if he wasn’t, wheelchair racing is not allowed. Do you understand?”
“Aye, aye, mon capatain, strictly forboden.” He managed to murder both the French and German languages.
Maggie wanted to be appalled by him. She wanted to look at him with the very same ferocious and completely uncharmed stare that Hillary was leveling at him.
Unfortunately, he made her want to laugh. But it felt to Maggie as if her very life—or at least her professional one—depended on hiding that fact.
Hillary drew herself to her full height. “I could have you discharged,” she said shrilly.
“Make my day,” he said, unperturbed by her anger. “I’ve been trying to get out of this place for a week.”
“Oh!” she said. She turned to Maggie. “Are you all right? Maggie, isn’t it? From Children’s Connection? Oh dear, your skirt is—”
“Very attractive,” Mr. August said.
The skirt continued to be bound up in some horrible way that was defying Maggie’s every attempt to get it back where it belonged.
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
