That Despicable Rogue Read online

  Sure enough, about nine o’clock the blinds across the way snapped down and the light went on behind them. Cole watched until he couldn’t stand it any longer, then spent the next three hours trying to get to sleep. The next morning he could hardly drag himself off his cot.

  Noralee Ness turned up promptly at ten o’clock. Hell, she was only eleven or twelve years old, but her brown eyes snapped with intelligence, and she brought apples and cheese and a slab of chocolate cake for her lunch and shared it with him while he showed her how to arrange the pieces of lead type in her type stick.

  She was quick to learn and even quicker with her hands. By noon he had finished the last page of the story he’d been writing, and before three in the afternoon Noralee had typeset it right down to the last comma.

  Two Newspapers? Why Not?

  Why shouldn’t the Smoke River Sentinel have some competition? It’s a free country. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. Besides, the little popgun press in this town shouldn’t fear a bit of healthy competition.

  Or should it? Is it possible the Smoke River Sentinel has grown complacent because it’s the one and only newspaper in this fair community?

  I ask you—with an election coming up, isn’t it reasonable to present two sides to every question?

  Cole Sanders

  Editor, Lake County Lark

  That night before he crawled onto his cot he slipped a copy of his first edition under the door of the Sentinel office across the street.

  Copyright © 2016 by The Woolston Family Trust

  ISBN-13: 9781488004131

  That Despicable Rogue

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Merritt

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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