Reckless Romance

by Maggie Riley

  Reckless Romance

  Maggie Riley

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Roommate Romance

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Riley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  To my Piglet- thank you for helping me find my tail.

  Chapter 1

  REAGAN

  It came to me in a dream.

  This happens a lot. I crawl into bed, my brain occupied with perfectly ordinary things: what the weather will be tomorrow, where I should go for lunch, the metaphorical use of flowers in Shakespearean sonnets. With those kinds of thoughts circulating in my noggin, I go to sleep. And then BAM. Inspiration.

  Sometimes the inspiration is foggy. A hint or a clue of something bigger, something more substantial. Something I’ll have to figure out with the help of tarot cards or maybe an astrological chart.

  But last night needed no explanation.

  I saw my friend Allie, resplendent in her wedding dress, standing in the theatre we worked at. The theatre where she would be marrying Shane, the hunky handyman/building manager/all around nice guy she had fallen in love with in front of my eyes.

  In my dream she looked amazing. He looked amazing. But the lighting. Well, the lighting was just plain terrible. Bright fluorescents blasted them with their intense, unflattering brightness.

  Allie looked at me, her eyes round with concern.

  Help, she mouthed.

  I clapped my hands. And everything changed.

  Suddenly, the theatre was awash in a beautiful golden glow. It was perfect. Allie’s skin looked luminous, her dress glittering as light bounced off each delicate bead. The whole room seemed to be out of a fairy tale. Magical. Beautiful.

  Allie and Shane approached each other, love radiating from them, and just as they kissed, I woke up.

  Shit, I thought to myself. I needed to fix the lighting before the wedding.

  Which is why when I was supposed to be backstage getting ready with the rest of the bridesmaids, I was actually on top of a ladder, my bridesmaid dress hiked up past my knees, trying to recreate the lighting I had seen in my dream. That perfect warm glow.

  Because it was clear that if I didn’t get this right, the fate of Allie and Shane’s marriage might be in jeopardy. I didn’t question my dreams. They knew things.

  If my parents could see me now they’d be horrified. They were always horrified by my behavior, but they certainly wouldn’t approve of their daughter—the youngest heiress of the Richmond family fortune—standing at the top of a ladder in a black box theatre with a smear of dirt on her arm, as she tried to get the perfect color temperature for a wedding starting in ninety minutes.

  I cast a quick look down at my phone, also balanced precariously next to me on the ladder. Shit. A wedding starting in sixty minutes. No wonder Allie had sent several bridesmaids to come fetch me. The last person she sent was Joanna, who stood at the bottom of the ladder tapping her heeled toe.

  “I’m almost done,” I told her, lying my ass off.

  Not that she believed me.

  “Please tell me you didn’t have one of your ‘visions’.” She frowned at me.

  She looked beautiful, as usual, but I had long stopped comparing myself to my gorgeous best friend.

  “It wasn’t really a ‘vision’,” I told her. “It was a dream. Can you hand me that gel?”

  She did. “That doesn’t make it any less weird,” she told me.

  “It won’t take long.”

  “Nothing ever lives up to your dreams,” she said.

  Trust Joanna to get at the heart of the matter. Not just in reference to these lights, but to my whole life in general. Because she was right. And I knew from years of experience that chasing those dreams could lead to a whole lot of heartache.

  But they could also lead to something great. That was my philosophy. There’s good and bad to every outcome. If you focus on the good, then it makes the bad worthwhile. Or at least hurt a little less.

  For example—when I told my parents (for the first time) that I wanted to work in the arts instead of becoming just an occasional patron of them and they sent me away to boarding school to change that, some people might categorize that as a bad outcome. But if I hadn’t been sent away to Millet Academy, I never would have met Joanna, who was a descendent of the school’s founder and the only other person I’d ever met—besides my Great Aunts—who loved theatre as much as I did.

  So even though I had spent months crying myself to sleep, homesick beyond belief, I cultivated a friendship that lasted past school. A friendship that had led to the creation of the very theatre I was standing in. There was always a good outcome, but sometimes you just had to look a little harder to find it. Sometimes it took longer to reveal itself.

  This philosophy of mine was probably the reason Allie had asked me to assist her brother, Josh, in digging himself out of his current funk. A former minor league pitcher, he had moved to New York recently at the urging of his sister. From what I had gathered, he had injured himself and was now unable to play professionally. This had thrown his whole life out of whack and he wasn’t doing a very good job of getting it back on track. That’s where I was supposed to help.

  The whole thing was supposed to be very covert, but I’ve never been good at pretending—there was a reason I never became an actor myself—and it was abundantly clear that Josh was a pretty sharp guy. I was pretty sure the only reason he hadn’t figured it out yet was due to his distraction over his move to New York and Allie’s wedding.

  “He just needs a friend right now,” Allie had told me.

