Page 4 of Romance and Peppermint Lattes
“I still don’t get why that column upset your mother so much,” Nolan said, gesturing helplessly toward his daughters. “All I did was thank her for making me dinner.”
“Did Daddy kiss you that night?” Bailey asked.
“No, he—”
“Don’t tell us,” Courtney cried, interrupting Maryanne. “Start at theverybeginning and don’t leave anything out.”
Nolan looked at Maryanne. “Why don’t you tell them, sweetheart?”
“I’ll tell them everything, then.”
“Everything?” Nolan repeated.
Courtney rubbed her hands together. “Oh, boy, this is going to be good.”
“It all started fifteen years ago...”
ChapterOne
“Maryanne Simpson of the New York Simpsons, I presume?”
Maryanne glared at the man standing across from her in the reception area of the radio station. She pointedly ignored his sarcasm, keeping her blue eyes as emotionless as possible.
Nolan Adams—Seattle’s most popular journalist—looked nothing like the polished professional man in the black-and-white photo that headed his daily column. Instead he resembled a well-known disheveled television detective. He even wore a wrinkled raincoat, one that looked as if he’d slept in it for an entire week.
“Or should I call you Deb?” he taunted.
“Ms. Simpson will suffice,” she said in her best finishing-school voice. The rival newspaperman was cocky and arrogant—and the best damn journalist Maryanne had ever read. Maryanne was a good columnist herself, or at least she was desperately striving to become one. Her father, who owned theSeattle Reviewand twelve other daily newspapers nationwide, had seen to it that she was given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the Seattle paper. She was working hard toprove herself. Perhaps too hard. That was when the trouble had begun.
“So how’s the heart?” Nolan asked, reaching for a magazine and flipping idly through the dog-eared pages. “Is it still bleeding from all those liberal views of yours?”
Maryanne ignored the question, removed her navy-blue wool coat and neatly folded it over the back of a chair. “My heart’s just fine, thank you.”
With a sound she could only describe as a snicker, he threw himself down on a nearby chair and indolently brought an ankle up to rest on his knee.
Maryanne sat across from him, stiff and straight in the high-backed chair, and boldly met his eyes. Everything she needed to know about Nolan Adams could be seen in his face. The strong well-defined lines of his jaw told her how stubborn he could be. His eyes were dark, intelligent and intense. And his mouth... well, that was another story altogether. It seemed to wrestle with itself before ever breaking into a smile, as if a gesture of amusement went against his very nature. Nolan wasn’t smiling now. And Maryanne wasn’t about to let him see how much he intimidated her. But some emotion must have shone in her eyes, because he said abruptly, “You’re the one who started this, you know?”
Maryanne was well aware of that. But this rivalry between them had begun unintentionally, at least on her part. The very morning that the competition’s paper, theSeattle Sun, published Nolan’s column on solutions to the city’s housing problem, theReviewhad run Maryanne’s piece on the same subject. Nolan’s article was meant to be satirical, while Maryanne’s was deadly serious. Her mistake was in stating that there were those in the city who apparently found the situation amusing, and she blasted anyone who behaved so irresponsibly. This was not a joking matter, she’d pointed out.
It looked as if she’d read Nolan’s column and set out to reprimand him personally for his cavalier attitude.
Two days later, Nolan’s column poked fun at her, asking what Ms. High Society could possibly know about affordable housing. Clearly a debutante had never had to worry about the roof over her head, he’d snarled. But more than that, he’d made her suggestions to alleviate the growing problem sound both frivolous and impractical.
Her next column came out the same evening and referred to tough pessimistic reporters who took themselves much too seriously. She went so far as to make fun of a fictional Seattle newsman who resembled Nolan Adams to a T.
Nolan retaliated once more, and Maryanne seethed. Obviously she’d have to be the one to put an end to this silliness. She hoped that not responding to Nolan’s latest attack would terminate their rivalry, but she should’ve known better. An hour after her column on community spirit had hit the newsstands, KJBR, a local radio station, called, asking Maryanne to give a guest editorial. She’d immediately agreed, excited and honored at the invitation. It wasn’t until later that she learned Nolan Adams would also be speaking. The format was actually a celebrity debate, a fact of which she’d been blithely unaware.
The door opened and a tall dark-haired woman walked into the station’s reception area. “I’m Liz Walters,” she said, two steps into the room. “I produce the news show. I take it you two know each other?”
“Like family,” Nolan muttered with that cocky grin of his.
“We introduced ourselves five minutes ago,” Maryanne rebutted stiffly.
“Good,” Liz said without glancing up from her clipboard. “If you’ll both come this way, we’ll get you set up in the control booth.”
From her brief conversation with the show’s host, Brian Campbell, Maryanne knew that the show taped on Thursday night wouldn’t air until Sunday evening.
When they were both seated inside the control booth, Maryanne withdrew two typed pages from her bag. Not to be outdone, Nolan made a show of pulling a small notepad from the huge pocket of his crumpled raincoat.
