The Reckless Secret, Complete Series (An Alpha Billionaire In Love BBW Romance)

W
ould
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W
ith his player past
, will she ever be able to trust him?

Maggie Emerson has had a crush on her brother's friend Declan for years. She knows he's not into girls like her - he's always surrounded by skinny model types. With her curvy body and a career choice that never made her wealthy family happy, Maggie is sure Declan will never fall for her. Except now that her job is in jeopardy, she has no one else to turn to...

Declan Archibald knows he wants no one else but Maggie. He wasn't ready for her before, but now he can't get her out of his mind. He tried wooing her a few months ago, and it didn't work - Maggie just thought he was using her. So how can he convince her that his feelings for her are real? When he discovers she's in trouble, Declan jumps to help. Will her crisis bring them closer together or push them apart?

Saving Maggie's job gets complicated, drawing dangerous secrets to the surface that threaten their already shaky bond. Maggie and Declan have plenty of chemistry, but can their growing love withstand so many obstacles?

M
aggie couldn’t really call
this one of her better mornings.

Hot travel mug scorching her one hand and the purse sliding off her opposite shoulder, she dodged a group of elderly tourists checking out the monument on the corner and almost rushed head first into the path of a UPS truck.

“Oh sh—” Her heart leapt into her throat as she stumbled back up the curb, UPS truck honking its horn as it raced past, yanking the attention of all passersby directly to her.

Her face burned hotter than the palm wrapped around her hastily brewed coffee.

She took another step back to avoid any more near-death experiences and await a safe crossing, and brought her heel down on something that made a man shout, “Ow!” into her ear, like stepping on the press of a pedal trash can.

“God, sorry,” she said, moving off the man’s toe and turning to face his livid death stare. “I’m so sorry.”

Thick eyebrows hung low over his ice-cold eyes.

“Um,” she said.

“
Go
,” he snarled, looking behind her pointedly, and she turned back around to see everyone now crossing the street, traffic paused. She was very much blocking this angry man’s way.

Which he rectified a split second later by barging past her and knocking the travel mug out of her hand. She watched, as if in slow motion, as the cup hit the ground on the edge of the street, burst open, and splattered all up the left leg of a passing nun.

After a full minute of flustered apologies and offers to dry-clean the nun’s clothes, she finally made it across the street and halfway to work before her phone rang and had her fumbling in her overstuffed purse.

“Hey, can I call you back later?” she panted into the phone, contents of her purse threatening to spill out onto the filthy sidewalk as she attempted to close the zip. “I’m
so
late—”

“Just a quick thing,” her brother said, and there was something odd in his voice. Something strained and cracked, not his usual rich tones. “I can’t make Jen’s wedding this weekend.”

The words stopped her dead in her tracks, forcing several people to swerve around her, muttering their irritation. “Sorry,” she mumbled vaguely to no one in particular, and then hurried over to an empty doorway, turning to face the wall to create some privacy. “What’re you talking about?”

“I can’t make it.” Grant sounded entirely unapologetic, and that alone was enough to set her on edge. Her brother didn’t let her down. Not him.

“But—you have to. You promised.” Because he knew how difficult she found these things, attending events with her cousins and aunts and other relatives who didn’t understand her, who judged her, who thought she needed to remember her place in the world—of country clubs and jewelry and brunch four times a week. Relatives who saw her chosen profession as an insult to the upbringing the family had given her. “We’ll find you a medical charity to assist; I’m sure there’s a board somewhere with a seat for you,”
they told her, back when she expressed her ambition of nursing. “At least become a
surgeon
.”

Her father had been apoplectic. “I didn’t pay to send you to all the best schools just so you could become a damn
nurse
!” he’d raged at her, for weeks on end, every time she saw him and watched that stain of disappointment blacken his eyes.

But her father’s opinion didn’t matter, not anymore—not since she was ten, and he turned her entire world upside down. Tore it apart with a savagery she would never forget.

Grant, her older brother, was the only man in her life who mattered to her from that point on, the only man she trusted. The one who promised to look after her, to protect her, to be everything her father couldn’t.

