My Hero

by Mary McBride

  She didn't even date in high school, where her reputation as The Brain was an obstacle far too difficult for any boy in Sandy Springs to tackle. In college, she hadn't dated all that much before she spent her senior year with Jeremy James, a pipe-smoking grad student, a poet with a seductive voice and a way with words and an innate need to be waited on hand and foot, which had made it fairly easy for her to leave him in the end. Her only other serious affair had been with a colleague in Cincinnati, but when it came time to choose between Bryan and her dream, there had been no choice. It was somewhat comforting to know that Bryan would have done the same, and Holly moved on to Columbus with a sigh and no regrets.

  After that, it seemed the farther east she traveled, the greater the number of jerks she encountered, along with morons, animals—those were mostly cameramen, for some odd reason—vanilla ice-cream anchors, cardboard cutout anchors, obsessive-compulsive weathermen, and frogs who wouldn't turn into princes no matter how many times they were kissed. Icebergs. Blips. The nicest man she'd ever met in the business was Mel Klein, who was old enough to be her father and still totally, grouchily in love with his wife of twenty-eight years.

  Since men had never mattered to her all that much, neither had their kisses. There was something else about that kiss last night, something she meant to remember, some unique blend of…

  Holly blinked now as one of the cabbage roses she was staring at seemed to take on some very suggestive features, morphing into a voluptuous, erotic, petaled organ almost worthy of Georgia O'Keeffe. My God. It was her second day in this room and just now she was noticing how sexy the wallpaper was? She hadn't really even thought about sex in the past two or three years, and here she was suddenly besotted by a kiss and surrounded by Victorian genitalia printed on a pink bubble gum background.

  It was probably time to get up and take a shower, she decided. She sat up and cast a baleful glance at the laptop, its battery quietly re-charging from the outlet on the wall, its keyboard resting in the darkness of the closed case, all its little circuits and synapses just priming themselves for her powerful presentation of Calvin Griffin's life story, and right now all she could think about was Calvin Griffin's mouth, the tiniest most erotic touch of his tongue on her lower lip, the faint taste of red wine and the scent of leather and soap, and how her stomach was reeling again, just cartwheeling, at the memory of his kiss.

  And it wasn't just the kiss that had turned her on so. It was the man himself. Once they'd started talking yesterday afternoon at the ranch, they hadn't stopped. Cal was funny and smart and far more sophisticated than she'd given him credit for. At one point, she even had to remind herself that he was a Texan, not someone whose roots were on the eastern seaboard, particularly in Washington or New York.

  To her amazement, he knew Manhattan better than she did after her three years there. And when he described a wonderful little Italian bistro in SoHo and said the next time he was in town he'd take her there, Holly found herself almost believing it for a moment despite what Dooley had said about Cal's returning to the Secret Service.

  Yesterday's interlude with her hero was a date. There was no denying it. And she had never done anything quite so stupid, so misguided and unprofessional, in her entire life. Holly flopped back down, reached back for the pillow and plopped it on her face so she couldn't see the stamens and pistils and velvet petals practically throbbing on the wall.

  Why hadn't they sent her to Ohio to do the Neil Armstrong bio? She knew Ohio like the back of her hand. She spoke the language there. She could have used that wonderful Moon footage and woven that “small step, giant leap” theme through her story like a golden thread.

  In Ohio, she would've been safe with the notoriously media-shy, reticent astronaut. Neil Armstrong wouldn't kiss a producer in the middle of her job!

  He wouldn't have the bluest eyes in all creation. He wouldn't look like a minor god who'd just jogged down from Olympus in wet gray sweats. He wouldn't laugh with her, tears streaming from both their eyes, about lost titanium canisters, Greeks and Creeks, and hairless goats. The pieces of Neil Armstrong's life wouldn't be packed and stacked in two dozen boxes in a sad spare room. He wouldn't have a shattered wedding photo or a sawed-off wedding band that just about broke her heart.

  If they'd sent her to Ohio, she wouldn't be waking up to erotic wallpaper.

