Come home to Winder Ranch in these two beloved stories, where broken hearts can find exactly what they need to heal—and love again

A COLD CREEK HOMECOMING

When Quinn Southerland returns home to Winder Ranch, Idaho, to find former high school queen bee Tess Claybourn serving as his dying mother’s hospice nurse, he’s far from pleased. But recently widowed Tess has done a lot of growing up since then. And as the two reconnect, she can’t help but wonder if there’s room in Quinn’s tortured heart for forgiveness—and maybe even love...

A COLD CREEK REUNION

After Taft Bowman lost his parents ten years ago, he buried himself in a grief that shut fiancée Laura Pendleton out completely. But now she’s back, recently widowed with two kids in tow, and Taft refuses to let her slip away again. Laura just wants a fresh start, but that’s easier said than done when seeing Taft stirs up feelings she thought she’d left in the past...

Praise for New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne

“Romance, vivid characters and a wonderful story; really, who could ask for more?”

—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author, on Blackberry Summer

“Entertaining, heart-wrenching, and totally involving, this multithreaded story overflows with characters readers will adore.”

—Library Journal on Evergreen Springs (starred review)

“This holiday-steeped romance overflows with family and wintry small-town appeal.”

—Library Journal on Snowfall on Haven Point

“A sometimes heartbreaking tale of love and relationships in a small Colorado town.... Poignant and sweet.”

—Publishers Weekly on Christmas in Snowflake Canyon

“This quirky, funny, warmhearted romance will draw readers in and keep them enthralled to the last romantic page.”

—Library Journal on Christmas in Snowflake Canyon

“RaeAnne Thayne is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.... Once you start reading, you aren’t going to be able to stop.”

—Fresh Fiction

“RaeAnne has a knack for capturing those emotions that come from the heart.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Her engaging storytelling...will draw readers in from the very first page.”

—RT Book Reviews on Riverbend Road

The Pines of Winder Ranch

A Cold Creek Homecoming

A Cold Creek Reunion

RaeAnne Thayne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Table of Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

A Cold Creek Homecoming

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A Cold Creek Reunion

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EPILOGUE

Extract

Copyright

A Cold Creek Homecoming

RaeAnne Thayne

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 email 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 webcam’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 email 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 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 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 caretaking 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 Archuleta, 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 roughhousing 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 Archuletas.

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 Archuleta 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 Archuleta’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 peaches 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 five 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 Southerland 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.

“People in town grew to respect and admire her for the loving care she gave Scott, even up to the end. When she moves to Portland in a few weeks, she’s going to leave a real void in Pine Gulch. I’m not the only one who will miss her.”

“She’s leaving?”

He again tried to be casual with the question, but Easton had known him since he was fourteen. She sent him a quick, sidelong look.

“She’s selling her house and taking a job at a hospital there. I can’t blame her. Around here, she’ll always be the sweet girl who took care of her sick husband for so long. Saint Tess. That’s what people call her.”

He nearly fell off his chair at that one. Tess Jamison Claybourne was a saint like he played center field for the Mariners.

Easton pushed back from the table. “I’d better check on Jo one more time, then get back to work.” She paused. “You know, if you have more questions about Tess, you could ask her. She should be back tonight.”

He didn’t want to know more about Tess. He didn’t want anything to do with her. He wanted to go back to the safety of ignorance. Despising her was much easier when he could keep her frozen in his mind as the manipulative little witch she had been at seventeen.

CHAPTER FIVE

“YOU HAVEN’T HEARD a single word I’ve said for the past ten minutes, have you?”

Tess jerked her attention back to her mother as they worked side by side in Ed Hardy’s yard. Her mother knelt in the mulchy layer of fallen leaves, snipping and digging to ready Dorothy Hardy’s flower garden for the winter, while Tess was theoretically supposed to be raking leaves. Her pile hadn’t grown much, she had to admit.

“I heard some of it.” She managed a rueful smile. “The occasional word here and there.”

Maura Jamison raised one delicately shaped eyebrow beneath her floppy gardening hat. “I’m sorry my stories are so dull. I can go back to telling them to the cat, when he’ll deign to listen.”

She winced. “It’s not your story that’s to blame. I’m just...distracted today. But I’ll listen now. Sorry about that.”

Her mother gave her a careful look. “I think it’s my turn to listen. What’s on your mind, honey? Scott?”

Tess blinked at the realization that except for those few moments when Quinn had asked her about Scott the night before, she hadn’t thought about her husband in several days.

A tiny measure of guilt niggled at her but she pushed it away. She refused to feel guilty for that. Scott would have wanted her to move on with her life and she had no guilt for her dealings with her husband.

Still, she didn’t think she could tell her mother she was obsessing about Quinn Southerland.

“Mom, was I a terrible person in high school?” she asked instead.

Maura’s eyes widened with surprise and Tess sent a tiny prayer to heaven, not for the first time, that she could age as gracefully as her mother. At sixty-five, Maura was active and vibrant and still as lovely as ever, even in gardening clothes and her floppy hat. The auburn curls Tess had inherited were shot through with gray but it didn’t make Maura look old, only exotic and interesting, somehow.

