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Blood Brothers
Anne/Lucy Mcallister/Gordon
DOUBLE TROUBLEThat was what you got when cousins Gabe McBride, a Montana cowboy, and Randall Stanton, a British lord, traded places! What Gabe and Randall got was the challenge of their lives!Anything Randall could do, Gabe could do better– but tackling centuries of tradition proved tougher than he thought. Almost as tough as convincing a beautiful widowed mother, Frederica Crossman, that he was a risk worth taking.Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Randall knew anything Gabe could do, he could do, too. He was resourceful, competent, clever. He could handle everything– except gorgeous, feisty Claire Stevens.When Randall and Gabe took on a challenge, they never quit. But to win Claire and Freddie, they' d need all their lordly pluck and cowboy try!
Earl Stanton’s Journal Entry
That was some birthday party! Eighty, and as good as I ever was!
It was great Gabe could make it from Montana—two steps ahead of an outraged husband, if I know Gabe!
Could be brothers, my grandsons—Gabe and Randall. Never saw two men more alike. Only in their looks, mind you. Gabe never grew up. As long as he knows where to find the next whiskey bottle, the next cow to rope and the next woman to fool with, Gabe’s happy.
Not Randall. He grew up too far and too fast. Being heir to an earldom is no joke, and Randall is naturally serious. But he’s in his thirties without ever having been in his twenties, and that’s all wrong.
What they need is the right women, one to knock some sense into Gabe and one to knock it out of Randall.
Though where you could find women crazy enough to take on those two, Lord only knows….
Dear Reader,
This Fourth of July, join in the fireworks of Silhouette’s 20
anniversary year by reading all six powerful, passionate, provocative love stories from Silhouette Desire!
July’s MAN OF THE MONTH is a Bachelor Doctor by Barbara Boswell. Sparks ignite when a dedicated doctor discovers his passion for his loyal nurse!
With Midnight Fantasy, beloved author Ann Major launches an exciting new promotion in Desire called BODY & SOUL. Our BODY & SOUL books are among the most sensuous and emotionally intense you’ll ever read. Every woman wants to be loved…BODY & SOUL, and in these books you’ll find a heady combination of breathtaking love and tumultuous desire.
Amy J. Fetzer continues her popular WIFE, INC. miniseries with Wife for Hire. Enjoy Ride a Wild Heart, the first sexy installment of Peggy Moreland’s miniseries TEXAS GROOMS. This month, Desire offers you a terrific two-books-in-one value—Blood Brothers by Anne McAllister and Lucy Gordon. A British lord and an American cowboy are look-alike cousins who switch lives temporarily…and lose their hearts for good in this romance equivalent of a doubleheader. And don’t miss the debut of Kristi Gold, with her moving love story Cowboy for Keeps—it’s a keeper!
So make your summer sizzle—treat yourself to all six of these sultry Desire romances!
Happy Reading!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Blood Brothers
Anne McAllister
Lucy Gordon
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
In darkest Devon…GABE
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…RANDALL
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Epilogue
Dear Reader,
Two years ago on a cold damp night in Bath, England, the two of us were sitting in a restaurant talking—as writers are wont to do—about what if…
What if we wrote a book together…what if we each had a hero…what if one was British and the other American…?
Of course, one what if led to another, and when Anne went home to America and Lucy went home to Northampton, we e-mailed each other more what ifs…and Gabe and Randall—and their crusty grandfather, the earl—were born.
What we’ve written is a book about two men who look alike but think differently, cousins from opposite sides of the Atlantic, cast adrift in each other’s world, floundering until two feisty, loving women take them in hand.
We wrote the Prologue and Epilogue jointly. Individually, Anne wrote about Gabe and Frederica (and counted on Lucy for advice on “darkest” Devon) and Lucy wrote about Randall and Claire (and depended on Anne to get her unscathed through a Montana winter).
Working together was a fresh and fun experience. We had a great time. We hope you do, too.
In darkest Devon…
GABE
ANNE MCALLISTER
RITA Award-winning author Anne McAllister fell in love with a cowboy when she was five years old. Tall, dark, handsome lone-wolf types have appealed to her ever since. “Me, for instance,” her college professor husband says. Well, yes. But even though she’s been married to the man of her dreams for over thirty years, she still likes writing about those men of the West! And even though she may take a break from cowboy heroes now and then, she has lots more stories planned for CODE OF THE WEST. She is always happy to hear from readers, and if you’d like, you can write to Anne at P.O. Box 3904, Bozeman, Montana 59772. SASE appreciated.
Prologue
As Gabe McBride’s plane touched down in England he didn’t have a clue that he was about to have a meeting with Destiny.
His cousin, Lord Randall Stanton, waiting for him outside Customs, didn’t look like Destiny. Randall looked, as he always had, like an English version of Gabe: same tall figure and broad shoulders, same dark hair and eyes, and lean, handsome features that had a strong family likeness. Their differences lay less in looks than mannerisms.
Randall carried his head with the proud air of an English toffee.
“You’d know he was a lord, just looking at him,” Gabe thought with an inward grin.
His own “air” suggested something entirely different. Generally it was one part horse, one part leather, one part bull rope rosin and several parts substances that polite society didn’t talk about. At the moment he’d done his best to scrub all that away. No sense walking into the drawing room smelling like a barn.
Drawing room! Now there was a term he didn’t use often. Didn’t reckon he’d said it aloud since the last time he was here—and that had been fifteen years ago. The very notion made him smile, a drawing room was such a far cry from the homely lived-in clutter of the Montana ranch he called home—when he was home.
Usually he wasn’t.
Usually he was going down the road from rodeo to rodeo. He’d be doing it now if it hadn’t been for getting hung up on that little spinning bull at the National Finals in Vegas last month.
“Shoulder separation,” the doc had said. “Again.” He’d looked at Gabe over the top of his glasses. “How many is that?”
“Five,” Gabe had admitted.
He didn’t like to think about it even now. Didn’t like to think about the surgery that had become inevitable, the months of recovery that would follow, the enforced idleness. A guy could get into trouble if he didn’t have something to keep him busy. A guy could meet a girl like Tracy…
Even now his mouth curved instinctively at the thought of Tracy. He’d known she was trouble from the moment he saw her, but that was how he liked ’em. Trouble, and sassy and all woman. She’d lured him into her bed, with no resistance from him, and had cost him a fortune in gee-gaws, which was fine.
It was her uptight brother with the shotgun who hadn’t been fine. Nor had the lively conversation they’d had in which the words “marriage”, “honest woman” and “decent thing” had occurred with alarming frequency.
Gabe, who had been taught from the cradle never to badmouth a woman, didn’t say that the words “honest” and “decent” were not exactly terms he would have used to describe Tracy. He’d just done his damnedest to assure the shotgun-toting brother that Tracy wouldn’t want to tie herself to a no-account bull rider with no more morals than a monkey. And then he’d promised to hightail it out of the country so she could find herself a “respectable” man.
Gabe wished all the respectable men in the good ol’ U.S. of A. the best of luck. He was off to visit his kin on the other side of the world.
That would keep him out of harm’s—and Tracy’s—way, and besides, it had the added benefit of pleasing his mother who couldn’t go because she was just recovering from the flu and Martha, his sister, who was spending the semester abroad in Brazil.
In fact, Gabe was rather looking forward to a brief vacation visiting his English relatives—especially his mother’s father, Earl Stanton, who was about to celebrate the fact that, in Randall’s words, “Someone let the old devil live to be eighty, without strangling him.”
But Destiny? Who needed it?
When you were young, healthy and in your prime, when there were always more ladies besides Tracy eager for your company, and you had enough money to indulge yourself, you made your own Destiny.
Which went to show how wrong a man could be!
Lord Randall Stanton broke into a grin at the sight of his scapegrace cousin loping out of the Customs Hall, and let out a yell that sat oddly with his elegant tailoring. It was met by an answering yell from Gabe, and for a moment the two young men pounded each other like schoolboys.
“It’s good to see you,” Randall said. “Even if it did take a scandal to get you here.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gabe declared innocently. “The old man’s eightieth—family duty, etc., etc., etc.—”
Randall just grinned. “Your mother called Grandpa just as I was leaving. Your secrets aren’t secrets any more.”
