Cara Colter - The Greatest Risk

Wrong, his voice of reason said stubbornly.

It was dumb to ignore that reason-voice. Luke knew from experience you almost always ended up going off a ramp on a dirt bike at eighty miles an hour, filled with the sudden knowledge that you would have had to be going ninety to make the ramp on the far side of the ravine.

He ignored the voice of reason. This was a challenge after all. He had a weakness. He had never been able to say no to a challenge.

And he had all the scars to prove it.

“Okay, the movie is out. Coffee is out. How about if we just go down to Morgan’s Pub, play a game of pool and call it a night?”

There. He’d risen to the challenge and gotten himself off the hook in one smooth move. No girl who got to know people from the church was going to say yes to going to a pub and playing pool with a virtual stranger, a renegade dressed in a custodian’s outfit.

She hesitated for only a moment, filled herself up with air as if she was building up the nerve to step off a cliff into a pool of ice-cold water, and then said, “Okay. I guess that would be all right.”

Maggie could not believe she had just said that. It would most definitely not be all right to go play a game of pool with Luke August. She didn’t even know how to play pool, though that would be the least of her problems.

It was his eyes, she decided. They were green and smoky and they danced with amusement and mischief and seduction.

Seduction, she repeated to herself with a gulp.

She had come here to Portland General to tell him politely she had come to her senses and that she was not going to a movie with a stranger, with a man she knew nothing about except that he raced wheelchairs. Badly. She could just have not come at all, but it had seemed as if it would be too rude to leave him standing there in the foyer, waiting for her.

Of course, if she was going to be honest with herself, the truth was she could have used the phone and left a message for him at the nursing station.

But then she wouldn’t have known if he had come. Somehow she had thought maybe he wouldn’t. What had she felt when she had first walked in and the hospital foyer had appeared empty?

Much too much.

Her resolve to break the date had intensified when Luke had touched her hair. What had she felt then? Again, much too much. As if she wanted to lean toward him, place her fingertips on his chest, feel the hard wall of muscle and man beneath her hands, as she had felt it this afternoon.

Everything in her mind was screaming at her to run. Every sinew of her body was keeping her rooted to the spot.

In the end his eyes had proved irresistible, the laughter in them beckoning to her, promising her something outside the predictability and the monotony of her own narrow world.

Look at it as homework, she persuaded herself when she heard her voice saying with deceptive calm that she would go play pool with him.

Homework assignment: Be bold. Do something totally out of character this week. So, she’d asked a man out. It hardly counted if she then refused to go out with him!

“My lady,” Luke said, picking up the bucket and resting the dripping mop over his shoulder, “follow me.”

By then she was helpless to do anything but obey. Following him allowed her to study the broadness of his back, the narrowness of his hips, the firm line of his rear end, the length of his leg.

She realized, even in those custodian’s overalls, too short for his six-foot-something frame, that he walked like a man who owned the earth, his stride long and loose, powerful and confident.

“Evenin’,” he said cheerfully to a nurse coming toward them.

The woman gave him a quick glance, squinted at his chest. “Evening, Fred,” she replied distractedly.

Maggie stifled a giggle.

“Fred” turned and winked at her. He led her through a maze of hallways and up and down elevators until they came to an exit she suspected no one knew existed.

While she watched, he reached for the zipper on the coveralls.

“Want to take bets what I have on underneath?” His eyes were very dark in the murky light of the hall, dark and watchful.

She wished she was one of those girls who knew what to say in moments like this, but Maggie only gulped and shook her head. But she didn’t look away, and he had known she would not look away.

Aware her eyes were riveted on that zipper, he lowered it very slowly, winked at her when she spotted the shirt underneath, and then he shimmied out of the coveralls, as if he undressed in front of women everyday.

Which he probably did, she reminded herself. The man was as close to irresistible as men came, and he knew it.

Underneath the coveralls, Luke had on a white denim shirt, sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow, revealing the power of his lower forearms. Faded jeans clung to the large muscles of his thighs.

“How did you know this was here?” she asked a trifle breathlessly, trying to think about anything but the way he was made.

“This exit? I explore.”

“For what reason?”

“You never know when you might have to get ten old people in wheelchairs out because of a fire.”

He could have said anything. That he got bored. That he was restless. And those things probably would have been true. But what he said also had sounded true. It would almost be too much to handle if he looked the way he did—so handsome, powerful, self-assured—and also had heroic qualities.

He opened the door for her and bowed. “The only one in the building that’s not alarmed,” he told her.

“How many alarms did you set off finding that out?” she asked, stepping by him, trying desperately to keep it light, to banter, not to give in to the shivering awareness she felt when she glimpsed the squareness of his wrist, caught the scent of him, noticed how the darkness made his faintly whisker-roughened face look like that of a pirate.

“Lots. Ask Nurse Nightmare.”

“I intend to.” She looked around. There was no light over the door, and it was pitch-black out here. She didn’t have the foggiest notion where they were. Behind one of the hospital wings, she assumed.

He leaned over and stuck a rock in the door, holding it ajar ever so slightly. “So I can get back in.”

“Why do you go to all the trouble?” she asked. “I think we could have just walked out the front door. You’re a patient, not a prisoner.”

“Ha. You don’t know the first thing about Nurse Nightmare, do you?”

“I know her name is not Nurse Nightmare! It’s Hillary Wagner.”

He leaned close to her. She could feel his breath on the soft hollow of her neck. It occurred to her she was in a very dark and deserted place with a man she knew absolutely nothing about.

“I like to live dangerously,” he said softly.

So, now she knew that. And yet she did not feel the least afraid, or at least not for her physical safety. When she looked into Luke August’s eyes she saw a man who planned escape routes for ten people in wheelchairs and who loved to play.

And she saw something else.

Her own need. She leaned toward him, her eyes closing, her lips parting. He was leaning toward her, too, so close she could smell the tangy scent of him, feel the faint heat rising off his body. She gave in to the temptation to touch. Her fingertips grazed his shirt, and she shut her eyes against the pulsating power contained behind the thin and flimsy wall of fabric.

He pulled back, away from her touch, and she straightened and stared at him.

“Ah, Miss Maggie Mouse,” he said softly, “you aren’t that kind of girl.”

She was grateful for the darkness because she could feel the blush leap onto her cheeks. It was true. She was not that kind of girl.

But she sure wanted to be.