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

  “Oh.” Karli finally realized what kind of man Trevor was. Her blush had barely begun to fade, yet here it came again, hot and embarrassing. “Trevor. It’s flattering that you think I’m in her league—even though I don’t play for that team. She’s really exotic and beautiful.”

  “Really?” Trevor smirked and swiveled the chair so Karli was facing directly across the salon at Leeza.

  Karli’s cheeks flushed even more deeply. Her face was so hot she was practically sweating. While she appreciated feminine beauty, it was purely as a spectator, not as a ... a participant. Leeza’s exotic beauty was what she pictured alongside a man like Jake, more than her own petite frame. But he’d be so big and powerful, Karli thought, feeling a distinct tingle between her legs as she envisioned Jake naked and moving toward her own naked body.

  Her pulse was already pounding, but it spasmed even faster with panic as she remembered that Trevor cut practically everyone’s hair at the station. She had to set the record absolutely straight before rumors started. She had just started this job, and here people would be hearing that she was a lesbian.

  “Jake is much more what I’m interested in,” she blurted in desperation. Then, realizing that she’d said the wrong thing again—now everyone is going to hear that I can’t stop thinking about being naked with him—she hastily added, “But he’s a distraction I can’t afford. Like I said, I’m going to file a few award-winning stories, and then I’m out of here.” She had learned during a college internship that dalliances with photographers could become very distracting indeed. The boy had been a nice guy and very attentive, but he had lacked ambition almost entirely.

  “Hmm. You’re interested in The Dick?” Trevor smirked and put the dryer away. He had pronounced the capital letters, and Karli knew her face showed that she’d heard them.

  “Well, I could have been, if he hadn’t accused me of having daddy issues. I guess.” Oh shit, Karli thought. I was trying to prevent rumors.

  Trevor indicated to Karli to stand up from the chair, turned her toward the mirror for the first time since she had entered the salon, and met Karli’s reflected gaze with raised eyebrows. “What do you think?”

  Karli looked at Trevor’s proud smile, then gasped as her eyes moved to see the reflection of her new style for the first time. Seriously sharp bangs no longer covered her eyebrows, and the long, glossy hair that had fallen along her cheeks and down to her shoulder blades was gone. She saw her small ears without tucking her hair behind them for the first time in years. Shock turned to anger as Karli took it in and then stammered: “Trevor, you gave me a p-p-pixie cut!”

  Karli was furious. She had meticulously grown and cared for her beautifully long hair. With the high heels she took off only seldom, the long hair had always helped her look taller and more serious than the short stature—5’ 1”—she believed hurt her credibility as a professional woman. Trevor had literally cut off her hope to appear taller than she was. This—this insult to my dignity—was what they had sent me to Mr. Hair Genius for?

  Leeza drew near as Karli’s irate stammers sputtered into speechlessness. “Trevor, who is this new person?” she asked. Even in her state of shock, it was obvious to Karli that Leeza was giving her a looking-over just as thorough as—and much more intimate than—Trevor’s had been. Leeza’s eyes languorously explored the smooth, tanned legs and roundly muscled backside that Karli spent so many hours in the gym to shape. Then Leeza calmly took in her round breasts and finally rested on the flashing blue eyes. “My, my, my,” Leeza purred, “You have uncaged a tigress, Trevor.”

  “Those long bangs and straight sides were too college-girl cute,” Trevor responded. “This opens her face up on every side and makes her more serious and complicated, don’t you think?”

  “Serious and fierce, Trevor,” Leeza said. “By parting the curtains and showing the great bones that were hiding behind those bangs, you’ve made her honesty into something powerful. Hello, Sienna Miller-as-a-brunette; goodbye, college cutie.”

