Love. Local. Latebreaking.: Book 1 in the newsroom romance series

by H. Laurence Lareau

  Karli’s expression changed from one of amusement to one of serious, if slightly inebriated, inquiry. Her fourth drink was now half-empty. “But doesn’t that become pandering right away?” she asked. “If we use emotional impact as our yardstick, doesn’t the news become an endless cycle of kitten-and-baby videos?”

  “Kittens?” Mary Rose asked loudly. “If I want impact, I want to see stories about Jake and the Kissing. Update that story, Karli.” Mary Rose took a languorous drink from her beer, then looked at Karli out of the corners of her eyes as she licked foam slowly from her upper lip, her tongue piercing flashing brightly. Karli looked down at the drink she held in her lap, but not before her cheeks showed red.

  “I didn’t say emotional effect was the only metric,” Bailey-as-Bielfeldt intervened with a placating raised hand. “I’m just suggesting that good editorial judgment and reporting requires including emotional content. Say a plant is closing and a community will lose 600 jobs. The economic impact is vitally important, yes, and that’s the story that we’re all ready to report. But it isn’t hard to find sources who say that self-esteem and marriages and child-rearing and all kinds of other things are wrapped up in having a solid job.”

  “Okay,” Karli conceded, again engaged with the earnestness that comes with just about enough alcohol and as though Bailey really were the consultant. “Some of that, yes. But you know lots of news directors will say stories on emotional effects are puff pieces or hand-wringing or whatever. They aren’t necessarily going to advance my career, in other words.”

  “My career, my career,” Mary Rose mocked. “Haven’t you got anything better to talk about?” She waggled her eyebrows first to Karli and then at Bailey. “The inspiration stuff is boring. And so is your career. Let’s talk about sex.”

  Karli looked desperately at Bailey, hoping to avoid that conversation. “So, Understandable and Emotional we’ve got. What does he have to say about Memorable?”

  Bailey shrugged. “He doesn’t have much to add there. Just that memorable things come in threes. That’s about it.”

  “Threesomes?” Mary Rose shrieked. “You two have been holding out on me!”

  Karli was appalled that so many eyes in the bar had turned their way in response to Mary Rose’s exclamation. “We did NOT have a threesome, Mary Rose,” she said in her best shushing tone. “It was just the two of us.”

  Mary Rose ducked her head down secretively, and Bailey eagerly returned to her seat and leaned in toward Karli. “Two of you is plenty,” Mary Rose blurted. “Girl, we need details. FULL details. Grooming and acts and dimensions and everything.”

  “And when did all this go down?” Bailey asked. “We haven’t been out for drinks in forever.”

  “We didn’t have sex, okay?” Karli’s blush felt like it covered her whole body. “We just had another kiss.” She caught herself and added, “Well, we had a few more kisses. But that’s it.”

  Mary Rose’s face looked suddenly downcast. “How come you run warm-up laps and never do the race? This is frustrating as hell, girl. I don’t know about you, but I want more!”

  There was a pause as Karli tried to figure out what to tell her friends. And as she thought about it, she recalled the heat and passion of the kiss in Jake’s gallery. Just remembering the sensations made her pulse race and tightened the coiled energy inside her. The tingling between her legs confirmed that she wanted more, too. A lot more. Soon.

  “Annnnd?” Bailey stretched the single syllable out impatiently.

  Karli snapped out of her hormonal reverie and looked back to her friends. “It turns out that he is a karate instructor,” she said. Then she drained her glass and gestured for more.

  “What?” Bailey was incredulous.

  “Of course he is,” Mary Rose added. “But I didn’t realize that was a necessary relationship qualification for you. Do you only shag karate guys?”

  “No!” Karli answered. “I don’t have sex with karate guys!”

  “So why is karate a good thing, then?” Bailey asked, genuinely confused.

  “Because that means he wasn’t sleeping with Sophia.”

  “What?” said Bailey. Her confusion showed all over her face.

  Mary Rose, who was also confused, didn’t let her confusion slow her down. “That bitch,” she said, “had better not be fucking Jake, or I would have to hate him for being stupid enough to let her go there.”

  “Well, I thought she was, because of the pajamas,” Karli said. “But the karate thing—really who even has one of those?—cleared that all up.” She concluded with a glowing smile, her explanation complete.

