“What did you wish?” Quinn asked,
a gruff note to his voice.

Tess made a face. “If I tell you, it won’t come true. Don’t you know anything about wishes?”

Right now, he could tell her a thing or two about wanting something he shouldn’t. That sensuous heat wrapped tighter around his insides. “I know enough. For instance, I know sometimes wishes can be completely ridiculous and make no sense. For instance, right now, I wish I could kiss you. Don’t ask me why. I don’t even like you.”

Her eyes looked huge and green in her delicate face as she stared at him. “OK,” she said, her voice breathy.

“OK, I can kiss you? Or, OK, you won’t ask why I want to?”

She let out a ragged-sounding breath. “Either. Both.”

He didn’t need much more of an invitation than that. Without allowing himself to stop and think, he stepped forward and covered her mouth with his.

Available in July 2010
from Mills & Boon®
Special Moments™

From Friends to Forever by Karen Templeton

&

The Family He Wanted by Karen Sandler

Baby By Surprise by Karen Rose Smith

&

Daddy by Surprise by Debra Salonen

A Kid to the Rescue by Susan Gable

&

Then Comes Baby by Helen Brenna

The Sheikh and the Bought Bride by Susan Mallery

A Cold Creek Homecoming by RaeAnne Thayne

A Baby for the Bachelor by Victoria Pade

The Baby Album by Roz Denny Fox

A Cold Creek
Homecoming

BY

RaeAnne Thayne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

RaeAnne Thayne finds inspiration in the beautiful northern Utah mountains, where she lives with her husband and three children. Her books have won numerous honours, including three RITA® Award nominations from Romance Writers of America and a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times BOOKreviews magazine. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website at www.raeannethayne.com.

In memory of my dear aunt, Arlene Wood,

for afghans and parachutes and ceramic frogs.

I only wish I’d dedicated one to you before!

And to Jennifer Black, my sister and hero,

for helping her pass with peace and dignity.

Chapter One

“You’re home!”

The thin, reedy voice whispering from the frail woman on the bed was nothing like Quinn Southerland remembered.

Though she was small in stature, Jo Winder’s voice had always been firm and commanding, just like the rest of her personality. When she used to call them in for supper, he and the others could hear her voice ringing out loud and clear from one end of the ranch to the other. No matter where they were, they knew the moment they heard that voice, it was time to go back to the house.

Now the woman who had done so much to raise him—the toughest woman he had ever known—seemed a tiny, withered husk of herself, her skin papery and pale and her voice barely audible.

The cracks in his heart from watching her endure the long months and years of her illness widened a little more. To his great shame, he had a sudden impulse to run away, to escape back to Seattle and his business and the comfortable life he had created for himself there, where he could pretend this was all some kind of bad dream and she was immortal, as he had always imagined.

Instead, he forced himself to step forward to the edge of the bed, where he carefully folded her bony fingers in his own much larger ones, cursing the cancer that was taking away this woman he loved so dearly.

He gave her his most charming smile, the one that never failed to sway any woman in his path, whether in the boardroom or the bedroom.

“Where else would I be but right here, darling?”

The smile she offered in return was rueful and she lifted their entwined fingers to her cheek. “You shouldn’t have come. You’re so busy in Seattle.”

“Never too busy for my best girl.”

Her laugh was small but wryly amused, as it always used to be when he would try to charm his way out of trouble with her.

Jo wasn’t the sort who could be easily charmed but she never failed to appreciate the effort.

“I’m sorry to drag you down here,” she said. “I…only wanted to see all of my boys one last time.”

He wanted to protest that his foster mother would be around for years to come, that she was too tough and ornery to let a little thing like cancer stop her, but he couldn’t deny the evidence in front of him.

She was dying, was much closer to it than any of them had feared.

“I’m here, as long as you need me,” he vowed.

“You’re a good boy, Quinn. You always have been.”

He snorted at that—both of them knew better about that, as well. “Easton didn’t tell me you’ve been hitting the weed as part of your treatment.”

The blankets rustled softly as her laugh shook her slight frame. “You know better than that. No marijuana here.”

“Then what are you smoking?”

“Nothing. I meant what I said. You were always a good boy on the inside, even when you were dragging the others into trouble.”

“It still means the world that you thought so.” He kissed her forehead. “Now I can see you’re tired. You get some rest and we can catch up later.”

“I would give anything for just a little of my old energy.”

Her voice trailed off on the last word and he could tell she had already drifted off, just like that, in mid-sentence. As he stood beside her bed, still holding her fingers, she winced twice in her sleep.

He frowned, hating the idea of her hurting. He slowly, carefully, released her fingers as if they would shatter at his touch and laid them with gentle care on the bed then turned just as Easton Springhill, his distant cousin by marriage and the closest thing he had to a sister, appeared in the doorway of the bedroom.

He moved away from the bed and followed Easton outside the room.

“She seems in pain,” he said, his voice low with distress.

“She is,” Easton answered. “She doesn’t say much about it but I can tell it’s worse the past week or so.”

“Isn’t there something we can do?”

“We have a few options. None of them last very long. The hospice nurse should be here any minute. She can give her something for the pain.” She tilted her head. “When was the last time you ate?”

He tried to remember. He had been in Tokyo when he got the message from Easton that Jo was asking for him to come home. Though he had had two more days of meetings scheduled for a new shipping route he was negotiating, he knew he had no choice but to drop everything. Jo would never have asked if the situation hadn’t been dire.

So he had rescheduled everything and ordered his plane back to Pine Gulch. Counting several flight delays from bad weather over the Pacific, he had been traveling for nearly eighteen hours and had been awake for eighteen before that.

“I had something on the plane, but it’s been a few hours.”

“Let me make you a sandwich, then you can catch a few z’s.”

“You don’t have to wait on me.” He followed her down the long hall and into the cheery white-and-red kitchen. “You’ve got enough to do, running the ranch and taking care of Jo. I’ve been making my own sandwiches for a long time now.”

“Don’t you have people who do that for you?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how.”

“Sit down,” she ordered him. “I know where everything is here.”

He thought about pushing her. But lovely as she was with her delicate features and long sweep of blond hair, Easton could be as stubborn and ornery as Jo and he was just too damn tired for another battle.

Instead, he eased into one of the scarred pine chairs snugged up against the old table and let her fuss over him for a few moments. “Why didn’t you tell me how things were, East? She’s withered away in the three months since I’ve been home. Chester probably weighs more than she does.”

At the sound of his name, Easton’s retired old cow dog that followed her or Jo everywhere lifted his grizzled gray muzzle and thumped his black-and-white tail against the floor.

Easton’s sigh held exhaustion and discouragement and no small measure of guilt. “I wanted to. I swear. I threatened to call you all back weeks ago but she begged me not to say anything. She said she didn’t want you to know how things were until…”

Her voice trailed off and her mouth trembled a little. He didn’t need her to finish. Jo wouldn’t have wanted them to know until close to the end.

This was it. For three long years, Jo had been fighting breast cancer and now it seemed her battle was almost over.

He hated this. He wanted to escape back to his own world where he could at least pretend he had some semblance of control. But she wanted him here in Cold Creek, so here he would damn well stay.

“Truth time, East. How long does she have?”

