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

by H. Laurence Lareau

  “So why are we going in, then?” Karli asked with a chuckle at his descriptions of station personnel from other departments.

  “We aren’t, kid,” he said. “We’re going to the bar. The drinks aren’t free there, but the company is a lot better.” And saying this, he guided Karli to the Blue Bar in the steakhouse located within the hotel building. The host took her coat, revealing her Tadashi Shoji lace-inset black dress and walked them through a haze of delicious surf-and-turf smells and on into the bar. Vince helped Karli into her tall bar stool and then climbed onto his own next to her. He gave her an appreciative, raised-eyebrow look as he settled into his seat. “You certainly got the dress-up part of the memo, didn’t you?”

  Karli was pleased and surprised at Vince’s uncharacteristic show of appreciation. Feeling a slight blush, she played along, making a show of crossing her legs and displaying her Jimmy Choo Alias lacy pumps. “Vince, I didn’t think you ever noticed,” she said, very nearly winking at her assignment editor.

  The bartender came and took their orders for Karli’s usual amaretto stone sour, Vince’s dry gin martini, and the roasted ravioli appetizer. After he left, Vince turned back to Karli. “Kid, I’m an old guy, but I’m not blind,” he said through a genuine smile. “I’m not dumb, either. You didn’t wear that dress so old guys would leer at you. And you sure didn’t wear it to impress the station management or the consultant.”

  He didn’t ask a question, but Karli recognized the veteran journalist’s interviewing technique of leaving a silent space to be filled. Most people feel obligated to fill the void with something, so they just start in talking without giving it much thought. She found the silence nearly irresistible herself. “You know us reporters, Vince. We love to look good any time there’s somebody to pay attention.”

  “So what time is Jake supposed to get here?” Vince asked.

  Karli took her iPhone from her clutch and checked the time. “It’s about 6:40 now, so he should be here in about 20 minutes.” Finishing, she looked up and found Vince nodding and grinning with a gotcha look of triumph.

  “You’d better let him know you’re in here, then, don’t you think?” he asked. “We wouldn’t want him heading to the big, boring room instead of feasting his eyes here, right?”

  Karli blushed, pursed her lips to the side in Olympic not impressed fashion, and slid her phone back into her purse. “You of all people should know that he ignores his cell phone pretty much all the time, Vince. Heck, he usually doesn’t even know where it is,” she said. Then realizing that she’d shown that she knew some of Jake’s intimate details, she tried to brush off the slip. “If he wants to find us, he will.”

  “Oh, he’s motivated to look hard,” Vince grinned, raising his martini glass to Karli in an unspoken toast. “I’d like to know what he’s going to find.” His raised eyebrows emphasized the implicit question.

  “Hey, Vince!” called a resonant female voice. “Karli.”

  Karli looked up with a cringing feeling to find Sophia Refai looking deliberately away from her and raising her chin imperiously toward the bartender. “Hey, Sophia,” she muttered, hearing Vince’s more good-mannered greeting rising over her voice. Her attention was jarred suddenly away from Vince’s voice as she noticed that the giant with the deep baritone and the product-laden hair was none other than Donald Harris, the distinctively gap-toothed features reporter from the perennial second-place newsroom. Karli was not surprised to see his arm reaching around Sophia’s waist to a spot just shy of inappropriately low on Sophia’s hip.

  He was a notorious womanizer, one who took full advantage of his television-personality status to sweep essentially anything with two X chromosomes into his bed.

  Sophia isn’t interested in him, Karli thought to herself. She’s interested in shocking the entire station by bringing one of the competition to our party.

  And Karli saw Sophia discreetly checking in the mirror behind the bar. A knot of station employees hesitated at the bar’s threshold, obviously noticing and commenting on Sophia’s date.

  Karli sighed with relief that she wouldn’t be required to make Christmas-y small talk with Sophia, who obviously had other matters to consider. The relief even greater in light of Sophia’s ongoing dislike for Karli. It had begun with the drug bust, but it was stronger and more obvious ever since she and Jake had, however quietly, become an actual couple.

