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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?
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.
She actually was blushing a charming shade of crimson, something Amber did not do, and would not do when he finally found her.
“Never mind,” she said, and tossed her hair. “That was a silly thing to say. I don’t know what got into me.”
It was the wrong kind of hair for him. Since Amber, he liked redheads, and not necessarily real redheads, either. But that self-conscious toss had drawn his eye. Miss Priss’s hair was an intriguing shade somewhere between corn silk and ripening wheat.
Considering it wasn’t the type of hair he went for, at all, he found it odd that he suddenly wanted to touch it. “We could,” he said, “go out.”
Her green-blue eyes got very big. Amber would have licked her lips and let her eyes travel suggestively down his hospital gown, but hers didn’t.
“Maggie, wasn’t it? Isn’t that what Nurse Nightmare called you?” He was helping her along, giving her an opportunity to flirt, but she was obviously terrible at this. She was looking everywhere but at him.
“Maggie Sullivan,” she confirmed reluctantly. “But really, never mind.”
“Go out?” he prodded her. “Like for a drink or something?”
“Oh. No. I mean I don’t drink.”
Hell’s bells, this was getting worse by the moment. Amber would drink. Get on the tables and sway her hips and lick her lips when she’d had a few too many.
And he’d be the one who got to bring her home.
“So, what did you mean, then, go out?”
“I thought maybe a movie…or something,” she said lamely.
Worse than he thought. A movie, which meant the big debate. Do you hold her hand? Put your arm over her shoulder? When was the last time going out had meant that to him?
He thought he’d been twelve.
“Did you have a particular movie in mind?” Mind. Had he lost his? Maggie Sullivan was not his kind.
On the other hand, his search for Amber was proving futile. Why not entertain himself until she came along? Maggie was the kind of girl who had always snubbed him in high school, the kind of girl lost behind too many books in her arms, not amused by being tripped by his big foot sticking out in the hall.
Miss Goody Two Shoes and the Wild Boy.
Life had been getting a little dull. Why not play a bit? She’d asked, not him. She’d started it. If she wanted to play with fire, why not accommodate her?
“I had heard Lilacs in Spring was good, but—”
Lilacs in Spring. He was willing to bet it was all about sappy stuff, no motorcycles or pool tables in the script. Kissing. Romance. Eye-gazing. Hand-holding. Fields full of flowers. Mushy music. In other words, the big yuck.
The type of movie he and Amber would not go to, ever.
“Meet me right here, at say, eight?” he said. “We could catch the late show.”
“Aren’t you in the hospital?”
“Did you ever see the movie Escape from Alcatraz?”
“No.”
That figures. “Everything’s way more fun when you’re not supposed to do it,” he explained, attempting to be patient with her. “I loved playing hooky as a kid. There are things a man misses about being a kid.”
He could tell she just wanted to turn and run. She had never gone out with the kind of guy who liked playing hooky, not in her entire life. Instead she yanked her skirt down one more time, lifted her chin and said, “Eight o’clock it is.”
She scurried away and he watched her, amused. “I bet I’ll never see her again,” he said out loud. Just the same, he knew he would be waiting here at eight o’clock just in case Miss Maggie Sullivan decided to surprise him one more time.
Something hit him hard in the knees and he turned around. Billy Harmon grinned at him from his wheelchair. His bald head was covered with the baseball cap Luke had given him yesterday.
The kid just tugged at his heartstrings, a surprise to Luke, since he liked to deny the existence of a heart.
“Hey, Billy, you escaped Nurse Nightmare. Good man!”
“Luke, I got two rolls of toilet paper. You want to do something with me?” Billy leaned forward, his eyes alight with glee as he laid out his plan for laying a toilet-paper trail all the way from Nurse Nightmare’s private bathroom facilities to the men’s locked ward.
Luke scanned the boy’s face, looking for signs of weariness, but there were none. That nurse had been right, he wasn’t a doctor. But he knew mischief could be a tonic, especially for a kid who knew way too much about the hard side of life. In Luke’s evaluation, Billy needed his mind taken off the bleak realities he faced everyday, and that wasn’t going to happen if he was lying in bed staring at the ceiling.
“I’m in,” Luke said, picking his wheelchair up off the floor. He inspected it for damage, found none and settled himself in the seat. He followed Billy’s example and hooked the toilet paper roll on the back push grip where it began to unroll merrily behind him.
But the whole time he laid his toilet paper trail down the hall, Luke August was uneasily aware that he was thinking of eyes that were an astonishing shade of blue and green, not the least little bit like Amber’s.
He tried to imagine if those eyes would be laughing or disapproving if she was watching him right now.
Who cares? he asked himself roughly.
He realized he did. And that maybe he was the one who needed to be thinking long and hard before he showed up in that hospital foyer at eight tonight.
Two
L uke caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of the hospital front doors, and felt satisfied with what he had accomplished. He was wearing the green overalls and the white-bill cap of a hospital custodian.
“Evenin’, Doc,” he greeted his own doctor as she hurried by him out of the building. She was an Amazon of a woman, in her mid-fifties, but they were on a first-name basis, and she had that gleam in her eye whenever she saw him. What could he say? It was a gift.
But tonight she barely glanced his way. “Good night,” she said politely.
It wasn’t just that she hadn’t recognized him. It was as if he was invisible. People leaving the hospital as the end of visiting hours approached bustled by him in the main foyer with nary a glance, returning his casual greetings without really seeing him.
Invisible. Exactly the effect he had been attempting when he had raided the maintenance closet on his floor. Luke swabbed the floor with his mop and congratulated himself on his ease with the art of disguise. He liked trying on other personas and slipped into them easily.
He would have made an excellent spy or undercover cop, he thought. He realized he probably would have excelled in a career in acting. In fact, he had entertained the idea of becoming an actor after one successful role in a high school production. A girlfriend had talked him into playing Hook in Peter Pan and he had gotten a great deal of mileage out of telling his upscale and very conservative parents he planned to hit Hollywood upon graduation. He could not find a single other career choice that his parents disapproved of as heartily as that one, which was guaranteed to get a rise out of them both.
His eventual choice, a career in construction, had certainly proven to be a close enough second in the disapproval rating. Nevertheless, he hadn’t looked back.