Easton’s features tightened with a deep sorrow. She had lost so much, this girl he had thought of as a sister since the day he arrived at Winder Ranch two decades ago, an angry, bitter fourteen-year-old with nothing but attitude. Easton had lived in the foreman’s house then with her parents and they had been friends almost from the moment he arrived.

“Three weeks or so,” she said. “Maybe less. Maybe a little more.”

He wanted to rant at the unfairness of it all that somebody like Jo would be taken from the earth with such cruelty when she had spent just about every moment of her entire seventy-two years of life giving back to others.

“I’ll stay until then.”

She stared at him, the butter knife she was using to spread mustard on his sandwich frozen in her hand. “How can you possibly be away from Southerland Shipping that long?”

He shrugged. “I might need to make a few short trips back to Seattle here and there but most of my work can be done long-distance through e-mail and conference calls. It shouldn’t be a problem. And I have good people working for me who can handle most of the complications that might come up.”

“That’s not what she wanted when she asked you to come home one more time,” Easton protested.

“Maybe not. But she isn’t making the decisions about this, as much as she might think she’s the one in charge. This is what I want. I should have come home when things first starting spiraling down. It wasn’t fair for us to leave her care completely in your hands.”

“You didn’t know how bad things were.”

If he had visited more, he would have seen for himself. But like Brant and Cisco, the other two foster sons Jo and her husband, Guff, had made a home for, life had taken him away from the safety and peace he had always found at Winder Ranch.

“I’m staying,” he said firmly. “I can certainly spare a few weeks to help you out on the ranch and with Jo’s care and whatever else you need, after all she and Guff did for me. Don’t argue with me on this, because you won’t win.”

“I wasn’t going to argue,” she said. “You can’t know how happy she’ll be to have you here. Thank you, Quinn.”

The relief in her eyes told him with stark clarity how difficult it must have been for Easton to watch Jo dying, especially after she had lost her own parents at a young age and then her beloved uncle who had taken her in after their deaths.

He squeezed her fingers when she handed him a sandwich with thick slices of homemade bread and hearty roast beef. “Thanks. This looks delicious.”

She slid across from him with an apple and a glass of milk. As he looked at her slim wrists curved around her glass, he worried that, like Jo, she hadn’t been eating enough and was withering away.

“What about the others?” he asked, after one fantastic bite. “Have you let Brant and Cisco know how things stand?”

Jo had always called them her Four Winds, the three foster boys she and Guff had taken in and Easton, her niece who had been their little shadow.

“We talk to Brant over the computer every couple weeks when he can call us from Afghanistan. Our Web cam’s not the greatest but I suppose he still had front-row seats as her condition has deteriorated over the past month. He’s working on swinging leave and is trying to get here as soon as he can.”

Quinn winced as guilt pinched at him. His best friend was halfway around the world and had done a better job of keeping track of things here at the ranch than Quinn had when he was only a few states away.

“What about Cisco?”

She looked down at her apple. “Have you heard from him?”

“No. Not for a while. I got a vague e-mail in the spring but nothing since.”

“Neither had we. It’s been months. I’ve tried everything I can think of to reach him but I have no idea even where he is. Last I heard, he was in El Salvador or somewhere like that but I’ m not having any luck turning up any information about him.”

Cisco worried him, Quinn had to admit. The rest of them had gone on to do something productive with their lives. Quinn had started Southerland Shipping after a stint in the Air Force, Brant Western was an honorable Army officer serving his third tour of duty in the Middle East and Easton had the ranch, which she loved more than just about anything.

Cisco Del Norte, on the other hand, had taken a very different turn. Quinn had only seen him a few times in the past five or six years and he seemed more and more jaded as the years passed.

What started as a quick trip to Mexico to visit relatives after a stint in the Army had turned into years of Cisco bouncing around Central and South America.

Quinn had no idea what he did down there. He suspected that few of Cisco’s activities were legal and none of them were good. He had decided several years ago that he was probably better off not knowing for sure.

But he did know Jo would want one more chance to see Cisco, whatever he was up to south of the border.

He swallowed another bite of sandwich. “I’ll put some resources on it and see what I can find out. My assistant is frighteningly efficient. If anyone can find the man and drag him out of whatever cantina he calls home these days, it’s Kathleen.”

Easton’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’ve met the redoubtable Kathleen. She scares me.”

“That makes two of us. It’s all part of her charm.”

He tried to hide his sudden jaw-popping yawn behind a sip of water, but few things slipped past Easton.

“Get some sleep,” she ordered in a tone that didn’t leave room for arguments. “Your old room is ready for you. Clean sheets and everything.”

“I don’t need to sleep. I’ll stay up with Jo.”

“I’ve got it. She’s got my cell on speed dial and only has to hit a couple of buttons to reach me all the time. Besides, the hospice nurse will be here to take care of things during the night.”

“That’s good. I was about to ask what sort of medical care she receives.”

“Every three hours, we have a home-care nurse check in to adjust medication and take care of any other needs she might have. Jo doesn’t think it’s necessary to have that level of care, but it’s what her doctors and I think is best.”

That relieved his mind considerably. At least Easton didn’t have to carry every burden by herself. He rose from the table and folded her into a hug.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she murmured. “It helps.”

“This is where I have to be. Wake me up if you or Jo need anything.”

“Right.”

He headed up the stairs in the old log house, noting the fourth step from the top still creaked, just like always. He had hated that step. More than once it had been the architect of his downfall when he and one of the others tried to sneak in after curfew. They would always try so hard to be quiet but then that blasted stair would always give them away. By the time they would reach the top of the staircase, there would be Guff, waiting for them with those bushy white eyebrows raised and a judgment-day look on his features.

He almost expected to see his foster father waiting for him on the landing. Instead, only memories hovered there as he pushed open his bedroom door, remembering how suspicious and belligerent he had been to the Winders when he first arrived.

He had viewed Winder Ranch as just another prison, one more stop on the misery train that had become his life after his parents’ murder-suicide.

Instead, he had found only love here.

Jo and Guff Winder had loved him. They had welcomed him into their home and their hearts, and then made more room for first Brant and then Cisco.

Their love hadn’t stopped him from his share of trouble through high school but he knew that without them, he probably would have nurtured that bitterness and hate festering inside him and ended up in prison or dead by now.

This was where he needed to be. As long as Jo hung in, he would be here—for her and for Easton. It was the right thing—the only thing—to do.

He completely slept through the discreet alarm on his Patek Philippe, something he never did.

When he finally emerged from his exhausted slumber three hours later, Quinn was disoriented at first. The sight of his familiar bedroom ceiling left him wondering if he was stuck in some kind of weird flashback about his teenage years, the kind of dream where some sexy, tight-bodied cheerleader was going to skip through the door any minute now.

No. That wasn’t it. Something bleak tapped at his memory bank and the cheerleader fantasy bounced back through the door.

Jo.

He was at the ranch and Jo was dying. He sat up and scrubbed at his face. Daylight was still several hours away but he was on Tokyo time and doubted he could go back to sleep anyway.

He needed a shower, but he supposed it could wait for a few more moments, until he checked on her. Since Jo had always expressed strongly negative feelings about the boys going shirtless around her ranch even when they were mowing the lawn, he took a moment to shrug back into his travel-wrinkled shirt and headed down the stairs, careful this time to skip over the noisy step so he didn’t wake Easton.