  “Um, Karli, I don’t think you need any more to drink,” Mary Rose said. “Or maybe you need a lot more. Come to think of it, that always makes for a better story. Let’s have more.” She clapped her hands together and rubbed them in anticipation, then raised a hand to catch the bartender’s attention and gestured for a new round.

  Bailey’s frustrated glare conveyed to Karli that her explanation had somehow fallen short of expectations. “So I was pissed because he was sleeping with her after he kissed me on the bridge. . .”

  “What bridge?” Bailey was interested but genuinely confused by now, and it showed in her tone and face.

  “Ooh, I love stories with trolls,” cried Mary Rose.

  “You know, the covered bridge outside of Winterset,” Karli said. “Where the book is set and where they did the movie.”

  “WHAT?” Bailey nearly shrieked. “He took you to a covered bridge in Madison County and kissed you there? That is probably the most romantic thing ever!”

  “Well, he didn’t kiss me,” Karli said. “At least, not at first. I sort of started with the kissing. Then he kissed me back. Really well.” Again, Karli’s memory transported her to a moment of intense passion. Again, she felt the coiled tension inside of her—the aching wetness between her legs, the tightened flesh of her nipples—crying out for release. Again, she lost the thread of the conversation.

  “On a covered bridge, no less.” Bailey sighed wistfully.

  “Right, so you kissed on a bridge. How far did you go?” Mary Rose asked.

  Karli turned her eyes back to her friends and brought them back into focus. “We kissed there, and then I thought I heard him and Sophia talking about sleeping together, and that wasn’t good.”

  “Yeah, but because he’s a karate instructor he didn’t sleep with her, right?” Mary Rose said. “I suppose that’s like a self-defense thing, not sleeping with the super-bitch?”

  “So anyway, he didn’t, and then he took me up into his apartment-studio-thing and explained about the karate—which I still don’t get because grown-ups don’t do karate really, do they?—and then I saw the pictures he took of me and it was all sexy and then I kissed him again and he kissed me back again and then we should have done it but he had this huge party to be at and he couldn’t even find a free bed in his own place so we couldn’t do it.” Karli finished breathlessly and looked for confirmation that she had spelled it all out in satisfactory detail for her curious friends. Somewhat puzzled yet smiling faces met her searching look. “So that’s it. Kissing and that’s all.”

  Scott Winstead, the darkly handsome weekend sports anchor, suddenly appeared in their midst. “Ladies, we need your company urgently,” he said, gesturing to the table where Buzz Czielsa, the clean-cut and blondely athletic main sports anchor sat with director Chuck Teros. Noticing Scott’s gesture, the boys waved cheerfully and even stood to pull out chairs where the women could sit.

  “Crap, Scott, it was just getting good over here, and now you’ve spoiled it!” Mary Rose complained, rising from her chair and grabbing her drink. Bailey and Karli took her cue and began to move across the bar.

  “We really ought to sit with the guys once in a while,” Bailey acknowledged, taking Karli by the arm and steering her toward the table. “They’re complete hounds, but they can be fun.”

  Sitting down at the table, Karli realized that she’d
never spent any time with the sports team. Everybody said they were the funniest people in the station, and there was no denying that they were very handsome.

  Scott had the café au lait complexion that made heritage an ethnic mystery. He had a kind of Latino air about him—maybe Brazilian or something, Karli thought, though his name was solidly none-of-the-above. Boy oh boy, does he ever wear strong cologne! At least it’s a relatively classy scent.

  Buzz was as wholesomely Iowan as could be: white-blonde close-cut hair, and he still rocked the physique of the Division I discus competitor he had been in college. Charlie Teros, the director, looked like a teenager next to the two specimens though he was probably ten years older. Charlie was sandy-haired, small, slight, and somewhat fidgety. He wore a very ‘80s mustache, perhaps to emphasize that he, too, was masculine, even in the hyper-manly company he kept.

  As the seating was arranged, boy-girl, boy-girl, Buzz called the cocktail server over and ordered a round for everyone. Karli protested that she’d had enough and would be perfectly happy with a diet Mountain Dew, but Buzz insisted. And so Karli found herself with yet another fresh drink in front of her. She fished around in her purse, came up with her keychain, and demanded, “Who is going to take these from me so I don’t drive tonight?”