  And—oh, dear God—if they'd sent her to Ohio, she would've been able to shake her hero's hand when her job was done and walk away without a second thought, without a glance over her shoulder, without a single twinge of sadness or regret.

  That wasn't going to happen now.

  Resting his leg after a tough half mile, Cal looked down at Bee, whose wet salt-and-pepper muzzle rested on his thigh. It wouldn't be such a bad job, he thought, being the town dog. The pay wasn't great, and there were certain indignities like outdoor plumbing and the occasional painted yellow stripes, but all in all Bee had a pretty good deal. He ate outside the back door of the Longhorn Café, got plenty of exercise for a guy his age, and still apparently had his way with Honeycomb's ladies, judging from the number of black-coated puppies around town.

  “I don't suppose you ever dream about herding sheep across the moors, do you, Bee?” he asked. “Or taking first in breed at Westminster?”

  The dog's bluish, cataract-clouded gaze lifted momentarily and his tail thumped twice on the ground.

  “Yeah. I didn't think so.” He settled his hand on Bee's neck, tipped his head back against the tree trunk, closed his eyes, and finally allowed his mind to go where he had forbidden it to go all morning.

  That had been some kiss last night. Sudden and sweet and as sensual as anything in his memory. He had reached across the car seat, pulled Holly against him, and claimed her mouth, all accomplished even before he'd worked up the courage to do it. If he'd thought about it overlong, he'd have been paralyzed.

  Maybe the reason it was kicking around in his head so much this morning was because it was just a kiss. When was the last time he'd stopped at a simple kiss? Probably '78 or '79 when he was still in junior high, and then he hadn't stopped willingly or graciously or of his own accord. Maybe his entire system had short circuited without the attendant climax, without the obvious conclusion to the natural chain of events that a kiss always put in motion. Maybe his bodily fluids had backed up and he was being slowly poisoned from inside.

  Maybe he should get a grip.

  Bee lifted his head, sniffed the air, then relaxed again with a soft, contented moan. Cal felt like moaning, but not out of any kind of contentment. Whatever moved a wolf to howl at the moon had its hook in him, too.

  Just a kiss, and yet it had wreaked more havoc in his system than a night of no-holds-barred sex ever had. He knew why, too. Any fool would. He was crazy about the little producer from New York with her bright green eyes and her strawberry curls and the undertones of Texas in her speech. She was quick-witted and warm, and he couldn't remember ever wanting a woman more than he wanted Holly Hicks.

  There must've been something really wrong with him, Cal thought, for marrying a woman he hadn't wanted half as much, and that was before his brain injury. God only knew what sort of scrambled, half-assed decisions he was making now.

  “What decisions?” He voiced the words so loud, so unexpectedly that they surprised him as much as Bee, who struggled to sit up and was now looking around for the human to whom Cal must've spoken.

  He hadn't decided anything. Not about Holly, anyway. Not about anything.

  He hadn't decided to get divorced. That had been Diana's unilateral conclusion, apparently arrived at as she hotfooted it out of the hospital after witnessing one of the three or four seizures he'd had in ICU before his condition stabilized. “It was just so…so…horrible,” she'd told him. No kidding. “You should've seen it from the inside, babe,” he'd replied.

  He hadn't decided on a year's medical leave. That had been the dictum from higher-ups in the agency, and he'd felt insulted that they thought it would ta
ke him anywhere near that long to come back. Now, of course, he was grateful for the time. That year of medical leave would be up in September.

  That's when he'd make decisions, three months from now, after he passed or failed the fitness tests at the federal training facility in Georgia. If he failed…well, that was that. If he passed, but not with scores high enough to put him back on protective duty, then there would be other decisions. Did he want to ride into the sunset on a desk, for instance? Right now the answer was no. But it wasn't a firm decision.

  As for Holly…If anyone had asked him if he needed a green-eyed, curly-haired, infinitely kissable woman to complicate all his equations right now, he would've said no. Negative. Absolutely not.

  But nobody had asked, had they?

  Jesus. She'd really blindsided him.

