“Flynn?”

“Working,” he snapped without looking up.

“You’re not the only one.” Rhoda shut the door at her back, marched over and sat in a chair. She folded her arms across her chest and stared holes at Flynn through her square-framed glasses.

But without the audience, ready and willing to consume the art, it becomes congealed leftovers to be dumped . . . “Damn it.”

He shoved back from his keyboard. “What?”

“You cut an inch from my feature.”

His hands itched to pick up his Slinky. And wrap its coils around Rhoda’s skinny throat. “And?”

“You said it was running a full twelve inches.”

“And what you had was eleven solid inches, and an inch of fill. I cut the fill. It was a good piece, Rhoda. Now it’s a better piece.”

“I want to know why you’re always picking on me, why you’re always cutting my pieces. You barely put a mark on John’s or Carla’s, and they’re all over my work.”

“John handles sports. He’s been handling sports for over a decade. He’s got it down to a science.”

Art and science, Flynn thought and made a quick shorthand note to remind himself to work it into the column. And sports . . . If anyone watched the way a pitcher sculpted the dirt on the mound with his feet until it was exactly the shape, the texture, the slope he—

“Flynn!”

“What? What?” He snapped back, rewound the tape in his mind. “And I do edit Carla when and if she needs it. Rhoda, I’m on a deadline myself here. If you want to get into this, let’s schedule some time tomorrow.”

Her mouth pruned. “If we don’t resolve this now, I won’t be coming in tomorrow.”

Instead of reaching for his action figure of Luke Skywalker and imagining the Jedi knight drawing his light saber and blasting the superior smirk off Rhoda’s face, Flynn sat back.

The time had come, he decided, to do the blasting himself.

“Okay. First, I’m going to tell you I’m tired of you threatening to walk. If you’re not happy here, not happy with the way I run the paper, then go.”

She flushed scarlet. “Your mother never—”

“I’m not my mother. Deal. I run the Dispatch. I’ve been running it for nearly four years now, and I intend to run it for a long time. Get used to it.”

Now her eyes filled, and since Flynn considered tears fighting dirty, he struggled to ignore them. “Anything else?” he asked coolly.

“I’ve been working here since before you could read the damn paper.”

“Which may be our problem. It suited you better when my mother was in charge. Now it suits you better to continue to think of me as a temporary annoyance, and an incompetent one at that.”

Rhoda’s mouth dropped open in what appeared to be sincere shock. “I don’t think you’re incompetent. I just think—”

“That I should stay out of your work.” The genial tone was back in his voice, but his expression remained frigid. “That I should do what you tell me instead of the other way around. That’s not going to happen.”