My Hero Read online

  “I was just curious.” She plucked a final burr from Bee's neck, flicked it away, then endured one last wet lick across her face before she stood up. “Guess I'll head back to Ellie's.”

  Cal got up, too. Not with the ease and grace of an athlete, but with obvious difficulty, accompanied by a grimace and a muted curse. She nearly winced watching him, then thought about what Dooley had told her a little while ago. The only person who thinks Cal's still got a future in the Secret Service is Cal himself.

  Holly clenched her teeth, aware of the question any Journalism 101 student would ask right now, knowing she ought to ask it, and fighting not only her professional instincts but her personal curiosity as well in order not to take advantage of this man's obvious vulnerability at the moment. She could almost imagine a microphone in her fist, directed first at herself as she intoned, “There are a lot of people who don't think you'll make it back, Cal. Would you care to comment on that?” and then angling the mike toward Cal for his response.

  “Come home with me,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  He lifted his hand to extract another burr from her hair. “I said how about coming home with me this afternoon.”

  She was so surprised by the invitation, so pleased, so distracted by his touch and her reaction to it that she didn't know what to say. Her invisible microphone sort of melted in her hand like an ice-cream cone, and there was nothing in her head to replace the question she'd decided not to ask. Yet. So, she didn't speak exactly. Her little sound bite was closer to a gulp. “Why?”

  “I don't know. Why not? You can snoop around the alleged hero's childhood home. Look at high school yearbooks. Go through old photograph albums. Don't you people use things like that? Or you could just keep me honest if the real estate guy shows up.”

  “I had planned to spend the rest of the day working,” she said, “but that's not a bad idea, actually. The yearbooks and the photograph albums, I mean. I had intended to ask you or your sister about those sometime soon anyway.”

  “Well, there you go,” he drawled as he reached down to scratch Bee's ears. “Why don't I come by Ellie's for you around noon?”

  “Great. Okay. It's a date.”

  Holly wished she'd bitten off her tongue rather than say those last three words. Waving her hand in the air, wishing she could erase them, she said, “Well, you know what I mean. It's not a date. Not a date date. It isn't a date at all. I guess if we had to call it something, if we had to come up with a word, you know, for this afternoon, appointment would be a good one. Or engagement. No, forget that.”

  God. She could hear herself babbling. She was standing there, having an out-of-body experience, watching herself chatter like a squirrel and wave her hands like an idiot while she conducted a monologue on semantics and while Cal Griffin's smile grew wider and whiter, and his eyes turned an almost Bahamian blue in their sensuous nest of crows' feet and crinkles.

  “Go on,” he said, crossing his arms.

  “Go on?”

  “Keep talking,” he said. “I'm waiting for you to get to the part where you explain what the definition of ‘is’ is.”

  She sucked in a breath, let it out slowly, and spoke with all the clarity and precision she could muster. “I'm extremely reluctant to mix business with pleasure.”

  “I can see that, Ms. Hicks,” he said, laughing as he stepped down from the grandstand and headed back toward the track with Bee at his side. Then he called over his shoulder, “I'll see you at twelve. And don't worry. I won't give you any more pleasure than you can handle.”

  Holly sighed. Oh, God. That's what she was afraid of.

  Well, he still talked a pretty good game, Cal thought as he changed out of his damp sweats in the men's room at Ramon's. He wouldn't give her any more pleasure than she could handle. Yeah, right. Provided his performance anxiety didn't get in the way.

  He hadn't even dared to resume his workout on the track until Holly had walked away for fear of tripping over his shoelaces or feeling his knee lock mid-stride, sending him sprawling, or taking a distant second place to an arthritic mutt in the quarter mile. On the other hand, maybe he should have just gone ahead while she was in the bleachers watching. His biography could probably do with a little comic relief.

  It was a date, dammit. She knew it as well as he did, no matter how she tried to cover it up with synonyms and semantics. And unless his injured brain was misreading her signals, Holly Hicks was as attracted to him as he was to her.

