Styling Read on Link

I'd like to style the link and hover colors for my excerpt's "Read on" link independent of the Content colors in Customizer. Basically, I'd like to use brown for the link color and blue for the hover. In the post content, I have that reversed because the brown recedes within the body of text.

I'm currently using the following snippet to create the "Read on" link following my post excerpts on the front page:

//* Changing excerpt more - only works where excerpt IS hand-crafted
  
function manual_excerpt_more( $excerpt ) {
	$excerpt_more = '';
	if( has_excerpt() ) {
    	$excerpt_more = '&nbsp;<a href="' . get_permalink() . '" rel="nofollow"><strong><p>Read on &rarr;</p></strong></a>';
	}
	return $excerpt . $excerpt_more;
}
add_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'manual_excerpt_more' );

As always, your help is greatly appreciated.