Free My Hero by Mary McBride Page A

a million years ago, but in others it seemed like just last week. Even the same song—
Crazy
—was playing on the jukebox back then.
    Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
That was about all she could remember from the French course she'd taken her sophomore year in college, hoping it would help eradicate her twang. It didn't. All it did was lower her grade point average. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
    Man, wasn't that the truth. Holly fished in her glass for a diamond-clear chunk of ice, then popped it into her mouth. Fourteen years spent heading to New York, and here she was back in a crummy little bar in Texas, drinking diet cola, sucking ice, feeling as if she'd never left. She half expected the ghost of Bobby Ray Hicks to limp in and tell her she was expected home right quick to do her chores.
    Just then, in the bottle-lined mirror that backed the bar, she saw the front door open and bright daylight cut briefly into the perpetual midnight of the tavern. A man ambled in. Holly couldn't distinguish his features, but his Stetson and outsized belt buckle and slim-legged jeans all branded him pure cowboy.
    “Here's your sandwich, ma'am.” The young bartender plopped a paper plate in front of her. He had stuck frilly green cellophane toothpicks into each sandwich half, and put a fat hot pepper on the side.
    “Thanks,” Holly said. “It looks good.”
    “You need anything to put on it? Mayo? Mustard?”
    “Mustard, please. Dijon, if you have it.”
    “Dee—what?”
    “Never mind. Plain ol' mustard'll do me just fine.” She couldn't believe those words had come out of her own mouth. And not just the words themselves, but the twang that had accompanied them. After less than twenty-four hours. Dear God. What was she going to sound like in a week or two?
    “Hey, now. Don't that look good?” The newly arrived cowboy slung his dusty denim butt onto the stool beside hers. “Rick, fix me up one of those, will you? Hell, make it two. But gimme a beer first.”
    He tilted his hat back, gave Holly's elbow a nudge, and grinned. God's gift to all the women south of the Nueces River. “Can I buy you a beer, honey?”
    “No, thank you.”
    Holly picked up her sandwich and turned away from him. She had barely swallowed the first bite when he moved closer, his arm fully in contact with hers.
    “You're not from around here, are you?” he asked.
    She took a sip of her cola to wash the sandwich down. “No.”
    “Yeah, I didn't think so. I'd've noticed you, for sure. The name's Tucker Bascom.” He stuck out a dirt-creased, cal-lused hand. “People just call me Tuck.”
    Oh, God. Why was it so easy to say “buzz off in New York and almost impossible to do it here? Holly ignored his hand in favor of another bite of her sandwich.
    “I bet I can guess your name,” he said, oblivious to the subtlety of her brushoff.
    From the opposite end of the bar came a female drawl. “She don't want nothin' to do with you, Tuck.”
    “Shut up, Patsy,” he growled. “Nobody's talkin' to you.”
    “Thank God,” the woman said.
    The cowboy lifted his bottle of beer, knocked back half of it, then turned toward Holly again. “You're almost done with that cola, honey. Rick, bring this little lady a light beer. On me.”
    The young bartender raised an eyebrow at Holly. “Ma'am?”
    She shook her head.
    “Aw, come on now, Jennifer or Jessica or…wait. I bet it's Tiffany. Am I right?”
    Holly leaned forward across the bar. “Could I have a plastic bag or something to put the rest of my sandwich in?” she asked Rick. “And a can of diet cola to go?”
    “Tiffany! Darlin'! You can't leave me like this. Why, hell, we've just met and…”
    A pair of shoulders wedged between Holly and the cowboy. “Take a hike, Tucker. The lady's with me.”
    There might have been a time when Holly would have taken great umbrage with this game of
Got Testosterone?,
when she might have snapped to her would-be rescuer,