The Greatest Risk

by Cara Colter

  Maggie used being stunned as a result of the collision to continue to stare at him. Her gaze drifted hazily down his features, ticking them off—thick, dark hair, arched eyebrows, beautiful nose except for a savage scar across the bridge, high cheekbones, strong chin. The cheeks and chin were darkly whisker-roughened. It was the face of a man who would have been far better suited to guide a pirate ship than a wheelchair.

  But pity never entered her mind because his lips, full and firm, suddenly formed themselves into a sardonic grin that revealed teeth so brilliant and white and sexy that she felt the breath was being drawn from her body. This close she could even see the smile was not perfect—a chip was missing from the right front tooth—but it did not detract from the powerful male potency of that smile even one little bit.

  Slowly, her awareness of the pure and roguish appeal of his face was diluted by another awareness. Their bodies were pressed as closely together as were those of that couple she had just judged on the front steps. And she was just as reluctant to pull away.

  He was all hard edges and formidable masculinity, and Maggie could feel herself melting into him. She could feel the steel-band strength of the muscled arms that had tightened around her, protecting her from the worst of the fall. To her dazed mind, he felt good, heated and strong, the exact drug that unnamed yearning in her had craved. His scent enveloped her, tangy and tantalizing, the scent of wild, high places, forests and mountains, and all things untamed.

  “Sorry,” he said, but the lazy grin said he wasn’t the least bit sorry, that he was quite content to be lying on the shiny tile floor of the main foyer of Portland General Hospital pressed intimately into the curves of a complete stranger.

  “Oh!” Maggie said, coming to her senses abruptly. She could feel her skirt—marginally too tight, despite her faithful use of Dr. Strong’s miracle NoWait ointment—binding the top of her thighs. She tugged frantically at it, not unaware that the lazy amusement burning in his eyes deepened as she wriggled beneath him.

  She was, however unintentionally, putting on a better show than the couple outside. At least that couple probably knew each other.

  “Anything I can help you with, ma’am?” he drawled.

  “Oh!” Maggie said. “How impertinent!”

  She rolled out from under him and onto her knees. The skirt was indeed stuck. She should have never taken Dr. Strong’s advice to use only half doses of NoWait oil.

  “You are already nearly the perfect size, my dear,” he had explained to her, his sincere brown eyes making her feel as if she was the most beautiful woman in the world. “Apply a half dose of the oil behind your ears for its nutritional value.”

  If she’d taken the full dose, her skirt wouldn’t be bunched up around her hips and refusing to move.

  Her attacker’s grin had evolved into a deep chuckle. If he wasn’t wheelchair-bound, she would probably hit him for that chuckle, and for the frank and insolent way he was evaluating parts of her legs that, to date, had only been shown at the beach.

  “Impertinent,” he repeated slowly, as if he was trying on a new label to see if he liked it. She suspected he did.

  She frowned disapprovingly at him.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, propping himself up on one elbow. His eyebrows arched wickedly as if he had taken a front-row seat at the peep show.

  “No, I am not okay,” she said through clenched teeth. “I am exposing myself to half the hospital!”

  He suddenly seemed to get it that she was not finding this situation nearly as amusing as he was. He shoved himself upward and then leaped lightly to his feet. He held an arm down to her.

  She stared at him, astonished, as if he was a biblical character who had folded up his cot and walked.

  “You aren’t handicapped!” She ignored his arm and rocked back from her kneeling position to sitting, hoping that changing position would help her untangle the skirt where it bound her legs. The skirt, however, was determined to thwart her. When she got home tonight, she was rubbing a whole bottle of NoWait behind her ears!

  He folded arms over a chest she now saw was massive. He had on a blue hospital gown that bound the muscles of his arms as surely as her skirt was binding her thighs, his result being far more attractive than hers. Underneath the gown, thank God, he had on a faded pair of blue jeans. He watched her undignified struggles with infuriating male interest.

  “It’s against the law to pretend to be handicapped,” she told him, though she had no idea if it was or not.

  “Handicapped?” He followed her glance to the overturned wheelchair. “Oh, that.”

  He watched her for a moment longer, then, apparently unable to stand it, moved quickly behind her and without her permission put his hands under her armpits and set her on her feet.

