away, probably getting yelled at by Phillip, and I counted the crates on the loading dock that contained the other pieces that had arrived.

  “Let’s get these moved inside,” I called to Pete, the head of our in-house moving team.

  Just as we finished checking the last box of the delivery, my phone rang. I was expecting Phillip, not a frantic Emma.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom, I was so distracted fixing my science project that I forgot my piano folder, ” Emma rushed out.

  I glanced down at my watch and sighed. Only two hours to get her folder to her. That meant heading across town and back in the beginning of rush hour traffic. Wonderful. “I’ll bring it to your music lesson.”

  She exhaled, sounding relieved. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Traffic wouldn’t help ward off the migraine knocking on my door or the seventeen new gray hairs I‘d have by morning.

  "Great job, team.” I nodded at the men as they covered the last box with the wool blanket.

  From my office, I scooped up the stack of paperwork on the corner of my desk. I still had so much left to do.

  Where was Phillip with my painting?

  Speak of the devil. My phone rang as I rushed to my car.

  I skipped the greeting. I didn’t have much left in me today. "Tell me you’ve found it, Phillip.”

  “It’s at the University of Oregon.”

  Great, my piece was five hours away at a college art museum. Phillip assured me that my painting would be at the gallery first thing tomorrow morning as I drove home.

  I was over the day by the time I ran into the house grabbed the folder and then ran back downtown to drop it off to Emma. Her shoulders visibly relaxed the moment she was prepared for her lesson. Matteo and I needed to sit with her to discuss her anxiety and stress levels. I knew it wasn’t healthy for a child to be as concerned about perfection as Emma was.

  While I waited for Emma’s lesson to end and Jackson’s lacrosse practice to finish, I ran the slew of errands on my to-do list throughout town.

  I dropped off new dry cleaning while picking up the previous batch I dropped off last week. Then I stopped at the UPS store to send back our Amazon returns. The drapes I ordered looked great online but not so great in person. Last was the grocery store. It seemed as if I lived at the grocery store. We were always running out of something. Either bread or milk or the protein bars that Jackson liked to eat before practice.

  Lately, my life felt as if it was a tornado, spinning around knocking down everything in its path or, in my case, the never-ending to-do list. I was Mom, Mrs. Collins, and the gallery manager. All at the same time on some days. Once in a while, I just wanted to be Natalie, and be Natalie in a place that was all about making Natalie happy. On the heels of that thought was always guilt. I had great kids, a wonderful husband, and a good job. I was happy. Truly I was, but I figured I was just tired of the monotony of everyday life.

  I finished at the store right on time. After packing everything into the trunk of my Jeep Cherokee, I swung back to pick up Emma before shooting to school to grab Jackson.

  Turned out, Jackson’s best friend, Scotty, needed a ride home, and Jackson volunteered me without bothering to check first. Not that I minded necessarily because I loved Scotty, but I was tired and Scotty lived on the other side of town, which meant twenty minutes in the opposite direction during the thick of rush hour.

  Emma glowered at the boys in the backseat, all the while complaining about having a lot of homework and how she would be way behind and miss Riverdale. As if missing Riverdale were the end of the world, but I assumed that to a twelve-year-old who would undoubtedly hear spoilers tomorrow, it was.

  It was after six when I pulled into the garage. “Can you each grab a bag before you rush into the house, please?” I asked the kids as I popped the trunk. I did not feel like making a second trip back out for the groceries.

  Emma let out a garbled protest while Jackson smiled. “Sure, Mom.”

  With the mood swings and anxiety raging through Emma’s body, I was sure her impending first period wasn’t too far off. God, please, anything but that. If Emma was about to start PMSing, I was going to move out.

  Exhaling a deep breath for what had to be the thousandth time that day, I gathered the remaining bags and headed into the house, needing to get dinner started.

  “Guys . . . get started on your homework,” I called as I dropped the bags onto the counter. “Jackson, please make sure you shower first. Dinner should be ready in about forty-five minutes.”

