Ever After Always (Bergman Brothers Book 3)

by Chloe Liese

  She raises her water bottle. “Cheers to that.”

  Ren smiles between us, then glances around. “Where’s Freya?”

  “I don’t know.” I peer around, too. “Where’s…the rest of your siblings?”

  “Present and accounted for,” Viggo says from somewhere over my shoulder.

  I startle in my chair. “Jesus. Will you ever make a normal entrance?”

  “Pff.” Viggo plops onto the seat next to me. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  When I turn back, Ren’s rubbing zinc oxide onto the bridge of his nose.

  Viggo snorts a laugh. “You do know you could try not staying paper white, right, Ren?”

  Ren arches a russet eyebrow. “Does this look like skin that ever sees the sun?”

  “No,” we all say.

  Frankie grabs the big tube of open sunblock and squirts it in her hands. “Don’t listen to them, Zenzero.” She rubs the sunblock between her hands, turning and straddling the chaise as she smiles at him. “You need sunblock. Lots. All over you.”

  Ren laughs as she slathers it down his chest and pushes him back on the chaise.

  “Ugh,” Oliver says, startling me just as badly as Viggo. Goddammit, these two. “We always knew he’d be like this once he had a girlfriend, but geez. Get a room!” he says through cupped hands.

  Frankie flips him the bird. “Public beach, bitches. Avert your eyes if you don’t like what you see.”

  Oliver grumbles to himself, then steals my water bottle and chugs half of it.

  “You know, Ollie,” I tell him, “you could actually drink your own beverage one of these days.”

  He does this. Constantly. Nabs a bite of food from your plate, tastes your wine. Chugs your water if he’s been running around and your glass happens to be there.

  Oliver gives me a What are you smoking? look. “You try being the bottom of five brothers and see if you don’t form survival tactics. If I didn’t eat or drink other people’s sustenance, I didn’t get any.”

  “Oh, please,” Viggo says, rolling his eyes. “I’m twelve whopping months older than you and I’m not a kleptomaniac with other people’s food.”

  “You were always twelve months developmentally ahead of me, too,” Oliver argues. “Just that little bit bigger and better.”

  Viggo smirks. “And that still holds today. Just that little bit bigger. And better.”

  Oliver glares at him. “Yeah. That’s what I was doing. Comparing dicks.”

  “Okay.” I throw my hands up. “I’m not sitting in the crosshairs of your incessant sibling spat. Don’t you two ever just relax and get along?”

  They both look at me like I have four heads, then say, “No.”

  All right, then. I open my book, the romance novel Viggo gave me, hidden in my lap, and change the subject. “Where’s Ryder?”

  And my wife?

  “Arriving tomorrow morning,” Viggo says, adjusting his chair so he’s reclined farther and opening his own book, which features half-naked people entwined on the cover. “Willa wasn’t going to be back from a traveling game until this evening. She told Ryder to go ahead but he said—” Viggo drops his voice and tries for sounding like his brother, “‘No way. I don’t come until you come.’ Which is generally a very good principle for a relationship,” he says, turning the page of his book.

  “Come on,” Oliver says. “Choreographed orgasms are the stuff of your bullshit romance novels.”

  “You watch your mouth!” Viggo snaps and sits upright. “Sometimes, yes, romance has reinforced unrealistic expectations of sexual intimacy and pleasure—however,” he says, making big, I’m saying something important eyes at us. “At least it’s put on the page. At least it foregrounds human intimacy and sexual freedom and passion, not just staring into the abyss, waxing philosophical about our inevitable mortality.”

  “Here we go,” Oliver sighs.

  Viggo is undeterred. “Romance is about the centrality of loving relationships, and it reminds us that human connection is vital to existence, rather than glorifying egoism or violence or greed. So excuse my genre for not being perfect, but let’s back the fuck up from hypocritically critiquing books that have done a lot more for humanity than slashers and circle-jerk, five-hundred-page, nihilistic tomes.”

  A slow clap echoes from behind us, snapping my attention over my shoulder. And then my mouth falls open. Because Freya’s untying her red wrap, and then it’s fluttering to her feet by my chair, and then she’s walking—no, strutting—in a tiny red bikini, straight down to the water.

