“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