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

Margo Duran has built a life that cannot be taken from her, and she built it on purpose, and she could tell you exactly how. A house full of lodgers who pay their rent and mind their own business. A job at a Denver animal foundation where she is very good at other people's grief and no use at all with her own.

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 younger, warmer and a great deal braver than Margo, and she has driven eleven hundred miles for a job she does not need. She has one question she has been carrying for four years. She is not going to ask it, because asking shows a person where to hurt you.

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

Neither of them is going to be the one who says it.

One of them is going to have to break first.

Reckless Hearts is a slow-burn, second-chance sapphic romance with an age gap, from award-winning lesbian fiction author Ruby Scott. Book five in the Healing Hearts series.

Explicit. Guaranteed happy ever after.