  13

  Freya

  Playlist: “Breakaway,” Lennon Stella

  The water’s perfect, but the feeling of Aiden’s eyes on me makes it even better.

  Try jumping off that for your stupid phone.

  I dive beneath a wave, feeling the ocean wrap me in that magnificent silence that greets you when you’re underwater. It’s so peaceful, so quiet beneath the waves, and for as long as my lungs can take it, I let myself hang below the water’s surface, feeling the rhythm of a fresh wave crashing down.

  Then a strong arm is drawing me up, crushing me to a hard, solid chest.

  “Freya!” Aiden’s voice is raw, his eyes searching me wildly as I gasp in surprise. “Holy shit! Don’t do that.”

  I gape at him. “Wha—”

  He kisses me. Hard. Frantically. “Holy shit,” he mutters, crushing me to him again. His arms are so tight around me I can barely breathe. “You scared me, Freya. You didn’t come up.”

  “I was just enjoying the water,” I whisper against his shoulder, reeling from his intensity. Tenderly, his hands drift along my arms, as if he’s reassuring himself I’m really there. Then he cradles my head against his chest, where I feel his heart pounding. “I’m okay, Aiden.”

  “I’m not,” he says honestly.

  For just a moment, I bask in his attention, his concern, the urgency in his touch. I bite my lip, remembering the warmth of his mouth on mine. But then the water slaps between us, snapping me out of it. I pull back the little that I can in his tight grip, hating how easily I respond to his touch.

  Aiden still holds me close, everything soft of mine crushed against the hard planes of him. I look away, trying to numb myself to how good it feels. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” I tell him. “I didn’t even think you’d notice.”

  “Not notice,” he mutters, cupping my jaw and tipping back my head until our eyes lock. “Freya, of course I did.”

  I swallow slowly as his thumb slides along my throat.

  “Of course, I did,” he whispers. His eyes are as aqua blue as the ocean waves around us, sparkling under the sun, and not for the first time do I notice how mesmerizing they are, how beautiful he is. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so attracted to him, that when I met his eyes, I wasn’t swept into their turquoise depths, that I didn’t fall deep and just keep falling.

  Aiden exhales slowly, steadying himself. “I’m sorry I mauled your face. It was half CPR, half Oh, thank fuck, you’re alive.”

  Before I can answer, his head whips sharply toward an incoming wave. In unspoken understanding we fill our lungs with air, then drop under the water together as it crashes overhead. The sounds of the ocean wrap around us, as Aiden holds me close, and when the wave clears, we rush to the surface.

  Our chests bump, then our noses, as we’re both thrown off-balance and clasping each other to steady ourselves. Steady again, I squint against the sun and the saltwater on my lashes as Aiden peers down at me. His thumbs wipe beneath my eyes gently, his body warm against mine.

  I start to pull away again, but he stops me, hands wrapping around my shoulders. “Freya.”

  “Aiden.”

  He swallows roughly. “I’m sorry. The other night, when I answered my phone was… I feel terrible. I’m sorry.”

  Pushing off the sand, we swim through a building wave and let it roll past us to shore. “So you’ve said.”

  “But clearly you’re still angry.”
<
br />   And hurt. Embarrassed. Humiliated.

  “Well, Aiden, you took a call when my shirt was halfway off and I was about to orgasm on the kitchen counter, so, yeah, not great for self-esteem.”

  “Freya, I said I was sorry, and I meant it. That had nothing to do with your desirability.”

  I laugh emptily. “Okay. Except your actions didn’t say that. They haven’t for months. It’s one thing to tell me that your sex drive is affected, but does your sex drive include hugs, Aiden? A real warm hug? A kiss goodnight? Just a little bit of affection and honesty? That’s all I wanted. I didn’t need to be ravished, but I don’t think the most basic sense of being the woman you want was too much to ask for.”

  He sighs, running his hand over his mouth and beard. I stare at him, this man who somehow looks everything and nothing like the person I married.

  How does this happen? How do you swear your life to someone, knowing you’ll both change? How do you promise each other ’til death do us part and happily ever after, knowing that more marriages end than survive?