Maura pursed her lips. “As I remember, you were a very good person. Not perfect, certainly, but who is, at that age?”

“I thought I was. Perfect, I mean. I thought I was doing everything right. Why wouldn’t I? I had 4.0 grades, I was the head cheerleader, the student body president. I volunteered at the hospital in Idaho Falls and went to church on Sundays and was generally kind to children and small pets.”

“What’s happened to make you think about those days?”

She sighed, remembering the antipathy in a certain pair of silvery blue eyes. “Quinn Southerland is back in town.”

Her mother’s brow furrowed for a moment, then smoothed again. “Oh, right. He was one of Jo and Guff’s foster boys, wasn’t he? Which one is he?”

“Not the army officer or the adventurer. He’s the businessman. The one who runs a shipping company out of Seattle.”

“Oh, yes. I remember him. He was the dark, brooding, cute one, right?”

“Mother!”

Maura gave her an innocent sort of look. “What did I say? He was cute, wasn’t he? I always thought he looked a little like James Dean around the eyes. Something in that smoldering look of his.”

Oh, yes, Tess remembered it well.

After leaning the rake against a tree, she knelt beside her mother and began pulling up the dead stalks of cosmos. Every time she worked with her hands in the dirt, she couldn’t help thinking how very much her existence the past eight years was like a flower garden in winter, waiting, waiting, for life to spring forth.

“I was horrible to him, Mom. Really awful.”

“You? I can’t believe that.”

“Believe it. He just... He brought out the absolute worst in me.”

Her mother sat back on her heels, the gardening forgotten. “Whatever did you do to the poor boy?”

She didn’t want to correct her mother, but to her mind Quinn had never seemed like a boy. At least not like the other boys in Pine Gulch.

“I don’t even like to think about it all,” she admitted. “Basically I did whatever I could to set him down a peg or two. I did my best to turn people against him. I would make snide comments to him and about him and started unsubstantiated rumors about him. I played devil’s advocate, just for the sake of argument, whenever he would express any kind of opinion in a class.”

Her mother looked baffled. “What on earth did he do to you to make you act in such a way?”

“Nothing. That’s the worst part. I thought he was arrogant and disrespectful and I didn’t like him but I was...fascinated by him.”

Which quite accurately summed up her interaction with him in the early hours of the morning, but she decided not to tell her mother that.

“He was a handsome boy,” Maura said. “I imagine many of the girls at school had the same fascination.”

“They did.” She grabbed the garden shears and started cutting back Dorothy’s day lily foliage. “You know how it is whenever someone new moves into town. He seems infinitely better-looking, more interesting, more everything than the boys around town that you’ve grown up with since kindergarten.”

She had been just as intrigued as the other girls, fascinated by this surly, angry, rough-edged boy. Rumors had swirled around when he first arrived that he had been involved in some kind of murder investigation. She still didn’t know if any of them were true—she really couldn’t credit Jo and Guff bringing someone with that kind of a past into their home.

But back then, that hint of danger only made him seem more appealing. She just knew Quinn made her feel different than any other boy in town.

Tess had tried to charm him, as she had been effortlessly doing with every male who entered her orbit since she was old enough to bat her eyelashes. He had at first ignored her efforts and then actively rebuffed them.

She hadn’t taken with grace and dignity his rejection or his grim amusement at her continued efforts to draw his attention. She flushed, remembering.

“He wasn’t interested in any of us, especially not me. I couldn’t understand why he had to be so contrary. I hated it. You know how I was. I wanted everything in my life to go exactly how I arranged it.”

“You’re like your father that way,” Maura said with a soft smile for her husband of thirty-five years whom they both missed dearly.

“I guess. I just know I was petty and spiteful to Quinn when he wouldn’t fall into line with the way I wanted things to go. I was awful to him. Really awful. Whenever I was around him, I felt like this alien life force had invaded my body, this manipulative, conniving witch. Scarlett O’Hara with pom-poms.”

Her mother laughed. “You’re much prettier than that Vivien Leigh ever was.”

“But every bit as vindictive and self-absorbed as her character in the movie.”

For several moments, she busied herself with garden shears. Maura seemed content with the silence and her introspection, which had always been one of the things Tess loved best about her mother.

“I don’t even want to tell you all the things I did,” she finally said. “The worst thing is, I got him kicked off the baseball team when he was a senior and I was a junior.”

“Tessa Marie. What on earth did you do?”

She burned with shame at the memory. “We had advanced placement history together. Amaryllis Wentworth.”

“Oh, I remember her,” her mother exclaimed. “Bitter and mean and suspicious old bat. I don’t know why the school board didn’t fire her twenty-five years before you were even in school. You would think someone who chooses teaching as an avocation would at least enjoy the company of young people.”

“Right. And the only thing she hated worse than teenage girls was teenage boys.”

“What happened?”

She wished she could block the memory out but it was depressingly clear, from the chalkboard smell in Wentworth’s room to the afternoon spring sunlight filtering through the tall school windows.

