The Greatest Risk

by Cara Colter

  Not that anyone noticed! A couple in one of the oak booths by the windows didn’t seem to be even remotely aware of either the noise or the crowd. They were tangled around each other like tree roots.

  Were these performances becoming more common? Or was Maggie just noticing them more?

  “Sheesh,” Luke muttered. “Get a room.”

  So, he had noticed, too. Maggie glanced once more at the couple and frowned. Wasn’t that a man she had seen on several occasions at the Healthy Living Clinic?

  “Hey, Luke, haven’t seen you for a while.”

  Maggie’s attention was diverted from the couple. The waitress was cute, one of those perky outgoing types that Maggie always somehow envied, even though they always seemed to end up working in places like this.

  Blond and decidedly voluptuous, the girl had on a white tank top that showed off a pierced belly button. It was exactly the type of clothing that Maggie would never be able to wear. The young waitress was looking at Luke with something that seemed frighteningly close to adoration.

  Maggie realized it should come as no surprise to her that Luke was the kind of man accustomed to being adored by the kind of girls who could get away with wearing skimpy white tank tops and piercing their belly buttons!

  She sneaked a look at him and felt a renewed ripple of pleasure at the sheer masculine presence of the man, the dark crispness of his hair, the roguishness of his features, the rippling strength evident in every inch of his powerful frame.

  A quick glance around proved his entrance had not gone unnoticed by many of the women in the establishment. A table of four attractive mid-twenties women were all looking at him with unveiled appreciation. When they caught Maggie’s eye, they turned quickly away, chattering animatedly to each other over the table. Maggie suspected they were asking the very same question she herself was asking.

  What was she, plain, ordinary Maggie Sullivan, doing here with this man? The movie would have been a better choice after all. She could have sat in the dark, chewed popcorn and worried about butter, never having a clue of what she was up against in terms of his massive appeal to all members of the opposite sex.

  Up against? Good grief, that made it sound as if she had designs on Luke August! Maggie reminded herself she was doing her homework, being bold, not making lifetime plans. Still, she watched the interchange between Luke and the waitress with pained interest.

  Luke gave the girl a light tap on the shoulder with a loose fist. “Hey, little sister,” he said, and with that single phrase, seemingly tossed out casually, he defused Maggie’s anxiety. The phrase recognized the girl’s youth without snubbing her. He acknowledged her, but didn’t encourage her interest.

  Was there more to Luke than met the eye?

  “Where have you been?” the waitress asked, coquettishly blinking mascara-dripping lashes at him. She slipped her tray onto her hip, apparently planning a long chat that ignored Maggie. “It’s been a couple of weeks, hasn’t it?”

  “I’ve been laid up,” he said. “Is there a table back in the pool room? Great. Hey, Rhonda, can you bring us a couple of burgers? Heavy on the fries. Don’t stint on the gravy, either.”

  Maggie suspected anyone else would have been told that that wasn’t her section, but Rhonda didn’t seem to realize she had been gently brushed off and was still eager to please. “To drink? Your regular?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your lady friend?”

  “Just a cola, thanks,” Maggie said.

  “Two regulars,” Rhonda said, rolling her eyes.

  Maggie and Luke pushed their way through the crowd in the front of the bar, to the pool room at the back. There was one table to sit at, and lots of greetings to Luke. He helped her take off her jacket, the old-world courtesy completely wiped out by the wicked way he raised his eyebrows at what was underneath.

  The black T-shirt was way too tight. She had known it when she put it on, but of course at that time her crystal ball had failed her. She hadn’t known the evening was going to hold more than a polite refusal to see him. She had thought the jacket was staying on!

  “You look great in that,” he said gruffly.

  The comment flustered her. Did she really? Or did he just know how to make women feel sexy?

  Thankfully, they had no sooner settled at the table than he was swarmed. He fielded questions about his long absence from this favorite watering hole.

  He was obviously popular and well-liked by both men and women. Though she desperately would have liked to find fault with him, Maggie found herself reluctantly liking how he interacted with people. He was a man who had been given many gifts, the kind of man who could easily have become stuck on himself.

  But Luke seemed genuinely interested in other people. He knew and remembered small details. He asked one woman about her cat, and even remembered the pet’s name. When he inquired about details of their lives, he appeared to care about the answers. He introduced Maggie to everyone who visited the table and made sure she was included in the conversations. He exchanged banter with some beautiful women, but never once to the point where Maggie felt he would rather be with them, or that he was asking the question she was certain everyone else was asking.

  What is he doing with her?

  Still, for all his comfort with the patrons of Morgan’s, after a while Maggie noticed something she found a tiny bit sad, though the word sad seemed like the last word you would have thought of, looking at the dynamic Mr. August holding court.

  “Doesn’t anybody know you’re in the hospital?” she finally asked when they once again had the table to themselves.

  He shrugged it off. “I didn’t exactly send out announcement cards.”

  But Maggie was a social worker. She was trained to look deeper, and her intuition was finely honed. She suspected Luke August deliberately chose relationships that were superficial, that required very little of him.