  You tell yourself you’re different. We’re different.

  But we’re not. We’re just Freya and Aiden, floating in the Pacific, with no damn clue how our story will end. And I hate it. I hate not knowing. I hate wanting him and fearing what will happen if I give in. I’m so tired down to my bones, tired of hurting and existing in this ambiguous, shitty marital purgatory.

  As if he senses my readiness to bolt, Aiden gently tugs me through the water until it’s deeper, and the waves are rolling instead of crashing toward the shore.

  His eyes search mine. “Freya, I messed up. Work got away from me. I let it suck me in too far. I admit that. And I have a kneejerk response to my phone going off because I worry I’ll miss something time-sensitive from Dan for the app. It was not at all about not wanting you. Though, I hear you. I understand what you’re saying. That my behavior didn’t demonstrate that. That it hasn’t in too long. And I’m sorry.”

  I roll onto my back and float gently now that we’re in a calmer part of the water. Aiden’s eyes dart down my body, and he swallows roughly. I barely bite back a smile of vengeful satisfaction. “I already accepted your apology.”

  “But I’m still suffering the consequences.”

  God, men really don’t get it sometimes. They want apologies to wipe away the pain. But pain takes time to heal. You can forgive and hurt as you recover from the wound.

  “Guess so,” I tell him. “And your penance continues tomorrow.”

  “What’s tomorrow?” he asks warily.

  “The boys have plans for you guys, soon as Willa and Ryder get in.”

  He groans. “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Dammit,” he mutters, dunking under the water, then coming back up.

  My eyes traitorously drift to Aiden, to water sluicing down his hard chest, as the sea breeze wraps around us and his flat, dark nipples tighten. It reminds me of how he shudders when my tongue traces them, when my hand drifts down his stomach—

  The water rolls beneath me like an admonition. Snap out of it.

  “You could always not join them,” I tell him, making sure my tone comes across even and unaffected. “I’m sure you have work to do.”

  “Can you let up on the jabs about work, Freya? Christ.”

  I give him an icy sidelong glance. “You’re right. Whyever did I think you’d plan on working?”

  His left eye twitches. Telltale for when I really get to him. He presses a finger to it. “I told Dan I’d be available sparingly.”

  “Sparingly,” I repeat skeptically. “Hm. Well, as long as you wear a smile around my parents, that’s all I need.”

  “I wasn’t planning on being privately miserable,” he says testily.

  Makes one of us.

  I shut my eyes and focus on floating. “No. I assumed you were planning on being privately busy. Working.”

  He sighs. “You’re seriously holding this over me?”

  I stop floating, dropping into the water as I glare up at him. “Holding this over you? Your tendency for work to eclipse every other part of your life, including your wife? The work that constantly preoccupies you, that vastly contributed to our marriage imploding because you kept it to yourself and kept me out of it? Oh, man. You’re right. What am I thinking, ‘holding this over you’?”

  Aiden stares down at the water, his face tight, eyes lowered. And a stab of empathy cuts through me.

  “Aiden, as I’ve said, while it hurts, I understand why you didn’t talk about your anxiety, how it affected our intimate life. You were coming to grips with it yourself. But this shit with your work and success? No, Aiden. It’s prideful and egoic, and I don’t have time for it. What you did the other night just cements its priority in your life.”

  He opens his mouth, but we’re interrupted by Viggo hollering from the sand. “Pickup! Get over here!”

  Not waiting for Aiden’s response, I swim away and catch a wave in.

  When I walk up the sand toward my parents, my mom squints up from beneath her straw hat and smiles. “What do you think of the water?” she asks.

  “It’s great. Have you gone in?”

  “We have.” Dad pats her thigh affectionately. “And she only dunked me twice.”

  Mom’s smile deepens as she picks up her book. “You deserved it.”

  Dad slides his sunglasses onto his head, glancing over his shoulder to where my brothers and Ziggy are setting up for pickup soccer. “You going to show those punks how the old folks play, Freya?”

  “Excuse me! Old folks?”

  Dad laughs as I ruffle his hair in retribution.