  All of his fine intentions of avoiding her seemed to have gone up in smoke this morning while he was picking cockle-burrs from her warm hair. He'd stood there wanting to sink his hands up to his wrists in those vibrant curls, wanting to sink himself into her lithe little body, wanting to drown himself in her the way he'd been drowning himself in booze these past few months.

  Once he was dressed, Cal realized he still had an hour before it was time to pick Holly up. He stashed his gym bag behind the bar.

  “Ready for a beer, Cal?” Ramon asked, and since the dark-haired, barrel-chested barman considered it a rhetorical question, he was already reaching for a cold Heineken when Cal said, “Let me have a club soda on ice, will you, Ramon?”

  The man leaned toward him across the bar, cupping a hand to one ear to shield it from a ninety-decibel Alabama tune. “A what?”

  “Club soda on ice,” Cal repeated, louder this time.

  Ramon stared at him a second, as if he barely recognized him, then asked, “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I'm okay,” he answered irritably. “Just pour me a goddamned seltzer, will you?”

  “Hey. Okay, man. Coming right up. You want a twist in that? Lemon or lime?”

  “Fine. Whatever. Anything but a fucking umbrella.”

  Cal straddled a bar stool while he waited for his drink. If things worked out the way he hoped, it was going to be a long day, spent in the company of the little hero hunter, Holly Hicks, and he didn't want to start out with one foot already in the bag. Maybe later in the afternoon he'd kick back with a beer. Maybe they'd have dinner at the ranch and maybe then he'd pull a bottle out of Ruth's built-in wine rack and…

  “Here you go. One club soda with a lime twist. And no umbrella.” Ramon slid a cocktail napkin in front of him and centered the clear, sparkling drink upon it. “Hey, man. As long as you're here, you mind taking a look at a fifty-dollar bill for me? Some guy asked Rick for change last night, and this fifty just doesn't look right to me.”

  “Sure. Let me see it.” Cal took a sip of the club soda while Ramon pulled the bill from beneath the change drawer in the cash register.

  “See what I mean,” the barman said, handing the bill to Cal. “It's a phoney, right?”

  Cal handled the limp, bleached paper with its frayed edges and taped tear. Bleaching and damage were often good ways to disguise a counterfeit, but in this case the defects were simply because the bill was old. As far as he could see without a magnifying glass the edges on this one were crisp enough and there was still a little life in ol' Ulysses' eyes.

  “It's fine,” he said, handing it back.

  Ramon didn't look convinced. “You sure?” He glared at the currency and kept turning it over in his hands.

  “Well, if you want a second opinion, take it over to Bobby at the bank and have him check it out. He's probably got a UV light or an iodine pen.”

  “Yeah. I just might do that.”

  While Ramon tended to other customers, Cal sipped his seltzer, vaguely enjoying its sharp bite on the back of his tongue, but wishing it were a beer. The neon clock told him he had another forty-five minutes before it was time to pick up Holly. At the moment it felt more like forty-five years. He was about to go through a day stone cold sober, something he hadn't done since coming home almost six months ago.

  That thought alone was enough to make a man want a drink.

  Even a hero.

  Chapter Eight

  I thought Cal would be home by now,” Ruth said, frowning at her
good watch while she paced from one end of her kitchen to the other. “Dooley, are you sure you told him we wanted to leave for Corpus around noon?”

  Her husband was half-standing, half-sitting, with one hip slanted on her marble-topped island. He looked so good in his western-cut gray tweed jacket and dark gray slacks. He'd even put on a regular tie, one of the dozens she'd given him over the years, silk Repps and paisleys and pin dots that rarely saw daylight and didn't do much but flap on his closet door whenever he opened it. She knew he'd put on the tie to please her, and she was trying hard not to slide into a foul mood that would sour the rest of the day.

  “I told him twelve-thirty, babe.” Dooley checked his watch. “It's just a few minutes past twelve. He'll be here.”

  She snapped on the cold water at the sink and filled a glass. Her throat was so dry and tight she could hear herself swallow. “I don't know why I let these things upset me,” she said. “I never used to.”

  “Worst that can happen, honey, is that the real estate fella will bring his client back some other time.”