“We both happened to have missed school on the same day, which happened to be one of her brutal pop quizzes, so we had to take a makeup. We were the only ones in the classroom except for Miss Wentworth.”

Careful to avoid her mother’s gaze, she picked up an armload of garden refuse and carried it to the wheelbarrow. “I knew the material but I was curious about whether Quinn did so I looked at his test answers. He got everything right except a question about the Teapot Dome scandal. I don’t know why I did it. Pure maliciousness on my part. But I changed my answer, which I knew was right, to the same wrong one he had put down.”

“Honey!”

“I know, right? It was awful of me. One of the worst things I’ve ever done. Of course, Miss Wentworth accused him of cheating. It was his word against mine. The juvenile delinquent with the questionable attitude or the student body president, a junior who already had offers of a full-ride scholarship to nursing school. Who do you think everybody wanted to believe?”

“Oh, Tess.”

“My only defense is that I never expected things to go that far. I thought maybe Miss Wentworth would just yell at him, but when she went right to the principal, I didn’t know how to make it right. I should have stepped forward when he was kicked off the baseball team but I...was too much of a coward.”

She couldn’t tell her mother the worst of it. Even she couldn’t quite believe the depths to which she had sunk in her teenage narcissism, but she remembered it all vividly.

A few days later, prompted by guilt and shame, she had tried to talk to him and managed to corner him in an empty classroom. They had argued and he had called her a few bad names, justifiably so.

She still didn’t know what she’d been thinking—why this time would be any different—but she thought she saw a little spark of attraction in his eyes when they were arguing. She had been hopelessly, mortifyingly foolish enough to try to kiss him and he had pushed her away, so hard she knocked over a couple of chairs as she stumbled backward.

Humiliated and outraged, she had then made things much, much worse and twisted the story, telling her boyfriend Scott that Quinn had come on to her, that he had been so angry at being kicked off the baseball team that he had come for revenge and tried to force himself on her.

She screwed her eyes shut. Scott had reacted just as she had expected, with teenage bluster and bravado and his own twisted sense of chivalry. He and several friends from the basketball team had somehow separated Quinn from Brant and Cisco and taken him beneath the football bleachers, then proceeded to beat the tar out of him.

No wonder he despised her. She loathed that selfish, manipulative girl just as much.

“So he’s back,” Maura said. “Is he staying at the ranch?”

She nodded. “I hate seeing him. He makes me feel sixteen and stupid all over again. If I didn’t love Jo so much, I would try to assign her to another hospice nurse.”

Maura sat back on her heels, showing her surprise at her daughter’s vehemence. “Our Saint Tess making a selfish decision? That doesn’t sound like you.”

Tess made a face. “You know I hate that nickname.”

Her mother touched her arm, leaving a little spot of dirt on her work shirt. “I know you do, dear. And I’ll be honest, as a mother who is nothing but proud of the woman you’ve become and what you have done with your life, it’s a bit refreshing to find out you’re subject to the occasional human folly just like the rest of us.”

Everyone in town saw her as some kind of martyr for staying with Scott all those years, but they didn’t know the real her. The woman who had indulged in bouts of self-pity, who had cried out her fear and frustration, who had felt trapped in a marriage that never even had a chance to start.

She had stayed with Scott because she loved him and because he needed her, not because she was some saintly, perfect, flawless angel.

No one knew her. Not her mother or her friends or the morning crowd at The Gulch.

She didn’t like to think that Quinn Southerland might just have the most honest perspective around of the real Tess Jamison Claybourne.

* * *

THAT EVENING, TESS kept her fingers crossed the entire drive to Winder Ranch, praying she wouldn’t encounter him.

She had fretted about him all day, worrying what she might say when she saw him again. She considered it a huge advantage, at least in this case, that she worked the graveyard shift. Most of her visits were in the dead of night, when Quinn by rights should be sleeping. She would have a much better chance of avoiding him than if she stopped by during daylight hours.

The greatest risk she faced of bumping into him was probably now at the start of her shift than, say, 4:00 a.m.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if he were away from the ranch or busy helping Easton with something or tied up with some kind of conference call to Seattle?

She could only dream, she supposed. More than likely, he would be right there waiting for her, ready to impale her with that suspicious, bad-tempered glare the moment she stepped out of the car.

She let out a breath as she turned onto the long Winder Ranch access drive and headed up toward the house. She could at least be calm and collected, even if he tried to goad her or made any derogatory comments. He certainly didn’t need to discover he possessed such power to upset her.

He wasn’t waiting for her on the porch, but it was a near thing. The instant she rang the doorbell of Winder Ranch, the door jerked open and Quinn stood inside looking frazzled, his dark hair disheveled slightly, his navy blue twill shirt untucked, a hint of afternoon shadow on his cheeks.

He looked a little disreputable and entirely yummy.

“It’s about time!” he exclaimed, an odd note of relief in his voice. “I’ve been watching for you for the past half hour.”

“You...have?”

She almost looked behind her to see if someone a little more sure of a welcome had wandered in behind her.

