by Neesa Hart
She pulled an envelope from her back pocket and headed for his desk. “Before you fire me,” she said, “I can save you the trouble.” She dropped the envelope. “That’s my letter of resignation.”
He said nothing. She tried not to squirm. This was beginning to feel like the time in kindergarten when she’d been called to the principal’s office for slugging Carolyn Lockhardt on the playground. The man hadn’t understood that Carolyn—with her perfect hair, perfect clothes and constant boasting about how she always colored inside the lines and moved her crayon in the same direction—had simply been begging for the punch. Every kindergarten kid had been on Molly’s side. She’d become the hero of the bad colorers. The principal had given her a lecture on ladylike behavior and suspended her for two days.
Something told her that Sam Reed wouldn’t let her off that easily. She forged ahead. “I—you don’t have to accept it. You have the right to terminate me. You probably should terminate me.” A voice inside her head was screaming at her to shut up, but his inscrutable expression wouldn’t let her heed the voice. Once, just one time, she wanted to see him crack—even if it meant watching his temper explode. The day he’d fired Lawson Peters for faking a source, he’d been noticeably angry but completely controlled. Molly had watched the exchange, fascinated by the raw current of power that seemed to ripple just beneath the surface of Sam’s facade. She had a feeling that if he ever released it, it would have the effect of a volcano. “It was a stupid thing to do,” she continued. “And for what it’s worth, I never intended it to actually run in the paper. I was angry at you on Friday.”
She paused, hoping he’d at least acknowledge her with a tilt of his head or a slight compression of his firm mouth. Anything. He sat statue-still. Molly waded out a little deeper. “When you wouldn’t listen to me about the transportation hub story, I lost my temper.” An understatement, she knew. She’d lost her cool in the editorial meeting when he’d refused to explore the validity of the story in favor of a community action piece he’d assigned to another writer. The depth of her reaction had surprised Molly herself, but not when she weighed it against the pressure of dealing with his heavy-handed management for the past six weeks. By Friday afternoon, she’d had all she could take. She’d exploded in a fit of temper that had left no doubt about the extent of her frustration. Sam had waited out her tirade in silence, then infuriated her by simply ignoring the outburst and continuing with his elaboration on the article he’d assigned.
Furious, Molly had left the meeting with a pounding headache and a hammering pulse. She couldn’t decide whether she was angrier with him for his condescending attitude, or with herself for letting him get to her.
Molly shook her head and shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. Sam still said nothing. He wasn’t going to make this easy for her. He had no reason to, she thought grimly. She’d brought this on herself. “Regardless,” she said wearily, “running the ad was irresponsible and unprofessional. I’m sure it made you uncomfortable, and if you want to fire me for it, then I understand. I can have my desk cleaned out by the end of the day.”
An uncomfortable silence began to spin its web in the stillness of his office. Molly fought the urge to fill the void. Finally, when her nerves were practically screaming for relief, he blinked. “Finished?” he asked softly.
She nodded. “Um, yes.”
“Good. Sit down.”
She didn’t have the energy to decide whether or not the proprietary command annoyed her. She dropped gratefully into the leather chair. He reached for his briefcase. The sound of the locks snapping open seemed unnaturally loud in the stillness of his office. Sam pulled the classified section from the briefcase and flipped it onto his desk.
Molly closed her eyes and waited for humiliation.
“I had no idea you were quite this—eloquent.”
He couldn’t possibly be teasing her. Could he? Her eyes popped open. “I minored in creative writing in college.”
“It shows.” He glanced at the newspaper. “Arbitrary decisions,” he read. He captured her gaze. “They aren’t arbitrary.”
Dear God. He was teasing her. “Er—”
“Periodic tantrums?” he continued, looking at the ad once more. “Smugness? I am never smug.”
The audacity of the statement made her mouth drop. “You have got to be kidding.”
She had been prepared for a blistering lecture and a dismissal. The hint of humor in his tone had her so off-guard that she found herself uncharacteristically speechless. Sam pushed the paper aside and regarded her with his frank, disarming stare. “What the hell were you thinking, Molly?”
