Still Mr. & Mrs.

by Mary McBride

  Maybe, she thought, she'd cried so much in Illinois that she'd actually damaged her tear ducts. Severed them or something. Or maybe she was still too emotionally unsettled by the shootings—Bobby and the “professor,” both—that she was afraid to let go. Or maybe, even probably, it was just that she was so damned happy to be sitting here with her hand tucked warmly into Bobby's, that crying was completely out of the question. All she wanted to do was smile.

  Now, beside her, Bobby squeezed her hand, then cleared his throat, not once but twice, before he tapped a spoon on his champagne flute. She thought he looked a bit queasy.

  “Are you all right?” she whispered.

  His response was the usual “Oh, yeah. I'm fine” as he rose from his chair and began to thank the president and the First Lady for their valuable time and incredible kindness, saying all the right things so appropriate to the occasion.

  She sat there looking up at him, almost not hearing his words so much as drinking in the sight of him, so handsome in his black tux, a little paler than normal after his stay in the hospital, a little thinner, but still so strong and sure and vital. How had she ever left him? The past seemed like a thousand years ago, something horribly sad that had happened to two other people. Not to them.

  Tomorrow, when they went to Arlington to visit Billy's grave, that sad past would forever be behind them. It would be tucked properly away in their hearts rather than simply ignored.

  Bobby was thanking her family now. Her gaze drifted to his left sleeve, picturing the little red heart hidden there. Maybe for Christmas she'd surprise him with one to match it.

  “The last time Angela and I were married,” he was saying now, “my brother, Billy, was … was best man. I wish—”

  She had looked away, toward her parents, but when Bobby stopped speaking so abruptly, her gaze jerked back to his face.

  His face! It was all scrunched up, his eyes closed and his lips twisted in a valiant and macho, but unsuccessful, attempt to hold back his tears.

  “I wish—”

  He absolutely couldn't speak. He bent his head, and his strong shoulders began to heave.

  And then Angela did something she thought she'd never, ever do. Not in a million years. She jumped up from her chair, threw her arms around her husband, kissed him and whispered, “Oh, honey. Oh, Bobby. It's okay. Don't cry. Sweetheart, please don't cry.”

  The weather was perfect the next day when they went to Arlington National Cemetery. Indian summer. Texas weather, Bobby thought, with big white clouds pushing across a brilliant blue sky, and a strong, steady breeze rustling the red leaves of the maple that shaded Billy's grave.

  They brought a pot of white chrysanthemums from the ceremony in the Rose Garden to place beside the smooth gray granite marker, which had yet to be inscribed.

  “It's time we put something on this stone,” Bobby said.

  Angela rested her head against his shoulder. “I would have done it before, but I didn't know what you wanted.”

  He stared at the glossy unmarked surface, but all he could picture was Billy's face with a milk mustache and that goofy grin of his. “What do you think?”

  “I was thinking,” she said with a sigh, “that it might be nice to have William Holland, the dates, and then just the simple word Brother. Would you like that?”

  Bobby knelt, reached to smooth his hand across the sun-warmed stone. “I'd like it,” he said, “but I'm not so sure Billy deserves to go through eternity labeled as somebody's kid brother.” He looked up over his shoulder. “You know?”

  She was quiet a moment. “I know.”

  “Maybe just his name and the dates, Ange. Or, if we put any word at all, we could put Hero”

  She didn't answer, and Bobby knew it was because she was crying. A year ago he would have walked away, waiting for his wife's tears to subside. But now he stood, wrapping his arms around her, absorbing her tremors and her tears, all of her. They'd talk later about Billy, about the shooting in Illinois, about sunsets, about everything.

  This, he thought, was a moment far more sacred than yesterday's renewal of their vows. For better or for worse. For richer or for poorer. In sickness and in health.

  In silence or in speech.

  This was their true beginning.

  About the Author

  Mary McBride has been writing romance, both historical and contemporary, for ten years. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and two sons.