  For some ridiculous reason an underarm deodorant jingle went through her head. She hoped, furiously, ridiculously, she wasn’t damp under her arms.

  “You were driving like a maniac,” she said, yanking herself away from him to hide her discomfort at how it had felt to be lifted by him, so easily, as if she were a feather, as if the NoWait could gather dust in her bathroom cabinet forever.

  “And you weren’t watching where you were going,” he said, coming back around to face her, looking down at her, smiling with an easy confidence and charm that might have made her swoon if he wasn’t so damned aggravating.

  She glared at him. She bet that smile had been opening doors—and other things—for him his entire life.

  How dare he be so incredibly sexy, and so darned sure of it?

  “Are you saying this was my fault?” she demanded.

  “Fifty-fifty?” he suggested with aggravating calm.

  “Oh!”

  “Mr. August!”

  He turned toward the voice. Maggie turned, too. Hillary Wagner, a nurse Maggie knew slightly from her own work as a social worker at Children’s Connection, an adoption agency and fertility clinic that was affiliated with this hospital, was coming toward them, looking very much like a battleship under full steam.

  Apparently here was a woman who was immune to the considerable charm radiating off Mr. August. “What on earth have you been up to now?”

  “Remember the nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?” he asked Maggie in an undertone.

  Maggie sent him a look. Was he an escapee from the psych ward, then?

  Hillary took in the upturned wheelchair, and her tiny gray eyes swept Maggie’s disheveled appearance.

  “Mr. August, you’ve been racing the wheelchairs again!” she deduced, her tone ripe with righteous anger. “And this time you’ve managed to cause an accident, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and hung his head boyishly, but not before giving Maggie a sideways wink.

  “Mr. August, really! You cannot be racing wheelchairs down the hallways. Who were you racing with? Don’t tell me it was Billy Harmon.”

  “Okay. You won’t hear it from me.”

  “Don’t be flip, Mr. August. He’s a very ill boy. Which way did he go?”

  “I think I caught a glimpse of him wheeling off that way in a big hurry when I had my, er, collision. Frankly, he looked better than I’ve ever seen him look, not the least ill.”

  “You are not a doctor, despite that horrible prank you pulled, visiting all the poor ladies in maternity.”

  “Isn’t impersonating a doctor illegal?” Maggie asked.

  “It certainly is!” Hillary concurred.

  But he ignored Hillary and turned to Maggie, not the least chastened. “What are you—a lawyer? I wasn’t impersonating a doctor. I found a discarded lab jacket and a clipboard. People jumped to their own conclusions.”

  “You are a hazard,” Hillary bit out.

  “Why, thank you.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment! Billy is sick, Mr. August, and even if he wasn’t, wheelchair racing is not allowed. Do you understand?”

  “Aye, aye, mon capatain, strictly forboden.” He managed to murder
both the French and German languages.

  Maggie wanted to be appalled by him. She wanted to look at him with the very same ferocious and completely uncharmed stare that Hillary was leveling at him.

  Unfortunately, he made her want to laugh. But it felt to Maggie as if her very life—or at least her professional one—depended on hiding that fact.

  Hillary drew herself to her full height. “I could have you discharged,” she said shrilly.

  “Make my day,” he said, unperturbed by her anger. “I’ve been trying to get out of this place for a week.”

  “Oh!” she said. She turned to Maggie. “Are you all right? Maggie, isn’t it? From Children’s Connection? Oh dear, your skirt is—”

  “Very attractive,” Mr. August said.

  The skirt continued to be bound up in some horrible way that was defying Maggie’s every attempt to get it back where it belonged.

  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 t
o 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?

  Meanwhile, it was true, he’d gone through a number of Amber look-alikes. Big-busted redheads, with steamy smiles and promising eyes, some of whom even shared his addiction to all things fast and furious. But somehow it always dead-ended, always disappointed, never even got close to filling that place.

  Luke did not like thinking about that place. The restless place. The empty space. He was thirty-four years old and facing up to the fact that the older he got, the harder it was to fill. Speed didn’t do it anymore, not the way it used to. And the broken bones took longer to mend than they used to.

  “What do you mean, go out?” he asked, leaning toward her, playing the game he knew how to play. Even though she was not his type, the man-woman thing was an effective form of outrunning that place, at least temporarily.