ROMANCING MO RYAN Read Online Free Page A

outspoken, opinionated sisters of hers would fall into deep depressions with suicidal ideations because some man wouldn’t act right.   Please.   Who needed all of that drama?   Nikki figured she could do bad all by herself.   And, given her sputtering life and career, she was doing just that.
     
    She arrived at the Jacksonville Gazette Newspaper building, early the next morning, barely on time.   She parked her aging Mustang in the half empty lot on the side of the rustic building, and hurried out.   Before relocating to Florida a month ago, she had been a star reporter with the Cleveland Dealer-Dispatch, and her career was on the fast track.   Until she referred to a city commissioner as one of the most blatantly corrupt politicians in history.   She was only quoting what his opponent had said, and had put those quotes in her story, but the commissioner took great offense.   He knew somebody, who knew somebody who knew the managing editor.   And when it was time for negotiations, that same editor refused to renew Nikki’s contract to work at the Dealer-Dispatch.   Although technically she wasn’t fired, because she was under contract, but it amounted to the same thing: she didn’t have a job.  
    If it hadn’t been for her best friend, Lance McKay, who lived here in Jacksonville and who begged his friend, an editor with the Gazette, to hire her, she didn’t know what she would have done.   But she thanked God when Phil Lopez, the editor, offered her the job.   She decided that a change of city and state would do her good, and arrived in Jacksonville ready to set this place on fire.
    But she couldn’t even get to work on time.   Ever since her arrival, in fact, she’d been on the verge of lateness seemingly every morning.   She had a chance to be on time this time, however, if she hustled.   And she did, hurrying up the steps in her high-heeled shoes as if she had no time to waste, her hobo bag slinging on her shoulder as if it didn’t wear the ton it wore. She was dressed professional but stylish, in a pretty, low-cut pink cardigan, and a short, white skirt that draped down well above her shapely knees.  
    As soon as she arrived at her desk, however, Helen Jones got in what was becoming her usual jab.
    “Good morning, Nikki,” she said.
    “Good morning, Helen,” Nikki replied.
    Nikki was, by more than twenty years, the youngest reporter the Gazette had on staff.   And many of her colleagues, particularly the females, found her dress style and her appearance in general a little too loud, too youthful, and a little too sexy for their taste.
    Helen looked down, at the low cut of her cardigan, at her short skirt, at her long, silky hair in waves of curls and bounciness, and then back up into her eyes.   “You look,” Helen started, and then took a moment to think about it.   “Let me put it this way.   There’s a saying I tell my own daughters all the time.   Why would the man buy the cow, I tell them, when he can get the milk for free?”
    Helen stared at Nikki, as if waiting for her to respond.
    “Well?” Helen asked.
    “Well what?” Nikki said.
    “You dress provocatively, Nikki.”
    Maybe to a fifty year old woman , Nikki wanted to say.
    “Well?” fifty-year-old Helen said again.   “Why should a man buy the cow when he can get the milk for free?”
    “Maybe he’s buying the cow,” Nikki replied, “for the hamburgers and steaks he can get out of it, too.”
    The men in the newsroom laughed.   Helen looked at Nikki angrily, and then turned back around to her own desk.
      But Nikki ignored them all and turned on her computer.   She didn’t come all this way to Florida to pick fights with Helen Jones or anybody else.   She just wanted to do her job and prove to the Gazette, and to Phil Lopez, that hiring her wasn’t a bad decision.   That was why she did everything they asked her to do without batting an eye, even though all of her assignments had gone nowhere fast.