Holly stopped breathing. The roses on the wall began to blend into one another and pulsate from the crown molding all the way to the floorboards. She wondered if a person who was already sitting down could faint.
Then she managed to drag just enough air in her lungs to say, “Mel, I can't breathe.”
“That's okay, kid. Air's bad for you anyway. Now get your Texas ass back to New York. Pronto.”
It was a dream come true.
It was a nightmare.
Holly cried and laughed all the way to Houston.
Cal felt like crying and laughing, himself. Laughing because Hero Week had gone belly up, and he was off the hook. Crying because he was about to put his Manhattan Chili Pepper on a plane when all he wanted to do was keep her close beside him. For days. Weeks. Years. For fucking ever.
He wasn't good at good-byes. No. That wasn't true. He was great at good-byes. In thirty-nine years he'd probably said more than his fair share of them and then turned his back with a smile of relief on his face.
Now, standing at the gate just minutes before his Holly was going to fly out of his life, he was at a loss for words. Even good-bye.
He shrugged the strap of her laptop case off his shoulder. “Go get 'em, Tiger,” he said, looping the strap over her arm.
She gazed up at him, her eyes glistening with tears. “I wish we had more time. Oh, God, I wish…”
Cal looked at his watch, mostly because it was too painful to look at her face. Christ. He'd rather take a bullet for her than watch her cry. “I should probably get going,” he said. “I told them I'd be at the field office by three for the debriefing about the shooting last night.”
“What if I didn't go?” she asked, reaching out to grab his sleeve.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“What if I didn't go? What if I stayed here?”
I'd be happy,
he thought.
I'd be so goddammed happy.
“You'd regret it all your life,” he said.
She nodded. “I know. I know it. Only…”
The gate attendant gave the final call for her flight to Newark.
He took her pretty face in both his hands, cupping her chin with his thumbs. “I'll be back in Washington in two months. I'll spend all my days off in New York.”
“Half your days off,” she said, trying her best to laugh.
“What?”
“Half your days off because you're only half in love with me.”
He kissed those just-about-to-pout lips, then turned her toward the jetway. “Go. I'll call you tonight. I'll see you in two months. Maybe sooner.”
Holly turned back. “How much sooner?”
“Until I can't half stand being apart from you. Now go.”
Five hours later, trying to negotiate the distance from the curb to the front door of the Media Arts Building with her suitcase, her carry-on, her handbag and Mel's laptop, attempting to maneuver east to west when half the population of midtown Manhattan was moving north to south, Holly raised her fist and screamed, “I'm walking here!”
Not that anybody cared. Not that anybody even heard her. Certainly nobody paused on their way to wherever it was they were going in such an all-fired hurry.
“All-fired,” she muttered to herself, shoving her suitcase forward another foot. “Now if that just don't beat all. Here I am, Holly Hicks, about to be a producer at CBS, and I'm talking like I've got cow shit on my Ferragamos.”
She was still muttering under her breath when she finally reached her office.
“Welcome back, kid,” Mel boomed.
Holly dropped into the chair across from his desk. “Mel, I'm conflicted.”
He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Tell me about it,” he groaned.
Now, as Holly well knew, in Texas when somebody said “Tell me about it” they meant quite sincerely “Tell me about it. What's wrong, hon?”
But she wasn't in Texas. She was in New York, where “Tell me about it” meant “Listen to this.”
So she sighed and listened to Mel as he began to rant. “You're not going to believe what Arnold and Maida, those two loose screws, want to do now.”
“I miss you,” Cal said on the phone that night. To Holly he sounded a million miles away as much as he sounded right there in the same room.
“Do you miss me completely or just half?” she asked.
“I miss you completely.”
Holly smiled. “That's good because I'm half out of my mind with missing you.”
She could almost feel his smile, almost feel the blue warmth in his eyes, the tenderness of his touch when he answered, “Well, that's not half bad, I guess.”
