The Greatest Risk (21 page)

When they went into her tiny bathroom, for some reason Maggie noticed the NoWait on the counter by the sink. She realized that she had not used it for a full week, her life full to brimming with the new adventure she had chosen.

Even without NoWait, the new Maggie, bold and beautiful, had emerged. And beauty had turned out to be about finding her strength, and giving herself over to risk. It hadn't had one darn thing to do with being skinnier. She leaned over slightly, and unnoticed by Luke, she pushed the NoWait off the counter and into the bin. She realized she did not want to be one bit different than she was right this instant.

In moments their dirty clothes were in a pile on the bathroom floor, and they were cloaked in the steam of the shower. Maggie was not sure she had ever experienced an intimacy so thrilling as Luke's strong, sure hands on her body, slipping over her. The dust and grime and sweat from the track washed away, leaving her feeling fresh and new and on fire for him all over again. Being away from him for a week had made her so hungry for him she felt that she could die from it.

She touched his wet skin and marveled how its texture could be so totally different wet than dry. She slid her hands over him, and then he pulled her close and kissed her hard. Even his kisses tasted different in the shower.

The water turned suddenly cold, but it didn't put out the fire. Not even close. Luke slammed the shower valve closed with his foot, then quickly dealt with the faucets. Then he picked her up and took her to bed.

“Have I told you yet that I love you?” he whispered as he put her slippery body in the bed, climbed in beside her and pulled the sheet over them both.

“As a manipulative tool only,” she reminded him. “Using it to try and get me not to race.”

“Okay. I love you.” He kissed the top of her head. “I love you.” He burrowed under the sheet and kissed the instep of her foot. “I love you.” He kissed her belly button.

“Are you still being manipulative?” she asked breathlessly.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered, his voice a rasp.

She laughed. “I think I know what you want this time.”

“I better just make sure you know what I want.” He kissed her ear. “I love you.” He kissed her inner thigh. “I love you.”

He kissed every nameable part of her body and some unnamed. And then he captured her mouth. “I love you, Miss Maggie. I want you to marry me.”

She felt the breath whoosh out of her body. Somehow, when she had decided to accept a life with more risk, she had accepted a philosophy of living moment for moment, with no attachment to results, no looking to the future for contentment.

And now Luke was holding out a glimpse of a shining future. Of days drenched in the sunlight of his love and his kisses. Of days of laughter and adventure.

Of days when the only adventure would be being together, doing nothing special, laughing over small things. Like green-eyed boys with freckles and messy hair.

She began to cry helplessly.

“Don't cry, Maggie,” he whispered. “We're just getting to the good part.” He kissed a few more body parts. Soon she forgot to cry.

But she began again, half an hour later, secure in the circle of his arms and his love.

“Hey,” he said, “stop that.” He traced a tear with his fingertip, held it to his lip and tasted it. Was it possible for tears to taste of honey instead of salt?

“I just feel so happy. I just feel so grateful for every single event of my life leading me to this. Even being left at the altar.”

“I'm still going to rearrange his face if I ever meet him.”

“No, you aren't, Luke. You're going to thank him for setting me free to find you.”

He was silent for a long moment. And then he said, “Maggie, all my life I've looked at things one way. It was cut and dried. You make me look at the world dif
ferently. You make me feel different. All my life I've enjoyed pretending to be other people. I'd make a game out of it. It was funny. But right underneath the laughter was a dissatisfaction with who I was.

“Do you know that lying here with you is the first time I can remember being absolutely content with who I am? I didn't even have to win my race today to feel that.”

“Do you think you can be absolutely content going out to dinner, because—” she pointed at the clock “—we're going to be late.”

“Let's cancel.”

“It seemed as if it would mean a lot to your mother. And Billy won't be comfortable if we aren't there.”

“Miss Maggie, you are determined to make me a better man.”

 

As he said the words, Luke saw himself in her eyes. He hoped he could always live up to what he saw there. A man who was larger than he was before, a better man, a man capable of forgiveness.

“Wear your red dress,” he growled at Maggie.

“I wouldn't wear any other.”

By the time Maggie got dressed and they'd stopped at his house for him to change, they were considerably late to his mother's dinner party.

The club was unchanged from the days he had been forced to come here as a child. The dining room was terribly formal, dark oak paneling with white linen tablecloths. And there was his mother, sitting at the head of the table, holding court with Leo and Hillary and Billy, looking like the queen in her diamond earrings and a pure white dress.

He wished they'd gone for pizza.

But he didn't say anything, because when she saw him come in, his mother's face lit with a happiness that was almost otherworldly.

What had he ever done to deserve a light going on like that in two women's faces just because he walked into a room? He went and kissed his mother on the cheek and didn't mention the earrings or her selection of restaurants. He suddenly was aware he didn't want to hurt his mother. The war was over.

Because she was working so hard at accepting him the way he was, and love made him able to see, it was time to return that same courtesy to her.

He was planning to tell them that he and Maggie were getting married, but they had no sooner sat down than his mother turned to him and said, with tears shining in her eyes, “Billy has some wonderful news to share with us.”

Billy looked shy and in awe of the surroundings. “My treatments are over for now,” he said. “The tests say I'm cancer-free. I'm officially in remission.”

They ordered champagne and even Billy got some. Luke exchanged looks with Maggie. Their news could wait for another time.

He looked around the table and could feel the force of love shimmering in the air around them. He took Maggie's hand in his.

Luke had never been a philosophical kind of guy, but sitting at that table, he became aware of the thread that connected each person who sat here. Wasn't all of life about this wondrous thing called hope?

