LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      “Mr. Reed—” she began.

      He held up a hand. It wasn’t the manicured, soft-looking hand of an idle businessman, she noted with some fascination. He had calluses on his palm, and new-looking scrapes that skimmed the edge of his blunt fingers. How was it that she’d never noticed his hands before? “Like now,” he said. “I’m not finished telling you why I cut you off about that story.”

      Molly frowned. He shook his head. She swore the sparkle was back in his eyes, turning the steel color a softer shade of gray. “I bug the hell out of you,” he said, “don’t I?”

      “Yes.”

      The flat response made him laugh. The rich laugh surprised her. It came easily and sounded well-used. Where, she wondered, was the Sam Reed she’d been sparring with in editorial meetings? He steepled his hands beneath his chin and gave her a dry look. “So you made me the victim of a personal ad to your friend?”

      Molly nodded. “JoAnna called on Friday afternoon. She usually does. It’s a ritual we’ve had since we graduated.” If a person could die from embarrassment, Molly figured, she would become an obituary at any moment. In hindsight, it all seemed extremely juvenile. Even trying to explain it only seemed to make it worse, but her sense of honor demanded that she take the licks. “I was angry. I vented. JoAnna was having a lousy day, too. She reminded me of the game. I wrote the ad and e-mailed it to her. I thought it would make her laugh. I forgot to clear it from my screen before I left for the night.”

      “And the stringer found it and diligently put it into copy by the Saturday-morning deadline for today’s personals,” he guessed.

      “Yes.” Molly rubbed her palms on the rough fabric of her jeans. “I didn’t know until this morning.”

      “Imagine my surprise.”

      There it was again, that slight thread of humor in his tone. Molly grimaced. “I was mortified. I’m sure it was worse for you. I—it was childish and irresponsible. There’s nothing I could say that would adequately apologize.”

      He picked up the unopened envelope that held her resignation. “So you came in prepared to quit?”

      “It seemed like the most honorable thing to do.”

      He nodded, his expression thoughtful. With a quick twist of his wrist, he tore the envelope in two and tossed it into his trash can. “Think of something else.”

      Molly stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

      “Think of something else. You’re the best journalist this paper has. You should probably be working in a bigger market—”

      “I don’t want to work in a bigger market.”

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