  “You're right.”

  She said it, but she didn't believe it somehow. The worst that could happen was she'd never have her restaurant. There would always be something—Cal being late, a no-show realtor, Dooley not getting the price he wanted for a particular bull, Colby totaling his truck and asking for a loan, her own doubts and hesitations—coming between herself and her dream.

  None of her friends had dreams. At least none that required such a substantial investment of capital. Ardith Voss had just gotten herself a web site to sell her patchwork totes and purses, but what was that? A couple hundred dollars at the most? Julie Caldwell, inspired by Oprah's book club, was working on a Master's degree in literature and trying to write a novel of her own.

  Ruth had considered a smaller dream. Writing a cookbook perhaps or marketing her balsamic beans. But it struck her as settling. And she didn't want to be an author or an entrepreneur. She wanted to be a restaurateur.

  The therapist she'd seen in Kingsville a few months ago hadn't helped at all. Ruth had made the appointment without telling Dooley, and she'd driven up there hardly even knowing why she was doing it except that it seemed to be the thing to do when things just weren't working out. The woman seemed nice enough. They'd talked for a while, sitting in matching flame-stitched wing chairs, sipping Earl Grey tea, and then the psychologist had asked, “What do you want?”

  “My own restaurant,” Ruth had replied.

  The woman put her cup and saucer down, closed her eyes a moment, then leaned forward and whispered, “What is it you really want?”

  That was when Ruth was pretty sure she needed a financial planner more than a therapist.

  God bless it. She wasn't depressed. She wasn't in the throes of a mid-life crisis or suffering from some peri-menopausal hormone imbalance or empty nest syndrome or anything else. She wanted her own restaurant. Just a little place with crisp white linens on the tables, substantial silverware, fine crystal, and comfortable chairs.

  She wanted to prepare Trout Meuniere and risotto alla Milanese, have it served by competent, if not elegant, waiters, and watch her customers close their eyes with pleasure as they ate. She longed for her skills to be enjoyed and appreciated by gourmets instead of people who were polite but would've preferred an eight-ounce rib eye, a baked potato, and tossed salad with creamy Italian dressing.

  It wasn't as if she wanted the moon. Not a full moon, anyway. Just a sliver. It was such a tiny dream when all was said and done. Except not for a woman living in Hell and Gone, Texas, where, even if she could afford to set herself up in competition with the Longhorn Café, she couldn't turn a profit what with the cost of trucking in fresh vegetables and seafood.

  All she wanted was a chance. Before it was too late. Before ill fate or bad luck or a bullet struck her down and took her dream away, the way it had with Cal. Well, she didn't know if he'd ever actually dreamed of being in the Secret Service, but she was convinced he wasn't going back.

  “We'll have a good time in Corpus,” Dooley said, straightening up, his head just missing her eight-inch omelette pan hanging from the rack above him. “We'll get a room with a Gulf view.” The slight, suggestive lift of his eyebrows and sexy slant of his mustache made her smile. Even after all these years.

  “I love you, Dooley Reese. Have I told you that today?” He opened his arms to her. “Seems to me you did, but it'd be nice to hear it again, darlin'.”

  Even Holly had to admit it was a gorgeous day with a sky that was nearly sapphire and big white clouds billowing across it. Okay. Maybe she did miss Texas skies. She was willing to concede that much. And maybe blasting down the road at sixty miles an hour in a convertible with Santana streaming from the radio and the wind whipping her hair did have all the overtones of a date, including the easy smile of the guy at the wheel and the way his right arm was draped over the seatback in her direction as if anticipating a “slide over, baby” turn. But this wasn't a date.

  It wasn't.

  Well, even if it was, she refused to let it distract her from her purpose.

  The story.

  “Tell me why you don't want your sister to sell the ranch,” she yelled over Santana and the wind.

  Cal disengaged his arm from the seatback to turn the radio down. “You mean other than the obvious?”

  “Which is…?”

  “Me winding up homeless.”

  “Don't you have a place in Washington?”

  “I had a place. A condo in Bethesda. Now it's my ex-wife's.”