“I thought you were supposed to be here at eight.”

She checked her watch and saw it was only eight-thirty. “I made another stop first. What’s wrong?”

He raked a hand through his hair, messing it further. “I don’t know the hell I’m supposed to do. Easton had to run to Idaho Falls to meet with the ranch accountant. She was supposed to be back an hour ago but she just called and said she’d been delayed and won’t be back for another couple of hours.”

“What’s going on? Is Jo having another of her breathing episodes? Or is it the coughing?”

Tess hurried out of her jacket and started to rush toward her patient’s room but Quinn grabbed her arm at the elbow.

Despite her worry for Jo, heat scorched her nerve endings at the contact, at the feel of his warm hand against her skin.

“She’s not there. She’s in the kitchen.”

At her alarmed look, he shook his head. “It’s none of those things. She’s fine, physically, anyway. But she won’t listen to reason. I never realized the woman could be so blasted stubborn.”

“A trait she obviously does not share with anyone else here,” she murmured.

He gave her a dark look. “She’s being completely ridiculous. She suddenly has this harebrained idea. Absolute insanity. She wants to go out for a moonlight ride on one of the horses and it’s suddenly all she can talk about.”

She stared, nonplussed. “A horseback ride?”

“Yeah. Do you think the cancer has affected her rational thinking? I mean, what’s gotten into her? It’s after eight, for heaven’s sake.”

“It’s a bit difficult to go on a moonlit ride in the middle of the afternoon,” she pointed out.

“Don’t you take her side!” He sounded frustrated and on edge and more than a little frazzled.

She hid her smile that the urbane, sophisticated executive could change so dramatically over one simple request. “I’m not taking anyone’s side. Why does she suddenly want to go tonight?”

“Her window faces east.”

That was all he said, as if everything was now crystal clear. “And?” she finally prompted.

“And she happened to see that huge full moon coming up an hour or so ago. She says it’s her favorite kind of night. She and Guff used to ride up to Windy Lake during the full moon whenever they could. It can be clear as day up in the mountains on full moons like this.”

“Windy Lake?”

“It’s above the ranch, about half a mile into the forest service land. Takes about forty minutes to ride there.”

“And Tess is determined to go?”

“She says she can’t miss the chance, since it’s her last harvest moon.”

The sudden bleakness in the silver-blue of his eyes tugged at her sympathy and she was astonished by the impulse to touch his arm and offer whatever small comfort she could.

She curled her fingers into a fist, knowing he wouldn’t welcome the gesture. Not from her.

“She’s not strong enough for that,” he went on. “I know she’s not. We were sitting out in the garden today and she lasted less than an hour before she had to lie down, and then she slept for the rest of the day. I can’t see any way in hell she has the strength to sit on a horse, even for ten minutes.”

Her job as a hospice nurse often required using a little creative problem-solving. Clients who were dying could have some very tricky wishes toward the end. But her philosophy was that if what they wanted was at all within reach, it was up to her and their family members to make it happen.

“What if you rode together on horseback?” she suggested. “You could help her. Support her weight, make sure she’s not overdoing.”

He stared at her as if she’d suddenly stepped into her old cheerleader skirt and started yelling, “We’ve got spirit, yes we do.”

“Tell me you’re not honestly thinking she could handle this!” he exclaimed. “It’s completely insane.”

“Not completely, Quinn. Not if she wants to do it. Jo is right. This is her last harvest moon and if she wants to enjoy it from Windy Lake, I think she ought to have that opportunity. It seems a small enough thing to give her.”

He opened his mouth to object, then closed it again. In his eyes, she saw worry and sorrow for the woman who had taken him in, given him a home, loved him.

“It might be good for her,” Tess said gently.

“And it might finish her off.” He said the words tightly, as if he didn’t want to let them out.

“That’s her choice, though, isn’t it?”

He took several deep breaths and she could see his struggle, something she faced often providing end-of-life care. On the one hand, he loved his foster mother and wanted to do everything he could to make her happy and comfortable and fulfill all her last wishes.

On the other, he wanted to protect her and keep her around as long as he could.

The effort to hold back her fierce urge to touch him, console him, almost overwhelmed her. She supposed she shouldn’t find it so surprising. She was a nurturer, which was why she went into nursing in the first place, long before she ever knew that Scott’s accident would test her caregiving skills and instincts to the limit.

“You don’t have to take her, though, especially if you don’t feel it’s the right thing for her. I’ll see if I can talk her out of it,” she offered. She took a step toward the kitchen, but his voice stopped her.

“Wait.”

She turned back to find him pinching the skin at the bridge of his nose.

“You’re right,” he said after a long moment, dropping his hand. “It’s her choice. She’s a grown woman, not a child. I can’t treat her like one, even if I do want to protect her from...the inevitable. If she wants this, I’ll find a way to make it happen.”

The determination in his voice arrowed right to her heart and she smiled. “You’re a good son, Quinn. You’re just what Jo needs right now.”

“You’re coming with us, to make sure she’s not overdoing things.”

