My Hero (29 page)

“Let's walk,” Cal said.

“All right. Let's do. Oh, but wait, sweetheart. Why don't we invite your producer to come along with us? I'm just dying to meet her. We've spoken on the phone, of course. I gave her some terrific ideas. Let's invite her, shall we?”

While Cal stood there dumb as a post, Ellie picked up the conversational slack. “I don't think Holly's up yet,” she said.

“Yes, she is. I heard her in the shower before I came downstairs. I'll just run back up and ask her about breakfast.”

Diana disappeared as quickly as she'd appeared, leaving Cal and Ellie staring at each other across the hood of the car.

“You could leave right now,” she said, doing her best to suppress a pretty nasty grin. “I surely wouldn't blame you.”

“Well, I would leave, Ellie,” he drawled, “but then they'd have to put me on Coward Week, wouldn't they?”

“Good luck,” she said, then shook her head and added, “You know, I can't for the life of me picture you married to that woman.”

“Neither can I, Ellie.” He sighed. “Neither can I.”

How did she get here? Holly wondered bleakly as she sat across from Cal in a back booth at the Longhorn Café. How could this be happening?

That woman. Diana the Huntress. Diana the Harpy. The Devil Woman. She was part bulldozer, part pit bull, and all Harper's Bazaar with her Size 2 designer jeans, a half ton of gorgeous turquoise jewelry, and her obscenely long, blood red acrylic talons. She had barged into Holly's room without knocking, introduced herself as Mrs. Calvin Griffin and then intoned, “You must join us for breakfast. I absolutely insist.” She was so insistent that Holly finally agreed to meet them at the Longhorn just to get rid of her.

So here she was in a rear booth at the Longhorn, across from Cal, alone with him because as soon as she'd arrived, Diana had looked at her turquoise beaded watch, realized it was nine o'clock in Washington, and had rushed outside in order to make a “crucial” call to somebody on her cell phone.

Holly picked up the knife from the place setting in front of her, pondered its blade a moment and her own reflection there, then put the utensil down with a sigh.

“What's the matter, Miss Manhattan? Thinking about using that knife to slit your wrists now that you're back in Texas?”

Her gaze lifted, meeting his. It was the first time they'd actually made and maintained eye contact this morning. Oh, God. Oh, damn. How could she have forgotten the pure, unadulterated blue of his eyes?

“No,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking about plunging it into your lying, cheating heart.”

His gaze didn't waver and those blue eyes didn't even blink when he answered, “I never lied to you, Holly.”

“Well, maybe not in so many words, Cal.” She forced a note of breezy who-gives-a-shit into her voice. “I'm a big girl, after all. Nobody put a gun to my head. I mean, I knew the risk I was taking by getting involved with a married man.”

“What risk? What the hell are you talking about?”

Holly cocked her head toward the window, outside of which Diana was striding back and forth, her cell phone at her ear. “You and your wife. You're back together. Kudos, Cal. Congrats. Bon Appétit. May you live happily ever after and all that crap.”

“Diana told you that.” It wasn't a question, but rather a blunt accusation.

“Right after I got back to New York last month.” She smiled with a kind of sweet venom. “Imagine my surprise.”

He swore and picked up his own knife, curling his fingers around it until his knuckles were white. “Why the hell didn't you just ask me?”

“You never called me back!”

“I never called you back, god dammit, because you were so fucking busy with whoever it was who was with you that night.”

She remembered brusquely telling him she had something on the stove, slyly implying that she wasn't alone. “My feelings were hurt,” she said.

“Jesus, baby, so were mine!”

Holly just stared at him then, at the tension in his jaw, the hard, determined set of his mouth, and most of all the sheen of moisture in his eyes. She'd been lied to a lot in her thirty-one years. But if ever there was a look of truth, an expression of bone-deep honesty, this was it. Oh, God. It was, wasn't it?

“So you're not back together?” she asked, hating the little quaver in her voice.

He shook his head.

“Then why did she…?”

“Are you kidding me?” He gestured with the knife in the direction of the window. “Look at her. She's a goddamn drama queen. She wants in on this TV thing, that's all. It doesn't have anything to do with me.”

“But you
are
still married to her.” She cocked her head. “Why
did
you marry her, Cal?”

“Damned if I know.”