  What did that say about him? Not much. It added to his already less-than-stellar résumé: that he was restless and reckless, loved to live dangerously and was quite comfortable shedding his clothes in front of women. And that was before she even began to factor in his ease at assuming roles from doctor to janitor, and his apparent love of flaunting rules.

  But a more sympathetic thought was already crowding out all the unsympathetic facts. How lonely could he be that he chose relationships that asked so very little of him? That gave him nothing?

  Ha! A man who looked less lonely she had rarely seen.

  Besides, could it be any lonelier than her life, where she managed to bury her own heartaches in an almost crippling workload? Was escaping a life of real commitment and intimacy through overwork any different than escaping through riding motorcycles too fast or cultivating friendships in a bar?

  “Hey,” he said, reaching over and pressing his thumb against her forehead. “You’re getting too serious, again. Tell me you are not thinking about butter.”

  She laughed. “No.”

  “Well, whatever you’re thinking about, stop. You’re going to get a wrinkle right here.”

  The small gesture, his finger briefly touching her forehead, coupled with the mischief in those green eyes, was strangely intoxicating.

  Besides, he was right. The whole point of this exercise was to have fun, to let go, to be different than she normally was. Bold. She gave herself permission to do that, ordered herself to quit the analyzing that came as second nature to her, a skill that made her a great social worker but probably not such a great date.

  “Is your regular drink really soda?” she asked him when their drinks arrived. “I’m surprised.” Again.

  “I am in the hospital. It’s probably not a great idea to return inebriated.” She realized he didn’t want to discuss his less-than-macho choice of drink because he quickly changed the subject. “I can’t wait for that burger. Maybe I’ll have two. Hospital food is, well, horrible.”

  “She said it was your regular,” Maggie said of his drink choice, not prep
ared to let him wiggle out of it.

  “Did she?”

  “So, unless you’ve been slipping out on these little field trips every night…” She already knew he hadn’t, at least not to Morgan’s.

  “Great idea, but no. This is the first time I’ve had a night out. This hospitalization, anyway.”

  “This hospitalization?” she asked. “So you play hooky every time you’re hospitalized?”

  He shrugged.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “Are you a reporter?” he teased, but did she hear a faint warning? Don’t ask too much. Don’t get too personal.

  “No, I’m curious.”

  “You know what that did to the cat.” He hesitated, then answered. “In the last five years, I’ve been in the hospital seven times. I get bored.”

  She was startled, but something in his look made her back off. She reminded herself she was supposed to be having fun. She wasn’t conducting a parenting suitability interview.

  “Well, here’s to brown and bubbly,” she said, lifting her glass to him.

  “Did you have me pegged for a beer-swilling swine, little Maggie Mouse?” he teased. He liked it light. Well, that was fine. She was planning one night of being out of character. It really had nothing to do with him, except that he was a different kind of choice than she had ever made before. And how.

  She ordered herself to lighten up and managed to laugh at herself. “I could picture you with a beer, yes.”

  “I spend too much time on motorcycles to drink much. I can’t be off, even by a little bit. I don’t ride with any alcohol in my system. Besides, I seem to have no problem having wrecks, even without being impaired.”

  So, despite the image he was trying to uphold of being a barfly, he didn’t drink?

  “So,” she said, determined to keep it light, not to follow the tantalizing thread of all the things he didn’t want her to know, like why he hung out in a bar when he didn’t drink, “to you motorcycles are—”

  “My life,” he finished the sentence easily. “I have three. A 1994 Harley Fatboy, which is my road trip bike. Then I have an off-road bike, a Honda CRF 450, which I race. And then I have a street bike, that’s kind of in pieces after, er, my last ride on it.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s a speed bike. Sometimes irreverently called a crotch rocket. I was going a little too fast into a turn. The road was wet.” He held up his glass. “Here’s to leather and helmets.”

  He was dismissing the accident as nothing, and she reminded herself it was her night not to care, not to probe, not to try and understand, just to go with the flow, to enjoy him, to have fun.

  So, a large part of his life was about motorcycles.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a motorcycle called a crotch rocket,” she admitted. Or a Fatboy, or a CRF 450, but why admit total ignorance?

  “I’ll point one out to you next time we’re together.”

  Next time they were together? She warned herself he had thrown it out casually. What were the chances there was going to be a next time?

  And so, despite her vow to keep it light, Maggie wanted to know everything she could this time.

  “Do you do something for a living?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure. I’m in construction. All brawn, no brains.” He said that with a certain challenge, as if he expected her to disapprove.

  But she could already tell there was plenty of brain there. And she had already figured out Luke did something physical. There would be no other explanation for the fine form of the man, unless he went to a gym, and somehow she couldn’t envision him admiring himself in mirrors and pumping iron.

  “Do you like your work?” she asked, probing the challenge she had heard in his voice.

  “Love it. I was the kid who could never sit still in the classroom. Now I get paid for the fact I’m high-energy.”

  Should she ask him why he sounded a tiny bit defensive? No! That would be the social worker in her speaking. And tonight she was trying to be bold, different.

  Instead, she said, “Not to mention the added perk that girls love muscles?”