They talked for an hour, maybe more. The debriefing about Hec's death had gone fine, as Cal had anticipated, and his actions were deemed appropriate under the circumstances. The sheriff had come back from his vacation and had demoted Jimmy Lee from deputy to patrolman. Tomorrow Cal planned to get back out on the track with Bee, and then he was going to help Ruth and Dooley come up with a preliminary plan prior to their meeting with the architect about their hunting lodge. Ellie sent her love.
“Everything's just about the same in Honeycomb,” he told her. “Except you're not here.”
“I wish I were,” Holly replied, shocking herself because she truly meant it. She wished she were in Texas. And then she laughed. “I can't believe I said that.”
Later that night, lying in bed with Manhattan noise and neon coming through her window, she called on Rufus to take her back to Honeycomb.
It may not look like much, this small and tattered town on a wide spot on a dusty road in Texas, but if you take the time to look closely, Honeycomb is a veritable hive of activity.
Rufus pans slowly past Ramon's, the Longhorn Café where Coral's standing by a table at the window taking an order for biscuits and gravy, the print shop with its shattered front window and yards of yellow tape flapping in the hot breeze. His camera swings south to the track where Cal and Bee are making their second circuit.
Whether you believe in heroes or not, Honeycomb isn't a half bad place to go looking for one.
I
n spite of all the time he'd spent over the years in the White House, Cal had never been inside the Oval Office. But now, in early September, on the one-year anniversary of the assassination attempt, he was standing just outside the door to that famed room, waiting for his appointment with President Jennings.
“Congratulations, Griffin,” Special Agent Terry Young-blood said to him from his post by the ante-room door. “I heard you passed the physical at Glynco with flying colors.”
“Thanks,” Cal said without elaboration. The fact was that, even though he'd passed the rigorous tests last week, his flying colors hadn't flown quite high enough to earn him a resumption of his duties on protective detail. He'd been bitterly disappointed for about a minute, partly out of pride and partly on principle, and then he realized that such rigorous, all-consuming, living-out-of-a-suitcase duty wasn't what he wanted at this point in his life.
Even if his performance scores had—by some extraordinary fluke of nature—landed him once more in the top echelon of Secret Service personnel, Cal would've declined the assignment. He just didn't want it anymore. He didn't need it, that feeling of mental and physical control, that macho mastery and mystique.
He wanted Holly Hicks. He needed her.
With each passing day from July to September, missing her more and more, he realized that he needed her to feel happy and whole. He needed her smarts and her sass, her coolness under fire, her hot little body beneath his.
For him, excitement used to be preceding the President off of Air Force One, or walking mere inches away from the Democrat Jennings when the man plunged open-handed into a crowd of hostile Republicans. Excitement used to mean knowing he stood as the last physical barrier between the President and harm.
But now his notion of a heart-stopping moment was witnessing Holly Hicks smile in her sleep, or watching her hair dry after she showered and seeing how each curl seemed to have a mind of its own and a God-given direction that would not be denied. Excitement would be knowing he was going to wake up beside her every morning for the rest of his life. Putting kids to bed on Christmas Eve. Teaching a son to ride a two-wheeler. Braiding a little girl's curly, unruly hair.
All of which was exactly what Cal intended to tell Holly this afternoon after his meeting with the President. How long could it take for Jennings to tell him again how grateful he was for his sacrifice last year? He was going to pick up his divorce decree and an engagement ring—not necessarily in that order—and then take the shuttle to New York. That city had never been his idea of a place to live happily ever after, but if his Holly was there, and if she were his, then he'd be happy enough. And, hell, Ruthie could visit once or twice a year and get her fill of New York restaurants.
The door to the Oval Office opened and Janet Adcock stepped out, brandishing a clipboard and looking like she needed a quick nicotine fix. Cal had forgotten what a long drink of water the Press Secretary was. Her eyes were level with his when she greeted him.
“Cal! Welcome back.”
“Janet. You're looking good.”
Her gaze warmed appreciably, even a bit flirtatiously if Cal was still a judge of such things. “You're not so bad yourself, Agent Griffin. Hey, I'm sorry that hero program didn't work out. I was really looking forward to watching it.”
He muttered a quiet, restrained oath. “What's this all about, Janet? Why does Jennings want to see me?”
