by Stella Rhys
Reckless
Stella Rhys
Contents
Copyright
Prologue
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
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
The Irresistible Series
NOW OR NEVER
CONTACT STELLA
Copyright © 2020 by Stella Rhys
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.
Prologue
AJ
A wise woman once told me, “Shut that shit down, Adrienne—starting now.”
That wise woman was my sister Emily, older by two-and-a-half years, advising me on how to survive my new, incredibly coveted job at the male-dominated Engelman Sports in Beverly Hills, where I’d been miraculously hired as assistant to “that unbelievable smokeshow.”
“He is hot as hell, girl, but I don’t care what you do. Flip a switch. Get a poker face. Fake it till you make it, AJ, because that office will eat you alive if you let on that you have even the tiniest crush on your boss,” Emily had said—and with that big sister sternness she always broke out when things were serious. When she felt I needed it.
Which I very much did.
Because once upon a time—a distant five years ago—I found Adam Maxwell to be deathly attractive. Like, lose-your-breath, when-was-the-last-time-I-blinked, why-am-I-suddenly-sweating attractive. Objectively, he was.
Still is.
But five years ago, I wasn’t equipped to deal with it. I was twenty-two years old. Fresh out of college and brand new to his presence. I’d yet to build up my Adam Maxwell immunity and in fairness, I’d just never been face to face with a man who looked like that.
Having grown up in SoCal, I’d seen plenty of good-looking guys before. But Adam Maxwell was stupid handsome. The kind of perfect in the face that you didn’t see outside of movies, that would make him a stone-cold panty-dropper even if he were a mortal five-foot-ten, but the man was six-foot-goddamned-four with the lean muscle of an Olympic athlete, and to make matters worse, he had that smile.
That big, devilish smile that made you smile even when you didn’t want to smile—even when you were actively trying not to smile.
It was annoying.
Completely maddening for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that I didn’t actually like him. I had a loving boyfriend in Caspar, whom I’d been dating since college, and I wanted nobody else. But getting heart palpitations when Adam Maxwell smiled wasn’t a choice, it just happened, and it wasn’t just me.
I saw with my own two eyes what it did to people. How it managed to seduce both men and women alike.
Thanks to that stupid, effortless charm, Adam got away with murder on a daily basis—murder that only I had to deal with the fallout of. He could blow off a date the fourth time in a row, cancel a meeting just as it was about to start, or plain steal the shirt off your back in the name of landing a client, but it would be totally fine—all because of that stupidly charming, irresistibly boyish-yet-cocky-as-hell smile.
In the beginning, I hated him for it.
But in the end, it was exactly what saved me.
Because every angry call I had to take, every Adam-induced fire I had to put out was like a little more dirt thrown on my silly crush, and within five weeks of working for him, the attraction was totally buried. Breathing or not, it was six feet under, and within about another month, I pronounced it officially dead.
Which made room for the start of our new dynamic.
The one where I was so consistently overworked and annoyed with the man that I didn’t have the time to do anything but my job, or the patience to bite my tongue and shut up when he was being far too much of a prick. Questions as to what “that face” was for were met with totally truthful answers, whether it was “you’re annoying me right now” or “I need you to stop rescheduling on this girl if you have no intention of ever seeing her.” And because Adam Maxwell was a bit of a twisted dickhead, that snappy brusqueness was precisely how our work relationship thrived. Precisely how I endeared myself to him and became known at the office as The Adam Whisperer. The only one who could rein him in when he was being a raging asshole. The only one who could make him sit long enough to actually listen.
It took a good six months, but once we fully settled into those roles, we became the ultimate dream team.
And in past five years, we’d gone to hell and back for his clients.
Together, we’d negotiated over three hundred-thirty million dollars worth of MLB contracts. Endured hundreds of layovers and thousands of hours worth of keeping one another sane in airports all around the world, with activities ranging from highlighting scouting reports for meetings to forcing our Spotify playlists on one another to filling out our trusty RuPaul-themed Mad Libs I’d bought from a Hudson News at O’Hare three years ago.
We’d camped outside clients’ houses together, driven through 2AM snow squalls together and argued over whether or not I said to just listen to the GPS, which I obviously had.
Unsurprisingly, I’d hated the man more times than I could count.
But that wasn’t to say I hadn’t also appreciated him before.
Borderline loved him.
Because the fact of the matter was that I’d lived the craziest, most eventful days of my life with him. We battled daily drama together, defended each other and guarded each other’s most precious secrets from the rest of the gossipy office.
Five years into this journey and we were a formidable duo, and in my mind, nothing was ever going to stop us.
But in my heart, I knew all good things came to an end.