  Karli’s attention was drawn away from the deliberate scandal as Margie Green’s figure emerged from the cluster at the doorway and headed straight toward her. The community relations personality had already had a couple drinks, making her effusive personality crowd even closer than usual. As she drew close, Karli felt herself enveloped in a nearly visible cloud of Margie’s liberally applied perfume and jingling costume jewelry. Margie’s heavily made-up face shone with joy and affection for every person she met, and Karli found her eccentricity charming rather than off-putting. Margie extended both of her hands, palms down and many flashy rings up, to grasp Karli’s and pull her into a two-cheek kiss of greeting. Pushing herself away from Karli after the quick pecks, Margie gave her an appraising look.

  “You are just the picture of a sleek and chic holiday party girl, Karli,” she fairly gasped. “And those shoes! You could take the magazine covers by storm in those!” Margie’s 60 or so year-old figure was tightly sheathed in a quirky, brightly colored dress that contrasted starkly with the red-and-green or little black dresses Karli thought appropriate to an evening Christmas party.

  “Margie, you’re too much,” Karli said. “What’s the party got for us tonight?”

  “Of course Robert from sales made his infamous reindeer punch. Be careful of that stuff, honey!” Margie leaned in, a conspiratorial look on her face and a strong scent of the punch’s main ingredient gusting along with her exclamation. “He has some voodoo secret to make that stuff taste like there’s not a drop of the booze in it, but every year it makes a lot of people very drunk and very indiscreet. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t just an excuse for people to do what they really want to do but can’t get away with.” Margie’s broad wink sent Karli into a quick spasm of poorly suppressed laughter.

  “What would you like to have an excuse for?” Karli asked, trying to match Margie’s obvious relish for the risqué.

  “Oh, well, I think you already get to do what every girl wants to get away with, don’t you?” The suggestive twinkle in Margie’s eye and the gentle slap-and-caress on her thigh left Karli in no doubt that Margie was talking about sex—and specifically sex with Jake. The innuendo raised a quick heat in Karli’s cheeks, which only made Margie’s beaming smile broader.

  Larry Robinson, one of the station’s most eager sales personnel, leaned into the conversation abruptly.

  His glassy grin and slightly swaying posture hinted that the highball in his hand was likely the fourth or fifth in a relatively short time. “You’ve got those sticky feet, don’t you Karli?” he fairly yelled. When Karli looked at him in puzzlement, he elaborated: “You know, you’re from Tar Heel country, right? Gotta watch out for those sticky-foot basketball players! They’ll beat you every time, right?”

  Karli tried not to roll her eyes and felt herself failing. “Larry, I’m from South Carolina,” she answered. “The Tar Heels are North Carolina.”

  “Oh,” Larry’s bonhomie stalled abruptly at learning a fact known universally to the unintoxicated. “Well, don’t put your sticky feet into that crazy Crimson Tide, right?” And with a firm nod indicating that he had managed to cover every base to his complete satisfaction, he slid across the room to his next encounter, leaving Margie and Karli to chuckle at his receding back.

  “He needs an excuse for that,” Karli muttered into Margie’s ear, “but it probably isn’t something he wanted to cross off his bucket list.”

  Karli caught a glimpse of Vince signing a check, tucking it back into the receipt book, and pulling the card from its little slot to return it to his wallet. He stood up from his bar s
tool, placed a light hand on Karli’s shoulder, and rasped, “She’s gone, but we’d better head to the party proper. This room is full of the folks we came here to avoid.”

  Margie’s eyebrows rose abruptly as she mouthed a silent, “Sophia?” to Karli, who gave a small nod in return. The three of them picked up their unfinished drinks and moved through the crowd and on into the ballroom where the actual party was set up. A projector filled a screen big enough for a movie theater with a giant image of the station’s call letters and the Three NewsFirst logo. Sterno-heated chafing dishes filled with miniature wieners, Swedish meatballs, bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, and tiny pizza puffs stood along one wall. Along the facing wall, a crush of station employees, raising and nearly sloshing cups filled with what looked like red Kool-Aid, dressed in t-shirts and jeans to business suits and everything in between, parted enough to permit only glimpses of three enormous punch bowls.

