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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.