  He muttered a gruff curse that caused Bee to lift his head again. Cal sighed. “You ready for another half mile, fella?” Bee was less enthusiastic about the second turn around the track, so he wandered off into the infield where he lifted his leg on the goalpost, and then headed toward town, leaving Cal to sweat it out on his own under the broiling sun.

  He was pulling up in front of the grandstand, checking his watch, berating himself for the dishonorable, downright embarrassing time of eight minutes twenty-eight seconds for a lousy half mile, when he heard three sharp rifle shots cut through the Sunday morning quiet.

  With her hair still dripping from her shower, Holly trotted down the stairs, but when she saw Ellie standing out on the front porch, she detoured from her original destination, the kitchen.

  Her hostess was standing with her arms crossed beneath her ample breasts, above her ample belly, staring in the direction of Main Street. She was so involved in her own thoughts that she started when Holly said, “Good morning, Ellie. What's going on?”

  “Oh. I didn't even hear you come out, honey.” She angled her gray head toward the center of town. “Seems we've got an incident.”

  “An incident?” Holly looked in the direction of Ellie's gaze and saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser. “What's going on?”

  “You didn't hear the shots?” Ellie asked.

  She shook her damp head. “I didn't hear anything. I was in the shower. What shots? What's happening?”

  “Well, if I had to guess, I'd say it's Kin Presley going on a rampage again.” She clucked her tongue. “It happens once or twice a year. He was due.”

  Holly's journalistic ears pricked up and her nose for news began to twitch. “Really? Some guy goes on a rampage a couple times a year? Any particular reason?”

  “Oh, sure. It's all because of Trisha.”

  “Trisha?”

  “His wife. She flirts and fluffs around town until Kin can't stand it anymore, and then he does something crazy. One of these days it'll end badly.”

  Ooh. Maybe today! It was horrible, but Holly was a journalist to the marrow of her bones. She never hoped for catastrophes or “incidents,” for disasters or dire events, but when they happened, she just couldn't help feeling a profound rush. And that's what she wanted to do right now. Rush toward Main Street.

  “Hm,” she murmured, attempting to sound as cool and dispassionate as any good journalist ought to be, not wanting her hostess to think she was a ghoul or an ambulance chaser. “Well, I think maybe I'll just wander over there and watch the fireworks, if there are any.”

  “Shoot. I'd come, too,” Ellie said, “but I'm waiting on a call from my Aunt Grace to see if she wants a ride to church. You be careful now, honey, you hear? Don't get too close.”

  “I won't,” Holly called over her shoulder, heading down the driveway, trying her best to keep from breaking into a ghoulish, ambulance-chasing run.

  She picked up her pace along the residential block of Washington in the dappled shade of its big oaks and sycamores, then skidded around the corner onto Main and into blistering sunshine.

  Cal scowled at the big plate-glass window of the Long-horn Café from his vantage point behind the open passenger door of Deputy Jimmy Lee Terrell's cruiser. He'd been hunkered down there for the past ten minutes, trying to inject a bit of common sense into the situation before somebody got hurt.

  A little authority was a dangerous thing for Jimmy Lee. The 5'7” deputy was usually quite literally in the shadow of Honeycomb's big, ham-fisted police chief, Vernon Bates. The duo gave a pretty good impression of Mayberry's finest, with Jimmy Lee perfectly cast as Barney Fife. But Sheriff Andy was on vacation in Alaska at the moment, and Barney was squatting down behind the open driver's door now, his service revolver drawn, using his damn bullhorn when a shout was all he needed to make contact with Kin Presley, barricaded with his runaround wife and a few unlucky customers inside the café.

  Jimmy Lee had recently attended a seminar in San Antonio on Suicide by Cop. At this point, he was more than willing, even eager, to oblige the poor, cuckolded son of a bitch.

  The last thing Kin had yelled was that he'd hand over his hostages in exchange for a car with a full tank of gas.

  The wiry deputy lifted his bullhorn and boomed back. “It's not the policy of the Honeycomb P.D. to negotiate.”

  “Jesus, Jimmy Lee,” Cal groaned. “Give the guy a fucking vehicle and get this over with.”