“Me?”

“The only way I can agree to this insanity is if we have a medical expert close at hand, just in case.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not? Can’t your other patients spare you?”

That would have been a convenient excuse, but unfortunately in this case, she faced a slow night, with only Tess and two other patients, one who only required one quick check in the night, several hours away.

“That’s not the issue,” she admitted.

“What is it, then? Don’t you think she would be better off to have a nurse along?”

“Maybe. Probably. But not necessarily this particular nurse.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not really much of a rider,” she confessed, with the same sense of shame as if she were admitting stealing heart medicine from little old ladies. Around Pine Gulch, she supposed the two crimes were roughly parallel in magnitude.

“Really?”

“My family lived in town and we never had horses,” she said, despising the defensive note in her voice. “I haven’t had a lot of experience.”

She didn’t add that she had an irrational fear of them after being bucked off at a cousin’s house when she was seven, then later that summer she had seen a cowboy badly injured in a fall at an Independence Day rodeo. Since then, she had done her best to avoid equines whenever possible.

“This is a pretty easy trail that takes less than an hour. You should be okay, don’t you think?”

How could she possibly tell him she was terrified, especially after she had worked to persuade him it would be all right for Jo? She couldn’t, she decided. Better to take one for the team, for Jo’s sake.

“Fine. You saddle the horses and I’ll get Jo ready.”

Heaven help them all.

CHAPTER SIX

“LET ME KNOW if you need me to slow down,” Quinn said half an hour later to the frail woman who sat in front of him astride one of the biggest horses in the pasture, a rawboned roan gelding named Russ.

She felt angular and thin in his arms, all pointed elbows and bony shoulders. But Tess had been right, she was ecstatic about being on horseback again, about being outside in the cold October night under the pines. Jo practically quivered with excitement, more alive and joyful than he had seen her since his return to Cold Creek.

It smelled of fall in the mountains, of sun-warmed dirt, of smoke from a distant neighbor’s fire, of layers of fallen leaves from the scrub oak and aspens that dotted the mountainside.

The moon hung heavy and full overhead, huge and glowing in the night and Suzy and Jack, Easton’s younger cow dogs, raced ahead of them. Chester probably would have enjoyed the adventure but Quinn had worried that, just like Jo, his old bones weren’t quite up to the journey.

“This is perfect. Oh, Quinn, thank you, my dear. You have no idea the gift you’ve given me.”

“You’re welcome,” he said gruffly, warmed despite his lingering worry.

In truth, he didn’t know who was receiving the greater gift. This seemed a rare and precious time with Jo and he was certain he would remember forever the scents and the sounds of the night—of tack jingling on the horses and a great northern owl hooting somewhere in the forest and the night creatures that peeped and chattered around them.

He glanced over his shoulder to where Tess rode behind them.

Among the three of them, she seemed to be the one least enjoying the ride. She bounced along on one of the ranch’s most placid mares. Every once in a while, he looked back and the moonlight would illuminate a look of grave discomfort on her features. If he could see her hands in the darkness, he was quite certain they would be white-knuckled on the reins.

He should be enjoying her misery, given his general dislike for the woman. Mostly he just felt guilty for dragging her along, though he had to admit to a small measure of glee to discover something she hadn’t completely mastered.

In school, Tess had been the consummate perfectionist. She always had to be the first one finished with tests and assignments, she hated showing up anywhere with a hair out of place and she delighted in being the kind of annoying classmate who tended to screw up the curve for everybody else.

Knowing she wasn’t an expert at everything made her seem a little more human, a little more approachable.

He glanced back again and saw her shifting in the saddle, her body tight and uncomfortable.

“How are you doing back there?” he asked.

In the pale glow of the full moon, he could just make out the slit of her eyes as she glared. “Fine. Swell. If I break my neck and die, I’m blaming you.”

He laughed out loud, which earned him a frown from Jo.

“You didn’t need to drag poor Tess up here with us,” she reprimanded in the same tone of voice she had used when he was fifteen and she caught him teasing Easton for something or other. He could still vividly remember the figurative welts on his hide as she had verbally taken a strip off him.

“She’s a big girl,” Quinn said in a voice too low for Tess to overhear. “She didn’t have to come.”

“You’re a hard man to say no to.”

“If anyone could do it, Tess would find a way. Anyway, we’ll be there in a few more moments.”

Jo looked over his shoulder at Tess, then shook her head. “Poor thing. She obviously hasn’t had as much experience riding as you and Easton and the boys. She’s a good sport to come anyway.”

He risked another look behind him and thought he heard her mumbling something under her breath involving creative ways she intended to make him pay for this.

Despite the lingering sadness in knowing he was fulfilling a last wish for someone he loved so dearly, Quinn couldn’t help his smile.

He definitely wouldn’t forget this night anytime soon.

“She’s doing all right,” he said to Jo.

“You’re a rascal, Quinn Southerland,” she chided. “You always have been.”