When he was a kid, Jo and Guff had shared a big master suite on the second floor. She had moved out of it after Guff’s death five years ago from an unexpected heart attack, saying she couldn’t bear sleeping there anymore without him. She had taken one of the two bedrooms on the main floor, the one closest to the kitchen.

When he reached it, he saw a woman backing out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

For an instant, he assumed it was Easton, but then he saw the coloring was wrong. Easton wore her waterfall of straight honey-blond hair in a ponytail most of the time but this woman had short, wavy auburn hair that just passed her chin.

She was smaller than Easton, too, though definitely curvy in all the right places. He felt a little thrum of masculine interest at the sight of a delectably curved derriere easing from the room—as unexpected as it was out of place, under the circumstances.

He was just doing his best to tamp his inappropriate interest back down when the woman turned just enough that he could see her features and any fledgling attraction disappeared like he’d just jumped naked into Windy Lake.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he growled out of the darkness.

Chapter Two

The woman whirled and grabbed at her chest, her eyes wide in the dimly lit hallway. “My word! You scared the life out of me!”

Quinn considered himself a pretty easygoing guy and he had despised very few people in his life—his father came immediately to mind as an exception.

But if he had to make a list, Tess Jamison would be right there at the top.

He was about to ask her again what she thought she was doing creeping around Winder Ranch when his sleep-deprived synapses finally clicked in and he made the connection as he realized that curvy rear end he had been unknowingly admiring was encased in deep blue flowered surgical scrubs.

She carried a basket of medical supplies in one hand and had an official-looking clipboard tucked under her arm.

“You’re the hospice nurse?” His voice rose with incredulity.

She fingered the silver stethoscope around her neck with her free hand. “That’s what they tell me. Hey, Quinn. How have you been?”

He must still be upstairs in his bed, having one of those infinitely disturbing dreams of high school, the kind where he shows up to an advanced placement class and discovers he hasn’t read a single page of the textbook, knows absolutely none of the subject matter, and is expected to sit down and ace the final.

This couldn’t be real. It was too bizarre, too surreal, that someone he hadn’t seen since graduation night—and would have been quite content never to have to see again—would suddenly be standing in the hallway of Winder Ranch looking much the same as she had fifteen years earlier.

He blinked but, damn it all, she didn’t disappear and he wished he could just wake up, already.

“Tess,” he said gruffly, unable to think of another thing to say.

“Right.”

“How long have you been coming here to take care of Jo?”

“Two weeks now,” she answered, and he wondered if her voice had always had that husky note to it or if it was a new development. “There are several of us, actually. I usually handle the nights. I stop in about every three or four hours to check vitals and help Jo manage her pain. I juggle four other patients with varying degrees of need but she’s my favorite.”

As she spoke, she moved away from Jo’s bedroom door and headed toward him. He held his breath and fought the instinct to cover his groin, just as a precaution.

Not that she had ever physically hurt him in their turbulent past, but Tess Jamison—Homecoming Queen, valedictorian, and all-around Queen Bee, probably for Bitch—had a way of emasculating a man with just a look.

She smelled not like the sulfur and brimstone he might have expected, but a pleasant combination of vanilla and peaches that made him think of hot summer evenings out on the wide porch of the ranch with a bowl of ice cream and Jo’s divine cobbler.

She headed down the hall toward the kitchen, where she flipped on a small light over the sink.

For the first time, he saw her in full light. She was as lovely as when she wore the Homecoming Queen crown, with high cheekbones, a delicate nose and the same lush, kissable mouth he remembered.

Her eyes were still her most striking feature, green and vivid, almond-shaped, with thick, dark lashes.

But fifteen years had passed and nothing stayed the same except his memories. She had lost that fresh-faced innocent look that had been so misleading. He saw tiny, faint lines fanning out at the edges of her eyes and she wore a bare minimum of makeup.

“I didn’t know you were back,” she finally said when he continued to stare. “Easton didn’t mention it before she went to bed.”

Apparently there were several things Easton was keeping close to her sneaky little vest. “I only arrived this evening.” Somehow he managed to answer her without snarling, but it was a chore. “Jo wanted to see all of us one more time.”

He couldn’t quite bring himself to say last instead of more but those huge green eyes still softened.

She was a hospice nurse, he reminded himself, as tough as he found that to believe. She was probably well-trained to pretend sympathy. The real Tess Jamison didn’t care about another soul on the planet except herself.

“Are you here for the weekend?” she asked.

“Longer,” he answered, his voice curt. It was none of her business that he planned to stay at Winder Ranch as long as Jo needed him, which he hoped was much longer than the doctors seemed to believe.

She nodded once, her eyes solemn, and he knew she understood all he hadn’t said. The soft compassion in those eyes—and his inexplicable urge to soak it in—turned him conversely hostile.

“I can’t believe you’ve stuck around Pine Gulch all these years,” he drawled. “I would have thought Tess Jamison couldn’t wait to shake the dust of podunk eastern Idaho off her designer boots.”

She smiled a little. “It’s Tess Claybourne now. And plans have a way of changing, don’t they?”

“I’m starting to figure that out.”

Curiosity stirred inside him. What had she been doing the past fifteen years? Why that hint of sadness in her eyes?

This was Tess, he reminded himself. He didn’t give a damn what she’d been up to, even if she looked hauntingly lovely in the low light of the kitchen.

“So you married old Scott, huh? What’s he up to? All that quarterback muscle probably turned to flab, right? Is he ranching with his dad?”

She pressed her lips into a thin line for just a moment, then gave him another of those tiny smiles, this one little more than a taut stretch of her mouth. “None of those things, I’m afraid. He died almost two years ago.”

Quinn gave an inward wince at his own tactlessness. Apparently nothing had changed. She had always brought out the worst in him.

“How?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, instead crossing to the coffeemaker he had assumed Easton must have forgotten to turn off. Now he realized she must have left a fresh pot for the hospice worker, since Tess seemed completely comfortable reaching in the cabinet for a cup and pouring.

“Pneumonia,” she finally answered as she added two packets of sweetener. “Scott died of pneumonia.”

“Really?” That seemed odd. He thought only old people and little kids could get that sick from pneumonia.

“He was…ill for a long time before that. His immune system was compromised and he couldn’t fight it off.”

Quinn wasn’t a complete ass, even when it came to this woman he despised so much. He forced himself to offer the appropriate condolences. “That must have been rough for you. Any kids?”

“No.”

This time she didn’t even bother to offer a tight smile, only stared into the murky liquid swirling in her cup and he thought again how surreal this was, standing in the Winder Ranch kitchen in the middle of the night having a conversation with her, when he had to fight down every impulse to snarl and yell and order her out of the house.

“Jo tells me you run some big shipping company in the Pacific Northwest,” she said after a moment.

“That’s right.” The third biggest in the region, but he was hoping that with the new batch of contracts he was negotiating Southerland Shipping would soon slide into the number two spot and move up from there.

“She’s so proud of you boys and Easton. She talks about you all the time.”

“Does she?” He wasn’t at all thrilled to think about Jo sharing with Tess any details of his life.

“Oh, yes. I’m sure she’s thrilled to have you home. That must be why she was sleeping so peacefully. She didn’t even wake when I checked her vitals, which is unusual. Jo’s usually a light sleeper.”

