She owed it to his grandfather. And even if she hadn’t, how could she tell her children, to whom she preached hospitality, that she couldn’t extend it here because Gabe McBride made her hormones dance?

Charlie and Emma were avidly curious about their guest.

Freddie introduced them, then sent Charlie to get Gabe’s things out of his car, while she showed him to one of the guest rooms in the converted attic. Emma followed, obviously entranced by this pied piper in cowboy boots and blue jeans.

“Why’s he wearing those?” Freddie heard her whisper to Charlie when they came back down. She was looking at Gabe’s boots.

“’Cause he’s a cowboy,” Charlie said.

Gabe must have overheard because he looked up at the boy and grinned. Charlie grinned back.

Freddie dished Gabe up a plate of the supper they’d just finished eating.

“Are you sure you’ve got enough?” he asked. “I can go down to the pub.”

“There’s plenty.” She motioned for him to take a seat. Both children came and stood, watching him eat. She tried, with jerks of her head and shooing movements with her hands, to get them to leave. They didn’t budge.

“Are you really a cowboy?” Emma asked. From the slightly worried look on her face, Freddie knew she was remembering Mrs. Peek proclaim a pair of renegade incompetent rob-you-blind plumbers as “cowboys” just last week.

“Not that kind of cowboy,” Freddie hastened to explain.

“How many kinds are there?” Gabe lifted a curious brow. He was tucking into the shepherd’s pie like he hadn’t had a square meal in weeks.

“The television kind and the kind that screw things up,” Charlie informed him.

Both brows shot up now.

“That’s what a cowboy is…over here,” Freddie explained.

“Not a compliment.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“We’ll have to work on that. You know about real cowboys, don’t you?” he asked Charlie.