Margo knows how to help other people through grief.She knows what to say, when to remain silent and how to make herself useful when someone’s world has fallen apart.Her own feelings are another matter entirely.Reckless Hearts, Book Five in the Healing Hearts series, is a slow burn second chance lesbian workplace romance about grief, vulnerability and the difference between being needed and being loved.And as a member of the Ruby Scott Collective Vault, you get to meet Margo and Nell before everyone else.Meet Margo and Nell in Reckless HeartsMargo has built her life around being the person everyone can depend on. Being needed makes sense to her. It gives her a role, a purpose and something practical to do.Love asks for far more.Then Nell comes into her life with her warmth, patience and inconvenient habit of seeing what Margo would rather keep hidden.They are both good at helping other people carry grief. When it comes to their own losses, fears and feelings for each other, they are considerably less capable.As they work alongside one another, Margo must decide whether being useful is enough or whether she is finally prepared to let someone love her.What to Expect from This Second Chance Lesbian RomanceReckless Hearts brings readers back to the world of the Healing Hearts series for a story featuring:Grumpy sunshine romanceWorkplace tensionEmotional wallsGrief and healingVulnerable heroinesSapphic chemistryA dog who may steal the bookThe difference between being needed and being lovedFamiliar faces from the Healing Hearts seriesThere is romance, humour and heat, but this may also be the most emotional book I have written.Reckless Hearts explores several forms of grief, including the heartbreak of losing a dog. I wanted to write about that loss honestly because anyone who has loved an animal knows they are never ‘just a pet’.There is also Brian, who is very much alive, permanently disappointed by life and looks like a Greek statue halfway through turning into a sheep.Read Reckless Hearts Chapter OneHere is your exclusive first look at Margo and Nell’s story.CHAPTER ONEMARGOMargo came in at six thirty to the evidence of two other lives going on without her permission and with her full, grudging consent. Jacob’s scrubs hung over the stair rail, the maroon ones, which meant he’d been on the children’s ward and would sleep till noon, so the vacuuming could wait. Nat’s latest concern, a cardboard box of small brown bottles labeled in Nat’s handwriting, had taken over one end of the kitchen table; the hot sauce had given way to a serum or a supplement, Margo hadn’t asked.A clean mug sat out on the counter where she’d set it that morning for someone. A viewing. She’d forgotten, and one look at her watch put it minutes away.She put the kettle on for a stranger. Nobody had asked her to build this, and here it was, built. A big house she’d never meant to fill and had filled anyway, with people who paid rent and left their bottles on her table and dried their scrubs on her stair rail and were, though she wouldn’t have said so aloud, the nearest thing she had to a household. She liked them. She’d have denied how much. She had denied it so long the answer came out smooth, worn in like the dip in an old stone step.The doorbell rang.The new one, a prospective lodger, wanted to talk about energy. Not the electric bill, which Margo could have discussed for an hour and enjoyed. Auras.Sasha, that was her name, stood in the middle of the kitchen with the tea Margo had made her going cold in both hands and explained that she read the energy of a house before she committed to a room in it. Other people checked for water damage. This house, she said, had a guarded energy. A withholding energy. Did Margo find that the rooms felt watched?“That’s the smoke alarm.” Margo nodded at the plastic disc on the ceiling, blinking its slow green pulse. “It does that. I keep meaning to take the battery out, and then I remember what it’s for.”Sasha gave her the look of a woman deciding to be patient with her.Margo turned to the sink and wiped the dish rack, which was dry, and squared the cloth over the faucet so the corners hung level. Behind her, Sasha had moved on to talk about the last place she’d lived and a landlord who’d kept her deposit. It was coming for her and she stood still and let it arrive. She was good at standing in the path of a person who needed to talk. It required nothing of her but standing there, and it spared her saying anything about herself, which was as close to a hobby as she kept.“And the worst part,” Sasha said, “is he made me feel like I was the unreasonable one.”