The Greatest Risk. Cara Colter

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      “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.

      “Manly, too,” he muttered to himself of his career choice. Now, though, he enjoyed being in character, an eccentric floor cleaner who muttered and swabbed. No one watching would be even remotely aware that Luke kept a surreptitious eye on the front door.

      “Visiting hours are now over,” the tinny voice over the public address system announced officiously.

      Luke glanced at the clock, confirming what he had just heard. Eight o’clock, on the dot.

      “Big surprise,” Luke said to his washtub, giving the mop a vigorous wring. “Miss Maggie Sullivan, an on-the-dot kind of gal if there ever was one, is not coming.”

      After his weak moment this afternoon, when he had caught himself actually caring what Miss Maggie would think of a grown man unraveling toilet paper down a hospital corridor, Luke had arrived at the conclusion that he was not going out with her. There was something dangerous brewing under the surface of that pristine exterior.

      Still, as the hands of the clock had ticked closer and closer to eight, curiosity, that worst of male vices, had gotten the better of him.

      He’d found everything he needed in the maintenance closet on his floor, including a name tag that said Fred. It was really the best of both worlds—he got to see if she showed up without being the least bit vulnerable himself.

      Really, Luke told himself, it was as if he was studying human nature, nothing more. He wanted to see how accurately he had judged her character, and now he congratulated himself on his astuteness.

      He’d surmised Miss Maggie had never asked a man out before in her life. He had predicted she would get cold feet.

      Okay, he might have also been just a tiny bit curious what she would have worn had he happened to be wrong.

      But he wasn’t. He looked at the clock again. Three minutes after eight. If she was coming, he would have bet his last fifty cents she would have been here at precisely five minutes to eight. She was not the kind of woman who would be late. He knew these things. He should have let Billy in on it. They could have bet five bucks, though it would have been a shame to take Billy’s money.

      Just underneath the hearty round of congratulations he was giving himself as he wrung out the mop one final time and prepared to go back to his room, Luke became aware of something besides self-congratulation stirring in his breast.

      He realized he was wringing the mop just a little too vigorously, the handle bending dangerously under the pressure he was applying. He paused and analyzed СКАЧАТЬ