Not one damn thing.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted, wishing like hell that he knew who’d sent that article to the Boston Globe. And how they’d been able to print it without permission from the author.
Because she’d just assumed it was Scott and hadn’t wanted to attract more attention to herself, Laurel had never pursued the issue. At least those were the reasons she’d given him. And the reason she hadn’t turned him in for forging her permission to use the article in the school paper.
“You still shouldn’t have given it to the school paper without my permission.”
“I know.”
“Wow!” Scott’s groin tightened at the laughingly condescending tone in her voice. “Miracles do happen on occasion,” she said. “I never thought you’d admit that you were wrong on this one.”
He wasn’t sure why he had.
“But since you have,” Laurel said, her voice dangerously soft. “I need to thank you.”
“For admitting I was wrong?”
“No, for submitting it in the first place.”
What? He almost swerved into the gravel on the shoulder of the road.
“I owe my entire career to that article,” she said, spinning his world into confusion.
“How so?”
“I’m such a private person, I never would have submitted anything to anyone. Yet it was all the reaction I got from that article, from people who told me that it made a difference to them, that showed me what I needed to do with my life. Until that article came out I never knew I had any talent for writing.”
“You have an uncanny ability to get the facts, to filter through them without apparent bias, and then present a sometimes new truth about whatever subject you report on.”
“Thank you.”
Her gratitude didn’t sit well with him, because he knew how very much he didn’t deserve it.
Luckily he’d just pulled into the parking lot and didn’t have to reply.
* * *
NERVES TAUT, LAUREL WATCHED silently as Scott found a parking spot at Cooper’s General Store. Philo and Phyllis Cooper were legends in Cooper’s Corner. A distant cousin to Maureen and Clint Cooper, Philo had lived in the village every one of his fifty-seven years, and his fifty-five-year-old wife was a local girl as well.
It wasn’t that Laurel disliked the older couple. To the contrary, she’d found them a pure delight when she’d first moved to town and had spent hours hanging around their store, learning all she could about the town she’d decided was going to be her hometown.
No matter what was going on in Cooper’s Corner, Philo and Phyllis knew all about it and were only too happy to give every detail to anyone who asked.
“Smart choice, coming here first,” she said as they got out of the truck.
“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?” he asked.
“Absolutely not! Why would you say that?”
“Sometimes the Coopers’ eagerness to pass on their knowledge is misinterpreted. Some people don’t understand that there is nothing malicious about their gossip.”
“Of course there isn’t!” she agreed. “They share the good just as much as the bad.”
“They’re great examples of a small community’s belief in the right of everyone to know exactly what’s going on in everyone else’s life.”
Laurel really liked how adamantly he was defending his town. But he didn’t need to defend it to her. Cooper’s Corner was her town, too.... Or at least the closest thing she’d ever had to a town she could claim.
“If it hadn’t been for Phyllis Cooper,” Laurel said, “no one would have known about that time old Mrs. Lathgate broke her hip. The poor woman would have had to cope on her own.”