“How are they?”

“Excuse me?”

“Her vitals. How is she?”

He hated to ask, especially of Tess, but he was a man who dealt best with challenges when he gathered as much information as possible.

She took another sip of coffee then poured the rest down the sink and turned on the water to wash it down.

“Her blood pressure is still lower than we’d like to see and she’s needing oxygen more and more often. She tries to hide it but she’s in pain most of the time. I’m sorry. I wish I had something better to offer you.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said, even as he wished he could somehow figure out a way to blame her for it.

“That’s funny. It feels that way sometimes. It’s my job to make her as comfortable as possible but she doesn’t want to spend her last days in a drugged haze, she says. So we’re limited in some of our options. But we still do our best.”

He couldn’t imagine anyone deliberately choosing this for a career. Why on earth would a woman like Tess Jamison—Claybourne now, he reminded himself—have chosen to stick around tiny Pine Gulch and become a hospice nurse? He couldn’t quite get past the incongruity of it.

“I’d better go,” she said. “I’ve got three more patients to check on tonight. I’ll be back in a few hours, though, and Easton knows she can call me anytime if she needs me. It’s…good to see you again, Quinn.”

He wouldn’t have believed her words, even if he didn’t see the lie in her vivid green eyes. She wasn’t any happier to see him than he had been to find her wandering the halls of Winder Ranch.

Still, courtesy drilled into him by Jo demanded he walk her to the door. He stood on the porch and watched through the darkness until she reached her car, then he walked back inside, shaking his head.

Tess Jamison Claybourne.

As if he needed one more miserable thing to face here in Pine Gulch.

Quinn Southerland.

Lord have mercy.

Tess sat for a moment outside Winder Ranch in the little sedan she had bought after selling Scott’s wheelchair van. Her mind was a jumble of impressions, all of them sharp and hard and ugly.

He despised her. His rancor radiated from him like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Though he had conversed with at least some degree of civility throughout their short encounter, every word, every sentence, had been underscored by his contempt. His silvery-blue eyes had never once lost that sheen of scorn when he looked at her.

Tess let out a breath, more disconcerted by the brief meeting than she should be. She had a thick enough skin to withstand a little animosity. Or at least she had always assumed she did, up to this point.

How would she know, though? She had never had much opportunity to find out. Most of the good citizens of Pine Gulch treated her far differently.

Alone in the quiet darkness of her car, she gave a humorless laugh. How many times over the years had she thought how heartily sick she was of being treated like some kind of venerated saint around Pine Gulch? She wanted people to see her as she really was—someone with hopes and dreams and faults. Not only as the tireless caretaker who had dedicated long years of her life to caring for her husband.

She shook her head with another rough laugh. A little middle ground would be nice. Quinn Southerland’s outright vilification of her was a little more harsh than she really wanted to face.

He had a right to despise her. She understood his feelings and couldn’t blame him for them. She had treated him shamefully in high school. Just the memory, being confronted with the worst part of herself when she hadn’t really thought about those things in years, made her squirm as she started her car.

Her treatment of Quinn Southerland had been repre hensible, beyond cruel, and she wanted to cringe away from remembering it. But seeing him again after all these years seemed to set the fragmented, half-forgotten memories shifting and sliding through her mind like jagged plates of glass.

She remembered all of it. The unpleasant rumors she had spread about him; her small, snide comments, delivered at moments when he was quite certain to overhear; the friends and teachers she had turned against him, without even really trying very hard.

She had been a spoiled, petulant bitch, and the memory of it wasn’t easy to live with now that she had much more wisdom and maturity and could look back on her terrible behavior through the uncomfortable prism of age and experience.

She fully deserved his contempt, but that knowledge didn’t make it much easier to stomach as she drove down the long, winding Winder Ranch driveway and turned onto Cold Creek Road, her headlights gleaming off the leaves that rustled across the road in the October wind.

She loved Jo Winder dearly and had since she was a little girl, when Jo had been patient and kind with the worst piano student any teacher ever had. Tess had promised the woman just the evening before that she would remain one of her hospice caregivers until the end. How on earth was she supposed to keep that vow if it meant being regularly confronted with her own poor actions when she was a silly girl too heedless to care about anyone else’s feelings?

The roads were dark and quiet as she drove down Cold Creek Canyon toward her next patient, across town on the west side of Pine Gulch.

Usually she didn’t mind the quiet or the solitude, this sense in the still hours of the night that she was the only one around. Even when she was on her way to her most difficult patient, she could find enjoyment in these few moments of peace.

Ed Hardy was a cantankerous eighty-year-old man whose kidneys were failing after years of battling diabetes. He wasn’t facing his impending passing with the same dignity or grace as Jo Winder but continued to fight it every step of the way. He was mean-spirited and belligerent, lashing out at anyone who dared remind him he wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old wrangler anymore who could rope and ride with the best of them.

Despite his bitterness, she loved the old coot. She loved all her home-care patients, even the most difficult. She would miss them, even Ed, when she moved away from Pine Gulch in a month.

She sighed as she drove down Main Street with its darkened businesses and the historic Old West lampposts somebody in the chamber of commerce had talked the town into putting up for the tourists a few years ago.

Except for the years she went to nursing school in Boise and those first brief halcyon months after her marriage, she had lived in this small Idaho town in the west shadow of the Tetons her entire life.

She and Scott had never planned to stay here. Their dreams had been much bigger than a rural community like Pine Gulch could hold.

They had married a month after she graduated from nursing school. He had been a first-year med student, excited about helping people, making a difference in the world. They had talked about opening a clinic in some undeveloped country somewhere, about travel and all the rich buffet of possibilities spreading out ahead of them.

But as she said to Quinn Southerland earlier, sometimes life didn’t work out the way one planned. Instead of exotic locales and changing the world, she had brought her husband home to Pine Gulch where she had a support network—friends and family and neighbors who rallied around them.

She pulled into the Hardy driveway, noting the leaves that needed to be raked and the small flower garden that should be put to bed for the winter. Mrs. Hardy had her hands full caring for her husband and his many medical needs. She had a grandson in Idaho Falls who helped a bit with the yard but now that school was back in session, he didn’t come as often as he had in the summer.

Tess turned off her engine, shuffling through her mental calendar to see if she could find time in the next few days to come over with a rake.

Her job had never been only about pain management and end-of-life decisions. At least not to her. She knew what it was like to be on the other side of the equation and how very much it could warm the heart when someone showed up unexpectedly with a smile and a cloth and window spray to wash the winter grime she hadn’t had time to clean off because her life revolved around care taking someone else.

That experience as the recipient of service had taught her well that her job was to lift the burdens of the families as much as of her patients.

Even hostile, antagonistic family members like Quinn Southerland.

The wind swirled leaves across the Hardys’ cracked driveway as she stepped out of her car. Tess shivered, but she knew it wasn’t at the prospect of winter just around the corner or that wind bare-knuckling its way under her jacket, but from remembering the icy cold blue of Quinn’s eyes.

Though she wasn’t at all eager to encounter him again—or to face the bitter truth of the spoiled brat she had been once—she adored Jo Winder. She couldn’t let Quinn’s forbidding presence distract her from giving Jo the care she deserved.