  Accustomed as she was to having people fuss over her appearance, Karli was still shocked. The radically different new haircut and Leeza’s overt come-on were almost too much for her. They were very different from the professional squinting and primping she’d received at the hands of convention-driven makeup and hair professionals at her last job in Palm Beach. She reached unsteadily for her diet Dew, and breathlessly mumbled a thank-you that she hoped would work as an exit line. Trevor heard his cue, gently took her arm, and led her to the front of the salon. “If you really want me to, I’ll tell Leeza you aren’t interested,” he mumbled into her ear.

  Karli stumbled out of the salon and belted herself into her car. She put the keys into the ignition, then grabbed the wheel and yanked herself back and forth until the whole car shook. Another jerk! she thought. He’s supposed to make me look better than I’ve ever looked before, and instead he makes me look like a winged elf or something. Here she gave the steering wheel a series of extra-hard tugs, still thrashing back and forth in the seat.

  And to make matters worse, he’s probably about to start a bunch of rumors that I’m either a lesbian or bi. No, it’s worse than that. Jake pissed me off so much with that daddy-issue comment that I let it slip. Now Trevor’s going to start rumors that I’m a bi nympho with the hots for that Leeza and for Jake, too!

  Tired and fighting off tears of frustration, Karli stopped shaking herself and the entire car. After catching her breath, she carefully started the car, put it in reverse, and began backing out. Catching a glimpse of her new hairstyle again as she looked in the rearview mirror, she was startled anew and stepped on the brake to take a better look. She turned her head from side to side, slowly. Who is this woman come out from behind the long bangs?

  She put the car back in park and opened the door to turn on the dome light. With her eyes nearly cleared now of the tears that had filled them but not spilled out, Karli looked more closely, with a television professional’s trained eye, this time assessing the short hair’s loose frame around her face and how it exposed her cheekbones and jawline from most any angle, sharpening her features with a look of keen intelligence.

  Then she frowned into the mirror, drawing semicircles with her index fingers at the lower edges of the inky shadows cast by the overhead light. They all but hid her eyes. I feel exposed, she thought. What had Leeza called her—a tigress?

  And then she thought about the rumors. And then she thought about Jake. “Jake is much more what I’m interested in.” Did I really say that about The Dick? she grumbled to herself. Of course, she thought, checking the mirror again, maybe Fierce Tigress Karli will be able to open his eyes about how good my reporting is. Karli was surprised to feel a flutter just below her stomach as she thought how she might react if Jake were to show her some appreciation. Okay, so he’s gorgeous, she thought. But he’s an arrogant asshole, and that trick about trying to blind me was a foul first-day prank on the new reporter. He’s The Dick for that alone.

  Karli took a final look in the mirror as another car began to maneuver into a space on her side of the street. Its headlights flashed in her mirror, and she squinted just as she had when Jake had put that giant light in her face at noon. Still looking at her reflection, Karli noticed that the shadows from the overhead dome light—directly overhead, just like the noonday sun—had been obliterated with light from the other car’s headlights.

  He was lighting me to make me look better, so viewers could see my eyes, she realized. She shook her head as she closed the door and rolled down the window, realizing that it hadn’t been a practical joke.

  Chapter Three

  Des Moines, Iowa State Fairgrounds

  Thursday, August 8

  Live shot for noon newscast

  Karli swiped the alert off her iPhone’s display. Even after three weeks, she was still getting texts from her father about how surprised he was with her new haircut and didn’t she think that things were moving a little too fast at this new station if t
hey thought they could just transform the Karli he’d known her whole life into some completely different person?

  Glad to see anything that wasn’t long-distance micro-management, Karli took in the crushing mass of sweaty Iowans and thought to herself that she had never seen a collection of people like these before. It had usually been hot in her last market, when she had been a reporter—and her own news photographer—in Palm Beach. But the folks at the Iowa State Fair, well, these people were definitely not used to year-round heat, nor did they look much like Floridians. And although Karli saw an occasional Hispanic or African American family, this crowd was overwhelmingly white. Either pasty white or sunburned white. But there weren’t many glistening, even, beach-ready tans like those most folks had so carefully cultivated in Palm Beach.