  Scott reached over to gently take her keys, wafting yet another cloud of his scent over her. “I’m still on my first drink, Karli, so I will stop now and be your designated driver,” he said.

  Buzz clapped him on the back and bellowed, “What we have here, my friends, is a genuine knight in shining armor. What do you think about that?”

  “I think I’ll have another drink,” Mary Rose said, tilting back a nearly full beer and draining it in effortless chugs.

  “Since Karli was my ride here, Scott, you now get to take TWO amazing women to their respective homes tonight.”

  If he was disappointed at Mary Rose’s self-invitation, Scott showed no sign. He continued to beam his sparkling white smile impartially around the table as he slipped Karli’s keys into his pocket.

  Buzz, Chuck, and Scott were having an impassioned debate regarding the merits of the Iowa Hawkeyes and Iowa State Cyclones basketball teams. Of course, impassioned is the only kind of debate intrastate rivalries permit.

  As they leaned into the table to pursue their good-natured and long-standing disagreements about Iowa’s college basketball programs, Mary Rose leaned back in her chair and across to Karli. “Aren’t you just ecstatic we left our great seats to come over here and listen to sports shit?”

  Karli, her voice slurring noticeably and quite a bit louder than she had intended her effort at a stage whisper to be, responded, “I suppose they could be talking about muscle cars or something even worse. But you’re right. How long do we have to stay?”

  Bailey got up and walked over to sit behind Buzz in a chair from the next table. “So they invite us over to appeal to our love of sports debate? Really?”

  Chuck had been sitting next to Bailey and watched her progress around the table with a hound-dog droop to his eyes. “C’mon guys,” he called to Buzz and Scott, “the three most beautiful women in Polk County joined us and you’ve rubbed them wrong in under three minutes!”

  Buzz and Scott snapped their heads back and forth around the table, observing exactly what Chuck had just described. They immediately fell all over themselves begging the women’s pardon, apologizing for boring shop talk and so on.

  “Hey,” Mary Rose said, directing a challenging look at Chuck. “You owe Bailey and Karli here an apology. They’re the two most beautiful women in Iowa, not just the Des Moines metro.”

  “I’ll go farther than that,” Chuck said with goopy sincerity. “Karli and Bailey are the two most beautiful women in the whole Midwest.” And he made not-entirely-sober puppy-dog eyes at each of them, not bothering to hide the keen, if somewhat indiscriminate crush he had on both after spending large parts of every work day with their faces filling the control room monitors that constituted nearly his entire view of the world.

  “There’s no doubt,” said Scott smoothly, “that you’re all three the most beautiful women in this bar.” He raised his glass ceremonially and said, “Gentlemen, let us toast the feminine magnificence that graces our table this evening. These women are, in the very finest sense of each term, Understandable, Memorable, and Emotionally irresistible. In short, Inspirational.”

  Buzz and Chuck erupted in laughter. “To the consultant-approved news faces!” Buzz cried, taking a huge drink. His laughter fading, Chuck reverted to the expression he usually wore with Karli and Bailey—sincere and smitten.

  “I’d dump my beer on you jerks,” said Mary Rose, gulping the last half of her drink, “if I wasn’t putting it to a better use. Kiss my inspirational ass.”

  She stood up onto the seat of her chair—an unusual sight for the normally stolid and upscale Savery hotel—stuck her butt out and slid the waist of her jeans down just far enough to reveal the T-shaped top of her black thong. Buzz leapt from his chair as soon as he saw what Mary Rose was doing, grabbed her hips and planted a loud smooch hard on the right back pocket of her jeans. Chuck and Scott emptied their hands to applaud, and Mary Rose twisted, bent slightly at the knees, and raised a mock-startled hand to her mouth as she gave her backside an extra little waggle, Betty Boop-style.

  Just as the noise died down and Mary Rose returned to her seat, Karli hiccuped. Loudly. And then her face fell into a half-lidded generalized grin, directed at nobody in particular. She reached for her drink, but Bailey snatched it away. “Oh no you don’t,” she chided gently. “You’ve had plenty enough, Karli. Time to go nighty-night.”