And I should have known that one day—in just a matter of seconds—everything would change between me and Adam. In a literal blink of an eye, our years of hard-earned friendship would burst into flames. The word “platonic” would be a joke.
And work would never be the same.
“Nothing in this world stays perfect, AJ,” Emily had always told me.
So I should’ve known that one day, Adam and I would be ruined forever.
And I should’ve known it would all start with Caspar.
1
AJ
“Whoa.”
The wide-eyed looks were immediate when I got into the office this morning, which made me snort as I rolled my eyes.
“Hair,” Carl at reception said bluntly, still staring in shock at my hair. Because it was down.
That was it.
Though in fairness to Carl, my hair was never down at work and it was professionally blown out for the first time since high school graduation—hence the whole being d
own thing.
On a regular basis, I was a wash-and-air-dry kind of girl, but I’d woken up early this morning and paid a semi-absurd sixty dollars plus tip to make my hair bounce and shine like something out of a L’Oreal commercial, because as soon as I was finished with work tonight, it was going to be the night.
The super special, extra romantic kind of night to remember forever, and dammit, I wasn’t about to let a single strand of my hair move out of place till it was seen by the man I’d had it so perfectly done up for.
Even if that meant showing up to work like this and breaking part of my self-imposed dress code for the office.
Ponytail. Basic makeup. Heels no higher than two-and-a-half inches. I could wear whatever I wanted once I was officially promoted to agent but till then, this was the rule. Unless, of course, it was a very special occasion.
Which today, it very much was.
“Ooh yesss, girl, he’s gonna love it,” Liza squealed excitedly, eyeing the garment bags I was carrying as I wheeled my luggage past The Pit, the cluster of assistant desks that sat across the big glass wall of agent offices.
As recently as a year-and-a-half ago, I’d sat there too. But then Adam was promoted up the ladder and with him, my desk was upgraded to a wonderfully quiet, much more secluded corner fifty feet down, right outside his shiny new office.
Flashing a big grin at Liza, I continued down the hall toward my head-on view of Adam sitting half-reclined at his sprawling glass desk, looking every bit the cocky bastard he was while wearing a tailored grey suit and bored smirk on his lips—generally the sign that he was putting next to no effort in charming the pants off whomever he was talking to.
And that was definitely the case right now, considering he was talking to Kenzie Engelman, the boss’s daughter-slash-our resident rich girl intern who spent most of her work day tending to her fairly massive following on Instagram and trying to flirt it up with Adam.
Whoops.
Considering I doubled as Adam’s bouncer on a day-to-day basis, I knew well that Kenzie had taken my late arrival to work as an opportunity to pounce and subject my boss to her unique brand of flirting, which consisted basically of showing him shots from her latest “photo shoot” and asking which he thought were “cute enough to post” on Instagram, and which were only “medium-cute,” and thus only worthy of Stories.
Sorry, bud, I winced, though my guilt was nixed as soon as Adam looked up to catch me striding down the hall.
He was mid-sentence when our eyes met, and though he didn’t miss a beat of his speech, he paused in the middle of flipping a page in his file, his piercingly blue gaze assessing me for a moment before his dark eyebrows lifted high at the sight of my swishy hair.
But the double take lasted all of a second before he caught sight of all the extra bags I was carrying and with a brief but deeply ridiculing shake of the head, rolled his eyes swiftly back to his file.
I snorted.
“Dickhead,” I said under my breath as I got to my desk, because that was exactly what he was.
And because he knew exactly what all my extra luggage was for.
It wasn’t for the big client meeting we were flying to Palm Beach for in three hours—it was for the giant surprise that was to take place after, that I’d spent the entire past week meticulously planning for my fiancé, Caspar.
It was his twenty-ninth birthday tomorrow and we were originally scheduled to spend it apart because of work. I had to be in North Carolina with Adam for a big meeting with our potential client, Sean Knox, and Caspar was shooting his latest short film in West Palm Beach. Thanks to our hectic work schedules, we hadn’t seen much of each other in literally months, and it would be an understatement to say that things had felt strained between us of late.
But tonight was going to change everything, because as brutally corny as it sounded, it was like the stars had miraculously aligned in the name of our love.
Out of nowhere last week, Sean Knox had decided to report to Spring Training early, which meant that Adam and I would no longer be meeting him at his home in North Carolina, but at his Spring Training rental in West Palm Beach—right where Caspar was working.
The sudden change of plans had come exactly six days ago and since the moment I heard, I’d been scrambling like a crazy person to orchestrate the biggest, sexiest, most romantic birthday surprise for Caspar.
And of course, Adam had spent the same amount of time rolling his eyes as hard as humanly possible, because he didn’t have the highest opinion of Caspar, and like a true dickhead, was never exactly shy about letting it be known.