  Margie and Vince steered a middle course toward the few figures that moved among the round, white-clothed tables that filled the room’s cavernous center. Before they were able to pick an empty table, John Bielfeldt gestured to them with a somewhat vague wave of his brimful cup of Reindeer Punch. “Yuletide greetings!” he called, beckoning them to his table. Vince looked quickly around the room, Karli assumed for an excuse to sit anywhere else. She leaned forward to whisper in his ear, “It’s okay, Vince. He can’t possibly destroy our evening all by himself, can he?”

  Vince shrugged and moved to the chair farthest from the consultant, pulling out the one next to it for Karli. Margie saw the gallant gesture, smiled broadly at Vince, and stepped nimbly in front of Karli to take the seat. Karli beamed over her seating figure at Vince, gave him a big wink, and drew out a chair for herself next to Margie’s.

  No sooner had she scooted in to the table than Margie turned to her with a salacious grin. “See that Hailey over there—that new production assistant?” She pointed with her forehead at a young, coltishly slender blonde standing at the middle punch bowl in a pair of jeans and a bright red Christmas sweater that emphasized curves that were, at least on her remarkably slender frame, distinctly prominent.

  After Karli indicated that, yes, she saw her, Margie leaned in for a long-distance whisper. “If you had legs like that, wouldn’t you be wearing a skirt to a party like this? Well, just watch how she walks, and I’ll tell you something that will knock your socks off.”

  Luckily the girl was right over Bielfeldt’s shoulder, as he was trying to get Karli’s attention with a slurred inanity. “Do you have any big plans for Christmas this year, Karli?”

  “No, John, I’m going to be working Christmas Day, so no big plans. I had Thanksgiving off, you know, and I’m the new kid in the newsroom, so I don’t get two in a row off.”

  As Bielfeldt launched into a predictable when-I-was-a-young-reporter-working-holidays story, Karli let her attention drift over his shoulder to where the young Hailey walked to the table nearest her and winced visibly as she sat down, pausing mid-sit to put her drink on the table, then tug at the knees of her jeans before sitting all the way down.

  Margie, caring nothing for Bielfeldt’s tedious reminiscence, did another long-whisper: “She’s got terrible rug burns on her knees. And so does that spicy sports kid, Scott. One of the engineers told me that he walked right by them on his way out at the end of the graveyard shift. They were so busy there on the newsroom floor that they didn’t even notice him! And now everyone is calling her Rug-burn Hailey.” Margie’s rasping chortle rose above the room’s general murmur of conversation and nicely covered Karli’s astonished peal of laughter.

  “I agree,” said a mildly surprised Bielfeldt. “It was funny when that cop was grousing about working Christmas Day and accidentally broadcast his whole rant to the dispatcher. You see, my photog was in the front seat, twisted around to shoot the cop, and his knee had keyed the car radio...” Karli watched the consultant’s eyes focus abstractedly into the distance as he recalled more boring details about his reporting youth. He paused momentarily to pour half of his remaining punch into his mouth, then he waved the cup in a semi toast, perhaps to his long-ago news photographer colleague, as he continued slurring out his memories.

  Seeing that Bielfeldt was too far gone to take lasting offense, Vince rose from his seat and tilted his head toward the punch bowls. Margie nodded enthusiastically and grabbed Karli’s hand, practically lifting her from her chair. Exchanging a mumbled excuse and a slurred of course with Bielfeldt, she rose and trailed in Margie’s wake. The three filled their cups and took cautious sips as they surveyed the swiftly filling room. “Ladies, once we get the blooper reel behind us, I’m going to call it a night,” Vince declared. “Everyone here is already bombed, and nobody is going to have anything sober to say for the rest of the night.”

  “That’s what makes this so wonderful!” Margie practically cheered. She then flung her arms wide and began to sing from an old Broadway musical: “This is our once-a-year day! Everyone’s entitled to be wild...”

  “Margie, shush!” said a smiling Jake, who had snuck up on the little group and thrown his arms around Karli and Margie’s shoulders, thrusting his head between the two and swinging it back and forth to take them in. “We shouldn’t let ourselves get too wild, should we?”