Gabe groaned. “Can’t trust ’em to keep their mouths shut, can you?”
“I’m sure Aunt Elaine is the soul of discretion. Usually. Wait until we’re in the car, and you can tell all,” Randall said.
Like hell he would. He and Randall might have shared a thousand secrets as boys, but when it came to women, Gabe drew the line. He followed Randall out to the parking garage, and whistled at the sight of Randall’s silver-colored Rolls-Royce.
“Does this come from the ancient family fortunes, or did Stanton Publications pay for it?”
“Stanton Publications,” Randall told him. “All the family estates do is soak up money. It’s the firm that makes it.” He settled behind the wheel and looked avidly at his cousin. “Come on. Give. All I know is, it’s something to do with a floozie called Tracy.”
Gabe cocked his head. “Do I detect a little envy in your voice, cuz?”
Randall scowled, then shifted his gaze to focus intently on fitting the key into the ignition. “Of course not.”
“It’s not a crime, you know. Every red-blooded male ought to meet a Tracy or two.”
“Or twelve or twenty,” Randall said drily. “Or have you had more than that?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Gabe grinned as he leaned back against the leather seat and flexed his shoulders. “You should have a few floozies in your life, bud. It would make you a better human being.”
“Like you, I suppose?” Randall snorted.
Gabe shrugged negligently. “All work and no play makes Randall a dull boy.”
“Better than all play and no work,” Randall said firmly.
One of Gabe’s dark brows lifted. “Just a little testy, are we?” he asked as Randall negotiated the narrow lanes of the parking garage.
“You’d be testy too if you had Earl breathing down your neck every minute of every day.”
They called Cedric Stanton “Grandfather” to his face; they called him “the earl” when speaking about him to acquaintances; but they called him “Earl” behind his back because one summer in Montana when they were boys, an old camp cook had actually thought it was the old man’s name and kept yelling, “Hey, Earl! Come an’ get it, Earl!”
Now Gabe grinned. “Hey, that’s Earl. Just tell him to buzz off.”
Randall gave a short sharp laugh. “I’d as soon tell a pit bull to play nice.”
“So buzz off yourself. I don’t see any chain around your neck. Invisible leash, is it?”
Randall almost unconsciously tugged at his collar. “Feels like it sometimes.” He didn’t say anything else, just concentrated on the road. Morning traffic around Heathrow was a good excuse for silence. But in fact, he had to admit Gabe had touched a raw nerve.
The death of Randall’s parents in a car crash when he was eight had made him heir to the earldom and all its rights and responsibilities. His fearsome grandfather had left him in no doubt that he expected both sides of the equation to be kept up. Randall had learned estate management so that he could run the ancient family domains. He’d loved that part of his life. But it hadn’t been profitable. At least not profitable enough. He’d also needed the skills to run the publishing empire by which the Stantons stayed one step ahead of the game.
He enjoyed that work, too, but he hadn’t bargained for it eating away so much of his life. He’d bowed his head to the burdens, but sometimes a voice whispered in his ear that there was more to life than this; that it would be great to toss his cap over the windmill and forget the duties for awhile.
And when he was with his charming, light-hearted, devil-may-care cousin, the whisper threatened to become a roar.
Now his hands tightened on the steering wheel, so slightly that only the sharp-eyed Gabe could have noticed.
“So when do we hear of your engagement?” Gabe asked him.
Randall’s head jerked around. “What engagement?”
“To Lady Honoria, or Lady Serena or Lady Melanie Wicks-Havering, or whoever. Time you did your duty to the House of Stanton, my lad.”
“Stop sounding like Earl,” Randall said in a harassed voice.
Gabe laughed. “So you’ve evaded the pack so far? But how long can the fox stay ahead? Tally Hoooo!” Gabe’s imitation of a hunting cry was excruciating.
“If I had my hands free I’d ram something down your gullet,” Randall muttered. “We can’t all flit from flower to flower with no thought for tomorrow.”
“Like I said, the ol’ green-eyed monster seems to have bit you but good.”
“Go to hell, McBride!”
“Oh, I reckon I will,” Gabe said cheerfully, and settled back as if satisfied that he’d done his bit for international relations.
Earl was looking older.
Of course Gabe had seen him last three years ago when the old man had come to Montana for a month’s visit. Then he’d seemed spry and ageless, his thick shock of white hair framing a relatively unlined face, his bright blue eyes brimming with enthusiasm and his every word outlining some new plan—mostly, Gabe remembered, ones that involved work for Randall.
But now he saw lines in the old man’s face. He saw a faint tremble in Earl’s fingers when, at the eightieth birthday bash, the old man had raised his glass at his grandsons’ toast to “eighty more years as adventure-filled as the last eighty.”
He saw that some day Earl wouldn’t be around anymore.
But he also saw that it was just possible that Randall would die first—of overwork.
Gabe had been in England two days, and while he’d spent a fair amount of time with the earl, he’d barely seen his cousin after Randall had dropped him off at Stanton House in Belgravia and had left.
“Got to be in Glasgow for a meeting,” Randall said apologetically. “Catch you later.”
But he hadn’t. Since Gabe’s arrival, Randall had been variously in London, Glasgow, Manchester, Cardiff and Penzance. The most Gabe heard from him was a phone call or another apologetic message. He barely even made it to Earl’s birthday bash.
He rang to say he’d be a bit late, and when he finally blew in, he stayed long enough for the toast and a piece of cake, and then he excused himself to make calls about a buyout.
Gabe, on the other hand, had a wonderful time. He discussed horseflesh with a couple of his grandfather’s cronies, wrapped himself around a fantastic meal. He danced with all the pretty ladies—of whom there were plenty—and flirted with the prettiest of the lot—a stunning blonde called Natasha, who looked at him with big violet eyes and said, “You’re not much like your cousin, are you?”
“Nope,” Gabe replied cheerfully. “Thank God.”
When the party finally ended, Randall still hadn’t returned. He was probably off somewhere making more money for Stanton Publishing or stopping the cash from flowing out of the Stanton ancestral coffers.
Gabe glanced at his watch. “Have you ever considered giving him a day off?” He and the earl were in the library, cozily ensconced in deep leather chairs, quaffing the best single malt scotch Gabe had ever tasted, and Gabe thought the old man looked mellow enough to allow him to consider broaching the subject.
“Day off?” Earl snorted. “Day off? Nobody ever gave me a day off! Earls don’t get days off.”
Gabe smiled thinly. Poor old Randall. “Reckon I’m glad I’m just a lowly commoner then.” He raised his glass in toast. “To the rabble. Long may we loaf.”
Earl made a harrumphing sound. “You needn’t be so almighty proud of it, my lad. Most men, by your age, have something to show for their lives.”
“You, for instance?” Gabe knew damned well the old man had been a wastrel in his salad days. It had taken a very determined Lady Cornelia Abercrombie-Jones to take Cedric David Phillip Stanton in hand, get a marriage proposal out of him and put an end to his frivolous ways.
“We aren’t talking about me,” Earl said huffily.
“You’re not,” Gabe agreed, “because you know it will undercut your case. I don’t care that you were a hellion. In fact, I’m all for it, as you know.” He grinned. “I just think you ought to allow Randall a shot at a little hell-raising—before you croak and make sure he never gets a day off.”
“You think I’m about to stick my spoon in the wall?”
“Does that mean die? No, probably not. But someday you’re going to. And if Randall hasn’t lived, who can tell what he might do with the Stanton legacy, with all those �burdens’ and �responsibilities’ you keep loading on him. He might just throw it all away!”
Earl’s face turned bright red. “Randall would never—!”
“How do you know? Have you ever let him out past ten o’clock? Except on business?”
Gabe never heard the answer to that question because the next moment the library door opened and Randall returned. A satisfied smile lit his often sober face. “We’ve done it. We’ve got the Gazette!”
“Another Gazette?” Gabe groaned. “How many Gazettes, Echoes, Advertisers, Recorders and whatever else does that make?”
