The Greatest Risk

Strong hands suddenly settled around her hips, and Maggie let out a startled little shriek.

The hands twisted, and the skirt rustled and then fell into place.

Maggie glared at the man, agreed inwardly he was a hazard, and then patted her now perfectly respectable skirt. “I don’t know whether to thank you or smack you,” she admitted tersely.

“Smack him!” Hillary crowed, like a wrestling fan at a match, without a modicum of her normal dignity.

“There’s Billy,” the hazard said.

Maggie turned to see a young man, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, his head covered in a baseball cap, doing wheelchair wheelies past the nurses’ station. Giving Mr. August one more killing look, Hillary turned and dashed after Billy.

“Maggie, I’m Luke August.”

Maggie found her hand enveloped in one that was large and strong and warm. She looked up into eyes that were glinting with the devil.

She snatched her hand away from his, recognizing the clear and present danger of his touch.

“You were racing wheelchairs?” she asked, brushing at an imaginary speck on her hopelessly creased skirt. “With a sick child?”

“He’s not really a child. Seventeen, I think.”

“And the sick part?”

“Careful, when you purse your lips like that you look just like Nurse Nightmare over there.”

“I happen to be an advocate for children,” she said primly.

“You would have approved, then. The kid’s sick. He’s not dead. He needs people to quit acting like he is. Besides, I was bored.”

She stared at him and knew that he would be one of those men who was easily bored, full of restless energy, always looking for the adrenaline rush. He was the type of man who jumped out of airplanes and rode pitching bulls, in short, the kind of man who would worry his woman to death.

“What brings you to Portland General, Mr. August?” she asked, seeking confirmation of what she already knew.

“Luke. Motorcycle incident. Broke my back. Not as serious as it sounds. Lower vertebrae.”

“Not the first time you’ve been a guest here?” she guessed.

He smiled. “Nope. They have my own personal box of plaster of paris put away for me in the E.R. I’ve broken my right leg twice, and my wrist. Of course, then there are the injuries they don’t cast—a concussion, a separation and a dislocation. And the cuts that required stitches. That’s what happened to my nose.”

She suspected he knew exactly how darn sexy that ragged scar across his nose was, so she tried not to look. And failed.

He smiled at her failure, and that smile was devastating, warm and sexy. Of course, he was exactly the kind of man who knew it, and whom a woman with an ounce of sense walked away from. No, ran away from. He had mentioned seven injuries in the span of seven seconds!

Besides, he was exactly the kind of man who could have you breaking all the rules—kissing on the front steps of a public place and loving it—before you even knew what had hit you.

“Look, Maggie, it was nice running into you.”

A different person might have known how to play with that, but she just looked at him with consternation.

“I’m trying to say I’m sorry I ran you down. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to make it up to you,” he said. He was dismissing her.

It was a carelessly tossed-out offer. He didn’t mean it, and of course there wasn’t anything he could do to erase the fact that she had been wagging her upper thighs at everyone who had come in the main entrance in the last few minutes.

But for some reason, looking into the jewel-like sparkle of those green eyes, feeling the wattage of that devilish grin, Dr. Strong’s homework assignment came to mind.

Be bold. Do something totally out of character.

It would be absolute insanity for Maggie to actually say the words that formed in her brain. She thought of that couple kissing on the steps and was filled with a sudden, heady warmth.

“You could go out with me,” she said, and then at the look of stunned surprise on his face, she stammered, “You know, to make it up to me.”

His eyes widened, and then narrowed. He was looking at her in a brand-new way, and she suddenly had the awful feeling she was coming up short.

She was not the kind of woman a man like this dated. He dated women who had waterfalls of wild hair, who wore skimpy clothing molded proudly to voluptuous curves. He dated women who wore bright-red lipstick and had a matching color for their fingernails.

Fingernails that would be long and tapered, not short and neatly filed. Maggie hid her fingers behind her back, but it didn’t help.

Maggie Sullivan was not Luke August’s kind of woman and they both knew it. Still, why did her heart feel as if it was going to fly right out of her chest while she waited for his answer?

You could go out with me.

Luke eyed the woman in front of him with surprise. She did not look like the type of woman who surprised a man.

She was presentable enough, in that kind of understated way that he associated with schoolteachers, librarians and dental hygienists, though her eyes prevented her from being ordinary. They were a shade of hazel that danced between blue and green. She had beautiful blond hair, untainted by the color streaks that were so fashionable. Her features, her nose and cheekbones and chin were passably cute, but not spectacularly attractive.

And she had a nice body under that prim gray straight-line suit with the uncooperative skirt, and he knew quite a bit more about her body than he should, since it had been flattened under him for fifteen or twenty most delectable seconds.

But Luke had already guessed quite a lot about her from their short acquaintance. She would be the predictable sort. If she said she’d meet you at two, she was the type who would be there five minutes before. The problem with the predictable sort was they always had an expectation that you were going to share their predictability.

He also guessed she would prefer reading a novel to experiencing real adventure. Her idea of a perfect Friday night was probably to be curled up on her couch with a book, a cup of tea and a cat. The problem with that type was that they generally held old-fashioned values of home and family in high esteem, a view that, given his own childhood home life, he was not inclined to share.

He was willing to bet she was the type who could be counted on to bake cookies and bring them into the office, and even though Luke liked homemade cookies as much as the next man, he was wary of what they represented—a longing for domesticity.

If the woman in front of him was all that she appeared, she was sweet, wholesome and predictable.

In fact, not his type at all. Least likely ever to wreck a wheelchair while racing down a hospital corridor.

Also least likely to ask a strange man out. Were there more surprises lurking behind that mask of respectability? Damn. He did like the unexpected.

Still, when he’d asked if there was anything he could do for her, what he’d meant was that he’d pick up her dry-cleaning bill. He should have been more clear about that.

He was going home to his ideal woman in a few more days. Her name was Amber. She had long, wild, red-tinted hair, red lips and eyes that were so black they smoked. A lacy white bra, filled to overflowing, peeped out from under her black leather jacket.

Amber had appeared in his life—unexpectedly—in April of 2002. In fact, she had appeared at the flick of his wrist. He’d been changing the calendar from March, and there she was, April 2002 on his Motorcycle Maidens calendar.

At least he was faithful to her. He had never turned the page to May. New calendars were a dime a dozen, after all, but a woman like Amber? He’d been searching for her since then. When he found her, then and only then, would he consider giving up the bachelor lifestyle. Meanwhile, he could tell his mother who, after seeking counseling several years back, had started showing unexpected and not entirely welcome interest in him, that he was “seeing” someone.

Amber was not the type who baked cookies, or was content with a cup of tea on a Friday night. She probably didn’t like cats or small children. But the way she unbuttoned her jacket and leaned over the handlebars of that Harley—the exact same make, year and model that he himself rode—who cared?