Love. Local. Latebreaking.: Book 1 in the newsroom romance series Page 15

  The ride back to the station was disconcerting for Karli, whose body was charged and ready for more action. She felt an odd melancholy from having the kiss interrupted and a nearly equal sense of relief. Her lips were still sensitive, and her thoughts kept drifting back to the series of moments: his eyes on hers, his lips moving toward hers, his hand pressing against her back, his small pause, her small nibble. Her groan.

  She groaned at the wintry landscape outside the car’s window. Still, she didn’t mention the kiss. Neither did Jake. They watched Iowa’s snow-dusted farm fields flit past in their shifting geometric patterns, their furrows forming suddenly criss-crossing parallelograms that flowed through their eyes and into the distance.

  She tried to understand the kiss. It was certainly memorable and emotional. But understandable? Definitely not. Jake was so hard to figure. He’d been as intense taking pictures of the couple as he had when he was shooting her. But he kissed me afterwards. And she realized that she’d kissed him, too—probably she had initiated the kiss. It wasn’t just that he’d flattered her with the impromptu photo session—though it had certainly found its way to her softest parts. It showed in the photos that he had seen well past her surface—and he had for a long time now. His attention was scary because it came from his knowing her so intimately. Intimate, she thought. That’s a scary word. That’s the kind of word that involves a lot more than kissing.

  Jake’s attention had always been moving toward intimacy, she realized, toward understanding her, her motivations, her values, her self.

  It was decision time, Karli realized. She was either going to have to choose to keep this inspirational, memorable, emotional, incomprehensible man at arm’s length, or she was going to have to accept a kind of intimacy she hadn’t experienced before. She was going to have to let him know her, deeply and honestly. Or she was going to have to keep it professional.

  And she didn’t know if she could push him away again. Not only because his passion was so overwhelmingly attractive, but because he was so obviously hurting and struggling to find his way. She couldn’t bear the thought of rejecting him after that kiss and inflicting another hurt on him when he was already so battered.

  She really couldn’t afford to become entangled with this man, in this place, when she was moving on.

  And Jake was capable of seeing her in ways deeper than she’d ever examined herself. The prospect of seeing herself through in his reflection made her feel too vulnerable, too exposed.

  Just as Karli resolved to let Jake down easily and let herself off as well, his voice pulled her back from her musings. “So, would you like to come over for Thanksgiving dinner? I know you don’t have any family in town, and we make it kind of a thing for as many friends as will come.” Jake paused and then added, as if to close the sale, “You’re guaranteed to get as stuffed as the turkeys. What do you say?”

  Before she could come up with a different reply, Karli heard herself saying, “I don’t have any plans for Thanksgiving, so that’d be great. Thanks. What would you like me to bring?”

  “Just your smile and a big appetite. We have the chow more than covered—you know, turkey any way you want it, ham, dressing, potatoes mashed and sweet, cranberry, green bean casserole, homemade rolls, your nine favorite kinds of pie, and lots of places to collapse afterward,” Jake’s eyes twinkled with anticipation as he went through the menu. “Or if you want to have some fun before you come over, you could go to Ingersoll Wine and Spirits and ask them what kind of wine they recommend to go with turkey. I think those folks’ heads are about to explode this time of year with answering that question.” Jake glanced away from the road and back toward Karli. “You know the answer, right?”

  This is not letting him down easily, Karli was thinking to herself. This is getting together on a major holiday with his family. “Answer?” she asked, coming back to the conversation.

  “Yeah, to the question of what kind of wine goes with turkey.”

  “Um, no. I’d have to ask, too,” Karli admitted. “I’m not a big wine sophisticate or anything.”

  Jake chuckled at her response. “The best wine to drink with your turkey, at least as far as I’ve ever been able to learn from reading foodie magazines and so on, is whatever wine you like that’s open or can easily be opened. All the snoots have an opinion, but they range from sweet whites to big, tannic reds and everything in between. So I figure that means anything is fair game. I like a dry white, like a Pouilly Fuissé, or a light-bodied red, like one of the million or so Beaujolais varieties.”

