A Cold Creek Homecoming

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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