ROMANCING MO RYAN Read online

  As he spoke on the phone, they both stared into each other’s eyes. And oddly enough, Nikki didn’t see a rigid ideologue there, she didn’t see harshness there, she saw compassion! Just as she had seen it two years ago. And it was that humanity, that kindness in his startling blue eyes, which made her know that this was the man she liked so completely in Cleveland.

  He remembered her fondly too, as he held a conversation with a fellow judge on the telephone. And the more he remembered her, and the more he stared into her beautiful, ginger-brown eyes, the more he smelled her sweet, perfume scent, felt her small, soft hand in his, the more he slowly moved her closer to him.

  Nikki didn’t realize that those subtle tugs of her hand moved her so closer to him that her small body ended up standing squarely between his wide-open legs. And as he stared at her while he conversed on the phone, and as she stared at him, he moved his hand out of her hand and placed it on the small of her back. And then, to her amazement but not to her surprise, he pulled her against his rock-hard body and wrapped his arm completely around her waist.

  Nikki felt a chill down her spine when he pulled her against him. What were they thinking, she wondered? This was supposed to be an interview, not some sex romp.

  But it felt so good. She hadn’t been touched so sensually by a man like this since the last time Mo had touched her. And the thought of his touch, and what it meant to her back then, caused her to close her eyes, and lay her head on his shoulder.

  Mo’s chest tightened when she allowed his embrace. And when his conversation ended and he hung up the phone, he wrapped both arms around her and pulled her so closely that her stomach was wedged against his expanding manhood. And he closed his eyes too.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said softly against her ear.

  Nikki leaned back from him, not enough to get out of his embrace, but enough to see him face to face. That wonderful, entrancing sincerity in her eyes caused him to shudder. “I’ve missed you too,” she admitted.

  And he pulled her against him again, and she laid her head on his shoulder again. What was it about this young woman, he wondered as he held her, that took him to such an emotional place that no other woman ever came close to taking him to? He hadn’t seen her in two long years, but it felt as if their time in Cleveland happened only days ago. And it also felt as if he had made, by not committing to her, by getting on that plane and flying away from her for what he thought would be forever, one of the biggest blunders of his life.

  But just like their time in Cleveland, reality began to set in for both of them. Nikki didn’t need this distraction and Mo didn’t need this drama. But when she lifted her head off of his shoulder again, and they were face to face once more, he couldn’t just let her simply grab her things and go. Not this time.

  “Have dinner with me,” he blurted out.

  Nikki stared at him. Everything within her was saying that it was a bad idea. This guy wasn’t that caring guy in Cleveland who rocked her world. This guy was burdened down with responsibility, with views she found almost offensive, with an aura about him that made her know that if she went down that road with him again she would be all-in this time, whether he wanted her to or not. When she could least afford to be all into anything other than getting her career back on track.

  “You haven’t given me enough,” she said to him.

  Mo’s heart dropped. “Enough of what?” he asked cautiously, unnervingly.

  “Information to give our readers your point of view.”

  He relaxed. “Then give them your point of view,” he said, his arms still around her, experiencing the softness of her.

  “I’m for real, Mo. I don’t see how I can justify to our readers why you should be recognized as one of this town’s heroes.”

  “That makes two of us,” he said. “Have dinner with me.”

  Nikki studied him. “When?” she asked.

  “I can’t tonight,” he said and her antenna immediately went up. Was it because he had a date with another female scheduled already? “What about tomorrow night?”

  No way should she have said yes. Not with this guy. Not when they’d only just met again and already her antenna had served her notice that there may be a lot of interference along the way. No man this fine was completely without drama, without having every gorgeous, every aggressive woman around working overtime to get his rod into their reel. And drama was the absolute last thing she needed right now. She had to tell him no.

  But she remembered how he pulled that rod out of her reel when he realized she was a virgin. And how he held her all night long in such a loving embrace, and how she felt protected for the first time in her life. And she loved that feeling.

  “Yes,” she said. “Tomorrow night is fine.”

  Mo smiled. She could see the lines of age slowly begin to appear on the sides of his tired eyes. “Thank-you,” he said to her. And pulled her into that warm, protective embrace she loved once again.

  FOUR

  Early the next morning Nikki knocked over the alarm clock on her nightstand as she grabbed her ringing telephone. When she finally managed to get the receiver to her ear, her voice was barely audible.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Lance McKay laughed. He was standing behind the counter at his art gallery in San Marco, flipping through the morning paper. He was a slender man, barely an inch taller than Nikki, who wore skintight suits, always black or blue, and elegant ascots around his slender neck. He had a honey-brown complexion and often came across with an air of sophistication and playfulness all wrapped into one. Since college, when he was being bullied for being gay and Nikki was being dissed for not going along with their classmates’ hazing-style tactics, he’d been her best friend bar none. Her only friend if truth be told.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  Nikki grunted a sleepy reply.

  Lance smiled. “Aren’t you late for work?” he asked her.

  Her eyes immediately stretched open. “What time is it?” she asked with some panic in her now very audible voice.

  “You are so easy. I’m kidding, all right? It’s only six forty-five.”

