Anne McAllister: Blood Brothers

© 2000

Dear Reader,

This Fourth of July, join in the fireworks of Silhouette’s 20 thanniversary year by reading all six powerful, passionate, provocative love stories from Silhouette Desire!

July’s MAN OF THE MONTH is a Bachelor Doctor by Barbara Boswell. Sparks ignite when a dedicated doctor discovers his passion for his loyal nurse!

With Midnight Fantasy, beloved author Ann Major launches an exciting new promotion in Desire called BODY & SOUL. Our BODY & SOUL books are among the most sensuous and emotionally intense you’ll ever read. Every woman wants to be loved…BODY & SOUL, and in these books you’ll find a heady combination of breathtaking love and tumultuous desire.

Amy J. Fetzer continues her popular WIFE, INC. miniseries with Wife for Hire. Enjoy Ride a Wild Heart, the first sexy installment of Peggy Moreland’s miniseries TEXAS GROOMS. This month, Desire offers you a terrific two-books-in-one value- Blood Brothers by Anne McAllister and Lucy Gordon. A British lord and an American cowboy are look-alike cousins who switch lives temporarily…and lose their hearts for good in this romance equivalent of a doubleheader. And don’t miss the debut of Kristi Gold, with her moving love story Cowboy for Keeps -it’s a keeper!

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…

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 if led to another, and when Anne went home to America and Lucy went home to Northampton, we e-mailed each other more what if s…and Gabe and Randall-and their crusty grandfather, the earl-were born.

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.

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 was home.

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 a no-account bull rider with no more morals than a monkey. And then he’d promised to hightail it out of the country so she could find herself a “respectable” man.

Gabe wished all the respectable men in the good ol’ U.S. of A. the best of luck. He was off to visit his kin on the other side of the world.

That would keep him out of harm’s-and Tracy’s-way, and besides, it had the added benefit of pleasing his mother who couldn’t go because she was just recovering from the flu and Martha, his sister, who was spending the semester abroad in Brazil.

In fact, Gabe was rather looking forward to a brief vacation visiting his English relatives-especially his mother’s father, Earl Stanton, who was about to celebrate the fact that, in Randall’s words, “Someone let the old devil live to be eighty, without strangling him.”

But Destiny? Who needed it?

When you were young, healthy and in your prime, when there were always more ladies besides Tracy eager for your company, and you had enough money to indulge yourself, you made your own Destiny.

Which went to show how wrong a man could be!

Lord Randall Stanton broke into a grin at the sight of his scapegrace cousin loping out of the Customs Hall, and let out a yell that sat oddly with his elegant tailoring. It was met by an answering yell from Gabe, and for a moment the two young men pounded each other like schoolboys.

“It’s good to see you,” Randall said. “Even if it did take a scandal to get you here.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gabe declared innocently. “The old man’s eightieth-family duty, etc., etc., etc.-”

Randall just grinned. “Your mother called Grandpa just as I was leaving. Your secrets aren’t secrets any more.”