Want Ad Wedding

“Uh-uh. He was, you know, like he usually is. Intense, only—” Karen seemed to search for a word.

“Darker?” Molly supplied.

Karen shook her head. “No, more like ‘alive’ or something. Actually, I’d say he’s in a pretty good mood.” She glanced at the paper again. “Considering.”

“Great.”

Karen leaned closer. “Frankly, I thought the two of you were actually going to come to blows in that meeting on Friday.”

“Me, too.”

“So it really didn’t surprise me—” The buzzer on her phone interrupted her. Karen gave a guilty start and punched the button. “Yes?”

“Is Miss Flynn here yet, Karen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” The soft click of his phone seemed to reverberate off the glass walls of the reception area.

Karen gave Molly a knowing look. “I guess you should go in.”

Molly nodded, forcing a bright smile, and headed for the door to the lion’s den. Sam pulled it open the instant she reached for the doorknob. Startled, she raised her gaze to his and saw a flinty look that quickly dissolved as he flashed an unusually warm smile. Was it her imagination, or was there a hint of steel in it? “Morning,” he said quietly, then looked at Karen. “Hold my calls, will you, Karen?” He placed his hand at the small of Molly’s back.

“Sure.” Karen leaned back in her chair, her expression speculative.

Sam was already applying a subtle pressure to her back, leading her through the door. “This could take awhile.”

The instant the door shut behind her, he dropped his hand, and walked to his desk in silence. When he had rounded it, he sat in the high leather chair and simply watched her with an enigmatic look in his eyes. Molly felt her sneakers sinking into the plush carpet. Like quicksand, she mused. She had to fight the urge to shuffle her feet. She’d seen a survival documentary once where the expert had explained that the surest way to die in quicksand was to fight the inevitable by thrashing around.

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.