A Rich Man for Dry Creek / a Hero for Dry Creek by Janet Tronstad Page B

doesn’t matter.” Especially when Jenny had pulled that hairnet of hers back on like it was armor.
    â€œYou run along, dear.” Mrs. Hargrove smiled at Laurel who had allowed herself to be coaxed into accepting Mrs. Hargrove’s invitation when it was apparent there was no hotel around. “I want Robert to help me bring in some wood before we all bed down. We won’t be long.”
    Laurel could have helped Robert out of his dilemma, but she wouldn’t. She kept a bored smile on her face that revealed little.
    Once Laurel made her bombshell announcement she apparently felt free to ignore him. Which would have been a dead giveaway about the true nature of their acquaintance if it wasn’t for the pouty face that Laurel put on for the show. She looked enough like a woman who’d been wronged to turn others to her defense.
    Robert sighed. His protests fell on skeptical ears. The truth was he hadn’t even been around Laurel for months. They had moved in the same social circle for years, but he had long ago made it a policy to spend as little time alone with her as possible.
    Even though the cold outside had iced every inch of tree and shrub, Robert was glad to be able to go out of the house and gather wood for the fire.
    Mrs. Hargrove had a stack of logs neatly arranged in a small shed on the south side of her house. Robert had offered to get the logs by himself, but Mrs. Hargrove had politely insisted on coming with him.
    He found out why when he had his arms half-full of frozen pine logs.
    â€œI run a godly household,” the older woman said. She had a plaid wool scarf wrapped around her chin, but her words still came out clear. “It’s late so I’ll come to the point—everyone sleeps in their own bed.”
    â€œOf course.”
    The woman nodded in satisfaction. “Just wanted to be sure we understood each other. I don’t know who you’re engaged to—”
    â€œI’m not engaged to anyone.”
    Mrs. Hargrove pinned him with her eyes. “You’ve got one woman who says you are. Why would she be saying that if it’s not true?”
    â€œI don’t know for sure.” Robert added another log to the stack in his arms. “But my guess would be that she’s trying to get her name in the paper.”
    Robert had been asking himself that same question for the past half hour and the only reason he could think of was that Laurel had somehow found out about the bachelor list.
    He’d suspected before that Laurel funneled information about him to the tabloids. That was one of the reasons he’d started avoiding her. But she could still get information about him from other people in their social set and pass it along. If that was what she was doing, it would appear that the communication flowed in both directions.
    Someone must have told Laurel he was a candidate for the big slot on the tabloid’s list. Laurel loved the spotlight. She’d see it as quite a triumph to announce her engagement to the number one bachelor in the U.S. at the same time, or shortly after he was named the most eligible bachelor around. The fact that Robert would deny the engagement the next day wouldn’t matter. Her picture would already be in every tabloid from here to Japan before Robert could get it all sorted out. Laurel would soak up the publicity. She might even get a book deal out of it.
    Mrs. Hargrove looked perplexed. “She’d get engaged just to get her name in the paper? They put the names of the bridal couples in the Billings Gazette , too, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting married just to see their name there.”
    â€œIt wouldn’t be the Billings Gazette .” Robert wished that that’s all his marriage would ever mean to the media—just a nice paragraph in the Newly Married column of the local paper. “I’m trying to get out of it, but some New York paper has got me picked for number one