  “I’m sure he has plenty of friends.” I couldn’t imagine someone like him being short of friendship.

  “He has friends in Nebraska,” Allie had explained. “He needs friends here. Needs someone to introduce him to the city. Get him settled.”

  “I don’t know if I’m the right person for the job,” I had told her honestly. “What about Shane?”

  Allie’s husband-to-be seemed like a far more logical choice.

  “He’s got the wedding to deal with,” she said. “Both of us do.”

  I had chewed at my lip.

  “You’re the most upbeat person I know,” Allie said. “He needs someone to keep him from holing up in his apartment and watching TV all day. Someone happy. And Joanna’s not really the brightest ray of sunshine.”

  “You want me to harass him with friendliness,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Allie had smiled at me. “At least until after my honeymoon.”

  I scooted down off the ladder, taking a look at the new lighting from the floor. It still wasn’t right. I
spun, my head up, trying to figure out what I could change to make it work. I got dizzy instead. Kicking off my heels, I dragged the ladder to the other side of the room to another set of lights that needed some adjustment. Maybe this would be the magic fix.

  I didn’t mind spending time with Josh, no matter how brief and fairly impersonal those times had been. After all, there probably wasn’t a woman in the world that would turn down a chance at quality time with Josh Lawson. The former minor league pitcher was gorgeous, to say the least. He shared a few of his sister’s features, including thick dark brown hair that always looked a little messy. But the rest of him was one hundred percent male. Tall and broad shouldered, he had the body of an athlete, retired or not. I had accidentally bumped into him a couple of times and knew that he was extremely fit. Muscles galore.

  And even though he seemed to wear a frown around me, I had caught him a few times with his nieces and nephews, and damn, when he smiled, it transformed his entire face. He still had oodles of appeal when he was grumpy—that whole sexy, stoic thing totally worked for him—but I had a real weakness for a guy who could laugh and when Josh was happy, he threw his head back and laughed with real abandon. It was enough to make a girl’s knees weak.

  But whatever fantasies I had about Josh and his sexy laugh would have to remain that—fantasies. Because not only was he my friend’s brother, he wasn’t the kind of guy who went for a girl like me. I’d had enough disastrous high school crushes to know that romance between jocks like Josh and theatre nerds like me only happened in the movies.

  Besides, I had enough on my mind. The theatre was doing well—we had two well-reviewed productions under our belt, but with those good reviews now came expectations. I stepped off the ladder once more, this time walking the length of the room the way the wedding party would. It was close. Really, really close. I dragged the ladder back to another bank of lights. I was starting to sweat a little and my glasses kept sliding down my nose. No doubt I looked ravishing.

  I scrambled back to the top of the ladder, my neck sore from looking upward. I rubbed at it while I regarded the lights.

  “Be good,” I told them.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d had a pep talk with the lights in the theatre. I tended to have one before every opening. A way to deal with my nerves, I suppose. We had to live up to the reputation we had created and I was finding that more daunting than launching the very first production. And I was stuck.

  If there was a director’s version of writer’s block, well, I had it. I had no idea what to do for our next show and I needed to think of something fast. And while my dreams were apparently happy to help me fix lighting problems they were doing absolutely nothing to help me choose our next show. It was bad enough that our last production had closed before we announced the one that was going to follow, but the wedding had been the excuse I had used. After today I’d have no more excuses and if we waited much longer, people in the industry would start to talk. And no one loved gossip more than theatre nerds. If there were any whisper that we were slowing down or dropping the ball, that information would spread quickly and it would affect audition turn-outs, which could be disastrous.

  My hair was starting to wilt. I could feel it slipping out of the knot that Allie’s hairstylist had wrangled it into. My straight hair had a tendency to do that. It took a lot of hair spray and a ton of bobby pins to get it to stay in any sort of style for more than an hour.

  I used the back of my hand to push my hair back. It flopped down again. I blew at it. Once again, it flopped. I gave up.

  It was Joanna’s last name that had gotten our first production any attention at all, but we could only coast on that for so long. And even if I hadn’t changed my own name—separating myself from my well-known family—I still wouldn’t have been able to approach them for help. They made it clear that the only way I would ever be welcomed back in their good graces was if I forgot this whole “silly theatre thing” and directed my attention on more serious things. Like going back to law school. So I was on my own in that regard. It was a struggle to be cast out by them—not just financially, but emotionally—but I wasn’t going to sacrifice everything I had worked so hard to get. Not now. We were a fledging theatre with a decent start, but we had to keep working, producing theatre that was good and consistent.

  That was my job. While I valued their input, both Joanna and Allie were more interested in budgets and schedules. I was the creative engine behind everything and while, at first, I had relished the chance to do whatever I wanted, it had begun to feel overwhelming.

