The Greatest Risk

by Cara Colter

  It seemed the guitar was finding that place, the melody haunting, exquisitely tender, making Luke feel exactly what the title of the song had promised.

  Love on a summer night. The boy’s fingers plucked and danced and stroked, and coaxed from his guitar not music but love, shimmering with hope and pathos and pain and glory.

  Luke had never had any desire to go to such places. Amber would not have brought him to a place like this. No, jukeboxes loaded with old Springsteen tunes would be more her style. Peanut shells on the floor, dancing on the tables as the night grew wilder.

  Despite the promise of Maggie’s red dress, Luke had a feeling this was as wild as things were getting tonight.

  Thank God. He could not stand the contradictions posed by Maggie. The complications. How could she wear a dress like that, and then bring him to a place of his soul instead of his libido?

  She obviously had no idea that this was a game men and women played, and that it had rules. He was willing to forgo his vow to show her a fun time. It was replaced with a desire just to get out of here alive.

  The dessert tray came. He ordered one of everything on it. Speed wasn’t the only way to stuff back uncomfortable feelings of confusion and yearning mixed. Besides, it was the kind of gesture that would have dismayed his well-bred mother.

  Maggie seemed to think it was hilarious, and she laughed. Just as it had done last night, her laughter transformed her and chased some of the seriousness from her. So, he was going to get her laughing after all.

  An hour later it occurred to him that eating too many sweets was a dumb plan for trying to get out of this evening intact. He had just eaten a dessert called death by chocolate and he was pretty sure that was going to be his fate.

  But better that than death by innocent girl in a red dress. He glanced up at her. She had a little ring of chocolate around her own mouth and looked adorable in her distress when she looked down at all the empty dessert plates.

  She excused herself rapidly.

  Watching her hurry off, he hoped she wasn’t one of those types who had to puke after they ate. No, she had too many delicious round curves to have that particular disorder. All he noticed when she came back was that the subtle fragrance of citrus and musk that seemed to be all hers was stronger.

  “Are you ready to go?” she asked.

  “No. I just have to have another death by chocolate.”

  She laughed and started to reach for her wallet.

  He put his hand over hers. “Excuse me?”

  “I invited you,” she said. “It’ll be my treat.”

  “Over my dead body. Which, you might have noticed the death by chocolate hasn’t quite accomplished yet.”

  “You paid last night at Morgan’s.”

  “Maggie, I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy.”

  He didn’t know what it was about the word old-fashioned that made her cheeks glow that sexy shade of red that nearly matched her dress, but he liked it.

  He liked so much about her. He liked the softness of her face under the glow of these outdoor lights. He liked the color of her eyes. He liked her laughter. He liked the richness of her hair. He liked her depth and her sensitivity.

  And he liked that dress.

  “Yeah, I’m ready to go,” he said gruffly.

  He drove again, aware of her expectation that he might drive somewhere quiet, like that beach he had thought of earlier.

  But Luke was well aware something very dangerous was going on inside him. This was the kind of woman—complex, deep, smart, beautiful—that a man could get into real trouble with.

  She was the type of woman a man could fall in love with.

  Not him, of course, he didn’t do the love thing. And he didn’t do it because he had the good sense to see it coming.

  He pulled into the hospital parking lot.

  “Thanks, Maggie. That was—”

  Before he could even brace himself she had thrown herself in his lap. Her arms were wrapped around his neck and her lips were laying claim to his.

  His vow to be a gentleman was just that! Words, a desire. The vow could not withstand this kind of test.

  How could he be a gentleman, when she intended to be a hellcat?

  He took what she was offering. He took the softness of her lips and the velvet of her tongue. He allowed himself to delight in the soft swell of her breast squeezed up hard against his chest, the roundness of her buttocks and the softness of her upper thigh where they rested on him.

  He had envied, briefly, that young musician and his girlfriend tonight, envied the newness of the world of men and women that they were exploring.