  Nikki relaxed. Then she thought about it. “And you’re calling me at six-forty-five why?”

  “Because, darling, I was surprised by your article.”

  “On Judge Ryan?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What’s surprising about it?”

  “I thought you said you guys had a history?”

  She usually told Lance everything, although, two years ago, she failed to mention her fling in Cleveland with a certain judge. She told him all about it last night, however, and how that same judge had asked her to have dinner with him tonight. To her shock, Lance was thrilled.

  “It’s about time you showed some interest,” he’d said.

  “What are you getting at, Lance?” she now asked him on the phone. “Why are you calling me at six in the morning about some article I wrote on Mo Ryan?”

  “Not so much the article, darling, as the headline.”

  Nikki’s eyes stretched again. Phil Lopez and the Gazette’s editorial staff were solely responsible for determining what the headline of any article would be. The reporters wrote the articles, and the slug lines, but the editors wrote the headlines. “What about the headline?” she asked Lance.

  “Just that it’s brutal, girl,” Lance said.

  Nikki threw the covers off of her and got out of bed. “Let me call you back, Lanny,” she said and hung up the phone before he could agree.

  She grabbed her housecoat, ran downstairs, and slung open her front door. The Jacksonville Gazette was waiting, as usual, on the step. When she saw the headline, her heart grew faint. Because Lance wasn’t exaggerating. The Gazette was known for its provocative, attention-grabbing headers, Nikki knew that going in. But this was different. She knew Mo Ryan. She’d never had such a strong reaction to a man the way she reacted to Mo Ryan in Cleveland, and again yesterday, in his office. But now, instead of patting herself on the back for one of her feature articles making the front page, all she could think about was what Mo was going to think about her when he read that headline himself. They were scheduled to go to dinner tonight. Would he call it off? She would actually be very disappointed, she realized, if he did. Because Lance was right. It was about time she showed some interest.

  She fell against the door and shook her head. Nothing she could do about it now. But she could just kill Phil Lopez.

  Then she went back upstairs and hurried to the shower. And she suddenly couldn’t get to work fast enough.

  When she did get to work she dropped her hobo bag on her desk, hurried past the Copy desk, and hurried into Phil’s office, dropping the newspaper on his already cluttered desk.

  “What is this, Phil?” she asked him.

  Phil was reading the Sports section of their newspaper when she walked in. He sat his own copy of the paper down and picked up hers. “It’s the article you wrote, whatta you think it is?”

  “But the headline, Phil,” she said, pointing at the headline. “Judge Maximum: Hero or Zero?” Her voice rose as she read the last word of the headline. “Seriously?”

  Phil smiled. “Clever, wasn’t it?”

  “Hero or Zero, Phil?”

  “Yes! You wrote it, what’s the big damn deal?”

  “I didn’t write the headline. You decide the headline.”

  “Based on the story itself.”

  “But I never referred to him as some zero.”

  “He’s no hero, you made that clear in your article. It was just a play on words, come on.”

  Nikki folded her arms. She knew arguing with her boss over some headline was a losing proposition. But this bothered her. “It’s so disrespectful,” she said. “That wasn’t the tenor of my article. Yes, I questioned his hero status. I questioned Nathan Crump’s hero status, too. But this goes too far, Phil. The last thing in the world I wanted to do with my profile of Mo Ryan was to disrespect the man.”

  Phil frowned. “What’s the matter with you? You never complained about any of my creative headlines before, and a lot of them have been far worse than this one. What’s the big damn deal here?”

  Nikki didn’t know herself. She honestly didn’t know herself. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just. . . tired, I guess. I went to this party with Lance last night and didn’t get home until really late.”

  “How’s Lance doing?” Phil asked. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  Nikki didn’t know if Phil’s interest in Lance was friendly or more than that, and at this point in time she didn’t care. “He’s fine.”

  “Yeah? Is he still dating that guy, that whatshisname?”

  Since Nikki didn’t know, and wouldn’t tell Phil even if she did, she shrugged her shoulder. Then said, “I’ll be at my desk,” as she turned to leave.

  “Not so fast,” Phil said, looking down at her perfectly fitted dress pants with her perfectly fitted silk blouse. A blouse, he also noticed, that crisscrossed at the chest and gave magnificent definition to her considerable breasts. When Nikki turned completely back toward him, he motioned toward the chair. “Sit down.”

  “I really need to get to work on that---”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Phil said, “sit down.”

  She sat down. But when he was able to look at her, eyeball to eyeball, and he saw just how flustered she was, he frowned.

  “No, you didn’t,” he said. “Please don’t tell me you fell for Ryan’s charm offensive too?”

  Nikki stared at him. “His what?”

  “His charm offensive! His seduction games.”

  “What seduction games?”

  “I told you every time I send a female over to interview that man they come back with goo-goo eyes and crap. With nothing. You didn’t, your article was hard-hitting and I liked that. But now, just because the headline is tough, you act as if . . . Oh, never mind,” Phil said, shaking his head. “That’s too crazy to even entertain.”