  She loves to hear from readers, so please visit her Web site at MaryMcBride.net or write to her c/o P.O. Box 411202, St. Louis, MO 63141

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  Please turn this page for a preview of

  MY HERO

  available in June 2003.

  “I don't believe in heroes.”

  “Holly, for crissake.” Mel Klein wanted to tear out his hair. What was left of it anyway after thirty-five years in television news production. “Do you want to be a producer or not?”

  He was bellowing. Okay. He couldn't help it. No more than he could keep his blood pressure from skyrocketing. He'd just spent the entire morning with the idiots in charge of programming for the VIP Channel, pleading Holly Hicks’ case, practically begging Arnold Strong and Maida Newland to give his assistant a chance to produce a single segment for Hero Week.

  One lousy hour out of the seven hundred they were projecting for the coming year. Forty-eight minutes of actual footage if you figured in commercials.

  He'd sung Holly's praises, handed out copies of her creatively padded résumé, passed her picture around, and popped in one of her tapes. With over three decades in the broadcast news business, Mel knew talent when he saw it, he told them. Holly Hicks had a real flair for putting together a story. She could write an opening sentence to nail the average viewer to his BarcaLounger. Her sense of timing was impeccable. Her sense of balance was right on. She had a rare eye and an intuitive appreciation for the blended power of pictures and words.

  All morning he'd virtually tap danced on the big teak conference table on the nineteenth floor. He had a headache now, not to mention carpet lint on his knees and elbows from practically prostrating himself between Arnold on his frigging treadmill and Maida in her black leather, NASA endorsed, er-gonomic executive chair.

  Then, just as he was about to toss his next raise and his firstborn grandson into the bargain, the idiots said yes.

  They said yes!

  He'd nearly given himself a coronary rushing back to his office to tell her the news. And now Holly—the Holly who'd been on his ass ever since the day she walked into the building three years ago in one of her itty-bitty, primly tailored, “This is how a producer looks” suits—the Holly who wheedled and needled and wouldn't let go of her smoldering desire to produce anything—I'll do anything, Mel. Anything!—the Holly who left homemade, but not half bad demo tapes on his desk every Monday morning—that Holly was blithely telling him she didn't believe in heroes.

  He bellowed again. “Do you want to be a goddamn producer or not?”

  “Of course I want to be a producer. It's all I've ever wanted to be.” Her chin came up like a little Derringer aimed at the frazzled knot in his tie. “I just thought I should be up front about my prejudices, that's all.”

  “Fine. Great.” He waved his hands like a maniac. “Hey, I don't believe in Santa Claus, but that didn't keep me from producing ‘Christmas Around the World,’ did it?”

  “No.”

  “I don't believe in capital punishment either, but I still did a helluva job on ‘Drake's Last Meal,’ right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, then …” Mel Klein planted his hands on the top of her desk and leaned forward, lowering his voice, allowing himself to grin for maybe the third or fourth time in his grouchy life. “You got it, kid.”

  Her pretty little face lit up. Two hundred watts at least.

  “I got it!”

  Then—Cut!—the light went out.

  “Mel, I th
ink I'm going to be sick.”

  In the ladies’ room, Holly Hicks splashed cold water on her face, then slowly lifted her gaze to the mirror above the sink, hoping to find Joan Crawford staring back at her. Big-shouldered. Yeah. Hard as a diamond. Tough as nails.

  Or Bette Davis—even better—with her bold, unblinking eyes.

  Madonna would be good.

  Instead Holly saw herself.

  She shook her head and watched her strawberry blond bangs rearrange themselves in a series of sodden spikes on her forehead. She was hardly big-shouldered. In fact, at five foot three inches, she wasn't even tall enough for her shoulders to be reflected in the glass. As for her eyes, rather than bold and unblinking, they were a pale green, smudged with mascara at the moment, and the left one was definitely twitching.

