“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.
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.