  “Wow,” Karli said, a look of genuine astonishment on her face. “I didn’t exactly figure you for a wine guy.”

  “Photogs just swill draft beer, right?” The corner of Jake’s mouth Karli could see in her view of his profile twitched up slightly.

  “Well, yeah. Mostly, anyway,” Karli fidgeted the top off her diet Dew and took a swig. “I guess I’ve never seen a photog drink anything else.”

  “Tell you what,” Jake said with clear, decisive tones, “I’ll make sure your glass is never empty on Thanksgiving and that you taste some of my different favorites.”

  After agreeing, Karli again watched the Iowa landscape flicker by for a while. Then the kind of thing that often comes after a fancy meal seasoned with lots of fancy wine came vividly to mind. She caught her breath quickly and felt the blush start to heat her cheeks. She was looking forward to a taste.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Three NewsFirst Parking Lot

  Tuesday, November 26

  Karli zipped into a parking space at the station and noticed Jake’s white pickup pull in just before her.

  In spite of the chill in the air, she felt a little rush of warmth as she anticipated the upcoming holiday with Jake. They had kissed. And the kiss had been almost unbearably romantic, and she still nearly lost her balance every time she thought about it.

  Now she was scheduled to attend a big fancy dinner with him and he was scheduled to get her all drunked up, and she was going to make sure she was as freshly showered as a girl could be after spending a long time eating and drinking.

  And there he was, getting out of his truck. They could walk in together and not talk about romantic kissing or getting-drunk-and-kissing-more even though it would be in the air all around them.

  So Karli grabbed her bag and her first diet Dew of the day and got out of her car just in time to see Sophia’s long, elegant figure getting out of the passenger side of Jake’s truck, a full gym bag over her shoulder and a smile on her face.

  “Thanks for the lift, Jake,” Karli could hear Sophia saying. “I really had a great time last night. I’ve never gotten pajamas sweaty like that before. Thanks for loaning them to me. I couldn’t believe it after I got them off—you worked me really hard, you know?” And as Jake and Sophia came together around the back of the truck and on their way into the station, she slugged him on the shoulder with a broad grin.

  Jake laughed in reply and said, “You totally had it coming. I wouldn’t want you to think I was easy.”

  Sophia quirked a smile at Jake in response. Her smile turned into a wince as she tried to keep up with Jake’s long, fast stride. “Hey, slow down there, big boy,” she said. “My butt and legs are sore from last night.”

  “Whiner,” he replied. “Being sore just means you were doing it right. Besides, you know you love it, so keep up already.” With that, Jake tapped in the code that unlocked the newsroom’s exterior door and swung it grandly open for Sophia to walk through. “After you, Miss Anchorwoman,” he said, then stepped into the building behind her.

  Karli sat, stunned and startled at what she’d just heard. That BITCH! she thought. That ASSHOLE! Karli’s left foot remained on the ground outside her car, her right still on the car’s floorboard. Her eyes stung with tears she immediately resolved never to shed.

  After all this bullshit and not wanting to even like that dick, he sweeps me into this big romantic event and gives me a big romantic kiss. We kissed
on one of the actual, physical Bridges of Madison County, for heaven’s sake! And even then, even after he has completely melted me from the inside out—and here she caught her breath once again as the memory of that kiss sent a surge through her femininity—I still don’t want to get involved with him, so I figure we’ll just pretend the kiss never happens. And THEN he brings on the charm offensive and the next thing I know he-with-whom-I-must-not-get-involved has talked me into a Thanksgiving Day wine-tasting and turkey party. Oh, that asshole. I can’t believe I fell for his shit.

  The diet Dew she’d been crushing and shaking during her private, silent tantrum started to fizz green-yellow fluid out from the not-quite-tight-enough cap’s bottom edge and then onto her hand. Damnit!

  Karli took a deep breath as she reached for a napkin from the center console to wipe the bottle and her hand. Okay, she thought. Sophia isn’t to blame here. How could she know that Jake had taken me to that bridge and kissed me?