  Holly wasn't sure about the propriety of a follow-up question, but she was insanely curious about his divorce, or more exactly about the brief marriage that had preceded it. Why had they even bothered? she wondered.

  “I'm not so much trying to prevent her from selling it,” he said. “I'm just buying a little time for myself. Who knows? I might wind up retiring here someday and buying out her share.”

  Retiring? Just as Holly was fashioning a follow up to that, something a bit more professional than “What do you mean, retiring?”, a car appeared in the distance. The large green SUV was pulled over on the side of the road and two men stood beside it, one with his arms crossed while the other gestured west over miles of mesquite.

  Cal's foot came off the accelerator. “Looks like a real estate agent to me,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Judging from his malicious little grin, Holly thought Cal Griffin was about to send another prospective buyer on a wild goose chase. This was going to be good. And much as she despised Texas herself, who was she to stand in his way if he wanted to retire here? More power to him.

  “I'd say you're right,” she answered with an evil little grin of her own. “He strikes me as moderately aggressive and fairly confident at the moment.”

  His expression turned positively devilish. “Not for long,” he said as he slowed and brought the T-bird to a dusty stop a few feet behind the SUV.

  “I'll be right back,” he said, opening the door and swinging his legs out of the car.

  “Need some backup?” Holly asked.

  He cocked his head and those blue eyes fairly twinkled. “Sure. How good a liar are you?”

  “On a scale of one to ten?”

  He nodded.

  “A fifteen,” she said. “I'll just follow your lead.”

  She joined him at the front of the car. He clasped her hand in his, and together they moseyed up to their unsuspecting victims.

  “Afternoon,” Cal drawled. “You fellas taking a look at the Griffin place?”

  The taller of the two stuck out his hand. “We sure are. Chuck Bingham of Bingham Properties. And you are…?”

  “Tucker Bascom,” Cal said without missing a beat. “And this is my wife, Charlene.”

  “Howdy, ma'am.” Chuck gave the brim of his hat a snap before he reached for Holly's hand.

  “Howdy,” she said in return, managing not to choke on the word.

  The realtor ge
stured to the shorter man who was wearing a pair of pleated khaki Dockers, a navy Polo shirt, and not boots, but Docksiders on his feet. “This is Gordon Brown, my client.”

  After another little round of howdy's and pleased-to-meet-you's, Cal casually inquired, “You raise cattle, Gordon?”

  “Me? Oh, no. I'm from Chicago. I represent a group of investors who hope to put together a ten thousand-acre parcel for a hunting lodge.”

  “Ah.” Cal nodded. Rather sagely, Holly thought.

  “Y'all live around here?” Chuck asked.

  “Down the road a ways,” Cal said.

  “We run a goat ranch,” Holly said, figuring it was her turn, and then, when Gordon appeared intrigued, she elaborated. “Actually we raise dairy goats. Angoras. We milk them by hand in order to make Feta cheese.”

  “Fascinating,” Gordon said.

  “I had no idea,” Chuck added.

  Cal simply gazed at her, clearly awarding her the floor, or the pavement in this case.

  “Feta,” Gordon murmured. “Isn't that the Greek cheese?”

  “That's right. My father's Greek. He started the ranch forty years ago right after he married my mama. She's Creek.”

  Gordon blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Creek,” Holly said. “Native American?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It's too bad about the titanium here,” she said, apropos of nothing, letting her gaze wander westward.

  The realtor cleared his throat. “The what?”

  Holly curled her arm through Cal's and leaned against him. “Why don't you tell them, hon?”

  Without a second's hesitation, he clasped the baton, so to speak. He didn't even blink. The man was magnificent.

  “Well, the Air Force said they cleaned up after that canister got loose in '96. They said nothing would leach into the soil. They said...”

  “Wait.” Chuck held up a hand. “What canister?”

  “The titanium,” Cal said. “From when the hatch blew on the C-130 making that emergency landing at the Naval Air Station in Kingsville.”

  “When was this?” Chuck asked. Behind him, Gordon said, “Titanium? Isn't that radioactive?”