Beyond deeming my fiancé “needy” for how often he texted to check in when I was at evening work events, Adam had also once called Caspar “an offensive caricature of a person from LA.”
“I mean there’s the aspiring filmmaker thing. The yoga thing. The green juice thing. And not that anyone should be a vegan evangelist, but you definitely shouldn’t be if you aren’t goddamned vegan yourself half the time,” Adam had said, which in fairness, was a pretty solid point.
Still, I called him a jerk in my head as I took a seat at my desk.
And just about the second my butt hit my chair, a pair of texts buzzed into my phone.
ADAM: I’ve asked her five times to leave
ADAM: Get the hell in here and save me already
I smirked, tapping the space bar on my computer to wake up my screen. Out of sheer pettiness, I opted to fire off a few emails before making any attempt to help.
But then came the third text.
ADAM: You’re working tomorrow morning if you don’t come get her now
“Oh, come on,” I grumbled.
I had specifically requested tomorrow morning off so I could have a little more time to bask in the glow of the passionate morning sex I fully expected to have with Caspar, and while I doubted Adam would actually renege on his decision, I wasn’t about to risk it either.
I’d purchased way too much pricy lingerie and endured far too much waxing pain to put this weekend in any sort of jeopardy.
So after finishing the last sentence of my email, I grabbed my planner, my file and swiveled my chair to the left, walking the four steps it was to Adam’s office and shooting a look that said drama queen as soon as our eyes locked over Kenzie’s shoulder.
I let the shaming sink in for a good two seconds, but then with a swift transition to a look of exaggerated concern, I gave a knock on the door.
“So sorry to interrupt, Adam,” I said gently just as Kenzie whipped her blonde head around. “But your housekeeper called. She said it happened again.”
There was a creak in Adam’s chair as he paused and eyed me warily. “What?”
“The dry cleaner. They broke the zipper on your good pair of footie pajamas.”
Adam stared at me. An instant look of what the fuck glimmered in his eyes as he gave a long pause, like he was trying to decide if he hated me right now or if he found this reasonably amusing.
It was often a fine line.
“Which one?” he finally asked, with just enough of a frown in his brow to portray a sense of meaningful concern.
Kenzie whipped her head from him back to me as I grimly said, “The alligator one. With the spiky tail.”
“Fuck.”
“Wait.” Kenzie sat stiffly, her eyes shifting from side to side. “I don’t get it… why is this such a big deal?”
“Oh…” I bit my lip and peered up at Adam, as if seeking permission to tell her. “Well, you know, after such long, stressful days, Adam can’t sleep unless he’s wearing a special onesie.”
Kenzie stared, her nose wrinkling a little. “Really?” She turned from me back to him. “Really?”
He nodded seriously.
“She’s on line one now, Adam, if you want to talk to her,” I said before holding the door open. “Sorry, Kenzie—do you mind giving him some privacy?”
We both kept our straight faces as I saw Kenzie silently out, but as soon as I closed
the door behind me, Adam let out a snort.
“You’re an asshole,” he informed me as he turned back to his laptop.
“Learned from the best,” I smiled brightly.
“Can’t argue that.”
“So Kenzie being at the fundraiser tomorrow night…” I stepped forward to stand in front of his desk. “Will that count as three of your exes in one room?”
“No, because one, I don’t have any exes,” Adam replied swiftly, which was actually fair because he didn’t do relationships and never officially dated anyone. “And two, you’re having way too much fun with the Kenzie story, so it’s being officially retired as of right now,” he said, to which I snorted, because I knew what he was referring to.
The Dungeon.
It was a place for off-limit topics. Things we’d inevitably discovered about each other after having worked so closely for so many years.
Once they were dungeoned, we were strictly not allowed to bring them up ever again, because one, they genuinely embarrassed the crap out of us, and two, there had to be rules when two people knew this much about each other. Without them, our heated debates—of which we had many—would get entirely too dicey. There were too many cheap shots and low blows we could resort to. It would be the Wild Wild West.
Hence The Dungeon.
It covered topics that ranged from the serious to the not-so-serious, like the time Adam gave a sincere “gracias” after asking a stranger for directions—in Tokyo—and the time he accidentally went on the world’s worst date with Kenzie three years ago.
Long story short, he’d invited her to a friend’s party after mistaking her late-night “hey u” as a text from a different Kenzie—whose name was actually Katie.
At said party, Adam was crestfallen to find the wrong hot girl not only waiting for him but convinced they were on a date. All night, Kenzie wound up following him like a puppy, fiercely cock-blocking him at every turn and eventually getting so high on edibles that Adam had to take her to the ER and spend three hours convincing her that she was not in fact dying.