  God. She'd waited her whole life for a chance like this. If not her whole life, then at least since she was twelve. While the other little girls in Sandy Springs, Texas, drooled over Donny Osmond, Holly had been a “Sixty Minutes” groupie in love alternately with Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace. But she didn't want to kiss them. She wanted toproduce them. It was why she'd come to New York in the first place.

  Not once had she taken her eyes off the prize.

  Not while growing up in a house where watching the news was considered a foolish waste of time, where reading was deemed eccentric at best, subversive more often than not. What's that you're reading, girl? “A Separate Peace”? Some kind of Commie Pinko story, I'll betcha. Lemme see that.

  Not while attending a high school where her nickname was El Cerebro, or The Brain, in a school where beauty and brawn were prized over intelligence, where the football coach was the only Ph.D. on the faculty, and where her classmates put far more effort into getting laid than getting an education.

  Not while filling out reams of scholarship forms each year at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism or practically indenturing herself every semester to the campus bookstore.

  Not while working her way east for so many years at so many stations she could have thrown darts at the alphabet and come up with the call letters of at least one of her employers. Not through downsizing, takeovers, cutbacks, drawbacks, freezes, firings, new regimes, old boys’ clubs, pink slips, and innumerable Sorrys and So longs.

  Hers had been the great American migration in reverse. Go east, young woman, go east. With her journalism degree hot in her hands, Holly had crossed the wide Missouri and the mighty Mississippi to a station in Peoria, Illinois, where the phrase “entry level” meant being solely responsible for a temperamental, two-pot Bunn-o-matic. Across the moonlit Wabash, in Terre Haute, she graduated to a three-pot coffee machine. Ohio took a while to traverse, and a lot of coffee, from Cincinnati to Columbus to Canton. In Wheeling, West Virginia, she'd actually been Acting News Director for two days before they brought somebody in from outside. She spent a winter in Buffalo that lasted a millennium. One wet spring in Syracuse. Then she'd bided her time in Albany before crossing the Hudson and hitting the Big Apple at the ripe old age of twenty-eight.

  Here at the VIP Channel, Holly had finally found a mentor in Mel Klein, a man who not only appreciated her abilities, but who also supported her goals. A man of uncommon generosity in this notoriously cutthroat business.

  You got it, kid.

  “I got it,” she repeated now as her adrenaline surged again and her heart began to race with a weird combination of high-flying excitement and lowdown fear.

  “Breathe, dammi$.” She sucked in a huge breath and held it while she kept her eyes closed. She counted to ten, slowly letting the air out through pursed lips, telling herself there was no one at the station, no one in New York, and probably no one on the planet more ready for this assignment than she was.

  Then she opened her eyes, and there she was.

  Holly Hicks. Producer.

  Hot damn.

  “You sure you're okay?” Mel asked her. “You want to take the afternoon off and we'll go over this tomorrow?”

  “Not on your life. Are those the production notes for Hero Week?”

  “Yep.” He slid the folder across the top of his desk, somehow managing to avoid a calendar, a tower of pink While-You-Were-Out notes, an electrie razor, three empty coffee cups, and a bottle of Maalox. Bless his heart. Mel's little office was an oasis of friendly clutter in the otherwise sterile chrome and glass headquarters of the VIP Channel.

  Holly held the dark blue binder a moment before she opened it, then she read the first page with its list of the five heroes Programming had chosen for the special week. Other than Neil Armstrong, she didn't recognize a single name.

  “Who are these people?” she asked. “Who's Al Haynes?”

  The springs of Mel's chair creaked as he leaned back. “He was the pilot of United Flight 232. Remember? The plane that pinwheeled down the runway in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989?”

  “Oh, sure. Good choice,” she said. Great footage!

  “Thelma Schuyler Brooks is the woman who started the music school on the Wolf River Reservation in Arizona, and now has at least one student in every major orchestra in the country.”