An aging woman hoping to make amends and find
forgiveness. A young boy, his life barely started, hoping for a miracle. Maggie, whose love had been betrayed so brutally and unjustly, hoping that such a thing as real love existed—and willing to bet everything on that single hope.

And Luke? What had he hoped for? He had hoped, in some secret depth within him that there was a place where he would not have to run so hard or so fast. He had hoped there was a place where a man could rest without his loneliness and pain catching up with him.

Each of the people at this table were connected by that thread of hope. Even Leo, who was looking at his mother, and Hillary, looking at Billy.

Each of them believed, in this shining moment, that the miracle had found them.

And the miracle had a name. It was love.

“My mom said I could get a dog when I get home,” Billy said happily.

“Oh, boy, do I have a deal for you.” Luke didn't really think he needed Stinkbomb, Too, anymore.

A small thing, a boy wanting a dog. But it was the same boy who had been writing his will just a short time ago. Something had changed in him. Billy believed there would be a future after all, and Luke had to put a hand to his eyes at the sudden pricking he felt there.

Hours later they stood on the front steps of his mother's club, saying goodbye to his mother and Leo and Hillary.

It had been a wonderful night, full of laughter and companionship. Maggie had turned every male head in the place.

Billy was between him and Maggie, in his wheel
chair looking exhausted, but happy, too. They dropped him off at the hospital, visited for a short time in his room and then left.

Luke opened the front door of the hospital for her, and Maggie joined the swarm of people leaving the hospital as visiting hours ended.

She stopped so suddenly that he bumped into her and nearly knocked her down. Unfazed, she turned into his arms and held him tight.

“What?” he asked her.

“That day we met—the day you ran me down—I saw a couple kissing on these steps.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And I was watching them, instead of watching where I was going, and I had hit the door. I was quite dazed from it.”

“Not looking where you were going at all,” he agreed.

“Luke, if those people hadn't been there, do you think I would have met you?”

“I don't know,” he said slowly.

“I judged them at the time. I didn't think they should be behaving like that in public. And at the same time I envied them. I wished I loved someone enough not to care who was watching when I kissed him.”

He waited.

“I love someone that much now.” She wrapped her hands in his shirt and pulled him toward her.

“Hey!” he teased. “There are all these people watching.”

“Who knows?” she whispered. “Maybe there is someone watching right now who needs to see this just
as much as I needed to see it. Maybe me kissing you on the front steps of the hospital will set a whole new chain of events into motion that are unpredictable and wild and wonderful.”

“So, stop talking and start kissing,” he told her. “I'm all for altruism.”

She laughed, a devil-may-care laugh that was reckless and endearing and definitely the most delightful sound he had ever heard.

“You're going to like the new me,” she said.

“I liked the old you just fine.”

“I think you always saw who I really was, Luke,” she said, twining her arms around his neck, and sliding her leg up his thigh.

Just like that the world was the two of them, bold and beautiful, and crazy in love.

And he knew it was going to be like that for a long, long time.

D
r. Richard Strong looked at the clock in his office. Eight o'clock. Time to go home. It was a Saturday night. Even someone dedicated beyond reason to his career could not be faulted for going home at eight o'clock on a Saturday night.

But the thought of home made him feel distinctly lonely. It was not really a home. It was an apartment, and it did not actually have much more personality than this office.

It had been a tough week in some ways. His first seminar had ended, and with it had gone all the one-to-one approval he had gotten so accustomed to receiving. When he led The New You: Bold and Beautiful seminar he had felt as if he mattered, had felt important, respected, liked.

He reminded himself that the weight-loss visualization series would be starting soon, but the thought did not lift his spirits.

“Ah, well,” he said, giving in to temptation, “let's see what silly Dr. Eatwell has had to say this week.”

Richard had taped the shows, Monday to Friday, but had refused to watch them. He had decided “Living Airy with Dr. Terry” was the worst kind of trash. He had sworn off the show completely. He had convinced himself that only common, uneducated people would take pleasure from watching that fat little man hand out advice.

But in some secret part of himself he missed Dr. Terry.

With a kind of guilty pleasure, he plucked Monday's tape from his video cabinet and put it in.

The opening bars of music were playing when he noticed a streetlight reflecting off the television screen. He got up to close his blinds.

His hand froze on the blind string. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. It was Maggie Sullivan in that red dress on the front steps of Portland General, right across the way from his office.

It was definitely Maggie and that mountain of a man, Luke August, who Richard had made the mistake of going to see at his construction site.

Only maybe it had not been a mistake, after all.

For she had stopped and was gazing up at the man, and he was looking back at her. There was no mistaking that look, even from a distance. Those two people were crazy about each other.

And then, without warning, they were holding each other way too tightly. And kissing with mad passion, uncaring that they were blocking the steps, that people
were having trouble getting by them, that people were looking at them with reactions that ranged from amusement to envy to disgust.

Slowly, Richard closed the blinds. Really, it should have made him feel lonelier than ever.

But it didn't. He wished, briefly, that he could be free from caring about what people thought of him. It was a prison, really, that he lived in every day.

But on the brighter side, seeing Maggie like that made him feel as if, somehow, he had made a difference. Counted. Hadn't he encouraged Maggie? Hadn't he gone and tried to talk sense to that young man? Hadn't he exposed the worst of his own life experience in trying to help the young couple?

He took a seat on the couch and reminded himself that Cynthia Reynolds was here in Portland, willing to try NoWait and signed up for one of his seminars.

With Cynthia's endorsement, he had no doubt a whole world beyond Portland could be opening to him soon. The loneliness evaporated, and feeling strangely content, with something to hope for, Richard used the remote to turn up the sound on Dr. Terry Beachball.