  “If I need federal intervention, Cal, I believe I know how to go through the proper channels.” He shot a glare across the cruiser's front seat. “You're not even carrying, are you?”

  “I usually leave my Uzi at home when I work out.”

  The deputy's eyes widened. “You got one of those babies back at the ranch? I'd sure like…”

  “What about it, Jimmy Lee?” Kin yelled out. “How about it? You gonna get me that car?”

  Then, just as the deputy was reiterating the Honeycomb P.D.'s stance on hostage negotiations, Cal caught a glimpse of blond curls out of a corner of his eye.

  Jesus H. Christ. Holly was coming down Main Street, slipping cautiously from doorway to doorway along the block, apparently oblivious to the fact that each doorway was a clean shot from the window of the Longhorn across the street. The closer she got, the cleaner each shot became. What the hell was she thinking? Every muscle in Cal's body tightened. Every nerve ending snapped. The headache he'd been coaxing to the back of his brain sallied forth in all its splendor as he placed a hand on the door's armrest and pushed himself up.

  “What are you doing, Cal?” Jimmy Lee exclaimed. “Get down. Get down.”

  Just what was he doing? Cal wondered as he walked across the street to the barbershop doorway where a certain strawberry blonde was trying pretty unsuccessfully to make herself one with the aluminum siding.

  Her green eyes were about the size of crab apples as she watched him approach.

  “I think I've done something pretty dumb here,” she said, her voice wavering with false bravado. “Something amazingly stupid, actually, and I'm not exactly sure…”

  No shit, Sherlock.

  “Do what I tell you to do,” he said, dispensing with any preliminaries or good cheer, positioning himself between her and Kin's rifle while he swung slowly around in order to keep an eye on the window and door of the café as well as the cruiser with its flashing lights and flung-open doors.

  Behind him, Holly's response was immediate and smart. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “Try the door. If it opens, get inside, lock it behind you, then go to a back room, away from the street.”

  He heard her jiggling the knob and swearing softly. “It's locked,” she said. “Oh, God. I can't get it open.”

  “Okay,” he said, keeping his voice absolutely level while he watched the barrel of Kin Presley's rifle poke out the café door once more. “We'll just go to Plan B.”

  Cal dragged in a deep breath and nudged his headache farther back in his skull. And just what was this Plan B? His assessment of the situation so far was that it wasn't lethal, but he knew only too well how things could go sour in the blink of an eye, with the twitch of a finger on a trigger
, with a single inept word from an angry spouse or a deputy going for glory.

  He didn't have any authority here, but by God, with Holly in jeopardy now, he had reason enough to take charge of the situation. There weren't too many options. He could screw around and try to find an open door for Holly on this side of Main, or he could just bring the whole incident to an end right now. All his training and experience screamed, “Shut it down.”

  “Plan B?” she gulped.

  “Just do what I tell you to do, Holly.”

  “Okay.”

  Oh, man. Well, of course she'd agreed to do whatever Cal told her. He was the expert here, after all. She wasn't stupid, despite the fact that she had stupidly blundered into the middle of a hostage situation. But Holly thought Plan B would involve getting away from the situation, not walking toward it.

  “Stay close behind me,” Cal had told her. “I mean close as in inches and completely behind me. Keep your eyes on the spot right between my shoulder blades. Do not even think about peeking around my shoulder to see what's going on. You got that?”

  “Okay, but…”

  “Don't argue. Just do it.”

  His voice was so level and calm, he obviously knew what he was doing. Right? His blue eyes had burned with such determination that she had to trust him. Didn't she?

  He'd told her to stay close, and she was doing her best, practically plastering her boobs against the middle of his back, measuring her stride to fit his as they crossed the street, but even so, managing to step on the heels of his running shoes every now and then.

  “Watch it,” he growled.

  “Sorry.”

  As instructed, she was keeping her gaze on the gray sweatshirt fabric between his shoulder blades, but in her peripheral vision she could see people peeking out of doorways up and down the street, then quickly ducking their heads back.