  Karli was not so naive that she didn’t understand that there were situations that were so romantic they created a must-kiss buzz more or less on their own. Heck, formal dances in high school and college had led her into more than one forgettable kiss with more than one completely forgettable guy.

  Jake isn’t a forgettable guy, though, she thought. And that was definitely not a forgettable kiss. At least it wasn’t for me. Apparently it was forgettable for him, though, if he can go straight into sweaty-pajamas-land with Sophia.

  What must that be like? she wondered. Feeling the tingles of arousal run through her body at the thought of ‘sexing with Jake,’ Karli firmly resolved not to let herself go there.

  Now I’m stuck with going to his house next week for some dumb Thanksgiving dinner with wine. Ugh. Grabbing her bag and her Dew, Karli finally moved her right foot out of the car and headed for the newsroom.

  Once there, she headed straight for the assignment desk, where Vince sat amidst the usual chaos of screeching scanners, mounds of papers, chirping phones, and coffee cups in varying degrees of emptiness, coldness, and moldiness.

  “Vince, I’m sorry I pushed so hard to get Thanksgiving Day off. I’ve changed my mind. So I’ll be in next week, okay?”

  Vince moved his eyes slowly from his computer’s monitor and toward Karli’s face. “What in the hell is your problem?” he asked, no trace of sympathy in his raspy voice.

  Karli was flustered at the usually avuncular Vince’s uncharacteristic hostility. “Um, I ... uh ... I don’t really have a problem. I just don’t need the day off any more.”

  “The hell you don’t,” Vince rasped. “You haven’t taken any time off at all since you got here, and you’ve worked a lot of extra shifts, too. Plus, you nagged at me until I talked about four other people into re-working their lives around the Thanksgiving schedule. So, no. You’re taking the day off.”

  Visions of a wine-fueled afternoon of Thanksgiving misery flashed before Karli’s eyes. She had to get out of this obligation, and work was the one excuse she could come up with. “Vince, I really ...”

  “You really need to take the holiday off,” Vince cut in, interrupting and shutting down Karli’s last-ditch effort at getting back onto the schedule. “Besides,” he added, “Jake was just here making sure that you had the day off. He said you were going to his place for Thanksgiving.” Vince tilted his head down to look over his reading glasses at Karli. Then he took them off and sucked a bit at one of the temple pieces. “You wanting to work wouldn’t have anything to do with Jake’s Thanksgiving dinner party, would it?” Karli could tell from his steady gaze that he knew the answer and that there was no point in denying it.

  “Vince, I just wanted to work. But since you won’t let me, let’s just say we never had this conversation, okay?”

  Giving her a sage nod, Vince softened and held Karli’s gaze a little longer. “Understand me, now, kid. That one is an actual human when you meet him in the wild, okay? He isn’t like the other animals you meet in this racket. You don’t need to take a chair and whip along with you—they won’t keep you safe from this one, anyway. He’s not Discovery Channel dangerous. Like I said, he’s a human.”

  Karli stared back at Vince, stunned at this surprising and frustrating bit of candor. Of course he is an animal, she thought. He does it just like all the other penis-brained jerks I’ve ever met: with anyone, any time. He must be an animal, too, to make her so sore. What must sex like that be like?

  Yet she heard something more than that in Vince’s uncharacteristically long speech. And in his tone and on his face. Vince truly believed that Jake was somehow different. But Karli knew that he was wrong. Jake could certainly come across like something more than the usual, yet she had just seen who he was with her very own eyes. This wasn’t the time to have that conversation with Vince, though. Karli nodded slowly, then turned away from him to head to her desk and begin the day’s work. She turned back quickly as she heard Vince’s usual tones addressing her.

  “Karli, that’s next week,” he rasped. “Today you’re going do a live shot of the Governor lighting the Capitol Christmas tree for the 5:30 and 6:00 shows. See if you can find something to give the story some meat for a change. Otherwise, it’ll just be pretty video and no story.”

  “Oh, and there’s one other thing, kid,” Vince said in a lower voice, as though to invite a secret conversation. “Sophia made the case to Jerry that she should have Jake on every installment of the heroin series. He started it, you know, it needs a consistent look, it’s a big series, all that. So he’s assigned to that for the foreseeable.”