And he spent the next fourteen years doing just that. Until recently, when hints of a different side of Grant started showing—a side of him she’d never seen before. A disheveled Grant, like the last time she’d seen him, showing up to her cousin Jen’s rehearsal dinner with bloodshot eyes, messy hair, his T-shirt inside out, and a scruff on his face at least three days old. And he never came through with the money for his half of the wedding gift, always
next week, I promise,
and brief, cold texts about being busy.

“I don’t have time to argue about it now, Mags,” he told her abruptly, and while his tone wasn’t unkind, he still sounded so very much like the opposite of her caring brother that it took her aback. “I gotta go. Sorry.”

“Grant—wait—” But he’d already hung up.

Blinking stupidly at the grimy wall before her, Maggie took a moment to worry about her brother. A vague, abstract sort of worry, the kind without a defining cause she could focus on, think of ways to fix. But she had no time to analyze the change in him, not right now—she was already late for work, and there were a couple of people there who’d delight in her being reprimanded for tardiness. One person in particular.

And he didn’t disappoint. Ronald Mitchell, Maggie’s mistake of an ex-boyfriend, had a sneer the size of Texas on his face when she hurried in, breathless and apologetic.

“For someone so determined to have
independence,
” he said, spitting the same word back at her that she’d yelled at him months ago, “you’d think you might figure out how to set an alarm.”

“Family crisis,” she snapped at him, half lying, as she yanked off her coat and stuffed it in her locker. “Don’t you have work to do?”

He was always here in the staff room with her whenever she needed to use it, almost like he was stalking her, but for the sole purpose of chipping away at her, berating her, reminding her—daily—of why she’d split up with him.

“Unlike you, I’ve been here since dawn.”

“And unlike
you
,” she said, “I don’t have my mom at home to wake me up every morning.” The sass came out without any real bite, and she sighed as she slumped onto the bench, bending over to pull off her shoes. “I couldn’t fall asleep.”

He paused. And then, stiffly: “I told you to stop drinking coffee so late in the day.”

“You also told me to quit my job and spend my life serving you.” Work shoes slipped on, she smiled up at him as she stood. “So forgive me if I completely ignore you.”

The icy smugness of his voice stopped her as she headed for the door. “Dr. Stevens is looking for you,” he drawled, the unpleasantness of it creeping down her spine, “so I’d wipe that smirk off my face if I were you.”

She swallowed and turned to face him, biting back her utter repulsion of his presence enough to ask, “Did he say what he wanted?”

He sniffed in a way that said he knew
exactly
what it was, but he wasn’t going to tell her about it.

She huffed, rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever,” she said, leaving the room with what she hoped was a modicum of dignity, even as her heart hammered against her ribcage and her stomach churned with anxiety. Dr. Stevens hated her, and there was no way he wanted to see her for anything that would put a smile on her face.

But neither could she think of anything she might have done wrong, except her lateness this morning—and that wasn’t enough for him to punish her in any way, was it? She was only late by a few minutes, and she still had twenty minutes before her first round.

She passed her friend Ashley at the nurses’ station as she headed to Dr. Stevens’ office, and they shared a troubled smile, making Maggie’s stomach tense even more as she realized that Ashley knew, too. Whatever it was. Whatever had happened this morning that she’d missed, being a couple of damn minutes late. And Ashley wasn’t the only one: three other people gave Maggie worried looks as she walked past, almost like she was heading down the green mile and at the end of it was her last meal…

There was a slight tremble to her hand as she knocked on Dr. Stevens’ office door.

He called her in, and then didn’t bother to look up at her as she entered the room, closed the door, and stood in front of his desk. He continued to write instead, scrawling on a large document, glasses perched on the edge of his bulbous nose and the silence in this room so thick and oppressive that the
scratch-scratch
of his messy writing was deafening to her, matching the amplification of her thunderous heartbeat in her ears.

“Ah, Ms. Emerson,” he said eventually, his tone soft and sneering. He placed his pen back in its holder and folded his hands on the desktop. “Good of you to join us.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I overslept, and traffic coming in this morning—”

“Traffic?” He raised a disdainful eyebrow. “I would’ve thought your driver might know how to avoid midtown rush hour…”

She blinked. “My driver?”

