A Cold Creek Homecoming Read online

  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 reprehensible, 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 bat
tling 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.