  And yet he was aware that this encounter had a new flavor to it, too. There was a dimension here that he had not experienced often.

  What was it? Tenderness?

  Innocence.

  The word exploded in his brain, and he put Maggie off his lap and glared at her. Her hair was a wild tangle. Her breasts heaved with desire under the line of that red dress. Her lips were puffy and her eyes were glazed with desire.

  He looked away, ran a hand through his hair.

  Luke realized he could not allow himself to be fooled by the boldness of her kisses. She was Maggie Mouse, sweet and shy, and much too vulnerable a girl for a rough guy like him.

  “You were right the first time,” he said, and was amazed it was taking all his strength to say it. “We can’t see each other again, Maggie.”

  Her name felt like that music coming off his lips, haunting and beautiful. He dared look at her, but looked swiftly away.

  He had to make her get this: it wasn’t going to work. She was too soft and too sensitive. No matter what that dress said, she was a picket-fence kind of girl. The kind of girl you said forever to, or nothing at all.

  “I’m going home tomorrow,” he said. “I’m being discharged.”

  He hazarded another look at her. She wasn’t getting it. Her eyes were still wide and filled with light.

  It occurred to him they were half in love with each other already. That was the light he saw in her eyes, tender and smoldering.

  It made him panic. He had to push her away somehow so that she was never coming back, never hoping, never dreaming.

  “I’m going home to my roommate. Her name is Amber.”

  The silence was choked. He glanced at her. She was looking stiffly straight ahead, but her hands were knitting and unknitting on her lap.

  “You live with someone?” she asked, and her voice was small and broken, and he knew he had accomplished exactly what he wanted.

  “She hangs around,” he said.

  “Could you get out of my car now?”

  He didn’t say anything else. He got out of the car. He felt like the worst kind of creep. She thought he’d gone out with her when he was committed to someone else.

  It was a lie and a monstrous one, but he’d told it for her own good.

  She didn’t even get out of the car, just scooted across from the passenger seat to the driver’s.

  She ducked her head so that her hair fanned out over her cheeks, but he had seen the truth. She was crying.

  He had made Miss Maggie Mouse cry.

  It should have felt like a confirmation. As if he had done exactly the right thing. Maggie was way too soft for him. He would hurt her without meaning to.

  A sharp, quick cut was better than a slow, lingering tear.

  But if he’d done the right thing, why did he feel like such a jerk? As if life had given him one good thing and he had tossed it away.

  He watched the Beetle until he could see it no longer, and then he shoved his hands in his pockets and went up the stairs of the hospital. He felt a hundred years old, and he didn’t think it had a thing to do with the physio workout he’d done today.

  Six

  “You’re fired. Get the hell off my job,” Luke said. He watched, his arms folded over his chest, his legs planted solidly, as his former employee shot him one dark, challenging look, reconsidered and then
scurried away.

  Luke turned to where he had caught the man smoking behind a pallet of plywood, and disgustedly stomped out the still-smoldering butt.

  “Ah, boss?”

  “Yeah?” Luke turned and glared at Brian, aware that firing the man who had been irritating him for three whole hours now had not taken the edge off his black mood. Not even a little bit.

  Brian was his best employee and a pretty good buddy, too. They’d been working together more than six years, which was a long time in this industry.

  “That’s the third guy you’ve fired in the three days since you’ve been back at work.”

  “It was not his coffee break. Besides, he screwed the dog—” he said, using the vulgar construction-site term for lazy. There, Maggie, that’s what kind of man I really am. He could just picture her, her little Maggie Mouse ears turning to crimson at words like that.

  Amber would use words like that, he thought.

  “Who’s Amber?” Brian asked baffled.

  Had he said that out loud? “I didn’t say Amber….” He improvised. “I said anger. As in that guy I just canned really pissed me off. He’s been pissing me off since he got here. How long did he work for me?”

  “Since this morning.”