He couldn’t disagree. He couldn’t have been an easy kid to love when he had been so belligerent and angry, lashing out at everyone in his pain. He hugged Jo a little more tightly for just a moment until they reached the trailhead for Windy Lake, really just a clearing where they could leave the horses before taking the narrow twenty-yard trail to the lakeshore.

“This might get a little bit tricky,” he said. “Let me dismount first and then I’ll help you down.”

“I can still get down from a horse by myself,” she protested. “I’m not a complete invalid.”

He just shook his head in exasperation and slid off the horse. He grabbed the extra rolled blankets tied to the saddle and slung them over his shoulder, then reached up to lift her from the horse.

He didn’t set her on her feet, though. “I’ll carry you to Guff’s bench,” he said, without giving her an opportunity to argue.

She pursed her lips but didn’t complain, which made him suspect she was probably more tired than she wanted to let on.

“Okay, but then you’d better come back here to help Tess.”

He glanced over and saw that Tess’s horse had stopped alongside his big gelding but Tess made no move to climb out of the saddle; she just gazed down at the ground with a nervous kind of look.

“Hang on a minute,” he told her. “Just wait there in the saddle while I settle Jo on the bench and then I’ll come back to help you down.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding more disgruntled than apologetic.

“No problem.”

He carried Jo along the trail, grateful again for the pale moonlight that filtered through the fringy pines and the bare branches of the aspens.

Windy Lake was a small stream-fed lake, probably no more than two hundred yards across. As a convenient watering hole, it attracted moose and mule deer and even the occasional elk. The water was always ice cold, as he and the others could all attest. That didn’t stop him and Brant and Cisco—and Easton, when she could manage to get away—from sneaking out to come up here on summer nights.

Guff always used to keep a small canoe on the shore and they loved any chance to paddle out in the moonlight on July nights and fish for the native rainbow trout and arctic grayling that inhabited it.

Some of his most treasured memories of his teen years centered around trips to this very place.

The trail ended at the lakeshore. He carried Jo to the bench Guff built here, which had been situated in the perfect place to take in the pristine, shimmering lake and the granite mountains surrounding it.

He set Jo on her feet for just a moment so he could brush pine needles and twigs off the bench. Contrary to what he expected, the bench didn’t have months worth of debris covering it, which made him think Easton probably found the occasional chance to make good use of it.

He covered the seat with a plastic garbage bag he had shoved into his pocket earlier in case the bench was damp.

“There you go. Your throne awaits.”

She shook her head at his silliness but sat down gingerly, as if the movement pained her. He unrolled one of the blankets and spread it around her shoulders then tucked the other across her lap.

In the moonlight, he saw lines of pain bracketing her mouth and he worried again that this ride into the mountains had been too much for her. Along with the pain, though, he could see undeniable delight at being in this place she loved, one last time.

He supposed sometimes a little pain might be worthwhile in the short-term if it yielded such joy.

As he fussed over the blankets, she reached a thin hand to cover his. “Thank you, my dear. I’m fine now, I promise. Go rescue poor Tess and let me sit here for a moment with my memories.”

“Call out if you need help. We won’t be far.”

“Don’t fuss over me,” she ordered. “Go help Tess.”

Though he was reluctant to leave her here alone, he decided she was safe with the dogs who sat by her side, their ears cocked forward as if listening for any threat.

Back at the trailhead, he found Tess exactly where he had left her, still astride the mare, who was placidly grazing on the last of the autumn grasses.

“I tried to get down,” she told him when he emerged from the trees. “Honestly, I did. But my blasted shoe is caught in the stirrups and I couldn’t work it loose, no matter how hard I tried. This is so embarrassing.”

“I guess that’s the price you pay when you go horseback riding in comfortable nurse’s shoes instead of boots.”

“If I had known I was going to be roped into this, I would have pulled out my only pair of Tony Lamas for the occasion.”

Despite her attempt at a light tone, he caught something in her stiff posture, in the rigid set of her jaw.

This was more than inexperience with horses, he realized as he worked her shoe free of the tight stirrup. Had he really been so overbearing and arrogant in insisting she come along that he refused to see she had a deep aversion to horses?

“I’m sorry I dragged you along.”

“It’s not all bad.” She gazed up at the stars. “It’s a lovely night.”

“Tell me, how many moonlit rides have you been on into the mountains around Pine Gulch?”

She summoned a smile. “Counting tonight? Exactly one.”

He finally worked her shoe free. “Let me help you down,” he said.

She released the reins and swiveled her left leg over the saddle horn so she could dismount. The mare moved at just that moment and suddenly his arms were full of warm, delicious curves.

She smelled of vanilla and peaches and much to his dismay, his recalcitrant body stirred to life.

He released her abruptly and she wobbled a little when her feet met solid ground. Out of instinct, he reached to steady her and his hand brushed the curve of her breast when he grabbed her arm. Her gaze flashed to his and in the moonlight, he thought he felt the silky cord of sexual awareness tug between them.

“Okay now?”

“I...think so.”

That low, breathy note in her voice had to be his imagination. He was almost certain of it.

