Reckless Hearts: A Second Chance Lesbian Romance (Paperback)

A slow burn second chance lesbian romance with an age gap, from award-winning author Ruby Scott.

Margo Duran lied to Nell Brown once, on a back step on the Oregon coast, and spent four years calling it the sensible thing. Now Nell has driven eleven hundred miles and taken the desk six feet from hers, and neither of them will say why.

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"We both knew what it was." It was the biggest lie she ever told.

Reckless Hearts is a slow burn second chance lesbian romance with an age gap, and the fifth book in Ruby Scott's Healing Hearts lesbian romance series.

Margo Duran has built a life that cannot be taken from her, and she built it on purpose. A big house in Denver full of lodgers who pay their rent and mind their own business. A job at an animal rescue foundation where she is very good at other people's grief and no use at all with her own. Nobody she works with can tell you one true thing about her, and that is exactly how she wants it.

Ask her about Oregon and she'll make a joke.

Four years ago Margo did something on a back step on the Oregon coast that she has never told a living soul about. Last Wednesday it walked into the building and shook her hand like a stranger.

Nell Brown is twenty-nine, warm, and a great deal braver than Margo. She has driven eleven hundred miles for a job she does not need, and she has one question she has been carrying for four years. She isn't going to ask it. Asking shows a person where to hurt you.

So they work. Two desks, six feet of floor, and a coffee at eleven o'clock that neither of them will explain.

Told across two timelines, between a big loud house in Denver and a fogbound stretch of the Oregon coast, Reckless Hearts is a grumpy sunshine workplace romance about grief and the difference between being needed and being loved.

Explicit. Guaranteed happy ever after. Reads perfectly well as a standalone.

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Margo 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.”