“That's not an acceptable answer,” she said bluntly.

“Okay.” He sighed, closed his eyes a second and then said, “I married her because I was thirty-eight years old and didn't have a family to call my own. Because I was sick and tired of sleeping in hotels. Sleeping around, if you really want the brutal, unvarnished facts.”

“Well, you can use a little varnish,” Holly cut in, figuring ignorance was bliss where Cal's sexual past was concerned.

“I don't know, Holly. Hell, I was just ready to settle down. The time seemed right. Diana was there. She said yes. It just seemed to happen somehow. It's a lousy reason, but I don't know how else to explain it to you or even to myself. Just believe me when I tell you it's over. The divorce papers went back to her attorney last month, all signed, sealed, and delivered. I mailed them the morning after we made love the first time, as a matter of fact.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You didn't love her?”

“I didn't even know what love was.” He reached across the table to grasp her hand. “Holly, not until I…”

A pungent blast of Fendi signaled Diana's return, and Holly pulled her hand away.

“Well, my dears, all hell is breaking loose in Washington. Let me tell you,” Diana moaned, sliding into the booth next to Cal. “Senator Ferriss' daughter was arrested last night after a car chase through Georgetown at ninety miles an hour. Can you believe that? In Georgetown. It's lucky she didn't take out a pedestrian or two. She's out on bail, but Jack Ferriss' people, idiots, all of them, don't have a clue about spinning this thing. I've got to get back there. Right now.”

“Oh, that's too bad,” Holly said.

Cal didn't say a word. Actually, he looked as if he were holding his breath. Either that or he was trying hard not to yell whoopee.

Diana looked at Holly. “I know that puts a terrible crimp in your production schedule, Holly,” she said, “but there's really nothing I can do.”

“Oh, that's okay.”

“I'll get back to you from Washington as soon as I possibly can. Naturally, we still have the option of filming there.”

“We'll work it out,” Holly said sympathetically, without the slightest intention of working anything out where this babe was concerned except celebrating her exit.

Just then, Coral—who'd been up to her blond beehive in taking orders and refilling coffee cups—sidled up to their booth. “Mornin', folks. What can I bring y'all?”

Diana glanced up, appeared to look right through the waitress, then frowned and picked up her menu.

“Coffee, Coral,” said Cal. “You got any of those great Danishes today?”

“Sure do, Cal.” She looked at Holly. “How 'bout you, hon?”

“Same for me,” Holly replied.

“And you, missy?”

Diana looked back up at Coral. “I'll have eggs Benedict, a croissant, unsalted butter, and a large pineapple juice with shaved ice. And tea, please. Earl Grey, if you have it. With lemon.”

Coral's pen kind of hovered over her order book for a moment, and then she looked at Cal. “She's kidding, right?”

“I don't think so,” Cal said.

“Ooo-kay.” She made a quick notation in her book. “That'll be three coffees and three Danish. Be right back.”

Two hours later Holly was walking—sauntering, actually—around Ellie's yard, getting a feel for the expensive video cam she signed out of the production department at the VIP Channel. It was light years beyond her own, which she'd picked up cheap from the station where she worked in West Virginia.

Ellie, who'd been gone since breakfast, clomped down her back stairs. “Hey, what's goin' on? I just went up to check on Diana's room and her stuff's all gone. I didn't miss any early fireworks, did I?”

Holly laughed, sighting Ellie in her lens. Her hostess' big denim dress just about filled the frame. “No, you didn't miss any fireworks. Diana and her PR firm had a crisis with a Senator's kid in D.C., and being on the evening news in every major market trumped the VIP Channel's comparatively meager viewership.”

“So, she's gone?”

“Yep. Cal drove her to Kingsville to catch the bus to Dallas.”

She laughed again, this time to herself. Even before they'd left the booth at the Longhorn, Diana had started with her arm twisting, wanting somebody to drive her all the way “to someplace civilized. Dallas. Houston. I really don't give a flying fuck.”

When Cal said he didn't have time to make the trip today, she still wasn't going to take no for an answer and she continued to press until Holly, suddenly inspired, told her, “The Thunderbird's only licensed in this county. He can't drive you any farther than the bus station in Kingsville.”

Diana looked more appalled than shocked or disappointed. “I've never heard of that.” She turned to Cal. “You can't drive your car out of the county?”