  “He was a lousy worker. I think he was scared of heights, too. Did you see him tiptoeing along that outside wall?”

  Brian did not look convinced. “Is everything okay?” he finally ventured cautiously.

  “Oh, jim-dandy. I’ve got to get this place locked up by the end of next week, and I can’t find a crew that’s worth a damn.”

  “I didn’t mean about the job,” he said. “You don’t seem right since you got out of the hospital. Are you in pain or something?”

  Oh, yeah, he was in pain. But it wasn’t physical. Or not all physical. It was the pain of a man who was carrying around a phantom woman inside him, a woman who watched him with huge, soft eyes, and cringed from his language, and laughed at his jokes and cried at the slightest provocation.

  Though telling her he lived with another woman was not exactly a slight provocation, even in his book.

  “No,” he snapped when he became aware Brian was studying him with a concerned look. Concerned looks were not welcome on the construction site. “I’m not in pain. Now get to work, or you’ll be following that guy down the road.”

  “You watch how you talk to me, or I will be following him down the road. Gladly.”

  They stood glaring at each other for a minute.

  “Sorry,” Luke finally said. Sighing, he pushed his fingers through his hair. He’d always been difficult to work for. He expected the same of his crew that he asked of himself. He was a perfectionist and he drove himself hard. He didn’t want to lose Brian because he was in a temper over Maggie.

  Brian stood his ground for a minute longer, then shook it off. “You know, boss, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say it was a girl.”

  “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say it was a girl,” Luke repeated, imitating Brian’s voice with annoyance as he walked into his house an hour later, tossed his tool belt off in the back entry hall, and slammed his lunch pail down. “Sure. A girl.”

  He went up the few steps from the back entry to the kitchen. The house was just outside the metropolis of Portland, in Clackamas County, in a satellite community called Boring. Even Luke was aware of the irony. His house was a 1970s split-level on an acre of land with a great shop out back. He bought these places, fixer-uppers, renovated them and turned them over. He’d extensively remodeled the kitchen on this particular house, and usually he enjoyed coming in the back door to the new raised panel white cabinets, hardwood floor, kitchen island, the big new window that looked out to Mount Hood.

  Tonight the kitchen seemed oppressive.

  “The heat. Maybe central air next,” he thought, though the average heat in July in this part of Oregon hovered around seventy-nine degrees, which hardly warranted air conditioning.

  Planning projects was easier than thinking about what he had done to his life four days ago when he had told Maggie he was going home to his roommate.

  Luke was acutely aware tonight of what was wrong with the kitchen. There were no smells of food cooking, no flowers on the table, no magnets on the fridge.

  There were none of those little touches that signaled a woman in residence, little touches that could clear oppression out of the air like smoke before a fan.

  The truth was there had never been a woman in residence here. There hadn’t even been any overnighters. It was his space, and he protected it. Nobody told him to pick up his clothes or tried to sew curtains for that new window.

  He flipped on the light of the newly installed sunshine ceiling, and realized there was a woman in residence, after all. Amber beamed at him from her place of honor on the wall by the phone. He grabbed a soda out of the fridge, popped the lid and sidled over to study her.

  “You aren’t the cooking, flowers, magnets-on-the-fridge, sew-drapes, pick-up-your-clothes kind of girl anyway, are you, honey?”

  He’d never wanted that. Ever. Wild in the bedroom would do for his ideal woman. The sad truth was, he’d had plenty of that.

  And it had always proved less than ideal. So much so that he’d retreated from the whole world of even superficial relationships for a long, long time. Which explained why no one had ever been here. Or no one of the opposite sex. Of course, his buddies dropped by all the time. They spent time out in the huge shop working on motorcycles, and they all enjoyed the freedom of coming in for a beer after. No one to nag about grease in the sink, or booted feet propped up on the coffee table. Oh, yeah, the buddies loved it here.

  And then they all went home to magnets on the fridge.

  Well, maybe someday he would, too.

