A Rich Man for Dry Creek / a Hero for Dry Creek Read Free

knives. Some of those boys could have done credible surgery on something larger and more alive than a hunk of carrot.
    Jenny was thankful for people like Sylvia Bannister who ran a center for gang kids in Seattle, and for Garth Elkton who had welcomed the kids to his ranch for a winter camp program. Jenny had seen how peaceful the Big Sheep Mountains looked in the snow. Low mountains skirted by gentle foothills. This little ranching community was a perfect haven for gang kids.
    Sylvia and Garth were giving those kids a second chance. Mrs. Buckwalter was funding the winter camp and providing the lobsters tonight, both as a thanks to the community of Dry Creek, especially to the minister who had recently gotten married, and as a reward to the teenagers from Seattle for putting down their knives and learning to dance.
    Sylvia and Garth were the kind of people that deserved to be number one on some New York tabloid list, not some hotshot rich man like Robert Buckwalter who spent half his life in Europe attending art shows, Jenny told herself. He didn’t even organize the shows; he just sat there and gave away money.
    Jenny felt a twinge of annoyance. An able-bodied man like Robert Buckwalter should be more useful in life. Giving away money hardly qualified as a job—not when he had so much of it. She doubted he even wrote the checks himself.
    â€œI ruined one of the mushrooms,” a girl wailed from the sink. “Totally ruined it. The stem didn’t come out right and—”
    â€œNot a problem. We just cut it up and put it with the stuffing.” Jenny walked to the refrigerator to get out the herbed bread mixture that went in the few mushroom caps they’d found in the café’s refrigerator bin. “Nothing goes to waste in a good kitchen. There’s always some other place for it. If nothing else, there’s soup. ‘Waste not, want not’ my mother always used to say. And remember, aprons everyone.”
    The kids groaned.
    Robert Buckwalter grunted. He wondered if he was crazy. He shouldn’t be annoyed with the ever-resourceful Jenny. He should be grateful to her. After all, he’d hired her because of her apparent good cheer and her complete indifference to him.
    During her job interview, she’d asked no personal questions about him—no sly inquiries about how often he’d be present for dinner at his mother’s home in Seattle, or whether as the family chef, she’d be required to fly to the flat he must have in London or maybe the villa he had in Venice or the chalet he had in the Alps…and surely he must have at least one of those, didn’t he? Or maybe he just traveled around in the plane he had, the one especially designed with all the gadgets, the one she’d read about in the papers, the one they called the ultimate “rich man’s” toy?
    The questions would come. They always did.
    Except with Jenny.
    But then, maybe she’d just been more clever than most.
    â€œFinished with the phone?” Robert asked politely. He hadn’t been fooled for a minute by the woman who had called claiming she needed to speak to Jenny urgently about some pudding order. Pudding, my foot. The woman was no salesperson.
    Why else would Jenny take the call and disappear into that hole of a pantry where no one could hear her conversation?
    Not even bats would go into that pantry if they didn’t have to. Jenny had literally needed to pry the door open earlier with a crowbar. The wood was half-rotted and the wind blew in through the knotholes.
    No, it wasn’t a place where anyone would go for a cozy phone conversation with a pudding salesperson.
    Robert Buckwalter swore he could spot a reporter a mile off and he had a bad feeling about that call.
    Maybe his time was up.
    Robert knew how to keep a low profile with the press but he was off his game. He’d gone completely rustic. On the flight over here, he’d looked at all the extra