  “Okay.” Holly was thinking she'd have to work closely with her sound man on that one, not to mention brush up on her Beethoven.

  “Howard Mrazek is the NYPD hostage negotiator who saved all those people a couple years ago during the standoff at the Chemical Bank.”

  “Mm,” Holly murmured as her eyes drifted further down the page. “Who in the world is Calvin Griffin?”

  “The Secret Service agent who took the bullet for the president last year. He's your hero.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He's your hero, Holly. He's your guy. That's the segment Arnold and Maida want you to produce.”

  “I'd rather do Haynes,” she said. She was already imagining how she could use repetition of that fiery runway footage to come up with a really dramatic piece. Hadn't they been in the air a long time, flying touch and go, trying to bring that sucker down? Had Haynes flown in Vietnam? Was the crash footage in public domain? What was her budget? Her mind was going ninety miles an hour, so she was barely aware of Mel's reply. She knew he'd said something, though, because the little office was still reverberating from his growl.

  “You're doing Calvin Griffin,” Mel said. “You don't have a choice, kid. That's what Arnold and Maida want. Griffin's how I sold them on the idea in the first place.”

  She glanced down at the name on the page. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean because you're both from Texas. Because you know the territory. You speak the language.”

  Holly wanted to laugh, but it would have come out high and maniacal, like a person being carted off to an asylum. She didn't know the territory. She hadn't been back to Texas in over a decade. Thank God. As for speaking the language, she'd had six months of very expensive lessons with a voice coach in Cincinnati in an attempt to bury her accent. She hadn't said y ‘allin years.

  “I do not speak the language, Mel.” She rolled her eyes. “When was the last time we went out to lunch and you heard me tell the waiter Bring me a slab of baby back ribs and a big ol’ beer?”

  Her mentor narrowed his eyes. “When was the last time you didn't have to remind yourself not to ask for mayo on pastrami?”

  He was right, of course, and Holly could feel her lips flatten in a thin, stubborn line. Why couldn't she have been born to a lovely couple in Connecticut, instead of Bobby Ray and Crystal Hicks of Sandy Springs, Texas?

  “Hey. Come on, kid. The accent's cute. Refreshing.” Mel's chuckle was just obscene. “Plus it got you the job. Not to mention an all expenses paid trip back home.”

  “Where I get to interview some good ol’ boy who got shot just doing his job,” she added glumly.

  “Take it or leave it, kid.”

  His is a seductive touch …

  SLOW HANDS

  by LAUREN BACH

  (0-446-61115-8)

  A.T.F. agent Alec Dempsey
swore he'd never return to Freedom, Arkansas. But now that a vengeful ex-con has threatened his first love, he finds himself back in Freedom, face to face with the woman he left behind. Keira Morgan swore to never let Alec hurt her again, but now she finds that a hard vow to keep. Alec needs Keira's trust in order to save her, but will his touch leave her wanting more?

  “An invigorating new talent who will catch the attention of romantic suspense readers everywhere.”

  —Romantic Times

  AVAILABLE AT BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE FROM WARNER BOOKS

  Try to catch …

  THE BACHELOR

  by Carly Phillips

  (0-446-61054-2)

  Foreign correspondent Roman Chandler has always prized his freedom. But when his mother falls ill, he seeks to grant her wish of giving her grandchildren. Roman has his eye on Charlotte Bronson—the woman who got away. Charlotte wants a man who won't go chasing around the world for a news story. So can the love of the right woman transforms a go-it-alone guy into a stick-around-forever kind of man?

  “Carly Phillips writes sexy stories packed with fast-paced fun.”

  —Stella Cameron, New York Times bestselling author

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  “I'm hooked on Mary McBride. She pens bright, masterfully motivated characters–an author headed to the top of the lists with a bullet!”

  –Susan Andersen, author ofHead Over Heels

  THEIR EYES AND EARS BELONG TO THE PRESIDENT. THEIR HEARTS BELONG TO NO ONE.