  Clearly it wasn’t what he’d expected, and he tried to hide the fact she’d surprised him by saying, “Do you like muscles, Miss Maggie?”

  Though she ordered them not to, her eyes immediately moved to that big, broad muscle of his exposed forearm. He flexed it.

  She gulped.

  He laughed and then moved easily away from her discomfort. “And how about you? What do you do for a living?”

  She told him about her work at Children’s Connection. Somehow she expected the same kind of disapproval that he had expected of her, or at least boredom. He did not look like the kind of guy who would list a social worker as a person of interest to him.

  She could see him with a model. Spy. Airline hostess. Actress. And yet for all that, he listened to her intently, asked questions, drew her out.

  It occurred to her Luke August was great at this. At making a woman feel special and as if she was the only one in the world. It also occurred to her it would be a mistake to take it personally, to read too much into it.

  The food arrived. The hamburgers were thick and juicy, the fries homemade, the gravy sumptuous. Maggie wondered if food had ever tasted so good.

  Maybe that was what being with such an intriguing man did, heightened all your senses. Wasn’t that probably the point of Dr. Richie’s homework assignment? Leave the comfort zone, so you could feel things more fully, more completely?

  Before she really even knew it, she had eaten every bite of food off her plate, including a monstrous mound of French fries and every last dollop of gravy.

  Luke looked at her empty plate approvingly. “You eat like a man,” he said. “None of this dainty whining about getting fat.”

  Maggie was not at all sure that was a compliment! Didn’t he remember the popcorn? She did worry about getting fat! She looked at her empty plate in horror. Oh no! Her hips had been giving her a message earlier today, and she had ignored it. Her shirt had been too tight, and she had ignored that, too!

  Plus, in her frenzy over having asked Luke to go out with her, and the ensuing chaos where she had tried on everything she owned to go and tell him she wasn’t going out with him, Maggie had completely forgotten to apply her daily dose of NoWait oil.

  She shuffled through her handbag, and her hand closed over the precious little vial.

  Emergency!

  She excused herself and went to the washroom. She couldn’t help but notice how many women were sneaking looks at Luke. Some weren’t even sneaking, eyeing him up as boldly as if he were a side of prime beef and they were the supermarket meat buyer.

  Despite what had seemed like very genuine interest as they had exchanged information about their jobs, he wasn’t going to see anything in her. Maggie just knew it. The washroom, unfortunately, had a series of wall-to-floor mirrors and she studied herself.

  Plain, she decided. And despite what Dr. Richie had said, she was not perfect. Her hips were way too wide. Her curves were just too curvy.

  Reaching into her bag, she took out the NoWait. Half the recommended dose?

  “Forget that, Dr. Richie,” she muttered to herself.

  Maggie rubbed the full dose behind her ears, and then just for good measure added another little dab.

  “Goodbye, burger,” she said.

  She reentered the pool room, stood in the archway, and watched Luke for a moment. He was so sure of himself. The fact that he was still alone surprised her—and didn’t seem to bother him one little bit. Looking at him, she felt as if he was taking her breath away.

  Maggie was not sure she had ever had such a physical awareness of a man as she had of Luke. Was it because of their first encounter? Because she had felt the solidness of him against her, felt his warmth and his fire on much too intimate terms?

  Was it because he had, however unintentionally, introduced her to her own yearning? For a moment, she though
t of bolting for the door. Dealing with this unfamiliar territory felt the same as navigating a minefield.

  But then Luke noticed her and, grinning as though he was thrilled to see her, waved her back over to him.

  “So, are you ready for some pool? I got us one of the tables.”

  “Sure,” she said doubtfully.

  But half an hour later Maggie was giggling helplessly as she leaned over the table trying to hit the white ball into one of the solid ones.

  “No, no, no,” he said sternly. “You have to get down farther. You have to be looking right down the shaft of the cue.”

  He came up behind her and fitted his body around hers, adjusting her over the cue. He took her arm.

  “Relax. Your elbow has to be loose. Loose! You feel like you have your arm in a splint from elbow to wrist. Geez, you smell good.”

  That was the contradiction. Relax? With the most gorgeous, sexy man in the universe draped around her? All the places where his body touched hers were tingling. She wanted to drop the pool cue and flip over, so that he had her bent over the pool table and she could feel the hard length of him, just the way she had on the foyer floor this morning.

  She reminded herself she had condemned that man and woman on the hospital’s front steps for their public display of affection….

  “I’m losing my mind,” she muttered.

  “Concentrate!”

  Sure. The question was on what? He had said she smelled good. That was the NoWait with its pleasant citrus fragrance, underlaid ever so subtly with a hint of musk.

  But his smell was intoxicating, and she was pretty sure he wasn’t wearing any scent except the one that came off his skin, clean, faintly tangy and perturbingly masculine.

  “Okay,” he said, his breath stirring the hair on the nape of her neck. “Bring your arm back.” Lightly he guided her arm back, his fingers on her elbow.

  “You’re tickling me!”

  “For God’s sake, woman, concentrate. Loose elbow. Tap the cue ball. Ticklish, hmm? I’m filing that away for future reference.”