The question was soft, and strangely curious. There was no demand in it. That had to be the reason why the explanation came so readily to her lips. “I—it’s silly,” she admitted. “Actually, it’s worse than silly. It’s humiliating and stupid.” She paused while her sense of justice convinced her pride that she owed Sam this explanation. “It was just a diversion that my friend JoAnna and I used in college—to de-stress and vent our frustrations. The two of us ran the university paper. One end-of-the-week challenge was to fill all the little spaces where the stories ran short.”
“Stringing,” he stated.
“Sort of. Stringers use actual material. We just made up ads. You know—stuff like, ‘for the secrets of the ancients, send one dollar to the following P.O. Box.”’
Sam nodded. “Most college papers have those.”
“And when people particularly annoyed us, we wrote ads about them.”
“Personal ads,” he guessed.
“Yes. It helped blow off steam.” She frowned as she recalled her mood from Friday afternoon. “After the editorial meeting—I was so angry at you.”
“You thought I shot down your article concept.”
“You did—”
“I didn’t. I just wasn’t finished with the piece we were already discussing. You have a habit of not letting me finish.”
Molly’s head started to ache. The conversation seemed almost surreal. For six weeks, she had wanted to strangle this man. He’d walked into the Payne Sentinel and taken over with the high-handedness of an Eastern potentate. While everyone knew the Sentinel was struggling financially, no one had suspected the extent of the trouble until Carl Morgan, the Sentinel’s owner, brought in Sam Reed to bail them out. He was part of Reed Enterprises’ vast publishing machine, and he had a reputation for taking small-market publications and folding them into large distribution conglomerates.
Unpredictable by reputation, Sam was the illegitimate son of publishing legend Edward Reed. Before his death, the old man had controlled a staggering fifteen percent of the daily periodicals in the United States. Sam had entered the Reed empire at age nine when, in a spectacularly publicized incident, his mother had announced to a press hungry for Edward Reed’s humiliation, that Sam was his child. Her emotional statement had laid out details of a month-long affair. She’d never told Edward of the child, she’d claimed, because she feared his retribution. Economic hardship and a guilty conscience had finally driven her to reveal the truth.
With his notorious élan, Edward had called her bluff. He’d acknowledged Sam as his son and taken him to live in the Reed household. The press, deprived of a longed-for spectacle, had quickly lost interest. Sam, and Edward’s legitimate son, Ben Reed, had inherited Reed Publishing when Edward died fifteen years later. Together, the two men had built the company from a feared bully into an admired success. Ben Reed, sources said, was the methodical one on the team. He did the planning while his brother was the maverick who took the risks and turned would-be failures into success stories.
And Molly didn’t like his vision for the Sentinel.
They’d clashed immediately. He was slowly doing away with the paper’s more serious content and expanding its community focus. Soon, she feared, the Sentinel would be nothing more than a coupon clipper.
She’d worked at the Sentinel since she’d been old enough
for her first paper route. Nobody knew the paper, or its subscribers, she figured, as well as she did. But Sam had turned down every suggestion she’d made. He’d locked himself away in this office, making it clear to the staff that they could do his bidding or quit. Editorial meetings had turned into sparring matches, where Molly stood up to him and he shot her down.
In the six weeks since Carl had introduced him as the man who was going to save the Sentinel, Molly had yet to see him show a human side. Until now. When he should be furious. When she’d finally given him the right to be furious. She couldn’t wait to find out what her sisters would say about this.
“Mr. Reed—” she began.
He held up a hand. It wasn’t the manicured, soft-looking hand of an idle businessman, she noted with some fascination. He had calluses on his palm, and new-looking scrapes that skimmed the edge of his blunt fingers. How was it that she’d never noticed his hands before? “Like now,” he said. “I’m not finished telling you why I cut you off about that story.”