  Karli looked again at her iPhone for the notes her assignment editor, Vince Guzman, had given her about the fair. It was, he said, “a celebration of hogs, husband-calling and heavy metal hair bands” that had somehow made it onto someone’s official list of 1,000 Places to Visit Before You Die.

  As she was reviewing her notes, a text message had popped up on the top of her iPhone’s screen. She saw with a twinge that it was from her father—again—and all of his stern tones came through the text and into her head: “If you’ve had enough of Iowa yet, the senior partner of the public relations agency here says he’d hire you right away. Make $$$! Love you!” The message finished with an emoji smiley face—something suspiciously out of her father’s character. He had staff to handle details like that.

  She sighed with exasperation and a measure of fear. She loved her daddy, but her heart sank at the prospect of having to concede that she couldn’t make a career on her own. She would be crushed if she ever had to crawl back and do what she was told. Her whole adult life had been spent extricating herself from the luxurious and predictable web her father had woven especially to ensnare her into what he had envisioned as the perfect future for her. At his direction, she had been accepted to a number of prestigious southeastern universities. Without his knowledge, though, she had applied to the University of Missouri’s broadcast journalism school—one of the finest programs in the country—where she had not only been accepted, she had been given an academic scholarship that very nearly paid all the tuition bills. And against his wishes and after many unpleasantly shouty or silent family dinners, she had packed herself into the Saab he’d passed on to her at graduation while he bought an American luxury car for its better political profile. So Karli had taken her high school diploma along in the Saab and driven herself to Columbia to begin classes. She excelled in school in spite of having to work nearly full time at a men’s clothiers to pay her room and board.

  And after the Saab company went into bankruptcy, the temperamental car’s frequent cries for maintenance ate deeper into her tight budget all the time. Summers were spent working newsroom internships (by day, and retail at night to pay the bills) that resulted in a decent collection of resumé-stories up on YouTube. Those stories had been good enough to get her that first job in Palm Beach.

  She had learned a few things about news and life along the way. News photographers in particular had been a minor field of study. She’d dated during her internships, and had thought she was serious about one of them. He was attentive and even charming, but he had turned out to have little or no ambition beyond each successive weekend. Karli, of course, was all about ambition. Having earned her own way through school, she was acutely aware of her education’s value. Stagnation at a middle-market newsroom was not anywhere near the achievement she was looking for, but he had been perfectly willing to settle for that. Her internship had ended just as she’d realized the relationship had to end. Resolved to settle for nothing short of the best she could accomplish, she’d returned to Missou to take her senior year by storm. She had, too, impressing the most demanding professors and making an academic name for herself.

  The job in Palm Beach had been lined up before graduation. Her parents had come to watch her walk across the stage in her cap and gown, yet they had been disconnected from what she’d accomplished, where she was headed, and the woman she had become. In their eyes, she remained the sweet little Karli they’d seen through high school, not the woman who had declined their offers of financial support and—always firmly—of relocation expenses to a school closer to home. They’d never understood why she felt compelled to sacrifice the comforts of an established social network and the comfortable lifestyle home offered.

  After graduation, in an effort to reestablish some common ground with them, Karli had detoured her Saab to Charleston on the way to Palm Beach. The detour became a flurry of country club dinners, shopping at all the best stores—with her parents hanging bags full of clothes and shoes on her, in spite of her protests that she would manage for herself.

  Her father was exactly the sort of man who bought clothes for her whether she wanted them or not and who would have found a plush job for her whether she wanted it or not. She stood firm on the job, though she gave in pretty quickly on the clothes. The job she was headed for fit her personality and ambitions. Any job her father found her would fit the money-centered world he ruled over Charleston. As he conceived it, he had pre-destined her for a role within that world, one where he could be sure she would have a jewelry-spangled life of country club receptions, glamorously philanthropic parties, and all the rest.