  Lately I had been experiencing a lot of doubt and fear. Two emotions I hated to entertain. My Great Aunts always said any thought or feeling that wasn’t positive was a drain on someone’s soul and I believed it. Unfortunately, my soul was getting drained on a regular basis—every time I looked at ideas for the next production I found something wrong with each and every concept.

  I held up the gels again, trying to remember how it had been in my dream, wishing they had been a little more specific in how to make it happen.

  Chapter 2

  JOSH

  There are some things a guy just can’t resist. Like beer at a ballgame, or a vintage car, or a smile from a pretty girl. And while I’m a sucker for all three, it’s the smile that can bring me to my damn knees. I’m powerless. Especially for the gap-toothed grin of my favorite niece, Emily.

  I’d do anything for the kid. Learn all the lyrics to her favorite Disney songs? Check. Take her to a tea party at The Plaza? Check. Dress up as Maid Marian so she could play Robin Hood? Check.

  And now I was t-minus 90 minutes away from walking down the aisle wearing a bright pink paper corsage the size of a baseball mitt. Because she had made it for me. But at least I wasn’t the one getting married. Sure, I’d probably get a few strange looks, but eventually all eyes would be on Allie, the true star of the show.

  “Did she say what she wanted?” I asked Emily, who had been sent to fetch me.

  Emily shook her head, her curls bouncing. They were done up in Shirley Temple style ringlets—something a straight male shouldn’t have been able to identify. But I had grown up with three sisters, one of whom was a major theatre nerd. And since Allie was the closest to me in age, I ended up seeing way more musicals than the average teenage boy.

  Not that it hadn’t served me well. In high school, my knowledge of that kind of stuff gave me an upper hand when it came to dating. Hell, just knowing names of musicals got me laid on more than one occasion. Or maybe I owed some of my success with women to my baseball uniform. Ladies seemed to love those white pants and, as a minor league pitcher, I had always been more than happy to show them my famous screwball.

  But that was all behind me now.

  Emily kept an iron grip on my hand as she dragged me towards the bridal suite. Or rather, backstage, which was masquerading as a bridal suite. When Allie told the family that she and Shane planned on getting married at the theatre where she worked, my mom refused to speak to her for a week. Both of my other sisters had done the traditional thing—church with a rec hall reception, the whole nine yards.

  Allie was anything but traditional. If she wanted to get married in a black box theatre in New York City, then dammit, she was going to get married in a black box theatre in New York City. Mom eventually came around, and had even admitted last night at the rehearsal dinner that it was a wonderful choice that suited Allie perfectly.

  And she was right. The off-Broadway theatre was less than a year old, the pet project of the eldest daughter of one of Manhattan’s wealthiest families. Joanna Millet owned The Hole in the Wall theatre, which was becoming well known for its avant-garde performances directed by the new but critically acclaimed director, Reagan Bennett. Allie had become close friends with both of them after signing on to stage manage their first show, eventually accepting a permanent position at the theatre.

  Which was currently decked out in lights and flowers. I wasn’t an expert on decorations, b
ut even I thought the place looked nice. The lobby was full of wedding guests, but Emily—as tiny as she was—plowed through them all. We bypassed the theatre itself, taking a corridor towards the backstage where my niece threw open the door without so much as a knock.

  The room erupted in feminine screams, and before I could get my bearings, a hand was quickly slapped over my eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” my mom demanded. “You’re not supposed to see the bride.”

  “That rule only applies to the groom,” I heard Allie say. “And I asked Emily to get him.”

  My eyes were uncovered and I found my sister standing in front of me decked out in her wedding gown. She looked beautiful. I wasn’t much for getting all sentimental and mushy, but looking at Allie in her dress and veil gave me a suspicious lump in my throat. I ignored it. Former minor league baseball players did not get emotional at weddings. Not even their sister’s. If I hadn’t cried when my career ended, I sure as shit wasn’t going to cry now.

  I cleared my throat. “You summoned me?”

  Allie nodded, nibbling on her bottom lip. Beautiful bride or not, I now saw that she looked a little frazzled. Obviously something was not going according to her plan. And Allie, being the planner that she was, was clearly freaking out over it.

  “I need you to find my missing bridesmaid,” she told me.

  I scanned the roomful of women. My mom was there, now talking to my older sisters. Emily was getting fussed over by Allie’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, Megan, and Allie’s college roommate, Liz. And in the corner was Joanna, which only left—

  “You need me to find Reagan?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

  I tried to suppress an annoyed sigh, but the last thing I wanted right now was to go hunting for Allie’s bespectacled maid-of-honor. Ever since I moved to New York and wedding plans had begun in earnest, Reagan had become a constant presence in my life. She seemed to be everywhere, driving me completely mad with her relentless cheerfulness and positive attitude. I had spent the last several months perfecting my grumpy demeanor and she seemed hell bent on dismantling it. If Allie hadn’t been so focused on her wedding, I would have assumed that my sister had asked Reagan to emotionally babysit me.