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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.