“That’s what they do.” Margo took a glass from the shelf, polished it, set it back. “The ones who take something from you always need you to agree they were owed it. Saves them having to feel like a thief.”She said it easily. There was a knack to keeping a stranger company through a grievance and she’d had it for years. You agreed in the right places and kept your hands busy so it didn’t look like effort. You never told them about yourself, and they went away saying what a good talk that had been.“You’re easy to talk to,” Sasha said, proving it.“It’s a gift,” Margo said. “I do weddings.”“He sounds like a lot,” Margo said, into the next gap that opened. “The landlord, I mean.”“He was toxic.”“Mm.” Margo lifted the kettle, found it heavy enough, set it down again without turning it on. “Some people are a leak you can’t trace. You stop looking for where the water’s coming in and you put a bucket down and live around it.”She stopped, because that had come out about something other than plumbing.“That’s very Zen,” Sasha said.“It’s very Denver. Everything’s a plumbing problem eventually.” Margo took the cold tea out of Sasha’s hands and set it by the sink. Sasha was never going to drink it, and a mug in both hands made people confide. “Room’s at the top, on the left. It’s small and the window swells shut in this heat, so you’ll want it open before noon or not at all. You’d share the bathroom with Jacob, who works nights and is a better person than me, and Nat, who’ll have your entire life story by Friday and will want to fix something in your room you didn’t know was broken. There’s a grad student in the attic too, but you won’t see them till October.”“And you?”“I own the chaos. I don’t participate in it.”“No, I meant—“ Sasha tilted her head and took her time getting there. “Are you partnered? It’s just, for the energy of the house. Whether there’s a couple in it.”Partnered. The word sat down at the kitchen table and made itself comfortable.“There’s me,” Margo said. “And the inmates. And a dog that isn’t technically mine, who eats better than I do. It’s a full life. You’d be amazed what fits in a day when you stop trying to cram another significant person into it.”Sasha laughed. People usually laughed, and then they moved on.The ad had been up since May. Four of them had stood in this kitchen since then and left again without ever seeing the rooms, and Margo had blamed the market each time. Jacob had needed two minutes and a look at the bathroom. Nat had talked her way in over an afternoon and a jammed window she’d fixed before anyone asked her to, and Margo had allowed it because she’d had a screwdriver in her back pocket and no argument ready. The rest of them got tea and the front door, and never noticed which of the two of them had said no.“Think about the room,” Margo said, walking her toward the door. The room stayed where it was at the top of the stairs, unviewed. Sasha, who could read the energy of a house she’d seen only the kitchen of, didn’t seem to notice she was being managed out of it. “No pressure. The energy’s not for everyone. I’ve been telling it for years to cheer up and it won’t listen.”When the front door shut, the house went back to being hers. Somewhere above her a faucet ran and stopped. Nat’s bike was in the hall again, propped where it wasn’t supposed to be, the back wheel still spinning down, and Margo stepped around it and left it there.She made toast and cut into the good cheese instead of making dinner, and ate standing up while she went through the mail. A flyer for gutter cleaning. A catalog of patio furniture for a deck she didn’t have. A glossy envelope offering life insurance, which they start mailing once somebody has decided you’re closer to the end than the beginning. That one went in the recycling with the others. The radio talked about the city council and the state of the roads, two callers being wrong about I-25 in a way she found restful. Strangers being mildly wrong at low volume was the right amount of other people. They couldn’t see her, and at nine o’clock she could turn them off.The dog came down.Brian belonged, in the technical sense that mattered to nobody including Brian, to the woman who used to live four doors down, who had gone into assisted living years ago and handed him over at the curb with a bag of kibble and the firm conviction that Margo wouldn’t mind. Margo had minded, in principle, for about a day. He was a greyhound crossed with something that had gone badly wrong around the head, a long gray animal built for mourning and then finished off with an apologetic woolly perm, so that he looked at all times like a Greek statue halfway through turning into a sheep. He had the face of a reader who