My Hero

by Mary McBride

  In a stall in the ladies' room, Holly stomped on the flush handle so hard she nearly broke it off. Of all the chicken-hearted things she'd ever done in her life, rushing away from Calvin Griffin the way she just had probably topped the list.

  After the near miracle of actually finding the man who matched the photograph in the crowd at the gate, she'd drawn in a calming breath, walked up to greet him, and then promptly panicked.

  She pummeled the soap dispenser at the sink now, trying to figure out what had just happened to her, deciding it had nothing whatsoever to do with Calvin Griffin, and everything to do with her native state. Airports all looked pretty much the same, but one glance at the people milling around the gate had proven without a doubt that this airport was in Texas where the Stetson still ruled, where shirts tended to snap instead of button, where “Howdy” was the greeting of choice.

  For one unsettling moment, it seemed as if she'd never left at all. She was almost afraid to speak to Calvin Griffin for fear the first word out of her mouth would be Howdy. She was reluctant to look into the mirror over the sink right now for fear of seeing herself at seventeen. God. She was half afraid to turn around for fear that Rod Serling would be standing back by the handicapped stall.

  Producer Holly Hicks boarded a plane in Newark believing she would safely arrive in Houston in a matter of two and a half hours. What she didn't know, however, was that the destination on her ticket was clearly marked The Twilight Zone.

  Do do do do, do do do do.

  After punching the knob on the hand dryer, Holly stood there telling herself she was being stupid and really, really overreacting. She was back in Texas, sure, but she wasn't going to stay, for heaven's sake. This wasn't a permanent assignment. She'd get her story, set up potential interviews, scout out a few locations for film—it would take a week if she was lucky, two weeks tops—and then she'd be on her way back to New York.

  Texas, after all, wasn't a giant pool of quicksand that was going to suck her back in. It wasn't flypaper, for God's sake. It was just a state. A big piece of geography. Okay, maybe it was also a state of mind. But more than anything, it was the past. Her future was in New York.

  When the dryer cut off, she headed out of the rest room, realizing she wouldn't need a picture to find Calvin Griffin this time. The black and white photo didn't do him justice. It didn't capture the incredible blue of his eyes. She'd noticed that the moment he had taken off his shades. Those eyes, set deep within a nest of sexy crinkles, were an astonishing hue, somewhere between periwinkle and cornflower. They were truly beautiful.

  The rest of him wasn't so bad either. For somebody still recuperating from a serious injury, the Secret Service agent looked extremely fit. Even his gray suit couldn't conceal the fact that he was muscular and required no extra padding in the shoulders. Rather than pale and sickly, his face was burnished from the sun. His hair was sun-tipped, too, a lovely light brown, just a shade or two removed from blond, and a tad longer than in the photograph.

  Her professional eye told her that Calvin Griffin's athletic good looks would be a boon to her piece. They could shoot him up close, really tight, to get the full effect of those marvelous eyes and the deep creases that parenthesized his finely shaped mouth, assuming of course that her “hero” would agree to go on camera.

  Holly caught sight of him then, sitting just about where she'd left him with her laptop and carry-on bag, looking patient as any saint. Scratch that. Patient as a man whose job it was to stand around for hour after hour guarding the President of the United States. As when he'd been shot in place of the President, Calvin Griffin was pretty much just doing his job.

  Cal had forgotten that in femalespeak “I'll be right back” was usually good for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was worth the wait, though, when he saw her walking toward him once again. Holly Hicks apologized for keeping him waiting, took back her carry-on bag, but seemed to forget about her computer. That was all right, though. After he grabbed her suitcase from the carousel, the laptop slung over his shoulder helped to balance him.

  The airport was crowded enough to make chitchat impossible, which was a good thing since Cal was concentrating on where he had parked the Thunderbird. Yellow level, wasn't it? He glanced at the palm of his hand, only to see a little smudge of ink that could have been any letter at all. A line of Y. Part of a G for green. The tail of the final D in red. A half-loop of the E in blue. Damn. He'd start on the Yellow level, and work his way down if he had to, all the while railing at the idiots responsible for color-coding to cover up his own ineptness. Hell, he would have used the same macho ploy even before a .22 caliber slug had scrambled his head.