Molly frowned. He shook his head. She swore the sparkle was back in his eyes, turning the steel color a softer shade of gray. “I bug the hell out of you,” he said, “don’t I?”
“Yes.”
The flat response made him laugh. The rich laugh surprised her. It came easily and sounded well-used. Where, she wondered, was the Sam Reed she’d been sparring with in editorial meetings? He steepled his hands beneath his chin and gave her a dry look. “So you made me the victim of a personal ad to your friend?”
Molly nodded. “JoAnna called on Friday afternoon. She usually does. It’s a ritual we’ve had since we graduated.” If a person could die from embarrassment, Molly figured, she would become an obituary at any moment. In hindsight, it all seemed extremely juvenile. Even trying to explain it only seemed to make it worse, but her sense of honor demanded that she take the licks. “I was angry. I vented. JoAnna was having a lousy day, too. She reminded me of the game. I wrote the ad and e-mailed it to her. I thought it would make her laugh. I forgot to clear it from my screen before I left for the night.”
“And the stringer found it and diligently put it into copy by the Saturday-morning deadline for today’s personals,” he guessed.
“Yes.” Molly rubbed her palms on the rough fabric of her jeans. “I didn’t know until this morning.”
“Imagine my surprise.”
There it was again, that slight thread of humor in his tone. Molly grimaced. “I was mortified. I’m sure it was worse for you. I—it was childish and irresponsible. There’s nothing I could say that would adequately apologize.”
He picked up the unopened envelope that held her resignation. “So you came in prepared to quit?”
“It seemed like the most honorable thing to do.”
He nodded, his expression thoughtful. With a quick twist of his wrist, he tore the envelope in two and tossed it into his trash can. “Think of something else.”
Molly stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“Think of something else. You’re the best journalist this paper has. You should probably be working in a bigger market—”
“I don’t want to work in a bigger market.”
“Let me finish, Molly,” he said, and damned if his lips didn’t twitch into a half smile. “You should probably be working in a larger market, but you decided to stay here. Why?”
“It’s my home.” She shrugged. “My family lives here. I’ve worked for the Sentinel since I was eleven years old.”
“Paper route?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “First job?”
“If you don’t count weeding Mrs. Ellerby’s vegetable garden.”
“That was seasonal work. It’s different.”
Molly had no response to that, so she simply watched him. The collar of his white shirt lay in stark contrast to the bronzed column of his throat. Was it her imagination, or was his tan deeper this morning than it had been on Friday? She simply couldn’t picture him doing anything as mundane or sedentary as strolling along the beach at Martha’s Vineyard. She thought about the scrape she’d seen on his fingers and could easily imagine him, shirtless, laboring under the afternoon sun. Maybe on a sailboat, though even that seemed too much like recreation. He leaned back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head. “My first job was a paper route. I liked the way the papers smelled when I picked them up.”
The admission surprised her, and yet, it didn’t. Edward Reed’s son probably wouldn’t have needed a paper route for spending money. The renowned media mogul could well afford to give his son a generous allowance. Though few people in the industry were unaware that Sam was Reed’s illegitimate son, Reed had made his acceptance of the child abundantly clear. But, the same thing that told her he didn’t spend weekends at the beach said he hadn’t spent his childhood living on his father’s money. “Did you have to roll and band them for delivery when you picked them up, or did they come that way?”
“I did it,” he said with a slight nod. “Kids today have it easy. They get those plastic bags.”
“Rolling’s half the skill,” she concurred. “If you don’t tuck the edges, you can’t toss the paper right.”
“Comes unwrapped in midair.”
“Plus you get paper cuts when you pull ’em from the bag.”
He smiled. It was dazzling. Molly couldn’t ever recall seeing him smile so naturally. This was a smile straight from a remembered pleasure. Her heart skipped a beat. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. The observation surprised her. The slight lines suggested that his smile, like his laugh, was something he used often. “The day I finally mastered the doormat toss onto old man Greely’s porch—” he shrugged “—I felt like Nolan Ryan pitching a no hitter.” The faraway look left his eyes as he met her gaze again. “He had shrubs. Boxwoods. They blocked the sidewalk.”
