nodded, sadly.
“I mean that is just way too much effort put into thinking about popcorn.”
“I know. I’m twenty-seven years old, and I have more self-doubt than I had as a teenager. It’s pathetic.”
Uh-oh. If he was not mistaken, he heard a past heartbreak in there. What else took a beautiful woman’s confidence from her so thoroughly? Geez. Somebody should teach this girl how to have a little fun. Not him, of course, but someone.
His voice of reason told him to wish her a polite good night and a nice life and get the hell back to his room. It told him heartbreak made women fragile. It told him he was the man least likely to be entrusted with anything fragile even for a few hours.
His voice of reason pointed out to him that she was worried about whether they were going to hold hands, for heaven’s sake, and his mind was already conquering her lips and beyond.
Of course, if he was any damned good at listening to his voice of reason, he wouldn’t be in the hospital for the seventh time in five years.
“What do you say we downgrade?” he suggested after a moment’s thought.
“Downgrade?”
“You know, from a date. We’ll just grab a cup of coffee somewhere.”
She wanted to say yes. He could tell. But she didn’t.
“I don’t think it’s a very good idea,” she said uncertainly.
It was really beginning to bug him that she found him so infinitely irresistible that she was resisting with all her might.
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s just the popcorn question with a different backdrop. Maybe worse. We’d have to talk. I mean just stare across the table and look at each other and think of clever things to say.”
Clever? Was she kidding? You told a few blond jokes, you talked about your job and your motorcycle, you found out she’d been a cheerleader in high school and owned a poodle. Maggie expected clever? It was his turn to worry.
His voice of reason told him to bid her adieu, go back to his room and start a gratitude journal.
Entry number one could be how grateful he was to have avoided any kind of involvement with a woman who didn’t know anything about flirting, dating or making small talk with the opposite sex. And also one who was so obviously a fresh survivor of a heartbreak.
“So, how do you usually get to know people?” his other voice asked. “Meaning men people?”
“Oh, you know. Shared interests. Work. Church.”
Shared interests? Would that be the poodle or the motorbike? Work? He couldn’t even picture Amber on a construction site! And the worst one of all—church?
Whoo boy, church girls were not on his list of potential dates. In his limited experience they lived by rules that all began with Thou Shalt Not. Church girls loved commitment. Made vows. Mooned over babies. Babies!
Run! His voice of reason screamed. But he wasn’t running. So, he’d show little Miss Maggie Mouse, church girl, an evening of fun. Maybe he’d get himself a few points in the heaven department if he didn’t encourage her to curse any more. Everybody could use a few points in the heaven department, right?
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