With You Forever (Bergman Brothers, #4)

by Chloe Liese

I snuck them into your suitcase, but I haven’t made you read them. You could have used them for kindling, but you’ve read at least some of them, judging by those cracked spines. Why?” Staring down at my coffee, I tip my cup side to side, watching the dark liquid slide and kiss the ceramic surface. “Because I’m curious, I guess. I’m not…against romance. I just don’t know that I’m cut out for it, either.” Viggo’s uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. He eases onto a seat closer to me and softly fans through the book’s pages, over and over. “And after having read a few of these?” he asks. “What do you think?” “I’m not sure. I don’t talk and act like the people in your books.” Viggo sets down the book. “No one does. That’s the point. Certain parts of historical romance are highly unrelatable—the marriage mart, the clothing, the elaborate etiquette, the formal language—and yet that’s what makes the stories poignant. Reading about people who look and live and speak so differently from us, yet struggle like we do with their inner demons and outside forces, fight for love in their friendships and families and the people they’ve fallen for, reminds us that not only romantic love, but familial and platonic and sacrificial love is universal, and romance is timeless, that there’s a love story for anyone out there who wants one.”