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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.
    â€œOkay, 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.”
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    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 himpolitely 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!
    â€œMy 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