had skipped to the end and realized, too late, he was invested in a tragedy. He was called Brian because the woman’s grandkid had called him Brian, and Margo had decided early that a magnificent doomed creature laboring under the name Brian was the funniest joke the house had going, and she refused every suggestion that he be renamed.Now he came to her knee every evening at the same hour, having identified her as the soft target in the building, and she crouched and did his ears the way he liked, both hands, slow, and told him he was a ridiculous animal and the worst decision anyone in this house had ever made, in the voice she used for nobody else. Brian leaned into her hands and believed none of it.She’d started buying him organic, gluten-free, grain-fortified treats from the health food store she passed on the way home, partly because the cheap ones gave him gas and partly because buying Brian something was allowed. Brian couldn’t leave her. He didn’t have the paperwork or the opposable thumbs. What came back was a warm idiot with a cheap perm leaning on her shins, which she considered the cleanest arrangement in the house.Or it would have been, if not for the cat.Persephone sat on the third stair from the bottom, exactly the height to take a swipe at anything passing, and watched Margo come through the hall, eyes yellow and unblinking, biding her time until the war crimes tribunal convened in her favor. She had come back from Oregon in a carrier Margo had bled for and hadn’t softened a degree since. The vet saw her by appointment only and wore the gauntlets. Nat kept a spray bottle. Upstairs, a stretch of landing had been ceded to her without discussion.“Don’t,” Margo told her, passing.Perse did it anyway, claws sheathed, a formality rather than an assault, to keep the relationship honest. Margo hadn’t named her. The name came with her, from before. People asked why a cat that looked like that and behaved like that was called Persephone, and Margo told them the name required no explanation and let them make of it what they liked.She took her tea to the back step.The night was cooling fast, Denver-fast, the heat lifting off the bricks. Out past the yard the gate sat shut on its stuck latch. It had been sticking for a year, maybe more, a scrape and a shriek every time anyone worked it, and she had stopped hearing that the way she’d stopped hearing the refrigerator; her hands knew the trick, lift and drag, and did it without consulting her. Nat had offered again on Sunday. Nat offered about once a month, because Nat’s genius was small repairs and she went through the house hunting for them like a truffle pig. Ten minutes, Nat had said. It’s a screwdriver and ten minutes. The screwdriver’s in the drawer with the dead batteries, I’ve checked, why won’t you let me? And Margo had said leave it, as she always did, and Nat had let the silence run on a beat too long, which was getting harder to deflect now that it had stopped being about the gate.She drank her tea and absolutely wasn’t thinking about the latch when the second text from Kristi came in. She hadn’t answered the first.You alive? You’ve gone quiet, which with you means either fine or the opposite of fine and I can never tell.It had been sitting there a while. She’d get to it tomorrow. Tonight the reply would come out true, and she didn’t send people true.She thought, not for the first time and not for long, that the mug she was drinking from was one of three objects in the house she would go back into a fire for. She had told nobody and had no plans to. It was a ridiculous thing to feel about a mug, and yet she felt it. Go figure. The mug, a pair of reading glasses, and, though she would have denied it under oath, the cat on the stairs, who had slept in another woman’s lap on another coast and was all that was left of it.Brian came out, put his chin on her knee, and sighed the enormous sigh of a creature with no debts and no immediate plans.“I know,” Margo told him. “I’d come back in for you too.”She stayed out until the tea went cold enough to be a reason to go in. The house was full above her, full of other people’s dripping faucets and other people’s small repairs waiting on her permission, and she sat in the last of the long summer light with a dog that wasn’t hers and a cat that was, though not by choice on either side, and a latch she wouldn’t let anyone touch and a phone she wouldn’t answer, and told herself, as she did most nights, that a full house with a quiet woman in the middle of it came to the same as not being lonely.Most nights she believed it.She went in before she could find out whether tonight was one of the nights she didn’t.