  “When I find you, Amber,” he promised. He kissed his fingers and planted them in the curve of her décolletage. Normally that would have given him a bit of a chuckle. Tonight it struck him as a sadly pathetic thing to do.

  Come to think of it, Luke had always liked this kitchen just fine, too. Brian had been uncomfortably close to the truth. Something was wrong, and it was about a female.

  Not a damn girl, either. A woman. Luke had given up a real woman—one who looked absolutely fabulous in a curve-hugging red dress—for this? Kissing a calendar and the privilege of washing greasy hands in the kitchen sink without being yelled at?

  But from the way Maggie had kissed, would she be both? A cooking, flowers, magnets-on-the-fridge kind of girl and breath-stoppingly sexy, too? Or was she just playing at being wildly sexy? What if she was everything? Smart and sexy? Beautiful and decent?

  “Well, what if she is?” he muttered. “With a girl like her those kisses could end up costing, big time.” There was always the price, and the price would be she’d want to tame him, for one. They all wanted to tame him.

  “Oh, Lukie,” he mimicked a female voice and batted his eyelashes, “you aren’t going to go ride your motorcycle instead of picking out wallpaper, are you?” Blink-blink.

  And after she sewed curtains she probably wouldn’t want to sell the place, no matter what the profits would be. No, siree, she’d want to nest. She’d want a picket fence to replace the overgrown hedge that surrounded his place, and eventually she’d be eyeing up a little swing set that would have to be moved every time he mowed the lawn. And thinking about the lawn, she’d probably want that mowed quite a bit more frequently than it was now.

  A swing set? Now he was thinking of kids and Maggie! Total confirmation that he had cut his losses at exactly the right time.

  “Stop thinking about Maggie,” he ordered himself. It was an order he’d already disobeyed at least half a dozen times today.

  The phone rang, and he picked it up before the first ring had completed, aware that his heart was beating wildly, that he wanted it to be her, the one he wasn’t thinking about.

  “Hello?”

  “Luke, darling, it’s Mother.”

  He wished
he’d invested in caller ID. “Hi, Mom.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were out of the hospital. I went to visit you today.”

  “The announcement card is in the mail,” he said. He winked at Amber.

  “Oh, Luke.”

  How did he manage to elicit that tone no matter what he did? If he’d told her he was leaving the hospital, he would have got the same thing for leaving too soon.

  It was always unspoken between them. Oh, Luke. You can disrupt my life without half trying.

  See, Maggie? he said inwardly. I saved you from myself. A disruptive, unreliable, risk-taking guy who doesn’t have any patience with his own mother. Luke knew Maggie wouldn’t like that.

  But Amber wouldn’t care.

  “How is Amber?” his mother asked.

  “Fine,” he said, careful as always not to say enough that his mother caught on that Amber was largely fictional.

  “I’d love to meet her sometime.”

  “Hmm,” he said, noncommittally.

  “And could you and I get together for lunch soon?”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  He closed his eyes. His mother had not seen him for most of his childhood—unless she was driving him to the hospital after another one of his accidents. Even that chore seemed to fill her with resentment, her child getting in the way of her life of hair appointments and charity balls and afternoon “tea” at the club. Tea that somehow made her breath smell like alcohol.

  Last year she’d gotten into a twelve-step group and therapy and God knows what else. Now she was always trying to fix things between them.

  He was thirty-four years old. He didn’t need a mommy anymore, thanks. Still, he found it hard to say no to Annabelle August. She was trying so hard. It was annoying as hell, but she was trying.

  “You saw me in the hospital a couple of times,” he reminded her.

  “That’s not private,” she said.

  He refrained, barely, from groaning. Luke hated it when she wanted private meetings between them. It meant she was going to try and probe his childhood wounds some more, drag herself over the coals for all the things not said and not done. She was making her way, painfully, through the years. She hadn’t even gotten to Stinkbomb, yet.