Chapter Three

Apparently Pine Gulch’s time machine was in fine working order.

Quinn walked into The Gulch and was quite certain he had traveled back twenty years to the first time he walked into the café with his new foster parents. He could clearly remember that day, the smell of frying potatoes and meat, the row of round swivel seats at the old-fashioned soda fountain, the craning necks in the place and the hot gazes as people tried to figure out the identity of the surly, scowling dark-haired kid with Jo and Guff.

Not much had changed. From the tin-stamped ceiling to the long, gleaming mirror that ran the length of the soda fountain to the smell of fried food that seemed to send triglycerides shooting through his veins just from walking in the door.

Even the faces were the same. He could swear the same old-timers still sat in the booth in the corner being served by Donna Archeleta, whose husband, Lou, had always manned the kitchen with great skill and joy. He recognized Mick Malone, Jesse Redbear and Sal Martinez.

And, of course, Donna. She stood by the booth with a pot of coffee in her hand but she just about dropped it all over the floor when she looked up at the sound of the jangling bells on the door to spy him walking into her café.

“Quinn Southerland,” she exclaimed, her smoker-husky voice delighted. “As I live and breathe.”

“Hey, Donna.”

One of Jo’s closest friends, Donna had always gone out of her way to be kind to him and to Brant and Cisco. They hadn’t always made it easy. The three of them had been the town’s resident bad boys back in the day. Well, maybe not Brant, he acknowledged, but he was usually guilty by association, if nothing else.

“I didn’t know you were back in town.” Donna set the pot down in an empty booth to fold her scrawny arms around him. He hugged her back, wondering when she had gotten frail like Jo.

“Just came in yesterday,” he said.

“Why the hell didn’t anybody tell me?”

He opened his mouth to answer but she cut him off.

“Oh, no. Jo. Is she…” Her voice trailed off but he could see the anxiety suddenly brim in her eyes, as if she dreaded his response.

He shook his head and forced a smile. “She woke up this morning feistier than ever, craving one of Lou’s sweet rolls. Nothing else will do, she told me in no uncertain terms, so she sent me down here first thing so I could pick one up and take it back for her. Since according to East, she hasn’t been hungry for much of anything else, I figured I had better hurry right in and grab her one.”

Donna’s lined and worn features brightened like a gorgeous June morning breaking over the mountains. “You’re in luck, hon. I think he’s just pullin’ a new batch out of the oven. You wait right here and have yourself some coffee while I go back and wrap a half-dozen up for her.”

Before he could say a word, she turned a cup over from the setting in the booth and poured him a cup. He laughed at this further evidence that not much had changed, around The Gulch at least.

“I think one, maybe two sweet rolls, are probably enough. Like I said, she hasn’t had much of an appetite.”

“Well, this way she can warm another up later or save one for the morning, and there will be extras for you and Easton. Now don’t you argue with me. I’m doing this, so just sit down and drink your coffee, there’s a good boy.”

He had to smile in the face of such determination, such eagerness to do something nice for someone she cared about. There were few things he missed about living in Pine Gulch, but that sense of community, belonging to something bigger than yourself, was definitely one of them.

He took a seat at the long bar, joining a few other solo customers who eyed him with curiosity.

Again, he had the strange sense of stepping back into his past. He could still see the small chip in the bottom corner of the mirror where he and Cisco had been rough-housing and accidentally sent a salt shaker flying.

That long-ago afternoon was as clear as his flight in from Japan the day before—the sick feeling in the pit of his gut as he had faced the wrath of Lou and Donna and the even worse fear when he had to fess up to Guff and Jo. He had only been with them a year, twelve tumultuous months, and had been quite sure they would toss him back into the foster-care system after one mess-up too many.

But Guff hadn’t yelled or ordered him to pack his things. Instead, he just sat him down and told one of his rambling stories about a time he had been a young ranch hand with a little too much juice in him and had taken his .22 and shot out the back windows of what he thought was an old abandoned pickup truck, only to find out later it belonged to his boss’s brother.

“A man steps up and takes responsibility for his actions,” Guff had told him solemnly. That was all he said, but the trust in his brown eyes had completely overwhelmed Quinn. So of course he had returned to The Gulch and offered to work off the cost of replacing the mirror for the Archeletas.

He smiled a little, remembering Lou and Donna’s response. “Think we’ll just keep that little nick there as a reminder,” Lou had said. “But there are always dishes around here to be washed.”

He and Cisco had spent about three months of Saturdays and a couple afternoons a week after school in the kitchen with their hands full of soapy water. More than he cared to admit, he had enjoyed those days listening to the banter of the café, all the juicy small-town gossip.

He only had about three or four minutes to replay the memory in his head before Lou Archeleta walked out of the kitchen, his bald head just as shiny as always and his thick salt-and-pepper mustache a bold contrast. The delight on his rough features matched Donna’s, warming Quinn somewhere deep inside.

Lou wiped his hand on his white apron before holding it out for a solemn handshake. “Been too long,” he said, in that same gruff, no-nonsense way. “Hear Seattle’s been pretty good to you.”

Quinn shook his hand firmly, aware as he did that much of his success in business derived from watching the integrity and goodness of people like Lou and Donna and the respect with which they had always treated their customers.

“I’ve done all right,” he answered.

“Better than all right. Jo says you’ve got a big fancy house on the shore and your own private jet.”

Technically it was the company’s corporate jet. But since he owned the company, he supposed he couldn’t debate semantics. “How about you? How’s Rick?”

Their son had gone to school with him and graduated a year after him. Tess Jamison’s year, actually.

“Good. Good. He’s up in Boise these days. He’s a plumbing contractor, has himself a real good business. He and his wife gave us our first granddaughter earlier this year.” The pride on Lou’s work-hardened features was obvious.

“Congratulations.”

“Yep, after four boys, they finally got a girl.”

Quinn choked on the sip of coffee he’d just taken. “Rick has five kids?”

His mind fairly boggled at the very idea of even one. He couldn’t contemplate having enough for a basketball team.

Lou chuckled. “Yep. Started young and threw in a set of twins in there. He’s a fine dad, too.”

The door chimed, heralding another customer, but Quinn was still reeling at the idea of his old friend raising a gaggle of kids and cleaning out toilets.

Still, an odd little prickle slid down his spine, especially when he heard the old-timers in their regular booth hoot with delight and usher the newcomer over.

“About time you got here,” one of the old-timers in the corner called out. “Mick here was sure you was goin’ to bail on us today.”

“Are you kidding?” an alto female voice answered. “This is my favorite part of working graveyard, the chance to come in here for breakfast and have you all give me a hard time every morning. I don’t know what I’ll do without it.”

Quinn stiffened on the stool. He didn’t need to turn to know just who was now sliding into the booth near the regulars. He had last heard that voice at 3:00 a.m. in the dark quiet of the Winder Ranch kitchen.

“Hey, Miss Tess.” Lou turned his attention away from bragging about his grandkids to greet the newcomer, confirming what Quinn had already known deep in his bones. “You want your usual?”

“You got it, Lou. I’ve been dreaming of your veggie omelet all night long. I’m absolutely starving.”

“Girl, you need to get yourself something more interesting to fill your nights if all you can dream about is Lou’s veggie omelet,” called out one of the women from a nearby booth and everybody within earshot laughed.

