well, that helped me get going. Looks like the link colors are overridden by injected styles that prevent setting the link color.
here is what I ended up with that seems to allow me to change the color and background, hopefully its correct and that there aren’t other conditional css injections that might break it. Thank you for your help.
.inside-article .read-more:hover {
background: #D2C75D;
color: #000000;
}
.inside-article .read-more {
display: block;
margin-top:10px;
width:120px;
padding: 10px 10px;
background: #9FA557;
color: #ffffff;
}