“That's right,” he said. “It's a special registration because of the steel plate in my head. A damned nuisance, too.”

“Well, that's absurd.”

“No,” Holly said with a shrug. “It's just Texas.”

“You expect me to…to take a…a bus?” The woman could hardly get the word out.

“Yep.” Holly and Cal had replied in unison, trading glances, both of them almost cracking up.

Ellie's laughter boomed across the backyard now. “I'm trying to picture that City Slicker on the bus from Kingsville to Dallas.”

“Not a pretty picture, is it?”

“No, indeedy. Well, one good thing about it, though.”

“What's that?” Holly asked.

“You can move back into the Rose Room, honey. I'll just go and strip the bed.”

“I'll help,” Holly said, already envisioning Cal coming up the fire escape when he returned from Kingsville this afternoon.

Yee-hah.

Chapter Nineteen

I
n this part of south central Texas, the Fourth of July was just about always crystal clear and hellishly hot, and today was no exception. Cal would've loved to have put the top down on the way to Kingsville, but Diana—with her high-maintenance hair and foot-long false eyelashes—wasn't exactly a top-down kind of woman, so he hadn't even suggested it.

Breezing along with the needle dancing around the speed limit, he found himself wondering again why he'd ever married Diana Koslov. Granted, he had felt a profound urge to settle down last year, an urge that had been building with every succeeding birthday in his thirties. But why Diana? Other than the fact that he was her lover at the time, Cal couldn't come up with a single reason.

If he made a list of the qualities he prized in a wife, Diana's sexual enthusiasm might have made it in the top dozen or so, but that was about it. She didn't have a sense of humor to speak of. That was important to him. A sense of humor like Holly's. Diana's intelligence wasn't stellar. Her curiosity was limited to the people and events in her own small coterie of socialites, politicians, and hangers-on, the people who paid her handsomely to get their names in or out of the paper, depending on the story.

It suddenly occurred to Cal that a better question than why he'd married
her
was why the hell she'd ever married
him.
After all, he was just as wrong for her as she was for him. He figured this was a good time to ask as they were only a few miles from Kingsville now, and after he put her on a bus he'd probably never see her again—he hoped—no matter how long he lived. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting until she broke the connection on the phone that had been attached to her ear for most of the trip.

“I've got a question for you, Diana. No big deal. Just something I've been wondering.”

“What's that?” she asked, then added, “Oh, would you roll your window up a bit more, Cal? This wind is absolutely ruining my hair.”

While he cranked up the window all the way and turned the AC down a notch, he cast about for a way to phrase his question so it wasn't insulting to her. Why he cared about that, he wasn't sure. In all honesty, though, Diana probably wouldn't recognize an insult if it bit her on her bony ass. “When I asked you to marry me last year, Diana, why the hell did you ever say yes?”

“What?” She sounded surprised, even slightly amused, and far from insulted.

“I said when I asked you to marry me last year…”

“I heard what you said, Cal.” She laughed as she pulled down the sun visor, adjusted its mirror, and fiddled with an eyelash. “Darling, don't you remember? You didn't ask
me.
I asked
you
”

He shook his head in disbelief, keeping his eyes on the two-lane road, doing his best not to blink in complete befuddlement or to look half as lame brained as he felt. She'd proposed to him? “No,” he said. “I don't remember that.”

“Well, I do. I asked you. It was a year ago today, come to think of it. The Fourth of July. Funny, isn't it?”

Oh, yeah. A real riot,
he thought. “You proposed to me? Why?”

“Why? I told you, Silly. As a matter of fact, I confessed to you right before you left for Baltimore last September. We had that terrible argument and…” She snapped up the mirrored visor and stared at him. “God, Cal, you really don't remember, do you? The little wager I had with Penny Price? Well, not so little actually. She's still bitching on a daily basis about having to pay up the inches she owes me in her column.”

Jesus H. Christ. He did remember now. It was as if Diana's words had jarred something loose in his brain, probably something lodged right beneath the metal plate. Penny Price and Diana were pals in a back-biting, cat-fighting sort of way. Penny wrote a gossip column—Penelope Tells All—in one of Washington's glossy chi-chi magazines, a column in which Diana, Queen of Public Relations, coveted coverage for her clientele.