Molly nodded. “I had a house like that. You had to float the paper over the shrubs so it landed on the mat.”
“Um. And Greely had a covered porch. So the paper had to go between the roof of the porch and the boxwoods and land on the mat—”
They said in unison, “Without hitting the door.”
Molly laughed. “I’m impressed. I was pretty good, but not that good.”
“I practiced for weeks.”
“I hope he tipped well.”
“I don’t think I ever got a tip out of the man. But he didn’t yell at me for hitting his door either. And when the paper I worked for threatened to take away my route and consolidate it into truck delivery, he went to the circulation director and saved my job. I never knew what he told that guy, but I kept the route until I graduated from high school.” He shook his head. “The day I graduated, Fred Greely sent me a check for a hundred dollars.”
Molly found her first smile of the morning. “No wonder you love the newspaper business.”
“Just like you?” he asked softly.
She hesitated. “Yes. Just like me.”
“I thought so. So find something else. You can’t quit.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said carefully.
Sam pushed the paper aside and folded his hands on his desk. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Since when do you ask me if you can make a suggestion?” she quipped.
Another slight smile. The dent—dare she call it a dimple—in his left cheek deepened when he smiled. And that dimple, that infuriatingly devilish dimple, did something to his face that made her stop breathing.
Oh, dear Lord, she thought, as she felt the flutter in the pit of her stomach, and recognized the way her lungs constricted. It can’t be. It can’t and must not be. But even as she struggled for breath and pressed a hand to her belly, she knew the signs. They were horrifying and impossible evidence that she found the man attractive. Her sisters had been telling her for weeks that the animosity she felt toward him was one step away from passion. She’d denied it. Vehemently. Too vehemently. With the sun glinting on his dark hair, an
d his damned dimple making her body temperature notch up, she had to fight the urge to bury her face in her hands.
Not again, she told herself fiercely. And for God’s sake not now. For years, she’d known that she had a chronic habit of falling for unsuitable men. With the same reckless abandon she lived life, she’d tumbled headfirst into relationships. Her sisters had been warning her for years. If they found out she’d fallen for Sam Reed, she’d never hear the end of it. Blissfully, Sam seemed unaware of her momentary lapse into insanity. He chuckled softly at her quip, and the sound made her stomach flip-flop. “Oh, no,” Molly muttered beneath her breath.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she assured him, fiercely demanding that her nerves quiet down. “You were saying?” she asked with a feeling of dread.
He looked at her curiously but continued, “I was saying that I’d like to offer you a way to make reparations for this—indiscretion.”
“What do you want?” she asked warily. She had a sinking feeling that whatever it was, it would be far worse than losing her job.
“I want you to have dinner with me.”
Chapter Two
She was sputtering. There wasn’t any other way to describe it, he thought, fascinated. Sam Reed was fairly certain he’d never seen a woman sputter. He watched her closely as she struggled for breath. “Dinner? With you? You mean, like a date?”
He was screwing this up, he thought wearily. No big surprise there. How he managed to succeed in business and fail so spectacularly at anything requiring tact, he hadn’t a clue. He’d obviously inherited the trait from his father. “Like a date,” he affirmed carefully, wondering why the word seemed so old-fashioned and quaint. He frequently took women to social events. He’d had his share of lovers. But he hadn’t “dated” since high school. “Don’t you have them?” She drew her eyebrows together in a sharp frown. Was baffled or just annoyed.
“Excuse me?”
He didn’t think he was imagining the way the spray of freckles on her nose had blended with the heightening color in her face. From the day he’d met her, he’d found Molly Flynn’s freckles fascinating. They formed a steady trail, which disappeared beneath the collar of her sweatshirt. The thought of following that line of freckles to its end made his mouth water—that and her maple-leaf–red hair and her eyes the color of summer clover. Nothing about Molly Flynn was bland. She had vibrancy and life—something Sam had begun to fear he himself was missing.