  What difference did it make? Sooner or later, this Holly was going to realize his mental elevator stopped one floor short of the penthouse. Sooner was probably better, humiliating though it was. And the sooner he got it through his damaged skull that bright, beautiful lady producers were way out of his league now, the better off he'd be.

  The doors leading to the Yellow level of the parking garage swooshed open, and there, parked not too far away, in all its chrome and turquoise glory was his T-bird. Cal rolled his eyes gratefully toward heaven.

  “Here we go,” he said, grasping her elbow and leading her across the line of exiting traffic toward the car. Her arm was so tense it felt as if he were gripping a mannequin.

  He had put the top up after he'd parked, but it was a hot night with a full moon and he was suddenly, inexplicably feeling like a seventeen-year old. “Mind if I put the top down?” he asked, sliding behind the wheel.

  “The what?”

  “The top. Down.”

  “Oh, sure. Go ahead.”

  He hit the button and listened to the smooth glide of the ragtop receding and tucking into its well behind the back seat. Backing out of the parking place was inelegant, to say the least, because of his inability to turn his head quickly, but he remembered where he had stashed his ticket to exit the garage, so Cal was feeling, if not quite manly and in control, then at least somewhat competent when he hit the highway for Honeycomb.

  “Nice night,” he said, settling in at sixty-five and enjoying the way the moon reflected off the polished hood of the car.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Nice night,” he shouted over the wind and the ambient road noise.

  She nodded, a tight smile on her face as she used both hands to brush her hair out of her eyes.

  “Too much wind?” he shouted.

  “No. It's fine.”

  “Okay.” He kept his eyes on the road for the next few miles of interchanges and ever-present construction barrels while his passenger seemed content enough to take in the moonlight and the ever-widening sky as they approached the open road.

  “How far is it to Honeycomb?” she shouted.

  “Not far,” he said. “About two hundred miles.”

  She laughed. “Now I know I'm really in Texas. It's the only place in the world where two hundred miles isn't far.”

  “How long ago did you leave?”

  “New York?”

  “No. Texas.”

  It took her a moment to answer. “A long time ago.”

  Then, when she didn't say anything more, Cal glanced to his right to find his passenger gnawing on her lower lip, frowning. All of a sudden she shifted sideways in the seat, cocking one leg up and looping an arm over the seatback. The expression on her face was eager now, if not urgent.

  “I need to be really up front with you about something, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Cal.”

  “What?”

  “Call me Cal.”

  “Okay. Cal. I think before we get started, I should make something absolutely clear.”

  “Okay,” he said, waiting with a sort of bleak patience for the other shoe to drop. The last time he'd heard a similar preamble from a woman sitting in the passenger seat, it turned out to be a frank disclosure of herpes, putting a right good crimp in his plans for the evening. Not that he had any sexual intention
s toward this Holly Hicks, but now that she'd kindled a few pleasant flames, he really didn't want cold water thrown on his newly awakened fantasies.

  “Go ahead,” he said, yelling over the wind, sounding a lot more irritated than curious. “Shoot.”

  “I don't believe in heroes.”

  “What?” He'd heard her well enough. He just couldn't quite believe his own ears.

  “I said I don't believe in heroes.”

  Cal laughed out loud for the first time in nine months. The sensation was like champagne. Like his bloodstream fizzing and popping a cork. “Neither do I,” he shouted back.

  “Pardon?”

  “That makes two of us.”

  She cupped her hand to her ear, still not comprehending.

  “I said we're going to get along just fine,” he yelled, settling more comfortably behind the wheel, taking nearly criminal pleasure in speed and hot moonlight and the company of an honest, windblown woman.

  The next time he glanced her way, Holly Hicks was sound asleep. Asleep! So much for his dazzling company.

  Dammit. He should have asked her where she planned to stay in Honeycomb so he knew where to drop her off. How could he have overlooked such an obvious and important question? Why couldn't he anticipate anymore, but only react?