He couldn’t possibly be attracted to her. Sure, she was still a beautiful woman on the outside, but she was still Tess Claybourne, for heaven’s sake.

He noticed she moved a considerable distance away but he wasn’t sure if she was avoiding him or the horses. Probably both.

“I’m sorry I dragged you up here,” he said again. “I didn’t realize how uncomfortable riding would be for you.”

She made a face. “It shouldn’t be. I’m embarrassed that it is. I grew up around horses—how could I help it in Pine Gulch? Though my family never had them, all my friends did, but I’ve had an...irrational fear of them since breaking my arm after being bucked off when I was seven.”

“And I made you come anyway.”

She mustered a smile. “I survived this far. We’re halfway done now.”

He remembered Jo’s words suddenly. 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.

Jo thought Tess was a survivor. If she weren’t, could she be looking at this trip with such calm acceptance, even when she was obviously terrified?

“That’s one way of looking at it, I guess.”

She didn’t meet his gaze. “It’s not so bad. After the way I treated you in high school, I guess I’m surprised you didn’t tie me onto the back of your horse and drag me behind you for a few miles.”

His gaze narrowed. What game was this? He never, in a million years, would have expected her to refer to her behavior in their shared past, especially when she struck exactly the right note of self-deprecation.

For several awkward seconds, he couldn’t think how to respond. Did he shrug it off? Act like he didn’t know what she was talking about? Tell her she ought to have bitch tattooed across her forehead and he would be happy to pay for it?

“High school seems a long time ago right now,” he finally said.

“Surely not so long that you’ve forgotten.”

He couldn’t lie to her. “You always made an impression.”

Her laughter was short and unamused. “That’s one way of phrasing it, I suppose.”

“What would you call it?”

“Unconscionable.”

At that single, low-voiced word, he studied her in the moonlight—her long-lashed green eyes contrite, that mouth set in a frown, the auburn curls that were a little disheveled from the ride.

How the hell did she do it? Lord knew, he didn’t want to be. But against his will, Quinn found himself drawn to this woman who was willing to confront her fears for his aunt’s sake, who could make fun of herself, who seemed genuinely contrite about past bad behavior.

He liked her and, worse, was uncomfortably aware of a fierce physical attraction to her soft curves and classical features that seemed so serene and lovely in the moonlight.

He pushed away the insane attraction, just as he pushed away the compelling urge to ask her what he had ever done back then to make her hate him so much. Instead, he did his best to turn the subject away.

“Easton told me about Scott. About the accident.”

She shoved her hands in the pocket of her jacket and looked off through the darkened trees toward the direction of the lake. “Did she?”

“She said you had only been married a few months at the time, so most of your marriage you were more of a caregiver than a wife.”

“Everybody says that like I made some grand, noble sacrifice.”

He didn’t want to think so. He much preferred thinking of her as the self-absorbed teenage girl trying to ruin his life.

“What would you consider it?”

“I didn’t do anything unusual. He was my husband,” she said simply. “I loved him and I took vows. I couldn’t just abandon him to some impersonal care center for the rest of his life and blithely go on with my own as if he didn’t exist.”

Many people he knew wouldn’t have blinked twice at responding exactly that way to the situation. Hell, the Tess he thought she had been would have done exactly that.

“Do you regret those years?”

She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes wide with surprise, as if no one had ever asked her that before.

“Sometimes,” she admitted, her voice so low he could barely hear it. “I don’t regret that I had that extra time with him. I could never regret that. By all rights, he should have died in that accident. A weaker man probably would have. Scott didn’t and I have to think God had some purpose in that, something larger than my understanding.”

She paused, her expression pensive. “I do regret that we never had the chance to build the life we talked about those first few months of our marriage. Children, a mortgage, a couple of dogs. We missed all that.”

Not much of a sacrifice, he thought. He would be quite happy not to have that sort of trouble in his life.

“I’ll probably always regret that,” she went on. “Unfortunately, I can’t change the past. I can only look forward and try to make the best of everything that comes next.”

They lapsed into a silence broken only by the horses stamping and snorting behind them and the distant lapping of the water.

She was the first to break the temporary peace. “We’d better go check on Jo, don’t you think?”

He jerked his mind away from how very much he wanted to kiss her right this moment, with the moonlight gleaming through the trees and the night creatures singing an accompaniment. “Right. Will you be okay without a flashlight?”

“I’ll manage. Just lead the way.”

He headed up the trail toward Jo, astonished that his most pressing regret right now was the end of their brief interlude in the moonlight.

* * *

THOUGH TESS LOVED living in the Mountain West for the people and the scenery and the generally slower pace of life, she had never really considered herself a nature girl.

As a bank manager and accountant, her father hadn’t been the sort to take her camping and fishing when she was younger. Later, she’d been too busy, first in college and then taking care of Scott, to find much time to enjoy the backcountry.

But she had to admit she found something serene and peaceful about being here with the glittery stars overhead and that huge glowing moon filtering through the trees and the night alive with sounds and smells.

Well, it would have been serene if she weren’t so intensely aware of Quinn walking just ahead of her, moving with long-limbed confidence through the darkness.

