“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.