She gave him one of her famous I-know-but-I'm-not-telling looks, then said, “He's waiting for you.” She gestured through the door. “Go on in.”
“Is that Cal Griffin I hear out there?” the President called.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, come on in, son. Janet, move aside and let him through.”
After the CBS people called with their decision, Holly put the phone back in its cradle and just stared at it for a while. Her hands must've been sweating because there was a little spot of moisture on the back of the black handset that took a minute or two to disappear.
She was vaguely aware of Mel walking past her open office door, then heard him swearing as he stepped back and stood there gazing at her.
His normally gruff voice went soft with concern when he asked, “What's up, kid?”
“CBS just called,” she answered rather tonelessly.
“Aw, damn. Aw, fuck.” He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “Hey, I'm really sorry, Holly.”
She simply stared at her boss then, blankly, as if he were an inanimate object, a coatrack or a floor lamp, one with a bald glass dome. Shouldn't she feel upset right now? Holly wondered. Shouldn't her stomach be roiling or, at the very least, shouldn't her temples be beginning to throb with the first pangs of a headache? What was the expression on her face that was making Mel go all soft and gooey?
“Oh, that's okay,” she finally said, still amazed by her own sense of calm.
Mel sagged in the chair across from her desk. He looked more like a basset hound now than his usual Rottweiler self. “Don't worry about it. You're good, kid. Better than good. You've got real talent. One of these day those idiots at CBS will be kicking themselves that they didn't snatch you up when they had the chance. You'll see. They'll be eating their hearts out—you mark my words, kid—that they didn't offer you this job.”
Holly smiled wanly. God. She felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience, as if she were watching herself talk to her boss, as if she hardly recognized her own voice. “That's the odd thing, Mel,” she said. “They did.”
“Pardon me?”
“They offered me the job. A producer's spot on the new show. I told them no.”
“You told them no,” he echoed. “You said no to CBS?”
Holly nodded.
He came out of his chair as if the seat had just caught fire. Leaning over her desk, his hands planted on her blotter, he growled, “You said no to fucking CBS?”
She nodded again.
“Holly,” Mel breathed. “Jesus, kid. Why?”
“Well, they wanted me to produce pieces out of London and Paris for the next two years.”
“Yeah. So? That's not exactly like asking you to transfer to Reykjavik or Kabul, you know, or even fucking Texas. Shit. London and Paris. I know at least fifty guys who'd sell their own grandmothers for a chance like that.”
He raised his hands and gestured toward the ceiling, then bellowed, “Hell, Holly, are you completely nuts?”
God. Maybe she was. Maybe she really was crazy, Holly thought, because a grin was working its way across her lips and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“No,” she said. “I'm completely in love.”
She was still sitting at her desk an hour later, trying to clamp down on the shit-eating grin on her face—at least that's how Mel had described it—when they buzzed her from Reception.
“There's a guy out here to see you,” Rhonda said in a voice that didn't quite carry her characteristic Brooklyn, Bay Ridge, been-there, done-that, seen-it, yeah, yeah tone. She sounded a bit breathless, in fact.
“Who is it?” Holly asked.
“I dunno. He won't give me his name. Just says he needs to see you.” Rhonda's voice dropped to a whisper. “Actually, um, Holly, he's wearing shades and a gray suit and he looks like a narc. I think he's here to arrest you.”
Even as her heart somersaulted, Holly had to bite her lower lip to keep from laughing like an inebriated loon. “Send him back, Rhonda,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah. I'm very sure.”
She put the phone down and went to her door just for the pleasure of watching him approach. But as she stood there, it occurred to Holly that maybe Cal was coming to tell her good-bye. Oh, God. He'd told her he had a meeting with the President this morning. Maybe Jennings had prevailed on him to return to his former detail. Maybe Jennings had pulled strings so that Cal's not-quite-good-enough scores were now good enough to resume protective duty. Maybe…
He pushed through the glass double door from the hallway and came striding toward her through bustling secretaries, dropped files, stacks of tapes and other hazards like a man who was so perfectly in control that nothing could deter him.