Everybody but Quinn. She was a regular here, just like the others, he realized. She was part of the community, and he, once more, was the outsider.

She had always been excellent at reminding him of that.

He couldn’t put it off any longer, he knew. With some trepidation, he turned around from the counter to the dining room to face her gaze.

Despite the mirror right in front of him, she must not have been paying attention to the other patrons in the restaurant. He could tell she hadn’t known he was there until he turned. He saw the little flash of surprise in her eyes, the slight rise and fall of her slim chest as her breathing hitched.

She covered it quickly with a tight smile and the briefest of waves.

She wasn’t pleased to see him. He didn’t miss the sudden tension in her posture or the dismay that quickly followed that initial surprise.

Join the club, he thought. Bumping into his worst nightmare two times in less than six hours was twice too many, as far as he was concerned.

He thought he saw something strangely vulnerable flash in those brilliant green eyes for just an instant, then she turned back to the old-timers at the booth with some bright, laughing comment that sounded forced to him.

As he listened to their interaction, it was quickly apparent to him that Tess was a favorite of all of them. No surprise there. She excelled at twisting everybody around her little finger. She had probably been doing the very same thing since she was the age of Lou Archeleta’s new granddaughter.

The more the teasing conversation continued, the more sour his mood turned. She sounded vivacious and funny and charming. Why couldn’t anybody but him manage to see past the act to the vicious streak lurking beneath?

When he had just about had all he could stomach, Donna returned with two white bakery bags and a disposable coffee cup with steam curling out the top.

“Here you go, hon. Didn’t mean to keep you waiting until Christmas but I got tied up in the back with a phone call from a distributor. There’s plenty of extra sweet rolls for you and here’s a little joe for the road.”

He put away his irritation at Tess and took the offerings from Donna with an affectionate smile, his heart warmer than the cup in his hand at her concern. “Thanks.”

“You give that girl a big old kiss from everybody down here at The Gulch. Tell her to hang in there and we’re all prayin’ for her.”

“I’ll do that.”

“And come back, why don’t you, while you’re in town. We’ll fix you up your favorite chicken-fried steak and have a coze.”

“It’s a date.” He kissed her cheek and headed for the door. Just as he reached it, he heard Tess call his name.

“Wait a minute, will you?” she said.

He schooled his features into a mask of indifference as he turned, loathe for any of the other customers to see how it rankled to see her here still acting like the Pine Gulch Homecoming Queen deigning to have breakfast with her all of her hordes of loyal, adoring subjects.

He didn’t want to talk to her. He didn’t want to be forced to see how lovely and perky she looked, even in surgical scrubs and even after he knew she had been working all night at a difficult job.

She smelled of vanilla and sunshine and he didn’t want to notice that she looked as bright as the morning, how her auburn curls trailed against her slender jawline or the light sprinkle of freckles across her nose or the way her green eyes had that little rim of gold around the edge you only saw if you were looking closely.

He didn’t want to see Tess at all, he didn’t want to feel like an outsider again in Pine Gulch, and he especially didn’t want to have to stand by and do nothing while a woman he loved slipped away, little by little.

“How’s Jo this morning?” she asked. “She seemed restless at six when I came to check on her.”

As far as he remembered, Tess had never been involved in the high-school drama club. So either she had become a really fabulous actress in the intervening years or her concern for Jo was genuine.

He let out a breath, tamping down his antagonism in light of their shared worry for Jo. “I don’t know. To me, she seems better this morning than she was last night when I arrived. But I don’t really have a baseline to say what’s normal and what’s not.”

He held up the bakery bag. “She at least had enough energy to ask for Lou’s sweet rolls this morning.”

“That’s excellent. Eating has been hard for her the past few weeks. Seeing you must be giving her a fresh burst of strength.”

Was she implying he should have come sooner? He frowned, disliking the guilt swirling around in his gut along with the coffee.

Yeah, he should have come home sooner. If Easton and Jo had been forthright about what was going on, he would have been here weeks ago. They had hid the truth from him but he should have been more intuitive and figured it out.

That didn’t mean he appreciated Tess pointing out his negligence. He scowled but she either didn’t notice or didn’t particularly care.

“It’s important that you make sure she doesn’t overdo things,” Tess said. “I know that’s hard to do during those times when she’s feeling better. On her good days, she has a tendency to do much more than she really has the strength to tackle. You just have to be careful to ensure she doesn’t go overboard.”

Her bossy tone brought his dislike simmering to the surface. “Don’t try to manage me like you do everybody else in town,” he snapped. “I’m not one of your devoted worshippers. We both know I never have been.”

For just an instant, hurt flared in her eyes but she quickly blinked it away and tilted that damn perky chin up, her eyes a sudden murky, wintry green.

“This has nothing to do with me,” she replied coolly. “It’s about Jo. Part of my job as her hospice nurse is to advise her family regarding her care. I can certainly reserve those conversations with Easton if that’s what you prefer.”

He bristled for just a moment, but the bitter truth of it was, he knew she was right. He needed to put aside how much he disliked this woman for things long in the distant past to focus on his foster mother, who needed him right now.

Tess appeared to genuinely care about Jo. And while he wasn’t quite buying such a radical transformation, people could change. He saw it all the time.

Hell, he was a completely different person than he’d been in high school. He wasn’t the angry, belligerent hothead with a chip the size of the Tetons on his shoulder anymore, though he was certainly acting like it right now.

It wasn’t wholly inconceivable that this caring nurse act was the real thing.

“You’re right.” He forced the words out, though they scraped his throat raw. “I appreciate the advice. I’m…still struggling with seeing her this way. In my mind, she should still be out on the ranch hurtling fences and rounding up strays.”

Her defensive expression softened and she lifted a hand just a little. For one insane moment, he thought she meant to touch his arm in a sympathetic gesture, but she dropped her arm back to her side.

“Wouldn’t we all love that?” she said softly. “I’m afraid those days are gone. Right now, we just have to savor every moment with her, even if it’s quietly sitting beside her while she sleeps.”

She stepped away from him and he was rather horrified at the regret suddenly churning through him. All these conflicting feelings were making him a little crazy.

“I’m off until tonight,” she said, “but you’ll find Cindy, the day nurse, is wonderful. Even so, tell Easton to call me if she needs anything.”

He nodded and pushed past the door into the sunshine.

That imaginary time machine had a few little glitches in it, he thought as he pulled out of the parking lot and headed back toward Cold Creek Canyon.

He had just exchanged several almost civil words with Tess Jamison Claybourne, something that a dozen years ago would have seemed just as impossible as imagining that someday he would be able to move past the ugliness in his past to run his own very successful company.

Chapter Four

“Do you remember that time you boys stayed out with the Walker sisters an hour past curfew?”

“I’m going to plead the fifth on that one,” Quinn said lazily, though he did indeed remember Sheila Walker and some of her more acrobatic skills.

“I remember it,” Jo said. “The door was locked and you couldn’t get back in so you rascals tried to sneak in a window, remember that? Guff heard a noise downstairs and since he was half-asleep and didn’t realize you boys hadn’t come home yet, he thought it might be burglars.”

Jo chuckled. “He took the baseball bat he kept by the side of the bed and went down and nearly beaned the three of you as you were trying to sneak in the window.”

