Blood Brothers

“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.