Helen Myers - It's News to Her

“Say it.” The rawness in Cord’s voice was as arousing as his kiss. “Admit you feel what I do.”

“This is no more ethical than what Jack did.”

He forced Hunter to meet his hungry gaze. “It damn well is.” Then he kissed her again as though he could will her to agree.

Once he felt her surrender, Cord locked her against him as though she was the only thing that could ease his emotional overload. She’d always known on some level that he was truth in advertising, a passionate man. But first and foremost he’d been the boss’s grandson and to someone like her, he needed to be blocked from the psyche.

Now he’d ruined everything, she thought as he released her lips to score a series of hungry kisses down the left side of her neck. She felt his heartbeat at every pulse point and knew there would be no more hiding from him.

“Tell me,” he coaxed, his breath searing her skin.

HELEN R. MYERSis a collector of two-and four-legged strays, and lives deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas. She cites cello music and bonsai gardening as favorite relaxation pastimes, and still edits in her sleep—an accident, learned while writing her first book. A bestselling author of diverse themes and focus, she is a three-time RITA ®Award nominee.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Hunter Harding always knew when something was about to go seriously wrong. It would happen within hours, usually minutes, after the thought sprang into her conscious mind that life was going pretty well. This wasn’t something that had evolved from being a journalist; her first experience went back to when she was sixteen, more precisely, on the morning she woke thinking how wonderful it was that her father was coming home that day from his latest assignment and would be there to see her dressed to go to the junior prom.

Her feet had hardly touched the stairs as she danced down to the kitchen—only to find her mother crumpled on the breakfast table, sobbing. Apparently, while Hunter had been in the shower, the phone had rung, the caller the station chief at her father’s TV network in New York. The plane out of Colombia carrying her father, Nolan Harding, was missing and fears were that it had crashed in stormy weather. Days later, the wreckage was found, and they had the confirmation everyone had feared: there were no survivors.

Although they were financially stable, her mother sold their Mahwah, New Jersey, home and moved them back to Hunter’s actual birthplace—San Antonio, Texas—to be near her maternal grandparents, since her father’s parents had died some years before. Even though it was her senior year and she knew no one, Hunter learned to love Texas, made friends easily enough, and despite the hole in her heart, she determinedly moved on for her mother’s and grandparents’ sakes.

Then, just before her college graduation, when those she loved most were scheduled to watch her get her diploma and life was looking bright again, she thought it safe to sigh in appreciation, only to learn that morning that her roommate Danica’s brother, foolishly tied up with unsavory types, had OD’d on drugs and was lying in a hospital in a coma.

This pattern of painful life experiences continued, the most recent the matter of her brief engagement to Denny Brewster. Hunter was still smarting too much from that episode to allow herself to dwell on the details for longer than a second. So when she woke in her San Antonio condominium early on a June morning and stretched with pleasure remembering yesterday’s news that she and her newest co-anchor Greg Benson had almost achieved another week as the number-one-rated news program for the five and ten o’clock slots, the ringing phone automatically sent her body and mind into panic mode. She just knew that she was about to have a another reality check, the question was how traumatic?

Please, no , she thought. What’s it going to take to end this hug-then-gut-punch pattern?

It turned out that the caller was KSIO’s executive producer, Tom Vold, informing her that Senator George Leeds of Texas—caught in a career-breaking scandal only days ago—was advising the press that he planned to make an announcement this morning. Tom was convinced he would be tendering his resignation and wanted her to get to the station pronto to go live when that happened.

Under normal circumstances, such a development could be received as a career-enhancing opportunity, however it threw Hunter into a tailspin. She was due to fly to New Jersey to deliver the commencement speech at the high school she would have graduated from had she stayed on the East Coast. How was she to do the live spot—if the senator actually went through with his resignation—and still make her flight? What was she to tell the school’s administration in New Jersey? “Hang on, I’ll be there. Maybe?” But to ask her boss to get Greg, her relatively new co-anchor, to do the spot would send the message to him and their audience that she didn’t see this as important news. If Tom wanted her to handle this, she needed to go.

Concluding that there would be little time to change tonight, she put on the red silk suit she’d planned to wear for this evening’s event and rushed to work. Rarely fussy in her personal life, she believed in dressing up, not down, whenever possible as well as investing in quality clothing and accessories for her professional image. For example, she rarely wore anything less than fourteen-karat gold on the set. She believed the camera could tell or an abrupt movement would betray its inferior construction. However, when it came to shoes, regardless of price, she approached them all with equal resignation. She always joked to the set crew as she hunted for her discarded footwear that she had undoubtedly been a beach bum or bunny in a previous life.

By the time she arrived at the station, there was word that the senator would, indeed, step down. Luck was with them and they had a whopping forty minutes to formulate a strong package and cull quality guests. When the countdown came, she ably represented the network through his announcement and the guest interviews that followed.

“And that concludes our special report,” she said some twenty-five minutes after the senator read his five-minute prepared speech. “I’m Hunter Harding. Please join us at five for a recap of today’s important developments and at ten o’clock for the latest reactions from the White House, Congress and more. Until then, be well,” she said as her outro, the newsroom jargon for an exit tag.

“We’re off. Clean air as usual, Hunter,” Wade Spangler, her news director, said of the mistake-free segment right after the control room advised that the computer had done a hard out, taken over and slid them into a commercial break. Regular programming for that hour of the morning would also be handled by computers.

“Thanks, Wade and everyone,” Hunter replied, adrenaline still pumping through her system. Pretending that she didn’t have a 220-volt cord buzzing up her spine, she added, “Pizza is on me. Someone check with Joey at the security desk. It should be here by now.”

As cheers of appreciation sounded from the control room as well as the set, Hunter pulled out her earpiece, unclipped her mike and slipped off the battery tucked at the small of her back inside the waistband of her suit in anticipation of the assistant assigned to collect them. At the same time, she slipped back into her high heels. The station would continue with the morning talk show out of New York, so there was no immediate need to rush off, but she did have to remind her bosses that she had a previous commitment for this evening and see about rebooking the flight that she’d missed. Collecting her notes, she gauged who best to speak to that might help move things along for her.