Stanton Publishing specialized in local newspapers, and owned eighty, all over the country.
“This is the Buckworthy Gazette,” Randall said triumphantly. “We’ve been after it for years.”
“Ah.” Gabe nodded in comprehension. The family seat was situated near the little town of Buckworthy, right down south in the county of Devon. It had always galled the Stantons that they couldn’t get their hands on the paper for their own locality. Now, at long last, Randall had triumphed.
Earl, of course, was over the moon. He leapt from his chair, rejuvenated, and slapped his grandson on the back, hollering his delight. “About time! Another few months and it would have gone right down the drain. Now you can turn it around, make it shine.” He glanced at his watch. “If you leave early enough tomorrow you can be down there by midday. It’s a Thursday paper. You’ll be in time to have some input on this week’s issue. No time like the present to begin putting things to rights. Sales haven’t been what they should be. You can start up an advertising campaign, too. And some sort of weekly contest. The one you did in Thrush-by-the-Marsh worked like a charm. Something like that!” Earl rubbed his hands together in glee.
But as Gabe watched, the enthusiasm seemed to drain right out of Randall, as if it were being choked off. As it probably was—by the added tug on the noose of even greater responsibilities.
“Whoa. Hey, hold up. You’ll choke him!” He looked at Randall and slid a finger around the inside of his collar.
Randall hesitated. His hand crept up and loosened his tie. His mouth opened. And closed again. He didn’t say a word.
Idiot! Gabe glared at him. Was he going to let the old man run him into the ground? Randall glared back.
Earl looked from one to the other of them. He frowned. “What’s the problem?”
“No problem,” Randall said at the same moment Gabe said, “Big problem! Here you go pushing more work off on him! I just told you, he needs a break!”
“And I told you there’s work to be done!”
“Get someone else!”
“Someone else?” Earl sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He was working himself up, breathing hard and going red in the face. “The Buckworthy Gazette is the Stanton paper,” he roared. “Ours by right. And failing badly. It’s going to take a Stanton to turn it around.”
“But why does it have to be this Stanton?” Gabe demanded.
“Because Martha is on the other side of the world.”
“Martha is not the only other Stanton!”
“Well, no, there’s you,” Earl said witheringly, “I’d as soon ask a fourteen-year-old to run a bank as send you to turn the Gazette around!”
“You don’t think I can do it?”
“It’s work,” Earl pointed out.
“You don’t think it’s work to raise cattle? You don’t think it’s work to sort and ship and doctor a herd?”
“Your father worked hard,” Earl allowed.
Big of him! Gabe gritted his teeth. “I worked with him!”
“You lent a hand when you passed by.”
“Who do you think did it since Dad died last year?”
“You?” Earl almost seemed to chuckle. “I thought that’s why your mother hired Frank as foreman. Or maybe Martha did it or that little orphan girl, Claire. Your mother says she lives in jeans and does the work of three men. Who needs you?”
Gabe’s teeth came together with a snap. “Think again.”
“You don’t say you’re actually good for a job of work, surely?” Earl regarded him with tolerant amusement.
“I’m good for anything he’s good for,” Gabe snapped, indicating Randall.
“Ho, ho, ho!” Earl scoffed.
“Don’t ho-ho me, old man—”
“And don’t call me old man—”
“Look—” Randall ventured.
As one, the other two turned on him. “YOU KEEP OUT OF IT!”
“Whatever needs to be done, I’ll do it,” Gabe said defiantly. “And you—” to Randall “—give me the details of this paper, and go take a vacation. Or �a holiday,’ I suppose you’d call it.”
“What I’d call it is madness.” Randall shook his head fiercely. “You’ll bankrupt us.”
Gabe slammed his glass down on the table. “Sez who? You think I can’t run things? I’ll show you. I’m off to Devon in the morning!”
There was silence.
Randall and Earl looked at each other. Then at Gabe.
Gabe glared back at them. And then, just as the adrenaline rush carried him through an eight-second bull ride mindless of aches, pains and common sense, before it drained away, so did the red mist of fury disperse and the cold clear light of reality set in.
And he thought, oh hell, what have I done?
Slowly, unconsciously, he raised a hand and ran his finger around the inside of the collar of his own shirt.
Much later the cousins put Earl to bed, then supported each other as far as Gabe’s room, where he produced a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
“Seriously,” Randall said, “it’s a crazy idea…”
“Yep, it is.” Gabe poured them each a glass and lifted his. “To the Buckworthy Gazette!”
“You don’t have to do—”
“Yes,” Gabe said flatly. “I do.” He downed the whisky in one gulp, then set the glass down with a thump and threw himself down onto his bed to lie there and stare up at his cousin. Randall looked a little fuzzy.
Gabe felt a little fuzzy, but determined. “Seriously,” he echoed his cousin. “Remember when we were kids and you came to Montana for the first time. We became blood brothers, swearing to defend and protect each other against all comers. Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Randall shook his head. “I don’t need protecting!”
Gabe wasn’t convinced, but he wasn’t going to argue. He shoved himself up against the headboard of the bed and reached for the bottle again. Carefully he poured himself another glass, aware of Randall’s tight jaw, his cousin’s years of hard work and legendary determination.
“There’s another thing, too. You’re not the only Stanton,” he muttered.
Randall blinked. “What?”
Gabe looked up and met his cousin’s gaze. “I can do this.” Though, as he said the words, Gabe wondered if he was saying them for Randall’s ears or for his own. “It will be fun,” he added after a moment with a return of his customary bravado.
“But you don’t know what you’re getting into.”
Gabe held up his glass and watched the amber liquid wink in the light.
“That,” he said, “is exactly why it’s going to be fun.”
One
How hard could it be?
Gabe was determined to look on the positive side. There was no point, after all, in bemoaning his impulsive decision. He’d said he would do it, and so he would. No big deal.
Randall apparently did this sort of thing all the time—dashed in on his white horse—no, make that, sped in in his silver Rolls-Royce—and rescued provincial newspapers from oblivion, set them on their feet, beefed up their advertising revenues, sparked up their editorial content, improved their economic base and sped away again—just like that.
Well, fine. Gabe would, too. No problem. No problem at all.
The problem was finding the damn place!
Gabe scowled now as he drove Earl’s old Range Rover through the gray morning drizzle that had accompanied him from London, along the narrow winding lane banked by dripping hedgerows taller than his head.
He’d visited the ancestral pile before, of course, but he’d never driven himself. And he’d always come in the middle of summer, not in what was surely the dampest, gloomiest winter in English history.
He’d left way before dawn this morning, goaded by Earl having said something about Randall always getting “an early start.” He’d done fine on the motorway, despite still having momentary twitches when, if his concentration lapsed, he thought he was driving on the wrong side of the road.
It had almost been easier when he’d got down into the back country of Devon and the roads had ceased having sides and had become narrow one-lane roads. His only traumas then came when he met a car coming in the other direction and he had to decide which way to move. Finally though, he found a sign saying BUCKWORTHY 3 mi and below it STANTON ABBEY 2 mi.
He turned onto that lane, followed it—and ended up on a winding track no wider than the Range Rover.
He felt like a steer on its way to the slaughterhouse—funneled into a chute with no way out.
And there was an apt metaphor for you, he thought grimly.
The lane twisted again, the hedgerows loomed. The windshield wipers swept back and forth, condensation rose. Gabe muttered under his breath.
Where were the wide-open spaces when you needed them?
“Damn!” He rounded the next blind curve and found himself coming straight up the rear tire of an antiquated bicycle that wobbled along ahead of him.
He swerved. There was no time to hit the brakes. The rider swerved at the same time—fortunately in the opposite direction.
Gabe breathed again as he passed, leaving the bicyclist, who appeared to be an elderly woman swaddled in a faded red sweater over more clothes than were necessary to get through a Montana winter, staring after him, doubtless unnerved, but fortunately unscathed.
It wouldn’t have done to have flattened a local.
“I thought you intended to save the Gazette, not make headlines in it,” he could well imagine Earl saying sarcastically.
Earl had openly scoffed when Gabe had proposed to take care of things and be back in a week.
