Nevermind. I played with it a little more and discovered that if I wrapped <!–more–> in an unstyled div, that the <p> would not be applied on the main articles page and would therefore not throw off the display.
Basically, instead of:
<!--more-->
I put:
<div><!--more--></div>
I hope this helps if anyone else out there was scratching your head about this same issue.
