Wild Reckless

Kensington Worth had her senior year planned down to the hour: her best friends, her posh private school in downtown Chicago, and time alone with her piano until the audition was perfect — a guaranteed ticket into the best music programmes in the world.

It did not happen all at once. Her life came apart like a thread being pulled, until everything she valued had been taken and she was living miles away, trapped in an existence she never chose and did not want. It did not help that the boy next door, the one whose eyes held danger, seemed to be enjoying every second of her fall.

Owen Harper is trouble. His heart is wild and his past is the kind people only talk about in whispers, and everyone warns Kensington away from him. But sometimes what everyone calls trouble is exactly the thing a person needs. The more she looks at Owen, the more she sees past the boy who has gotten very good at taking other people down first — and finds things worth admiring, and then things worth loving. Those are the frightening ones.

Wild Reckless is the first book in Ginger Scott's Harper Boys series. It is a high-school romance that deals directly with suicide, addiction and family breakdown.