  “Freya!” Ziggy yells. “No goalies, right?”

  I wrinkle my nose. “Of course not.”

  The guys all throw their hands up in protest.

  “One-on-one, winner decides if we play goalies,” Oliver calls, crooking his finger at me in challenge.

  I point to my chest. “Who? Me? Are you sure? This hardly seems fair. I’m quite old and delicate these days.”

  Oliver flashes a cocky smile. “Which is why we’ll have this settled nice and quick.”

  Viggo massages his forehead. “Shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Yep,” Ren says. “She’s gonna whoop your butt now.”

  Axel slides his shades down onto his nose and sets his hands behind his head. “And I’m going to enjoy watching.”

  I rush toward Oliver and pull the ball off of him, but soon he’s right on my tail. He’s twelve years younger than me, in prime fitness, plays soccer at UCLA, so I’m probably not going to win, but confidence sometimes goes a long way, and for a moment, I have him scrambling, trying unsuccessfully to gain possession.

  “Geez, Frey!” he laughs, when I throw a hip. “Like that, is it?”

  I laugh, too, as I spin, then go for a shot which he blocks with his foot. When Oliver pulls the ball back and tries for a shot himself, I turn and take his shot straight to the ass, sending all of them into hysterics, including Oliver. Which makes it easy to steal the ball, then kick it right through the makeshift goal.

  Ziggy squeals as she runs at me, throwing her arms around my neck. “My heroine! No goalies!”

  “Of course there’s no keeps,” a new voice says.

  I jolt, turning to face Aiden, and feel my knees go wobbly.

  He stands, the sun behind him, casting his tall frame in sharp backlit shadow. He tips his head and shakes water out of his ear, making all the muscles in his torso flex and bunch. I barely swallow a hum as my eyes trail his body.

  Strong but not shredded. Solid and heavy and hard. Round shoulders, big pecs, water glistening down his taut stomach and dark hair arrowing beneath his swim shorts’ waistband. A rush of air leaves me as my eyes wander down and lock on the thick outline of him inside his wet swim trunks, plastered to his muscular thighs—

  Dammit. I’m angry at him. And I am on the longest no-sex streak I’ve been on for the better part of a decad
e. It is not a nice combination.

  Aiden’s eyes meet mine and flicker like he knows what I’m thinking. I shut my eyes as he walks right by me toward my brothers.

  I will not look over my shoulder and check out his ass.

  I will not look over my shoulder and—

  I look and bite my lip as I stare. Aiden says he’s hardly had time for working out, but it’s very obvious he hasn’t been skipping deadlifts.

  At all.

  Ziggy clears her throat.

  “What?” I blurt.

  She smiles. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Right. Okay. C’mon, Zigs. Let’s show those boys how to play.”

  I glance over at Aiden, my stomach twisting when he smiles at something Ren says. It jars my memory, reminding me of when we used to play on a co-ed soccer team, when Aiden and I would make a date out of it.

  Riding in the car, we’d sing along to each other’s playlists. Then when we were there, we’d watch each other in a sea of other people, high on that fizzy delight of observing your person out in the wild, realizing how much you liked them and wanted them, how special they were to you, how much you knew about them that no one else did.

  I’d watch his bright smile, the deep groove of a dimple bracketing his mouth, as he offered someone that easy charm that lights up a room. I’d notice as he shifted his weight and his big thighs flexed. My eyes would travel and settle on his bright blue eyes and the kindness in his face. And I’d want him. So deeply, from the core of my body to my fingertips. I’d want him with my heart and my body and this inexplicable thing I still can’t name except belonging. Undeniable, soul-deep belonging.

  That same fierce sensation coils inside me, as I watch him chugging water, giving Viggo shit about the width of the makeshift goals.

  And my stomach does this unsettling flip-flop, like it did the first time I saw him, staring at me across the field. He was tall and lanky and beautiful, almost too beautiful. An angular face that I felt like I could stare at for lifetimes and still not fully appreciate. Dark thick lashes, those vivid blue eyes pinning me. It felt like a strike of lightning, straight down my spine, and I looked away, terrified. No one had ever made me feel that.