Anne McAllister, Lucy Gordon
Blood Brothers
© 2000
Dear Reader,
This Fourth of July, join in the fireworks of Silhouette’s 20th anniversary year by reading all six powerful, passionate, provocative love stories from Silhouette Desire!
July’s MAN OF THE MONTH is a
With
Amy J. Fetzer continues her popular WIFE, INC. miniseries with
So make your summer sizzle-treat yourself to all six of these sultry Desire romances!
Happy Reading!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Dear Reader,
Two years ago on a cold damp night in Bath, England, the two of us were sitting in a restaurant talking-as writers are wont to do-about
What if we wrote a book together…what if we each had a hero…what if one was British and the other American…?
Of course, one
What we’ve written is a book about two men who look alike but think differently, cousins from opposite sides of the Atlantic, cast adrift in each other’s world, floundering until two feisty, loving women take them in hand.
We wrote the Prologue and Epilogue jointly. Individually, Anne wrote about Gabe and Frederica (and counted on Lucy for advice on “darkest” Devon) and Lucy wrote about Randall and Claire (and depended on Anne to get her unscathed through a Montana winter).
Working together was a fresh and fun experience. We had a great time. We hope you do, too.
In darkest Devon…
GABE
Prologue
As Gabe McBride’s plane touched down in England he didn’t have a clue that he was about to have a meeting with Destiny.
His cousin, Lord Randall Stanton, waiting for him outside Customs, didn’t look like Destiny. Randall looked, as he always had, like an English version of Gabe: same tall figure and broad shoulders, same dark hair and eyes, and lean, handsome features that had a strong family likeness. Their differences lay less in looks than mannerisms.
Randall carried his head with the proud air of an English toffee.
“You’d know he was a lord, just looking at him,” Gabe thought with an inward grin.
His own “air” suggested something entirely different. Generally it was one part horse, one part leather, one part bull rope rosin and several parts substances that polite society didn’t talk about. At the moment he’d done his best to scrub all that away. No sense walking into the drawing room smelling like a barn.
Drawing room! Now there was a term he didn’t use often. Didn’t reckon he’d said it aloud since the last time he was here-and that had been fifteen years ago. The very notion made him smile, a drawing room was such a far cry from the homely lived-in clutter of the Montana ranch he called home- when he
Usually he wasn’t.
Usually he was going down the road from rodeo to rodeo. He’d be doing it now if it hadn’t been for getting hung up on that little spinning bull at the National Finals in Vegas last month.
“Shoulder separation,” the doc had said. “Again.” He’d looked at Gabe over the top of his glasses. “How many is that?”
“Five,” Gabe had admitted.
He didn’t like to think about it even now. Didn’t like to think about the surgery that had become inevitable, the months of recovery that would follow, the enforced idleness. A guy could get into trouble if he didn’t have something to keep him busy. A guy could meet a girl like Tracy…
Even now his mouth curved instinctively at the thought of Tracy. He’d known she was trouble from the moment he saw her, but that was how he liked ’em. Trouble, and sassy and all woman. She’d lured him into her bed, with no resistance from him, and had cost him a fortune in gee-gaws, which was fine.
It was her uptight brother with the shotgun who hadn’t been fine. Nor had the lively conversation they’d had in which the words “marriage”, “honest woman” and “decent thing” had occurred with alarming frequency.
Gabe, who had been taught from the cradle never to badmouth a woman, didn’t say that the words “honest” and “decent” were not exactly terms he would have used to describe Tracy. He’d just done his damnedest to assure the shotgun-toting brother that Tracy wouldn’t want to tie herself to