He smiled at the memory of Brant’s guilt and Cisco’s smart-aleck comments and Guff’s stern reprimand to all of them.

“I can’t believe Guff told you about that. It was supposed to be a secret between us males.”

Her mouth lifted a little at the edges. “Guff didn’t keep secrets from me. Don’t you know better than that? He used to say whatever he couldn’t tell me, he would rather not know himself.”

Jo’s voice changed when she talked about her late husband. The tone was softer, more rounded, and her love sounded in every word.

He squeezed her fingers. What a blessing for both Guff and Jo that they had found each other, even if it had been too late in life for the children they had both always wanted. Though they married in their forties, they had figured out a way to build the family they wanted by taking in foster children who had nowhere else to go.

“I suppose that’s as good a philosophy for a marriage as any,” he said.

“Yes. That and the advice of Lyndon B. Johnson. Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy, Guff used to say. One is to let her think she is having her own way. The other, to let her have it.”

He laughed, just as he knew she intended. Jo smiled along with him and lifted her face to the late-morning sunshine. He checked to make sure the colorful throw was still tucked across her lap, though it was a beautiful autumn day, warmer than usual for October.

They sat on Adirondack chairs canted just so in the back garden of Winder Ranch for a spectacular view of the west slope of the Tetons. Surrounding them were mums and yarrow and a few other hardy plants still hanging on. Most of the trees were nearly bare but a few still clung tightly to their leaves. As he remembered, the stubborn elms liked to hang on to theirs until the most messy, inconvenient time, like just before the first hard snowfall, when it became a nightmare trying to rake them up.

Mindful of Tess’s advice, he was keeping a careful eye on Jo and her stamina level. So far, she seemed to be managing her pain. She seemed content to sit in her garden and bask in the unusual warmth.

He wasn’t used to merely sitting. In Seattle, he always had someone clamoring for his attention. His assistant, his board of directors, his top-level executives. Someone always wanted a slice of his time.

Quinn couldn’t quite ascertain whether he found a few hours of enforced inactivity soothing or frustrating. But he did know he savored this chance to store away a few more precious memories of Jo.

She lifted her thin face to the sunshine. “We won’t have too many more days like this, will we? Before we know it, winter will be knocking on the door.”

That latent awareness that she probably wouldn’t make it even to Thanksgiving—her favorite holiday—pierced him.

He tried to hide his reaction but Jo had eyes like a red-tailed hawk and was twice as focused.

“Stop that,” she ordered, her mouth suddenly stern.

“What?”

“Feeling sorry for me, son.”

He folded her hand in his, struck again by the frailty of it, the pale skin and the thin bones and the tiny blue veins pulsing beneath the papery surface.

“You want the truth, I’m feeling more sorry for myself than you.”

Her laugh startled a couple of sparrows from the bird feeder hanging in the aspens. “You always did have a bit of a selfish streak, didn’t you?”

“Damn right.” He managed a tiny grin in response to her teasing. “And I’m selfish enough to wish you could stick around forever.”

“For your sake and the others, I’m sorry for that. But don’t be sad on my account, my dear. I have missed my husband sorely every single, solitary moment of the past three years. Soon I’ll be with him again and won’t have to miss him anymore. Why would anyone possibly pity me?”

He would have given a great deal for even a tiny measure of her faith. He hadn’t believed much in a just and loving God since the nightmare day his parents died.

“I only have one regret,” Jo went on.

He made a face. “Only one?” He could have come up with a couple dozen of his own regrets, sitting here in the sunshine on a quiet Cold Creek morning.

“Yes. I’m sorry my children—and that’s what you all are, you know—have never found the kind of joy and love Guff and I had.”

“I don’t think many people have,” he answered. “What is it they say? Often imitated, never duplicated? What the two of you had was something special. Unique.”

“Special, yes. Unique, not at all. A good marriage just takes lots of effort on both parts.” She tilted her head and studied him carefully. “You’ve never even been serious about a woman, have you? I know you date plenty of beautiful women up there in Seattle. What’s wrong with them all?”

He gave a rough laugh. “Not a thing, other than I have no desire to get married.”

“Ever?”

“Marriage isn’t for me, Jo. Not with my family history.”

“Oh, poof.”

He laughed at the unexpectedness of the word.

“Poof?”

“You heard me. You’re just making excuses. Never thought I raised any of my boys to be cowards.”

“I’m not a coward,” he exclaimed.

“What else would you call it?”

He didn’t answer, though a couple of words that came immediately to mind were more along the lines of smart and self-protective.

“Yes, you had things rough,” Jo said after a moment. “I’m not saying you didn’t. It breaks my heart what some people do to their families in the name of love. But plenty of other people have things rough and it doesn’t stop them from living their life. Why, take Tess, for instance.”

He gave a mental groan. Bad enough that he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about her all morning. He didn’t need Jo bringing her up now. Just the sound of her name stirred up those weird, conflicting emotions inside him all over again. Anger and that subtle, insistent, frustrating attraction.

He pushed them all away. “What do you mean, take Tess?”

“That girl. Now she has an excuse to lock her heart away and mope around feeling sorry for herself for the rest of her life. But does she? No. You’ll never find a happier soul in all your days. Why, what she’s been through would have crushed most women. Not our Tess.”

What could she possibly have been through that Jo deemed so traumatic? She was a pampered princess, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in town, the town’s bank president, apparently adored by everyone.

She couldn’t know what it was like to have to call the police on your own father or hold your mother as she breathed her last.

Before he could ask Jo to explain, she began to cough—raspy, wet hacking that made his own chest hurt just listening to it.

She covered her mouth with a folded handkerchief from her pocket as the coughing fit went on for what seemed an eon. When she pulled the cloth away, he didn’t miss the red spots speckling the white linen.

“I’m going to carry you inside and call Easton.”

Jo shook her head. “No,” she choked out. “Will pass. Just…minute.”

He gave her thirty more seconds, then reached for his cell phone. He started to hit Redial to reach Easton when he realized Jo’s coughs were dwindling.

“Told you…would pass,” she said after a moment. During the coughing attack, what little color there was in her features had seeped out and she looked as if she might blow away if the wind picked up even a knot or two.

“Let’s get you inside.”

She shook her head. “I like the sunshine.”

He sat helplessly beside her while she coughed a few more times, then folded the handkerchief and stuck it back into her pocket.

“Sorry about that,” she murmured after a painful moment. “I so wish you didn’t have to see me like this.”

He wrapped an arm around her frail shoulders and pulled her close to him, planting a kiss on her springy gray curls.

“We don’t have to talk. Just rest. We can stay for a few more moments and enjoy the sunshine.”

She smiled and settled against him and they sat in contented silence.

For those few moments, he was deeply grateful he had come. As difficult as it had been to rearrange his schedule and delegate as many responsibilities as he could to the other executives at Southerland, he wouldn’t have missed this moment for anything.

With his own mother, he hadn’t been given the luxury of saying goodbye. She had been unconscious by the time he could reach her.

He supposed that played some small part in his insistence that he stay here to the end with Jo, as difficult as it was to face, as if he could atone in some small way for all he hadn’t been able to do for his own mother as a frightened kid.

Her love of sunshine notwithstanding, Jo lasted outside only another fifteen minutes before she had a coughing fit so intense it left her pale and shaken. He didn’t give her a choice this time, simply scooped her into his arms and carried her inside to her bedroom.