  “I wanna smooch Mary Rose’s butt, too,” Karli complained.

  “You’re darn right you do,” Mary Rose said, moving her grin from Buzz to Karli. “Let’s get in the car first though, okay?”

  “I’d recommend it,” Buzz chortled. “That’s a world-class backside.” He looked at Mary Rose with a lascivious sparkle in his eyes.

  Scott rose grandly and gestured toward the exit. Mary Rose slid an arm around Karli to get her up and moving. Karli looked drowsily at her and leaned to whisper in her ear, “I want to smooch your butt because it’s so cute. You have a really cute butt, you know? And that thong is really sexy.” She finished with a loud hiccup.

  Mary Rose laughed and urged the off-balance Karli along towards the exit with a minimum of stumbling.

  Scott held the door for them and then walked ahead to his car, a low-slung Volkswagen CC sedan. He opened the front passenger door and Mary Rose helped Karli slide in, then Mary Rose got in the back seat. Scott patiently got both addresses and drove away.

  “Mary Rose, you’re closer, so I’ll drop you off first, okay?”

  “No!” Karli said. “I haven’t kissed her sexy little bubble butt yet!”

  “Karli, you don’t need to kiss my butt tonight,” Mary Rose said, reaching up to pat Karli’s shoulder. “We can save that for next time, okay?”

  Karli turned around in her seat, her voice slurred and her gestures big and sort of vague. “Okay, but you need to tell me how to be sexy. Because you’re good at that, and all I do is get all worked up and then feel like I have to do it RIGHT NOW. Like, right now, that’s how I’m feeling. Like I want to do it right now. You know that feeling?”

  Mary Rose laughed again as she continued to pat Karli’s shoulder. “You’re doing just fine on the sexy thing, Karli. Dudes dig you like crazy.”

  “No, they don’t,” Karli began to transition to the tearful phase of intoxication. “They think I’m just a career bitch who has to be on TV because she has daddy issues. That’s what Jake said. There’s nothing sexy about me.”

  “Scott, back me up here,” Mary Rose said. “Isn’t Karli a hottie?”

  “Heck, yeah!” Scott cried without hesitation. “I’ve thought so since her first day at the station. She’s rockin!”

  “There you go, Karli—dudes think you’re hot. If there’s ev
er been a dude’s dude, it’s Scott.”

  “That’s me,” Scott said beaming his bright smile back at Mary Rose and then Karli. “All man, all the time.” As he spoke, he pulled over in front of Mary Rose’s apartment building. “And here we are, Ms. Mayer. Do you need me to walk you to the door?”

  “Don’t get carried away, Prince Valiant,” Mary Rose replied, leaving the car. “I can make it inside fine. Just promise me you won’t go from knight in shining armor to retard in tin foil, okay?”

  “Of course he’ll take care of me, Mary Rose!” Karli called back through the open rear door. “He’s a dude’s dude and I’m sexy!”

  Scott grinned at Mary Rose’s face looking back in through her door, gave a one-shoulder shrug, and put the car back into gear. Mary Rose closed the door and stood on the curb, watching the car recede from view.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Three NewsFirst Christmas Party

  Holiday Inn, West Des Moines

  Friday, December 20

  Karli watched the wind whisk the steam of her breath away from the hood of the heavy coat she’d worn to keep the wind out. The coat resembled a giant down pillow more than anything else. It was certainly not glamorous. She had reasoned that, although this party was supposed to be a formal occasion, the formal part didn’t apply until she was inside and at the party. Her trek across the gigantic parking lot convinced her she had made the right choice. Although 24 degrees was practically balmy for a Des Moines winter day, the wind and the little black dress underneath her huge coat did not promise to play well together.

  Vince was shivering around a cigarette outside the hotel’s entrance, wearing no overcoat on top of his tuxedo. As Karli came close, he took his last drag, stubbed out his smoke and dropped the butt into the ashtray. He smiled broadly at Karli and offered her his arm to go into the lobby. “Glad to see you here finally, kid,” he rasped. “So far it’s just been sales and the traffic department that schedules everything to hit the air except news. The sales crew can’t quit pressing the meaningless small talk and crappy jokes, and the traffic people only talk to one another around giant mouths-full of chow. You’d think they never ate at home.”