  “Bah!” Margie gusted boozily into Jake’s smile. “We’re here for the hijinx! I want to see the action, and soon!”

  “You’re in luck,” Mary Rose Mayer called, walking briskly toward the laptop feeding the hotel’s video projector. “I’m here, and I brought the hijinx with me!” As she said this, she turned her beaming smile to the laptop that fed video to the giant hotel projector. Clicking and tapping briefly, the huge screen’s image changed to a splashy countdown. In the Channel Three colors, huge text screened back like a watermark read: “Time to bloopers.” In the foreground, a giant “15:00” began counting down, second by second. Once it reached 14:45, the digital-clock format froze, then dissolved away. Pushed in from the left a verbal description of the time crawled onto the screen, proclaiming, “Fourteen minutes, thirty seconds.” As that slid off the right side of the screen, text slid vertically along the side, this time saying, “Quatorze minutes, vingt-cinq seconds.” That was replaced in its turn by something that looked like kanji characters, then five seconds later, something scrolled from right to left in what looked like arabic characters. Karli looked away from the screen toward Mary Rose and caught the quirking grin at the edge of her mouth. “That’s really unusual. And awesome!”

  Word of Mary Rose’s innovative countdown apparently spread fast, as the ballroom began to fill quickly with folks who had been prowling the lobby and bar.

  Karli watched Mary Rose and turned to look where she was looking: at the darkly handsome Scott Winstead, who was walking in with the usual bachelor crowd of sportscasters, photogs, and control room personnel. Mary Rose raised her hand for a high five in response to Scott’s appreciative whistle at the elaborate countdown. No sooner had their hands touched, though, than Mary Rose reached down and slapped her hand across Scott’s khaki-clad knee. Karli’s abs tensed with suppressed laughter as Scott yelped in pain and danced quickly out of Mary Rose’s reach. The group of assorted masculinity walking in with him burst into gales of laughter, mimicry, and fake-slapping toward Scott’s knees.

  “That is exactly,” Jake whispered to both Karli and Margie through his own chuckles, “why I don’t want to display any of my own hijinx—there’s a price to pay for the Reindeer Punch excuse.”

  “Oh, but they were shagging yesterday!” Margie fairly yelled. “Long before they had any punch to blame it on. And besides, it’s kind of sweet, isn’t it? They got to share all that pleasure, and now they get to share a little memento.”

  Karli heard Jake’s chuckling intensify, and she felt his breath stir her hair. The tingling down her neck and back made her want to squirm out from under his arm—or snuggle more closely into it. Either way, it set her tingling. Maybe another Reindeer Pu
nch would go down well after all, she thought to herself. Either it’ll calm me down a little or—and here she felt her breath catch—give me the excuse I don’t really need to do what I really want to do with Jake.

  Mary Rose’s countdown kept the giant screen busy with different animations displaying different languages.

  Suddenly the countdown shrank down to a small corner of the screen as the screen filled with an extreme close-up of a male movie star’s face. Those who were watching the screen started to laugh—the actor had played a newsman in a major movie. The star’s eyes moved as though he were taking in the entire crowd, then he fairly shouted, “Everyone! I need your attention, please!” The abrupt and fully amplified sound startled most of the room to silence, and nearly every head turned toward the screen. “There are only ten minutes left! So it’s time to make some NOISE!” The image shook as the volume increased to the level of actual discomfort.

  Mary Rose screamed her best “woo-hoo!” as a heavy percussion soundtrack rose from under the actor’s voice. The crowd in the ballroom erupted in applause and shouts. The screen changed to the station manager trying to shout, “I say THREE, you say NEWSFIRST!” Then the sales manager’s face came on: “THREE!” And Karli heard Margie’s shriek rise along with everyone else’s voices: “NEWSFIRST!” Then the chief engineer came on the screen and struggled through, “Three!” The crowd responded with mingled laughter and cries of, “NewsFirst!” The chant was repeated with different managers from all the departments leading from the screen and the room shouting back.

  Abruptly, the chant stopped. The percussion stopped. The countdown swelled back to fill the screen, this time with an odd progression of Roman numerals. VII:V IX, VII:V VIII, VII:V VII.