  Nikki knew exactly what he meant. The thought that a liberal-minded person like her would even dream of hooking up with a rigid ideologue like Mo Ryan was preposterous on its face.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  “What’s up?” she asked Phil.

  “So he impressed you yesterday?”

  “His beliefs certainly didn’t.”

  Phil looked at her. “But he did?”

  Nikki stared at him.

  “But no matter. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. I didn’t know who to give this story to, but now I think you’ll be perfect.”

  A story? A big story? This definitely interested Nikki. “What’s going on?” she asked him.

  “You remember Wade Shepard, don’t you?”

  Nikki thought about this. “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s right. Geez. I forgot. You weren’t even here yet. Well, Sheppard was this mildly retarded kid accused of strangling a woman and her daughter at a Laundromat a while back. His case went to trial a year ago. That case stayed in my mind because he, this mentally-challenged kid, supposedly wrote this college-level confession that was later tossed out in court. But he was convicted anyway.”

  “What about him?”

  “The Gazette has learned that new scientific evidence may exonerate Mr. Sheppard.”

  This didn’t make sense to Nikki. “But why was he convicted if they had all of this evidence?”

  “They claimed they didn’t, but they had it all along. His new attorneys tested everything they thought could possibly shed some light on the case, even the victims clothing that the prosecutor at the time didn’t bother to test, and the Public Defender didn’t bother to question. But his new attorneys requested testing, at their own expense, and hit the jackpot.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow is right,” Phil said. “The guy whom our very own Judge Maximum sentenced to death for a double homicide he apparently never committed, may just be exonerated, Nikki Tarver. He’s innocent.”

  Nikki’s heart dropped. Mo was the judge? Did he just say Mo was the judge? But she had to maintain her composure. “My goodness, Phil,” she said. “This is fantastic news. For Sheppard, especially.”

  “I’ve been in touch with one of his attorneys. They’re expecting the conviction to be vacated. Of course the prosecutor’s office is going ballistic. Evidence or no evidence, they’re still convinced the kid is guilty.”

  “What arrogant assholes,” Nikki said. “They make her sick with that! It was the same way in Cleveland. Can they ever admit when they’re wrong?”

  “Never,” Phil agreed. “But it may not matter in the long run.”

  “And Ryan was the presiding judge?” Nikki asked this casually.

  “Yep. He’s the one who laid down the sentence of death.”

  Nikki swallowed hard. Then looked at Phil. “What’s been his reaction?”

  “That’s where you come in.”

  “Me?”

  “Ryan won’t agree to an interview, he’s turned us down cold late yesterday when we asked, but since you saw him yesterday, maybe you could get in to see him again.”

  They were scheduled to see each other tonight, but that was private. This was something else. “But why would he want to meet with me again?” she asked. “I wrote that Hero or Zero article, remember? He’s not going to tell me anything.”

  “Oh, yes he will. He has to know you’re a journalist first, since your article made clear that you weren’t letting him off easy the way other reporters always do. And he also knows he’s in deep shit image-wise right now. He needs a straight-shooter like you to breathe some life into his ass. I think he’ll have a lot to tell.”

  Nikki looked at Phil and sighed. He didn’t know what he was asking of her. Here she was trying to see if she could build something up with Mo Ryan after all, and here Phil was offering her up to tear Mo Ryan down. And she knew doing both at the same time would be damn-near impossible. But it just seemed so hopeless. It seemed as if she and Mo Ryan, whether they liked it or not, were just destined to keep tripping into each other.

  But despite her article, and despite the Sheppard situation, he didn’t cancel their dinner date. She, in fact, didn’t hear from him at all that day. She attempted to phone his office, not only to confirm the date but to see if she could discuss the Sheppard case with him, but his secretary said he’d be in court until after five pm. She didn’t bother to leave a message. She assumed he wasn’t the kind of man who would cancel a date without notifying his date. So she prepared herself.

  She was dressed and ready and on time, thanks to Lance. She didn’t want his help, she found the entire idea of Lance leaving his busy gallery to come help her prepare was absurd, but he insisted on coming over and selecting the exact right outfit for her to wear.

  “You’re a very honest, sincere, hardworking girl,” he said to her, “but when it comes to your dress style, honey, you’re somewhere between a tween and Joan Rivers. You’re all over the place! You need pure sophistication tonight. That’s what Judge Ryan is expecting to see tonight, and that’s what you’re going to show.”

  “And you know this about Mo Ryan how?” Nikki asked as she lay across her bed watching Lance scour through every inch of her closet.

  “I’ve heard things about him, okay,” Lance said, eyeing a low-cut dress that caused him to frown. “Unlike you, I get around.”

  “What things have you heard?” Nikki asked, interested.

  “That he, you know,” Lance said. His attention was completely focused on finding her the right outfit.

  “That he what, Lanny?”

  Lance glanced at her, surprised by the urgency in her voice. When he saw that earnest look in her eyes, he turned toward her. He really did love Nikki Tarver. She was the most sincere, guileless human being he’d ever met. “He likes the ladies, Nikki,” he said to her.

  Nikki’s heart plunged. “As in he has a lot of ladies?”