  Still, it wasn't as if there were all that many accommodations from which to choose. To Cal's knowledge there was only the old Mesquite Inn on Route Six, which was essentially a diner with three tourist cabins out back, and then there was Ellie Young's bed and breakfast downtown. The only visitors who ever came to Honeycomb were there to attend weddings or funerals or else they were rodeo people doing business with Dooley. It was more a town for leaving than for coming to.

  The little producer barely stirred when he stopped for gas in Hungerford, and was still asleep when he drove past Ellie Young's big house at almost two o'clock in the morning. If Ellie was expecting her, she hadn't left the light on.

  It was time for a command decision, and the last time Cal had made one of those he'd gotten half his head blown off.

  Hell. He didn't have much choice except to take Sleeping Beauty back to Ruth and Dooley's for what was left of the night. Even when he made a hard right into the gravel drive and then cut the engine, she didn't rouse. Her head was tipped back against the seat, allowing moonlight to cast the shadows of her eyelashes onto her cheeks where she hadn't bothered to cover up a sprinkling of freckles. Those, along with the chaos of curls on her head, made her look more girl than full-grown woman.

  He couldn't help his gaze moving along the strawberry-colored contours of her T-shirt, no more than he could suppress his body's reaction to those fine, first-class breasts. The past nine celibate months suddenly felt like nine years, and Cal sighed with a mournful mixture of lust and nostalgia and more than a little self-pity, grateful that the sound didn't wake the object of his unexpected and inappropriate desire.

  There was a time he could have carried the tiny producer, her suitcase, her carry-on and her laptop all at the same time from the car to the house, but since he didn't want to fall flat on his face with Holly Hicks in his arms, he carried her in first through the back door of the dark house.

  It figured she'd wake up just as he lowered her onto the unmade sofabed in his room.

  “I must've dozed off,” she murmured, as if it had only been for ten minutes instead of nearly four hours. When Cal turned the light on, she blinked. “How long was I asleep?”

  “About two hundred miles.”

  She swore under her breath. “I'm so sorry, Mr. Griffin. This is really embarrassing. I took a muscle relaxant when I got on the plane, but I—”

  “It worked,” Cal said, feeling stupidly relieved somehow that it wasn't his company that had made her comatose. “I didn't know if you'd arranged to stay any place, so I brought you here.”

  She looked around. “Where's here?”

  “My place. Well, actually it's my sister and brother-in-law's place.” Cal looked around, too, at the sorry space he inhabited. The sofabed spilled out from one wall. Another wall was stacked with boxes, two deep and three high, which held most of his worldly belongings. Diana had paid somebody to pack it all up and ship it off. There was a blue reclining chair tucked into a corner, and on the table beside it were some paperbacks and three, no, four empty bottles of beer. He picked them up and dropped them in the wastebasket.

  “I'll go out and get the rest of your stuff from the car,” he said.

  “Wait.” She jumped up from the bed. “I don't want to put you out. I didn't make any reservations, but maybe there's a motel I can go to tonight?”

  “There's a nice bed and breakfast in town, but it's pretty late. I'll take you there in the morning.” From the doorway he said, “If you want to help, just pull those sheets off. I'll be right back with some clean ones.”

  Holly muttered to herself as she yanked the sheets from the mattress. The Valium she'd swallowed at the Newark airport was supposed to calm her down, just chill her out, for heaven's sake, not put her out like a light. Calvin Griffin probably thought she was some wigged-out media jet-setter who always traveled as high as the plane.

  Way to go, Holly. She balled up the sheets and punched her fist into the bundle. Good way to begin a job, too. You've been with your subject for almost four hours and you slept through all but fifteen minutes. Of course, the good news was that it was three hours and forty-five minutes less of the Lone Star State that she'd be forced to endure.

  Calvin Griffin dropped her suitcase just inside the door, then put her laptop on the dresser. “Be right back with sheets,” he said, then disappeared again.

  When he returned, Holly said, “Look, I really don't want to put you out, Mr. Griffin. Isn't there a couch I can just curl up on for a few hours?”

