Blood Brothers

by Anne McAllister

  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 bicycl
ist, 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 plu
nged 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?”