“A week? You think you’re going to turn ten years worth of sliding sales, bad management and terrible writing around in a week?”
“Well, two, then,” Gabe had muttered. How the hell was he supposed to know? He’d never saved a newspaper before. He barely even read them—beyond checking the price of steers and maybe glancing at the sports page.
“Two months,” Earl had said loftily. “If you’re clever.”
Two months? Gabe had stared. “I have to be back for calving and branding come spring!” he protested.
“Guess you’ll have to leave it to Randall then,” Earl had said with a bland smile.
Like hell he would!
He’d said he would rescue the Gazette. And damn it, he would. No matter how long it took.
He knew Randall, too, thought he’d blow it. He’d spent half the night before Gabe left giving him advice. “Just go in there and lay down the law. Speak authoritatively.”
“Be the lord and master, you mean?” Gabe said derisively.
“Exactly. Speak softly but carry a big stick.”
“Teddy Roosevelt said that.”
Randall blinked. “Did he? Well, he must have stolen it from us.” Then he’d clapped Gabe on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine. Everything will be right as rain if you just…well, no matter. If you can’t, you just ring me up.”
“No, I can’t,” Gabe said smugly. “You’ll be in Montana.”
That was the other part of the deal. Gabe would do his job if Randall would oversee the ranch.
“Nothing to it,” Gabe had reassured his cousin, though Randall hadn’t looked all that cheerful at the prospect. “Piece of cake.”
And this would be, too, he assured himself. And if it wasn’t, he’d get it done anyway. He’d show both Earl and Randall. He was tired of having everybody think he couldn’t last at anything for longer than eight seconds.
But one look at Stanton Abbey when he finally found it, and Gabe thought if he made eight seconds he’d be lucky.
He’d last visited Stanton Abbey when he was ten. He was thirty-two now. It hadn’t changed. Of course, twenty-two years in the life of Stanton Abbey was a mere blink of an eye.
The original building was seven hundred years old if it was a day. There had been additions over the years. The damp dark stone building sat on the hillside like a squat, stolid Romanesque stone toad with slightly surprised gothic eyebrows.
The surprise no doubt came in part from having had a Tudor half-timbered extension grafted onto one side and a neoclassical wing tacked onto the other. Since the eighteenth century nothing had been added, thank heavens. The upkeep on what was already there had kept two hundred years of Stantons busy enough.
Gabe had never really envied Randall the earldom. His first adult look at Stanton Abbey gave him no reason to change his opinion. In fact he wondered that Randall hadn’t said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” long ago.
When he was ten, Gabe had thought Stanton Abbey an endlessly fascinating place. He and Randall had chased each other down long stone corridors, had hidden from Earl in the priest’s hole and had raced to see who could first get through the garden maze.
Anyone who ventured into the garden now, Gabe thought as he stared at the brambles and bushes, had better mark a trail or he’d never be seen again.
Randall had tried to warn him.
“It’s a bit overgrown,” he’d said. “We keep up with the house. Got to, you know. It’s a listed building, grade one, and all that. And Freddie’s done a wonderful job with the renovations. Still, every time I go down it seems some timbers need replacing—and there’s been a spot of bother with the rising damp.”
Rising?
Drowning, more like. Gabe could feel it permeating his bones. Had he really committed himself to living here for the next two months?
In a word, yes. And he wasn’t about to turn tail and run. Earl would never let him live it down.
Well, if Randall could do it, so could he.
He’d just find Freddie the caretaker to let him in.
Frederica Crossman was not expecting visitors.
That was why she was still in her nightgown and down on her hands and knees on the stone-flagged floor of Stanton Abbey’s dower house at ten o’clock on Monday morning, trying to coax her son Charlie’s on-loan-from-school-over-the-Christmas-holidays rabbit out from under the refrigerator.
Charlie was supposed to have taken it with him, but he hadn’t managed to catch it before he left for school this morning.
“It absolutely has to be back today, Mum,” he’d told her, “or I’m toast.”
“I’ll catch him,” Freddie had promised blithely at ten minutes to eight. She’d been trying ever since.
Now she could almost reach the little creature. If only she had longer fingers…or the rotten bunny wasn’t terrified…or…
The knock on the door startled her. She jerked and banged her head on the desk next to the refrigerator. “Blast!”
Another knock came, louder and more persistent than the first.
Freddie didn’t want to answer. She knew precisely who it was—Mrs. Peek. Freddie had been expecting her ever since she’d learned yesterday that Stanton Publishing had bought The Gazette. Mrs. Peek, the village’s most ardent gossip, was bound to appear, eager for a cup of tea and the latest news.
Freddie was only surprised it had taken her so long.
When Lady Adelaide Bore, a member of another Family Of Note in the neighborhood, had run off with her groom, Mrs. Peek had known about it before the ink was dry on the farewell note.
A third imperious knock.
Irritably, Freddie pulled Charlie’s old mac around her like a dressing gown and, still rubbing the bump on her head, opened the back door.
It wasn’t Mrs. Peek.
It was a man. A lean, ruggedly handsome man with thick, ruffled dark hair and intense blue eyes. A memorable man.
Freddie remembered him at least. And she had no doubt that Mrs. Peek would, too.
It was Lord Randall Stanton. The heir.
Or was it? Suddenly Freddie wasn’t sure.
Freddie had met Lord Randall Stanton two or three times when he’d brought his grandfather down for a visit to the ancestral home. Lord Randall had always been charming, solicitous, unfailingly polite. Very public school. All his tailoring bespoke. She couldn’t imagine him being caught dead in blue jeans.
But blue jeans, faded and worn in exceedingly interesting places, were just what this man wore. Even more astonishing, he had a huge shiny gold object affixed to the center of his belt. A buckle? Freddie had seen serving platters that were smaller!
“Hi,” he said and gave her the famous Stanton grin.
His American accent settled one issue. Whoever he was, he wasn’t Lord Randall.
“Hello?” Freddie replied cautiously. She clutched Charlie’s mac tightly around her.
The grooves at the corners of his smile deepened. “I’m Gabe McBride. I’m looking for the caretaker of Stanton Abbey. Is he in?”
“He?”
It was not one of Freddie’s finer moments.
Caretakers were not always men. She suspected even the American Mr. McBride would be willing to admit that. But even he, she imagined, would expect a caretaker of either sex to be dressed by ten o’clock in the morning.
But before she could panic about that, she caught sight of the rabbit out of the corner of her eye as it dashed from beneath the refrigerator toward the old cooker. “’Scuse me!” Freddie exclaimed and plunged after it.
She expected Gabe McBride, obviously some relation to the Stantons as his likeness marched up and down the portrait hall at the abbey, to stand by and watch her make a fool of herself.
She was astonished when he joined her.
“Is it a rat?” He was on his knees beside her, all eagerness, his dark hair shedding drops of rain on the flagstone floor.
She shook her head. “A bunny.”
“A bunny? A rabbit?”
“Yes! Here, Cosmo! Cosmo, come here! There’s a nice bunny. It’s time for school, Cosmo.” She was crawling on the floor, trying to stretch toward the back of the cooker where she could see the rabbit hunched, its beady left eye looking straight at her.
“I’ll get it.” Gabe McBride flopped down on his belly next to her. He scrabbled forward, reaching for the bunny who, seeing he was outnumbered, feinted left, looked right and skittered right between the two of them and ran into the dining room.
Freddie bit off a very unladylike exclamation, leapt to her feet and, still clutching the mac around her, ran after it with Gabe McBride in close pursuit.
“You go that way,” he directed. “I’ll go this.” He jerked his head, directing her. “We’ll head him off at the pass.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He grinned. It was lethal.
It was a good job, Freddie thought, that she was on her knees already, else she’d be lying out flat on the flagstones that very minute. And letting the man have his way with you.
“Never!” she exclaimed aloud.
“What?” said Gabe McBride.
Freddie shook her head. “N-nothing. I was just saying we’re never going to catch him.”
“Sure we will. Just do what I told you.” He edged around the other way. “Be real still. I’ll flush him out toward you. Ready?”