  “Nope. And it's Cal, okay?”

  “Okay. Here. Let me have those.” She pointed to the pale blue linens in his hand.

  “I bet you didn't expect to be making up a bed tonight, huh?” He shook out a sheet. Holly took a corner and helped align it on the sofabed's thin mattress.

  “I didn't know what to expect, to tell you the truth. This job only materialized yesterday. And it's…” She pressed her lips together. She'd been about to confess that it was her first producing job, which wouldn't exactly instill inordinate confidence in her subject. “It's been a little hectic,” she said, reaching for an edge of the top sheet and tucking it in on her side of the bed while he changed cases on the pillow.

  “There,” he said, tossing the pillow against the sofa back that served as a headboard. “The bathroom's just across the hall.” He gave a nod to the boxes along the wall. “Sorry about the mess.”

  “I don't mind.”

  “Well, good night then. I won't be far away, so just holler if you need anything.”

  “Thank you, Mr…Cal. I really appreciate this.”

  “No problem. Good night, Holly.”

  After the door closed, Holly took off her shoes and wriggled out of her jeans. When she opened the closet door to stash them away, she was greeted by the sight of half a dozen suits, in varying shades of gray, all neatly aligned on their hangers. Conservative, blend-into-the-woodwork, Secret Service suits, not so different from the one Calvin Griffin was wearing tonight. There was a tux, too, in a dry cleaner's plastic bag. It made sense that he'd have his own tux in light of all the formal functions the President had to attend.

  Suddenly the horrible news footage of the assassination attempt ran through her head again, and she wondered sadly if Calvin Griffin had been wearing one of these suits when Starks had fired his gun, then even more sadly she concluded that that particular gray suit had probably been soaked with blood and tossed in a trash can at the hospital. Or would the authorities have bagged it and kept it as evidence? She probably ought to find that out, but she was too tired to even make a note to herself right now.

  She turned out the light, then slipped between the fresh sheets, flopping around until she fou
nd the place where the pull-out sofa's metal bar didn't cut across her spine. Closing her eyes, she let out a long sigh.

  Texas. God. If she worked fast—really, really fast—maybe she could go home in a week.

  Rufus panned the crowd waiting at the gate, then homed in on a powerfully built man, his shoulder slanted against a post, his blue eyes beckoning while Holly voiced over.

  Heroes are where you find them. In a sea of Stetsons, in a desert of denim and dusty boots, one man stands out…

  Chapter Four

  The next morning Holly awoke with her usual sense of anticipation. Maybe today would be the day when Mel would finally pass a producing assignment her way. Maybe today somebody at CBS or ABC would finally call about one of the dozens of demo tapes she'd sent them. Maybe today her dream would finally come true. Then she realized where she was, remembered that Mel already had come through for her and that she was indeed a producer. Her anticipation fizzled in the face of reality. The good news was that her dream really had come true. The bad news was that it had come true in Honeycomb, Texas.

  She had no idea what time it was, but the sun was well up and there were sounds of life in the house.

  Oh, Lord. Whose house was it? What had Calvin Griffin said last night? Was it his sister and brother-in-law's place, or his brother and sister-in-law's? She'd find out soon enough, she supposed.

  She put yesterday's jeans and tee back on, slipped into the bathroom across the hall, and then located the kitchen from the clattering sound of pots and pans.

  There was a woman standing at the sink, humming softly to herself. After Holly said good morning, the woman turned and it was immediately obvious that she was Calvin Griffin's sister. Her hair was long and dark, but the blue eyes were nearly identical. Those eyes were also wary and not the least bit warm. Her lips formed a downward curve.

  “I'm Ruth Reese,” she said. “Cal's sister. He says you're here to shoot a biography of him or something?”

  “Something like that.” Holly felt stupidly unprepared for the question. Well, dammit. She'd only been a producer for about thirty-six hours, and she didn't have her hook yet. Was it always the hero or was it the hill of beans angle? Once she knew where she was going with this piece, it wouldn't be so hard to get there.