  Charleston was a great city, and her father was near the center of the area’s power structure. But he couldn’t see clearly beyond that world. And he couldn’t conceive that his daughter could make her own mark in a world that wasn’t bound by strings he pulled. She loved his dark, handsome, consciously Rhett-Butler-esque style. He was proud to provide and plan for his family. She knew she couldn’t fit into the sanitized and contrived life laid out for her, however well intentioned her father’s designs might be.

  Shaking her head and dismissing her father’s text unanswered, Karli’s attention turned again to the fairgrounds she had been unconsciously navigating with her face down in her phone. She had people’s stories to discover and tell.

  She looked up to noises of lemonade shake-up vendors hawking their goods and the shrill growls of chainsaws sculpting tree stumps into eagles and astronauts. She saw teenage boys slurping from oversized cups and gawking at teenage girls. The boys came in essentially two varieties: jeans, work shirts and boots, or gym shorts and t-shirts.

  The teen girls were slightly more various, starting with jeans and workshirts and moving through all the way to daisy dukes and halters. Their footwear was completely mix-and-match, with flip-flops under hardworking jeans, cowboy boots under daringly short cut-offs, and vice versa. And Uggs under anything. In August.

  In spite of their odd wardrobe selections, Karli saw that those girls were stunning. Toothpaste-commercial smiles beamed from faces that had an unusual openness and look of goodwill to all. Like girls everywhere, they giggled and squealed over whatever nonsense was on the smartphone screens they shared with one another, but theirs was a beauty more fully revealed and candid and less manipulative than the Florida girls Karli was used to covering or the South Carolina sorority girls she’d grown up with.

  More homogenous were the retirees. The breathless, sweaty, lumpy uniformity of their bright white sneakers, khaki shorts, and fanny packs pressed along the main concourse and through each exhibit building.

  They had once probably looked as sweetly attractive as the coltish teenagers and early-20s crowds, but that past was constrained by taut buttons and zippers. Fleshy creases described, strata-like, the years of accretion from countless hearty meals over their youthful glories. Still, youthful enthusiasm bubbled forth from them like a baby’s saliva-laden laughter. Every sight or experience offered at the fair was another occasion for muttered exclamations of joy or restrained gestures of appreciation. Each booth’s offerings were greeted as though they were completely novel—the latest material developed by NASA and put to practical application in, s
ay, beehive framing.

  Still, watching one of these jolly goliaths devouring a bacon-encrusted corn dog, Karli came up with a lead that she could never use in any story: At today’s Iowa State Fair, dieticians discovered the origin and destination of Middle America’s ever-expanding middle section. With more on this flyover state’s annual hickstravaganza of gluttony, Karli Lewis is live in the fryer zone...

  The youngest children, Karli thought to herself as she walked through the fair, were as beautiful and happy as any she’d ever seen. Their parents were loving but not overindulgent. Covered with silly hats and sunglasses, the preschoolers all were having a great time running through the seemingly endless animal exhibits, the kid zone, and all over the midway.

  She and Jake had interviewed any number of these Iowans this morning, and they’d sent the video back to the station for editing. Now it was time for Karli to put her game face on and keep interviewing people about the fair. Today’s stories were not likely to win any awards, but it was refreshing to relax through an easy day of reporting news as fluffy as the cotton candy being spun just a few feet away.

  “Lookin’ good so far, Karli,” Jake said, his tenor voice enthusiastic. “What’s the next group of fair-goers you want to charm into submission with your attentive ear and delicate questioning?” His eyes twinkled with mischief, and his left cheek dimpled over a troublemaker’s grin.

  He was so cute that he almost certainly knew he was cute, Karli thought. But he didn’t seem at all aware that he put on a show just about every time he moved. And Karli was having a hard time not watching the show. He was built like a spokesman for Bowflex—but with his shirt on and no glycerin making his skin sparkle. His brown hair curled around the viewfinder when he was framing shots, and his eyes were as delicious as their milk chocolate color.