Still reeling from her aberrant, wholly inappropriate thoughts, Freddie crouched, feeling like a goalkeeper at the ready, nightgown and mac draped around her.
Gabe McBride got on his belly again and stretched beneath the china cabinet. The rabbit watched worriedly. Gabe’s fingers got closer and closer.
“Yes,” she breathed. “You’re going to…”
Then all of a sudden, Gabe smacked his hands together in a loud clap. The rabbit shot out directly toward Freddie.
“Gotcha!” And she fell over on her rear end, clutching the rabbit gently in both hands. Her heart slammed against the wall of her chest.
From the exhilaration of the chase, she assured herself, not from the handsome American grinning down at her!
“Way to go!” He was breathing heavily, too, and his shirttails were pulled out and he had a button undone.
There came a knock. The door opened. “Yoo-hoo, m’dear?” called Mrs. Peek. “Anybody home?”
Freddie was a girl!
Well, actually she was a woman—and quite a woman at that, with her tumbling wavy dark hair and her flushed cheeks. Not to mention the womanly curves and heaving bosom Gabe had been treated to as they’d chased down the rabbit.
“I’m the caretaker,” she told him breathlessly as she carried the rabbit to its cage.
“You’re Freddie?”
“Frederica,” she said firmly. “My husband worked for Earl Stanton.” At his quizzical look she added, “Mark died four years ago.”
This entire conversation took place in the scant moments it took for them to return to the kitchen, rabbit in tow, and intercept an elderly woman in a red sweater who was making herself at home in the kitchen. She was, Gabe realized, the one with the bicycle he’d almost mowed down in the lane.
She was looking from one to the other of them, blue eyes alight with curiosity.
“This is Mr. McBride. Mr. McBride, meet Mrs. Peek,” Freddie-the-caretaker said briskly as she put the rabbit in the cage on the table.
Gabe nodded politely and shook the woman’s hand, but his attention never strayed very far from the delectable Freddie. He hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off her since she’d opened the door to him wearing that ridiculous too-small raincoat over what looked to be a nightgown.
A soft flannel nightgown with sprigs of some kind of purple flowers on it such as, his fashion-conscious sister Martha would have said, only sexless grannies wore. Martha would have been wrong. Big time.
Gabe sucked in another careful breath.
“Have you got a pain, Mr. McBride?” Mrs. Peek asked.
“What?”
“You seems to be havin’ trouble breathing.”
Well, yes. But mostly he was having more trouble controlling what Earl would doubtless call “his baser nature.”
Freddie-the-caretaker was enticing as all get out. Still, he didn’t think his grandfather would look kindly on his throwing the resident caretaker down on the kitchen table and having his way with her. Especially not with the old lady in the red sweater avidly looking on.
Mrs. Peek, he decided after a few minutes’ conversation, was very well named.
Nothing happened in the village of Buckworthy that Mrs. Peek didn’t know about. She certainly knew about him!
“Come t’run the Gazette,” she said, bobbing her head in approval. Then her brows arched behind her glasses and she looked from him to Freddie-the-caretaker with her loose hair and mussed nightgown and said, “And a mighty fast worker he is, too.”
“Mr. McBride came for the keys to the abbey,” Freddie said firmly. But while she contrived to sound firm and businesslike, her hands fluttered around, as if she was torn between smoothing her disheveled hair or clutching the raincoat even tighter.
As she was managing to do neither, Gabe just stood there and enjoyed the view. The prospect of spending two months in Devon was looking brighter all the time.
“Us could do with a cup of tea,” Mrs Peek said.
Freddie put on the kettle.
Mrs. Peek smiled brightly. “You’re the young lord’s cousin, then? The American. Has the look of ’is lordship, he does,” she pronounced. “He were right han’sum, too. Th’ earl, I mean. Cedric.” Mrs. Peek’s voice softened and became almost dreamy. Her cheeks were already red from the cold, but if they hadn’t been Gabe felt sure that the thought of Earl might have contributed.
Earl? Make someone’s heart beat faster? Now there was a sobering thought.
“You know my grandfather, Mrs. Peek?”
The ruddy color on her cheeks deepened. She looked a little flustered. “Us was…acquainted.”
Gabe bet they were. And very well acquainted at that. Mrs. Peek had to be seventy-five if she was a day, and it was a little hard to imagine her and Earl getting it on. But then it was a little hard imagining Earl once looking like him!
“I’ll give him your regards when I talk to him,” he said. “I just came down from Stanton House where we celebrated his birthday.”
That, of course, required a detailed description of the birthday party. Mrs. Peek was all ears. Freddie, to Gabe’s dismay, excused herself after she’d poured the tea.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “I just need to get more…presentable.” Her hands were fluttering still.
“Don’t bother on my account,” Gabe grinned.
Freddie clutched the raincoat across her midsection and said firmly, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“’Er’s a dear soul, our Freddie,” Mrs. Peek said the moment Freddie was out of earshot. “Always workin’, ’er is. Too much for one woman, keepin’ up wi’ the abbey, but can’t tell her so. Good job you’ve come. Right proper Stantons gettin’ the Gazette an’ old Cedric sendin’ his very own grandson to set things right. As well he should,” she said firmly. “This bein’ his old home, an’ all. Th’ neighborhood needs ’er gentlemen.”
Gabe looked over his shoulder, then realized the gentleman in question was him! He began to feel a bit of the responsibility Randall seemed to shoulder so easily.
“I’ll do my best.”
Mrs. Peek nodded eagerly “You’ve got plans?”
“Have to see it first. Check things out. Assess the situation. Develop a plan of attack.” He was pretty sure that was the sort of claptrap Randall would have come up with when pressed. “I’ll know more in the next few days.”
“That’s for sure.” Mrs. Peek smiled.
Gabe wasn’t sure what she meant by that cryptic comment. She finished her cup of tea, then got up. “Glad you’ve come, me han’sum. Wish’ee well.” Her blue eyes sparkled and Gabe had a glimpse of what Earl must have been drawn by all those years ago. Then, nodding with satisfaction, she added, “’Tis time.”
She was pedaling down the drive when Freddie returned.
Her hair was pulled up and pinned on top of her head, and she was dressed now in jeans and a bright blue loose-necked pullover sweater. She wasn’t quite as obviously delectable as she had been crawling around on the floor in her nightgown giving him a glimpse of long lovely legs, but Gabe had a good memory.
“Where’s Mrs. Peek?”
“On her way. She got what she came for.”
Freddie smiled. “She means well. She lives alone and she enjoys a cup of tea and a chat.” Freddie swished through the kitchen, picking up the cups and putting them in the sink. The jeans hugged her hips and thighs. Not bad. Gabe watched them sway, then dragged his gaze upward and his mind back to the point.
He cleared his throat. “I get the feeling she thinks I’m here for good. I’m not.” He wanted that clear right now. “I’m doing Randall…my cousin…a favor. I said I’d sort the Gazette out. I will. Then I’m gone. This is just a one-time deal. I have a ranch back in Montana. I’m a cowboy, not a lord.”
“A cowboy?” Freddie said doubtfully, as if it were in a foreign tongue. Her lips curved. She had very kissable lips.
Gabe wondered what they would taste like.
Had Earl wondered the same thing about Mrs Peek’s the first time he’d seen her? Had she been a pretty young thing, too?
Freddie wasn’t that young, he reminded himself firmly. She was a widow. She had kids old enough to go to school. That made her pretty old herself.
“How old are you?” he asked, unsure why he needed to know. He expected her to say forty or so. Mothers were. His own was nearly sixty, after all.
“Thirty-one.”
“Thirty-one?”
She was younger than he was! Gabe stared at Frederica Crossman, poleaxed. “How old are your kids?” It wasn’t a question as much as an accusation.
“Charlie’s nine. Emma’s seven.”
Gabe opened his mouth. He closed it again, having nothing at all to say. She was thirty-one and her kids were half grown!
That meant he could have kids that old!
No. He couldn’t!
He was barely more than a kid himself.
“It’s not polite to ask someone’s age,” Freddie said tartly, “especially if you’re going to stare at me dumbfounded when I give you an honest answer.”