  While putting away the groceries, I also started dinner. Life wasn’t possible without multi-tasking. I pulled out the sauce from two nights ago to heat while I started the water for the lasagna noodles. I had just slid it into the oven and had begun working on the salad when Matteo came in the garage door.

  “Hey.” He smiled at me as he strolled into the kitchen “It smells so good in here.”

  “Thank you,” I replied, turning my head toward him for a kiss.

  Matteo was probably the world’s best husband. He was kind, patient, and level-headed. He listened and never failed to kiss me hello or good-bye. I knew that, no matter what, I could always count on him.

  He picked a cherry tomato from the bowl before asking, “How was your day?”

  “Long, but all right. Yours?”

  “Same old, same old.” Matteo was an actuary. He assessed risks for a living. Like the guy Ben Stiller played in the movie Along Came Polly. He analyzed the financial costs of risk and uncertainty, using a bunch of math stuff way beyond my comprehension, to judge the likelihood of an event happening, and then he helped his clients develop policies that minimized the cost of that risk. “The kids in their rooms?”

  I nodded as I gave the salad a final toss before bringing it to the table. “Can you make sure Jackson showered? Oh, and fair warning, Emma is pissy because we had to take Scotty home and now she’ll miss her show.”

  He took a deep breath. “Oh boy. Okay, I’ll talk to her. How much longer?”

  “About ten more minutes.”

  Matteo killed Emma’s bad mood, a skill he excelled at. She was such a Daddy’s girl. Dinner passed smoothly with even a few smiles from our daughter. Man, no one told us how hard this parenting gig would be when the teenage years loomed over our heads. It was exhausting.

  As I stood in front of my dresser hours later, pulling out a pair of pajamas, warm hands slipped under my top and rubbed along the waist of my skirt. “We made it through another day,” Matteo said, kissing my neck. “How about a little after-dark fun?”

  I turned in my husband’s arms and kissed him. I wasn’t particularly in the mood for sex, but I wasn’t not in the mood either. Sex had become the same things on repeat lately. It almost felt like a chore. Not one that I necessarily dreaded, like folding the laundry, but a chore nonetheless. It felt as though we were always on a time limit. There was the bare minimum amount of foreplay. Some kissing, a bit of petting, and then one of us was on top of the other.

  Still, I pulled my top over my head while he unbuttoned his shirt. We had to be quick because we never knew when the kids would remember a permission slip that needed signing or needed a shirt that couldn’t be found but they needed for tomorrow. Both things had happened to us before. Nothing kills an orgasm faster than the sound of your child calling your name while you have a dick inside you.

  Maybe that was part of the rut as well. We were always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or at least, I was.

  I kissed Matteo’s neck under his ear where he liked it the most as he shucked off his dress shirt. His dick stiffened against my hip as I stepped into him. He unzipped the zipper in the back of my skirt, and it dropped to the floor while I pulled his undershirt over his head.

  A few moments later, we were both naked and laying on the bed. Matteo reached down and strummed me just where he needed to while I stroked him up and down. He licked my nipple before pulling it into his mouth. As if we could a
ctually hear the ever-ticking clock, Matteo shifted his hand from my body to his as I let him go. He lined himself up at my entrance and pushed in. I wished I could say that I felt all the sparks and fireworks that I read about in my stories, but unfortunately, no. It felt like a penis slipping into a vagina. The same as the last one hundred times. It felt the same as always . . . good.

  He moaned softly in my ear.

  I scratched my nails down his back and wrapped my legs around his waist, trying to pull him deeper into me. It had been getting harder and harder to quiet my mind during sex enough to come. My brain was too busy worrying about what needed to be done next that I wasn’t able to enjoy what was happening in the moment.

  Did I wash Jackson’s lacrosse uniform for his game tomorrow?

  Did Emma have play practice Tuesday or Thursday this week?

  Did I mail out Matteo’s mother’s birthday card?

  Shit, I needed to focus or I wouldn’t be able to at least try to come.

  Maybe if Matteo gave my ass a little slap it would keep my attention in the moment.