  Karli nodded again and turned away, her eyes filling with surprising tears. Not only does that bitch take my series and all the credit for my work, she takes Jake, too. Can that be why they were getting all sweaty? Shaking her head as though to chase these thoughts from it, Karli raised her chin with new resolve and went to power on her computer. The challenges of another day’s reporting were a comfort. As she waited for the computer’s reassuring start-up tone, she flashed back on her dilemma: she was going to have to go to Jake’s for Thanksgiving, and she couldn’t get out of it.

  She worked on finding meat for the story—learning that the governor was going to tour an Iowa LED lighting company in Ankeny before the tree-lighting ceremony—she began working on an energy-efficiency angle. And it occurred to her that she could simply treat her Thanksgiving experience with Jake efficiently. She’d show up late, eat fast, and leave early. No pressure to hob-nob with Jake the Snake or his friends, just a quick meal like at Burger King.

  Nodding smartly to herself, Karli began dialing an energy efficiency expert’s phone number to find out how many power plants could go offline if people used LED Christmas lights instead of incandescent.

  This was going to be easy. Efficiency was Karli’s new watchword.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Thanksgiving Party

  Thursday, November 28

  Karli drove in what felt like circles around the neighborhood to the south of I-235 near Theodore Roosevelt High School, looking first for Jake’s address, and then once she’d found it, for a parking space. It seemed that on any other day a parking space would’ve been easy to find. This was a quiet, upscale neighborhood with long driveways and broad streets. But Jake’s driveway and both sides of the street for a long block in either direction were lined with parked cars of every conceivable variety, from rusted-up-to-the-windows old sedans to glistening new German, Italian, and British imports and everything in between. Karli didn’t usually notice cars, but seeing a battered, multi-colored trash heap next to a gloriously polished monster of a sedan was a surprising contrast. Especially when it turned out that the solemnly massive car was an actual Rolls Royce with the steering wheel on the wrong side.

  Who comes to this Thanksgiving dinner? Karli wondered as she trudged along the neighborhood streets to get from her car to Jake’s. The houses she walked past were modestly upscale Colonials, mostly in brick. Sneaking a peek through a dining room wi
ndow in one of the houses, Karli saw a surprisingly Norman Rockwell family sitting down to a huge meal. The kind of Thanksgiving she’d grown up with had been a mostly dress-up affair, outside the house. Her father set the day’s agenda of going to the country club for Thanksgiving.

  That meant that the family dressed formally around noon and drove to the club for a dinner that, apart from the turkey, was not dramatically different from other dinners there. After the meal and some lingering over drinks, they returned to a dark home. Then it was pretty quiet until the shopping began the next day.

  Here in Des Moines, Karli smelled the smoke from cozy fireplaces and saw houses glowing with crowds of extended families and driveways packed with cars, while others were silent and dark, their occupants gone elsewhere for the holiday. Finally she came to Jake’s house, which had cars parked crammed into the full length of the driveway and all over the front yard. She marched up the driveway, carrying the random wine from Ingersoll Spirits and a bunch of flowers she’d bought at the grocery store on her way.

  Because the lot was so big, the immense red-brick Georgian house looked deceptively small until Karli came closer. She saw the sweeping curve of a grand music room project eastward from the main house, the mullioned windows exposing a throng of people and the up-tilted glossy top of a grand piano rising in the room’s middle. The entire roof of the huge room was outlined with white-painted railings that contained a spacious balcony apparently accessed from the master bedroom. Set back in a lot bordered by towering oaks, the house loomed ever higher over her as she approached the front door. Looking up, Karli saw that the six huge dormers projecting from the roofline were on the third story of brickwork. Candles—presumably electric ones—gleamed from each of the 20 or so front-facing windows. The aqua-tinted patina of the copper sheathing along the upper roof gave the house a college-campus look, one that was enhanced by the competing Drake University and Iowa State University flags that flapped slowly on poles leaning outward from either side of the front door.