Gabe flushed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…I’m just…surprised. You look so…so young.” He’d thought she was an incredibly well-preserved forty.
He shook his head, still trying to sort it out. He’d never thought about aging before. Not himself at least. Earl, yes. The old man was whiter and frailer, even though his voice still boomed and his spirit never flagged.
Randall, too, had aged. There were marked differences between the boy Randall had been at eighteen and the man he’d become.
But Gabe hadn’t really thought it had anything to do with age. He’d just thought Randall looked old because he worked so damn hard.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
Maybe they were all getting older. Earl at least had a life’s work to look back on with pride. And Randall, too, had something to show for it. So apparently did Freddie Crossman, mother of two half-grown children.
What about him? What about Gabriel Phillip McBride?
He looked down at his bull-riding championship belt buckle. Suddenly it didn’t seem like enough.
Two
She should have invited him to stay with them.
It would have been the polite thing, the responsible thing, certainly the financially sensible thing to do! After all, Freddie often opened the dower house to holidaymakers looking for a B&B.
But it wasn’t summer. It was January, as cold and bleak and wintry as it ever got in Devon. Her favorite time of year because for once she had time for herself and Charlie and Emma.
Nothing said she had to open her home to Gabe McBride—just because she owed his grandfather more than she could ever repay.
He’d never asked for repayment. He’d never so much as hinted.
But Freddie knew she owed him. The earl felt guilty about the death of her husband, Mark, though she had assured him over and over it was Mark who’d made the decision to sail the earl’s boat home that night; it was Mark who had taken the foolish risk; no one—least of all Lord Stanton—had commanded him to.
But the earl didn’t see it that way.
“He was working for me,” he said. “I take care of my own.”
The feudal blood in Lord Stanton’s veins ran deep. It didn’t matter that Freddie was earning a living, albeit meager, as a renovator and could make ends meet. She and her children were, he informed her, his responsibility. He would see to their welfare. Next thing she knew he arranged for them to move from their little flat in Camden to the Stanton Abbey dower house.
“I don’t know anyone in Devon!” she’d protested.
“You’ll meet them.”
“My business—”
“Will thrive. You renovate. Renovate the abbey.”
“My children—”
“Can go to school in fresh air and have acres and acres to play in.”
For every argument she had, the earl had had an answer. No one ever said no to the earl. Certainly Freddie never managed to.
So she was very grateful now that he hadn’t asked her to put up his grandson!
She didn’t know how she could have refused.
She only knew she would have had to!
Gabe McBride set off all the bells and whistles of attraction that Freddie was certain had well and truly died with Mark. It had been four years since Mark’s death, and she hadn’t once looked at another man.
But she had looked at Gabe McBride today.
Then she’d have handed him a key and sent him on his way. She wished she could have sent him clear back to America!
The feelings were all too familiar. The attraction all too strong. It was the same thing she’d felt for Mark.
And the very last thing she needed.
A cowboy, for heaven’s sake!
She’d already proved her susceptibility to one handsome devil-may-care man—Mark had been wild and dashing and reckless. It didn’t take much imagination to see that Gabe McBride, however much blue Stanton blood ran in his veins, was another red-blooded, risk-taking man.
She’d read his belt buckle, hadn’t she? It had proclaimed him a Salinas bull-riding champion.
Freddie wasn’t sure exactly what being a bull-riding champion was, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t anything safe.
No, sorry. No matter how much she owed the earl, she wasn’t offering hospitality to the likes of Gabe McBride.
Not a chance.
Gabe had always thought himself hale and hearty—resilient, capable of withstanding great extremes of weather. He was, after all, Montana born-and-bred.
He damn near froze his ass off in one night in Stanton Abbey!
“Get a good night’s sleep,” Earl had told him cheerfully when Gabe had rung before bedtime.
Sleep? Gabe doubted he slept a wink. He spent the whole day reacquainting himself with the Abbey and all night prowling the cupboards, looking for more blankets, piling them on, trying to sleep, shivering, then rising to go look for more.
He understood the meaning of “rising damp” now. It was what got you up to go find more covers.
Central heating had come along a good six hundred years after the abbey, and though it did its best, it couldn’t rise to the occasion. The pipes hissed and moaned. They sputtered and rattled. Gabe turned it off again.
After all, he wasn’t a sissy. He could cope.
He considered starting a blaze in a fireplace. But the fire-places were big enough to roast an ox in. Gabe reckoned he’d have to move right in with the wood to get the benefit of any warmth. In the end, he piled on every piece of clothing he’d brought, buried himself beneath every blanket he could find, and huddled next to the stove for the night.
He was sure Earl would call it bracing.
He called it ridiculous. But he didn’t seriously consider other options until he drove past the cozy warmth of the dower house on his way to the Gazette office in the morning.
All of the dower house chimneys appeared to be working. He remembered the kitchen had been cheerful, not echoing, the parlor welcoming, not forbidding, and the occupant…well, he’d been thinking about her all night.
He cast a longing glance over his shoulder as he drove past—and noticed a discreet little sign at the end of the dower house drive.
B&B FULL BREAKFAST ВЈ15. DINNER AT EXTRA COST.
He smiled. “Well, now why didn’t she mention that?”
Fixing the Buckworthy Gazette would best be accomplished, Gabe had decided by lunchtime, if he simply lobbed a bomb into the building, blew up the whole place.
Unfortunately that solution was out of the question.
“I say we set fire to it, throw ’em out on their ears, and start over,” he told Earl when the old man rang up later that afternoon. “The place is falling down around their ears, and they don’t give a rat’s ass. There’s not a computer in the building. The printing press looks like it came over on the Mayflower—”
“We didn’t go on the Mayflower,” Earl reminded him. “We’re still here.”
“And they’re still probably using the same damn one! I swear I saw a pen with a quill. I’m surprised there’s a telephone.”
“There wasn’t,” Earl said cheerfully, “last time I was there.”
“When was that?” Gabe wanted to know. “Last week?”
“Tut-tut,” Earl admonished. “Sarcasm won’t get you anywhere with these people. They are fixtures—”
“You can say that again.” Made of stone, if Gabe’s first impression was accurate.
They had all assembled in the main room when he arrived—two reporters, a receptionist-cum-tea-lady, the printer and the office manager all lined up in a row and bowed and scraped and tugged their forelocks when he’d come in.
He’d been appalled, but, taking a page from Randall’s book, had very firmly told them that things were about to change, that they were going to make a profitable paper out of the Gazette and he was going to tell them exactly how to do it.
“Yes, Mr. McBride.”
“Quite so, Mr. McBride.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. McBride.”
“We need a computer,” he told the office manager, Percy Pomfret-Mumphrey, a man as pompous and fussy as his name.
“A computer?” Percy squeaked.
“Software,” Gabe went on relentlessly. “We’ll need a database. A spreadsheet. We’ll want to enter the subscription list. The advertisers. We can look into offset printing,” he told John the printer. “And we need an answering machine,” he told Beatrice the receptionist who let the phone ring fifteen times—he’d counted—while she poured everyone a cup of tea.
“Offset printing?” John the printer wrinkled his nose.
“An answering machine?” Beatrice didn’t look as if she’d ever heard of one.
“Oh my, no.” Percy spoke for them all. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
Percy gave a simple shrug of his shoulders. “We’ve never done it that way before.”
Famous last words.
“They’re completely resistant to change,” Gabe complained to Earl. “If it hasn’t been done that way, it won’t be done that way, can’t be done that way!”
An answer phone, Beatrice had told him, would hurt people’s feelings. “They’ll think we don’t want to speak to them.”
“You think they don’t get that idea when you don’t answer the blasted phone now?”
“They know I’m busy. They’ll ring back.”
To do offset printing would offend the Fuge brothers, John the printer had said. The Fuge brothers came every Wednesday and helped with the typesetting. “They’ll think they aren’t needed,” John told Gabe. “We wouldn’t want that.”
“Whose feelings would the computer hurt?” Gabe had asked.
“No one,” Percy said. “But we haven’t the electricity to handle it. Blow a fuse, we would. Shut everything down. Wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“It wouldn’t take any more juice than an electric typewriter,” Gabe argued, then realized that they were all staring at him. He looked around. There were no electric typewriters, only manuals.