“Rest there and I’ll find Easton to help you.”

“Bother. She…has enough…to do. Just need water and…minute to catch my breath.”

He went for a glass of water and returned to Jo’s bedroom with it, then sent a quick text to Easton explaining the situation.

“I can see you sending out an SOS over there,” Jo muttered with a dark look at the phone in his hand.

“Who, me? I was just getting in a quick game of solitaire while I wait for you to stop coughing.”

She snorted at the lie and shook her head. “You didn’t need to call her. I hate being so much of a nuisance to everyone.”

He finished the text and covered her hand with his. “Serves us right for all the bother we gave you.”

“I think you boys used to stay up nights just thinking about new ways to get into trouble, didn’t you?”

“We had regular meetings every afternoon, just to brainstorm.”

“I don’t doubt it.” She smiled weakly. “At least by the middle of high school you settled down some. Though there was that time senior year you got kicked off the baseball team. That nonsense about cheating, which I know you would never do, and so I tried to tell the coach but he wouldn’t listen. You never did tell us what that was really all about.”

He frowned. He could have told her what it had been about. Tess Jamison and more of her lies about him. If anyone had stayed up nights trying to come up with ways to make someone else’s life harder, it would have been Tess. She had made as much trouble as she could for him, for reasons he still didn’t understand.

“High school was a long time ago. Why don’t I tell you about my latest trip to Cambodia when I visited Angkor Wat?”

He described the ancient temple complex that had been unknown to the outside world until 1860, when a French botanist stumbled upon it. He was describing the nearby city of Angkor Thom when he looked down and saw her eyes were closed, her breathing regular.

He arranged a knit throw over her and slipped off her shoes, which didn’t elicit even a hint of a stir out of her. That she could fall asleep so instantaneously worried him and he hoped their short excursion outside hadn’t been too much for her.

He closed the door behind him just as he heard the bang of the screen door off the kitchen, then the thud of Easton’s boots on the tile.

Chester rose from his spot in a sunbeam and greeted her with delight, his tired old body wiggling with glee.

She stripped off her work gloves and patted him. “Sorry it took me a while. We were up repairing a fence in the west pasture.”

“I’m sorry I called you in for nothing. She seems to be resting now. But she was coughing like crazy earlier, leaving blood specks behind.”

Easton blew out a breath and swiped a strand of hair that had fallen out of her long ponytail. “She’s been doing that lately. Tess says it’s to be expected.”

“I’m sorry I bugged you for no reason.”

“I was ready to break for lunch. I would have been here in about fifteen minutes anyway. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have you here so I know someone is with her. I’m always within five minutes of the house but I can’t be here all the time. I hate when I have to leave her, but sometimes I can’t help it. The ranch doesn’t run itself.”

Though Winder Ranch wasn’t as huge an operation as the Daltons up the canyon a ways, it was still a big undertaking for one woman still in her twenties, even if she did have a couple ranch hands and a ranch foreman who had been with the Winders since Easton’s father died in a car accident that also killed his wife.

“Why don’t I fix you some lunch while you’re here?” he offered. “It’s my turn after last night, isn’t it?”

She sent him a sidelong look. “The CEO of South-erland Shipping making me a bologna sandwich? How can I resist an offer like that?”

“Turkey is my specialty but I suppose I can swing bologna.”

“Either one would be great. I’ll go check on Jo and be right back.”

She returned before he had even found all the ingredients.

“Still asleep?” he asked.

“Yes. She was smiling in her sleep and looked so at peace, I didn’t have the heart to wake her.”

“Sit down. I’ll be done here in a moment.”

She sat at the kitchen table with a tall glass of Pepsi and they chatted about the ranch and the upcoming roundup in the high country and the cost of beef futures while he fixed sandwiches for both of them.

He presented hers with a flourish and she accepted it gratefully.

“What time does the day nurse come again?” he asked.

“Depends on the nurse, but usually about 1:00 p.m. and then again at five or six o’clock.”

“And there are three nurses who rotate?”

“Yes. They’re all wonderful but Tess is Jo’s favorite.”

He paused to swallow a bite of his sandwich then tried to make his voice sound casual and uninterested. “What’s her story?” he asked.

“Who? Tess?”

“Jo said something about her that made me curious. She said Tess had it rough.”

“You could say that.”

He waited for Easton to elucidate but she remained frustratingly silent and he had to take a sip of soda to keep from grinding his back teeth together. The Winder women—and he definitely counted Easton among that number since her mother had been Guff’s sister—could drive him crazy with their reticence that they seemed to invoke only at the most inconvenient times.

“What’s been so rough?” he pressed. “When I knew Tess, she had everything a woman could want. Brains, beauty, money.”

“None of that helped her very much with everything that came after, did it?” Easton asked quietly.

“I have no idea. You haven’t told me what that was.”

He waited while Easton took another bite of her sandwich before continuing. “I guess you figured out she married Scott, right?”

He shrugged. “That was a foregone conclusion, wasn’t it? They dated all through high school.”

He had actually always liked Scott Claybourne. Tall and blond and athletic, Scott had been amiable to Quinn if not particularly friendly—until their senior year, when Scott had inexplicably beat the crap out of Quinn one warm April night, with veiled references to some supposed misconduct of Quinn’s toward Tess.

More of her lies, he had assumed, and had pitied the bastard for being so completely taken in by her.

“They were only married three or four months, still newlyweds, really,” Easton went on, “when he was in a bad car accident.”

He frowned. “Car accident? I thought Tess told me he died of pneumonia.”

“Technically, he did, just a couple of years ago. But he lived for several years after the accident, though he was permanently disabled from it. He had a brain injury and was in a pretty bad way.”

He stared at Easton, trying to make the jaggedly formed pieces of the puzzle fit together. Tess had stuck around Pine Gulch for years to deal with her husband’s brain injury? He couldn’t believe it, not of her.

“She cared for him tirelessly, all that time,” Easton said quietly. “From what I understand, he required total care. She had to feed him, dress him, bathe him. He was almost more like her kid than her husband, you know.”

“He never recovered from the brain injury?”

“A little but not completely. He was in a wheelchair and lost the ability to talk from the injury. It was so sad. I just remember how nice he used to be to us younger kids. I don’t know how much was going on inside his head but Tess talked to him just like normal and she seemed to understand what sounded like grunts and moans to me.”

The girl he had known in high school had been only interested in wearing her makeup just so and buying the latest fashion accessories. And making his life miserable, of course.

He couldn’t quite make sense of what Easton was telling him.

“I saw them once at the grocery store when he had a seizure, right there in frozen foods,” Easton went on. “It scared the daylights out of me, let me tell you, but Tess just acted like it was a normal thing. She was so calm and collected through the whole thing.”

“That’s rough.”

She nodded. “A lot of women might have shoved away from the table when they saw the lousy hand they’d been dealt, would have just walked away right then. Tess was young, just out of nursing school. She had enough medical experience that I have to think she could guess perfectly well what was ahead for them, but she stuck it out all those years.”

He didn’t like the compassion trickling through him for her. Somehow things seemed more safe, more ordered, before he had learned that perhaps she hadn’t spent the past dozen years figuring out more ways to make him loathe her.

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