“Yes,” he said, dragging the word out. “Your family makes use of an entire fleet of town cars, do they not?”

“I—yes?” This was new. Dr. Stevens wasn’t exactly subtle about his dislike for her, but he’d never brought her family into it before. “I don’t, though.”

He tipped his head as if to say, “If you say so,” his disbelief entirely evident, and she had half a mind to set him straight, if it wasn’t for him catching her off guard with his next words.

“You know about the stealing, yes?”

It was like someone had very slowly, very delicately, dropped an ice cube into her gut. “No. I don’t know anything about the stealing.”

He observed her for a long moment. “Hmm,” he said, and then, “Have a seat, Ms. Emerson.”

When she sat, he rose from his chair, walked around the desk to perch on the end of it, and stared down at her. From this angle, he was relentlessly formidable.

“Where were you at four p.m. yesterday?”

She swallowed thickly. “I was here, sir. Working.”

“Yes,” he said conversationally, rubbing a thumb along his jawline. “And again on Monday afternoon, correct?”

“Yes…”

He let silence hang between them, staring at her while she tried not to squirm, not to panic, not to blurt out something wholly inappropriate and land herself in a world of trouble. She’d wait it out.

She didn’t have to wait long, it turned out.

“Someone is stealing drugs from the nurses’ store cupboard in your department, Ms. Emerson, and I’m sure it’s no surprise for you to hear that right now it’s all pointing to you.”

The screech of her chair scraping back registered before she knew she was moving, and once on her feet, her pulse hammering in her ears, she found the voice she’d kept subdued since entering this office.

“Are you accusing me of
theft
, sir? What do you mean, it’s no surprise to me? Are you suggesting—because let me tell you—”

“You’ll tell me nothing,” he said calmly, straightening a cuff. “The matter is under investigation, and for now you’ll return to work until such a time as we have more substantial evidence.”

“Evidence…” Her mouth ran dry, and she cast about wildly for the thread of her composure. “Evidence. What evidence?”

“That’s confidential at the moment.”

“I think I have a right to know!” she said, waving a hand in his general direction. “Considering I’m the one in the frame here.”

“Are you?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Would you put yourself in the frame?”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She let out a billowing huff of a breath and shoved a hand into her hair. “This is insane. I’ve never stolen anything in my life!”

“Well, I’d hardly expect you to admit it, would I?” He sniffed again, then gave her a long, appraising look from her feet to her head. She felt naked all of a sudden, and she resisted the urge to hug her arms around herself. “Still, I wanted to give you the opportunity to come clean. Pity,” he added delicately. “You can go now. We’ll talk about this in due course.”

She stared at him, entirely gobsmacked—watched him walk back around his desk and take a seat, pick up his pen and examine his document like he hadn’t just tipped her on her ass.

“No.”

He looked up at her, eyebrows raised. “No?”

“No.” She folded her arms, making an attempt at hardening her expression. “I’m not leaving until you tell me why I—out of everyone in this hospital—am the one accused of stealing drugs.”

“Like I said, Ms. Emerson, it’s currently confidential infor—” The beeping of his pager cut him off and he looked at it, muttered under his breath, and then stood. “I don’t have time for this now,” he said to her, reminding her of her brother’s abruptness not thirty minutes ago. As mornings went, this one wasn’t her best.

She watched, entirely helplessly, as he swept past her, unable to stop him and demand more of his time when the pager was no doubt calling him out to perform some kind of life-saving procedure.

He paused in the doorway, framed by the hustle and bustle of the corridor behind him, his weathered face highlighted by unforgiving neon lighting. When he looked at her this time, he made no effort to mask quite how much the very existence of her displeased him.

“Call it a hunch,” was all he said, the hint of a smirk on his face. And then he was gone, leaving her in a solitary panic.

Because it wasn’t a hunch. He had evidence. And that meant everything she worked for, everything she’d put ahead of her family’s wishes, all her years of hard work and dedication and her lifelong desire to help people—all of it, every last moment of it, was in danger.

And with Dr. Stevens refusing to tell her the evidence, to give her any information at all, the whole situation was completely out of her control.

Which was the most terrifying thing of all.