“We’re traditional here, you know,” Percy said. “We’ve a history to uphold. The Buckworthy Gazette is An Institution. The journalistic equivalent of Stanton Abbey, if you will!”
Well, that Gabe could certainly agree with. There was a hell of a lot of rising damp in the employ of the Buckworthy Gazette, too.
What would Randall do?
He could, of course, ask. But he wasn’t about to call Randall and admit ignorance.
“Well, things are going to change. I want all of you in my office for a meeting at three to discuss how we can turn this paper around.”
They all stared. Then they began to shake their heads.
“Something wrong with three?” Gabe inquired with deadly calm.
“We always have tea at three,” Beatrice said. Everyone nodded.
Gabe sucked in a breath. “Bring the pot. I’ll have coffee. Black.”
“We don’t have coffee.”
“Then that’s the first thing we’ll change.”
The day went downhill from there.
They didn’t have meetings on Tuesdays, Percy informed him.
“Well, we’re having one today,” Gabe said. “And if you don’t want to come, I suggest you start cleaning out your desk.”
There was a collective gasp.
Percy drew himself up to his full five feet seven. “You cannot threaten me, Mr. McBride. Nor can you fire me.”
Gabe lifted a brow. “No?”
“No.” Percy went into his own office where he opened a desk drawer and pulled out some papers. “It’s a condition of the sale. It guarantees my employment.”
Gabe skimmed them rapidly. It was there in black and white: if someone came to oversee the running of the Gazette, Percy Pomfret-Mumphrey was to be retained.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me I was getting Percy the Albatross hung around my neck?” he groused at Earl later.
“Ah, met Percy, have you?” Earl chuckled. “Well, I’m sure you can handle him. What did you say, two weeks and you’d have it all shaped up?”
“Two months,” Gabe said through gritted teeth. He banged down the phone.
Save the Buckworthy Gazette in two months? Two millennia, more like!
He shut the door on them all and pored over recent editions of the Gazette, determined to get a feel for the newspaper. He had to start somewhere, and the end product seemed like the best place to figure out where things had gone wrong.
It was just like rebuilding a herd, actually. You looked at the beef and figured out why things weren’t turning out the way you wanted them to. Then you set to work changing it. But you couldn’t do that unless you knew your animals and the lay of the land.
At ten to five Beatrice told him there was a call for him. Earl? Again?
“What now?” he barked into the phone.
“Gabe? How’s it going, then?” It was Randall, not Earl. A nervous, worried Randall, from the sound of him. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right! What do you think?” Gabe might have groused at Earl less than an hour before, but he damned well wasn’t going to complain to Randall.
One word from him and his duty-driven cousin would be on the next plane home.
“I just…thought you might need a little moral support.”
“Well, I don’t. I’m fine. No problem,” he lied through his teeth.
“Really?” Randall sounded dubious, but cautiously pleased.
“Nothing to worry about,” Gabe said. “A child could do it.” A child with access to explosives. “How are things at your end?”
“Fine,” Randall said quickly and with excessive cheer. “Couldn’t be better.”
So Mr. Competent wasn’t having any problems? Gabe felt oddly nettled. And more determined than ever to prove himself here. He rubbed a hand against the back of his neck. “Well, go find something to do. Cut wood. Feed the cattle. Sit in front of a roaring fire. Relax, damn it. And stop calling me up!”
“I was only checking,” Randall said. “I’m…glad everything’s going so well.”
“It is,” Gabe said firmly. “Don’t call me again. Goodbye.”
It was six o’clock, cold and damp and well past dark by the time he left the office. He made three trips to his car, lugging every piece of business correspondence he could find, all the ledgers and the last five years’ worth of past papers to read. Then he got in and headed back toward the abbey.
He had no intention of going to the abbey, of course. He turned in at the dower house. It sat warm and welcoming on the hill, its windows cheerfully lit behind the trees. It was the one good thing in his life at the moment.
And in it was Freddie Crossman.
Freddie of the tumbling hair and the flowered nightgown. Freddie of the hip-hugging jeans and laughing eyes. He parked round the back, got out of the car and tapped on the kitchen door.
He could see her through the curtains behind the panes of glass. She didn’t look surprised, just concerned as she opened the door. He turned on his best Montana cowboy grin. “Saw your sign. B&B. Full breakfast. Fifteen pounds. Sounds good to me.”
Freddie’s eyes got huge. She started to shut the door. “Oh, but—”
“You’re not full.” He was positive about that.
“No, but—”
“I like rabbits,” he assured her. He tried to look boyishly charming. “And kids.” He could see two now peeking from around the corner of the dining room door. “And,” he added honestly, “I like you, Freddie Crossman.”
“Oh, dear.” Her hand went to her breast, as if it might protect her.
Now that he’d seen her again—beautiful and bright and tempting in spite of herself—Gabe could have told her: nothing would.
She let him in.
What else could she do?
Freddie had told herself all day long that she’d exaggerated her awareness of him, that she’d been overwrought by the elusive bunny yesterday and that was why the hairs on the back of her neck had stood at attention, that was why his soft Montana accent tantalized her, that was why she’d felt the same sort of zing somewhere in the region of her heart that she’d felt when she’d first met Mark. It wouldn’t last, she’d assured herself.
She was wrong.
Gabe McBride had every bit the same disastrous effect on her equilibrium and good sense tonight that he’d had earlier. She was a damn fool for opening her door to him.
But she had no choice.
She owed it to his grandfather. And even if she hadn’t, how could she tell her children, to whom she preached hospitality, that she couldn’t extend it here because Gabe McBride made her hormones dance?
Charlie and Emma were avidly curious about their guest.
Freddie introduced them, then sent Charlie to get Gabe’s things out of his car, while she showed him to one of the guest rooms in the converted attic. Emma followed, obviously entranced by this pied piper in cowboy boots and blue jeans.
“Why’s he wearing those?” Freddie heard her whisper to Charlie when they came back down. She was looking at Gabe’s boots.
“’Cause he’s a cowboy,” Charlie said.
Gabe must have overheard because he looked up at the boy and grinned. Charlie grinned back.
Freddie dished Gabe up a plate of the supper they’d just finished eating.
“Are you sure you’ve got enough?” he asked. “I can go down to the pub.”
“There’s plenty.” She motioned for him to take a seat. Both children came and stood, watching him eat. She tried, with jerks of her head and shooing movements with her hands, to get them to leave. They didn’t budge.
“Are you really a cowboy?” Emma asked. From the slightly worried look on her face, Freddie knew she was remembering Mrs. Peek proclaim a pair of renegade incompetent rob-you-blind plumbers as “cowboys” just last week.
“Not that kind of cowboy,” Freddie hastened to explain.
“How many kinds are there?” Gabe lifted a curious brow. He was tucking into the shepherd’s pie like he hadn’t had a square meal in weeks.
“The television kind and the kind that screw things up,” Charlie informed him.
Both brows shot up now.
“That’s what a cowboy is…over here,” Freddie explained.
“Not a compliment.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“We’ll have to work on that. You know about real cowboys, don’t you?” he asked Charlie.
Her son nodded emphatically. “Seen ’em on television. D’you shoot Indians?”
“No, I work with them.”
“Can you yodel and play the guitar?” Emma asked.
Gabe laughed. “I can see I got here in the nick of time,” he said to Freddie. “The Gazette is only half my job. I have to stay—to correct your children’s misconceptions about cowboys.”
The dower house beat the abbey by a mile. The rooms were warm, the meals were good, the bed was soft.
And even if he hadn’t managed to share it with Freddie Crossman—yet—he still enjoyed the pleasure of her company.
Sort of. Actually he didn’t get to spend much time with Freddie.
She was always busy when he was around—cooking, serving, cleaning, washing up. She barely sat still.
Good thing he liked to watch her move. He liked listening to her soft accent, too. It reminded him oddly—or maybe not so oddly—of home. His mother, after all, was British. Her accent was not that unlike Freddie’s.
But that was the only way she reminded him of his mother. And the feelings she evoked in him had nothing to do with her maternal qualities at all.
She was, though, clearly a good mother. Charlie and Emma were polite and well-behaved, but not at all like little robots. They were eager and inquisitive, and they followed him around like young pups.
He liked Charlie and Emma enormously. He enjoyed listening to Charlie try to explain cricket to him, and was always eager to be “taste tester” when Emma helped her mother make scones or a cake. He loved telling them stories of cowboying and rodeoing. It was a kick to watch their eyes get big and their jaws hang open. He gloried in wrestling on the parlor floor with Charlie and delighted in getting down on his hands and knees and letting Emma have horse rides on his back while Charlie pretended he was much too old to want to do anything like that.
Partly he liked it because it was fun. But mostly he liked it because it was guaranteed to get a rise out of their mother.
“Charlie, don’t pester,” she would say.
“Emma, leave Mr. McBride alone now.”
“They’re fine. We’re all fine,” Gabe protested. “Come on in. Sit down.” He patted the space on the sofa next to him. He knew she wanted to listen to his stories, too. He knew she was interested in them—in him.
Gabe McBride had been attracting women like honey did bees since he was twelve years old. He recognized the signs—even in a woman like Freddie who was determined not to show it.
“How come you’re stiff-arming me?” he asked her the third night he was there. He and Charlie and Emma had become fast friends by then, but Freddie still kept her distance. He’d done his best. He’d been funny and charming and he’d played with her children. No hardship there. He liked them. He’d taken them out to eat last night over Freddie’s protests. He’d gone to Emma’s school program this afternoon because Emma had invited him even though Freddie had tried to act like he wasn’t there.
Now he tracked her down after the children were in bed. She was in the parlor, patching a pair of Charlie’s trousers, and she looked up warily. He came across the room and dropped onto the sofa beside the chair where she sat.
“Stiff-arming?”
“Acting like a prig.”
“Prig!” Freddie sputtered, her cheeks reddening.
Gabe grinned and stretched his arms over his head, easing tired muscles. It never ceased to amaze him how much more tired he got at a desk job than when he rode the range all day. “See. You admit it.”
“I never! I don’t! I’m not a prig!”
“Then you’re giving a damn good imitation of one. Loosen up a little. Let go. You’re beautiful when you smile.”
She scowled at him, her cheeks reddening.
“See? Like that.” He grinned and was rewarded by a twitch at the corners of her mouth. “And let the kids play with me.”
“I don’t want them bothering you. You’re a paying guest and—”
“And in the interests of good hospitality, you shouldn’t be making me feel like one,” Gabe said flatly. “You should be making me feel at home.”
“I’m trying, but—”
“Very trying,” he agreed. “Come on. One more smile,” he urged. “It won’t kill you. I’ll pay extra for it.”
Freddie laughed reluctantly. And her laugh made the exhaustion of the day go away. It made Percy’s pomposity and Beatrice’s worries and John’s disapproving silence fade into insignificance.
Gabe smiled, too. “That’s better,” he said softly. Then he reached out a hand and, with one finger, touched hers.
She jerked hers away, of course.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll stick with smiles. For now.”
He didn’t touch her again. He’d made the connection. That was what mattered.
“You’ve taken a boarder, I hear.” Mrs. Peek regarded Freddie over the top of her teacup.
It was four days since Gabe McBride had taken over their lives, and Freddie was sure that the news had reached Mrs. Peek within hours of the event. But the rain and sleet had been relentless until now. This morning it was no more than a fine drizzle. Mrs. Peek never let a fine drizzle slow her down.
Freddie concentrated on paring an apple for a pie. “He’s gone a great deal of the time. So it’s really no bother.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Mrs. Peek cackled. “Never a bother having a han’sum fellow put his feet under your table. Better yet in your bed.” When Freddie spun around to protest, Mrs. Peek said, “Time you married again, m’dear.”
“I’m not interested in marrying again.”
“Bah. Fine young gels need husbands. No sense pining away. Us never pined.”
When she wasn’t having a fling with Lord Stanton, Mrs. Peek had been marrying all and sundry. She’d been widowed at least four times—the last as the result of the death of Thomas Peek last winter.
“Seize your chances, m’dear. A good man doesn’t turn up on your doorstep everyday.”
The “good man” being, of course, Gabe McBride.
Freddie supposed he was good. By some accounts anyway. He was certainly working hard at the Gazette. And anyone who drove Percy crazy—which the village grapevine assured her he was doing—couldn’t be all bad.
But more than he was a good man, he was a dangerous one. At least when it came to Freddie’s peace of mind.
She hadn’t got a good night’s sleep since he’d arrived. She was too conscious of his footsteps above her head when she went to sleep at night, too aware of him whenever they sat across the table at mealtimes, and last night she’d almost jumped out of her skin when he’d deliberately reached out and touched her hand!
What did he think he was doing?
Don’t be daft, Freddie, she admonished herself. It was clear what he was doing: he was coming on to her.
Flirting with her. Looking at her as if it was only a matter of time until there would be more between them than the fifteen pounds a night he was paying for his room.
She resisted even thinking in terms of “bed-and-breakfast” where Gabe McBride was concerned.
The “bed” part seemed far too intimate.
“Be good for the little tackers to have a man around, too,” Mrs. Peek went on, unaware of the turmoil going on in Freddie’s mind. “Likes ’em, I can tell.”
And they adored him. The children were enthralled to have a real-live Montana cowboy living in their house. Once Emma had adjusted her definition of “cowboy,” she’d been as enchanted as Charlie. Freddie tried to stop them bothering him, but he brushed off her concern.
He let Charlie clump around the house in his cowboy boots and wear his belt hitched tight enough so that it circled her son’s narrow waist and proclaimed him the Salinas Champion Bull Rider.
To her dismay, he told both slack-jawed children exactly what a champion bull rider did. Last night she’d come upon all three of them, sitting on the bed in Charlie’s room, long after both children should have been asleep.
“It’s like ridin’ a whirlwind,” she heard him tell them. “Hangin’ onto a hurricane. You know what a hurricane is, Em?”
As Freddie came to stand in the doorway, ready to lower the boom, she saw her daughter’s eyes grow round and fill with excitement. “It’s a storm,” Emma said eagerly. “A big, big storm.”
“Right. Well, you just imagine havin’ that storm gathered right up underneath you. A ton of the meanest damn—er, darn—cow you’ve ever seen, just itchin’ to run you through with one of his horns. An’ he’s lookin’ at you, pawin’ an’ blowin’, snortin’ snot—”
“Bedtime,” Freddie cut in.
“Not yet, Mum!” Charlie protested.
“We can’t,” Emma begged. “We have to hear what happened. Truly! Please, Gabe, tell us!”
“Mr. McBride,” Freddie tried to correct.
Gabe raised his brows at her. “I told you. Friends use first names.”
And Gabe and her children were obviously friends. While Freddie had been trying determinedly to steer clear of him, Charlie and Emma had been doing their best to get close.
They were, Freddie told herself, just starved for some masculine attention. But a bull rider’s?
She could have wished for more discernment. A British “cowboy”—and all that that entailed—seemed almost preferable.
“It’s nearly ten o’clock!”
“Please, Mum,” Charlie’s eyes were alight with an enthusiasm she’d begun to fear she would never see again. He had been six when Mark died—old enough to remember, to long for the adventures they had shared, to miss his father dreadfully.
“I’ll make it short,” Gabe promised. “You wouldn’t want me to leave ’em hanging overnight, would you, Fred?”
And that was another thing! Fred!
He’d started calling her that the day after he arrived and had made the children giggle. Fred!
No one had ever dared call her Fred! Not even Mark—who was the most reckless person she’d ever known.
But Gabe did.
And now he just grinned at her, challenging her. His blue eyes were laughing, teasing her. It had been so long since anyone had teased her.
Freddie resisted the grin, she resisted the teasing in his eyes. But she couldn’t resist the story. She pressed her lips together. “All right. But make it quick.”
“Eight seconds,” Gabe promised solemnly. He patted the bed where he sat between Charlie and Emma. “Sit down, Fred. Get your daily dose of American culture.”
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