The man exuded sensuality. She sighed, wishing she could ignore his effect on her. She disliked the way her heart picked up a beat or two, the little churn of her blood, the way she couldn’t seem to keep herself from stealing secret little glances at him as they made their way toward the lake and Jo.

She hadn’t missed that moment of awareness in his eyes back there, the heat that suddenly shivered through the air like fireflies on a summer night.

He was attracted to her, though she had a strong sense he found the idea more than appalling.

Her gaze skidded to his powerful shoulders under his denim jacket, to the dark hair that brushed his collar under his Stetson, and her insides trembled.

For a moment there, she had been quite certain he wanted to kiss her, though she couldn’t quite fathom it. How long had it been since she knew the heady, exhilarating impact of desire in a man’s eyes? Longer than she cared to remember. The men in town didn’t tend to look at her as a woman with the very real and human hunger to be cherished and touched.

In the eyes of most people in Pine Gulch, that woman had been somehow absorbed into the loving, dutiful caretaker, leaving no room for more. Even after Scott’s death, people still seemed to see her as a nurturer, not the flirty, sexy, fun-loving Tess she thought might still be buried somewhere deep inside her.

Seeing that heat kindle in his eyes, replacing his typical animosity, had been both flattering and disconcerting and for a moment, she had been mortified at her little spurt of panic, the fear that she had no idea how to respond.

She just needed practice, she assured herself. That’s why she was moving to Portland, so she could be around people who saw her as more than just Pine Gulch’s version of Mother Teresa.

They walked the short distance through the pines and aspens, their trail lit only by pale moonlight and the glow of a small flashlight he produced from the pocket of his denim jacket. When they reached the lake a few moments later, Tess saw Jo on a bench on the shore, the dogs at her feet. She sat unmoving, so still that for a moment, Tess feared the worst.

But Quinn’s boot snapped a twig at that moment and Jo turned her head. Though they were still a few yards away, Tess could see the glow on her features shining through clearly, even in the moonlight. Her friend smiled at them and for one precious instant, she looked younger, happier. Whole.

“There you are. I was afraid the two of you were lost.”

Quinn slanted Tess a sidelong look before turning his attention back to his foster mother. “No. I thought you might like a few moments to yourself up here.”

Jo smiled at him as she reached a hand out to Tess to draw her down beside her on the bench. When she saw the blankets tucked around Jo’s shoulders and across her lap, everything inside her went a little gooey that Quinn had taken such great care to ensure his foster mother’s comfort.

“Isn’t it lovely, my dear?”

“Breathtaking,” Tess assured her, her hand still enclosed around Jo’s thin fingers.

They sat like that for a moment with Quinn standing beside them. The moon glowed off the rocky face of the mountains ringing the lake, reflecting in water that seethed and bubbled as if it was some sort of hot springs. After several moments of watching it, Tess realized the percolating effect was achieved by dozens of fish rising to the surface for night-flying insects.

“It’s enchanting,” she said to Jo, squeezing her fingers. She didn’t add that this moment, this shared beauty, was almost worth that miserable horseback ride up the mountainside.

“This is such a gift. I cannot tell you how deeply it touches me. I have missed these mountains so much these past weeks while I’ve been stuck at home. Thank you both so very much.”

Jo’s smile was wide and genuine but Tess didn’t miss the lines of pain beneath it that radiated from her mouth.

Quinn must have noticed them as well. “I’d love to stay here longer,” he said after a moment, “but we had better get you back. Tess has other patients.”

Jo nodded, a little sadly, Tess thought. A lump rose in her throat as the other woman rose, her face tilted to the huge full moon. Jo closed her eyes, inhaled a deep breath of mountain air, then let it out slowly before turning back to Quinn.

“I’m ready.”

Her chest felt achy and tight with unshed tears watching Jo say this private goodbye to a place she loved. It didn’t help her emotions at all when Quinn carefully and tenderly scooped Jo into his arms and carried her back toward the waiting horses.

She pushed back the tears as she awkwardly mounted her horse, knowing Jo wouldn’t welcome them at all. The older woman accepted her impending passing with grace and acceptance, something Tess could only wish on all her patients.

The ride down was slightly easier than the way up had been, though she wouldn’t have expected it. In her limited experience on the back of a horse, gravity hadn’t always been her friend.

Perhaps she was a tiny bit more loose and relaxed than she had been on the way up. At least she didn’t grip the reins quite so tightly and her body seemed to more readily pick up the rhythm of the horse’s gait.

She had heard somewhere that horses were sensitive creatures who picked up on those sorts of things like anxiety and apprehension. Maybe the little mare was just giving her the benefit of the doubt.

As she had on the way up the trail, she rode in the rear of their little group, behind the two black and white dogs and Quinn and Jo, which gave her the opportunity to watch his gentle solicitude toward her.

She found something unbearably sweet—disarming, even—at the sight of his tender care, such a vivid contrast to his reputation as a ruthless businessman who had built his vast shipping company from the ground up.

That treacherous softness fluttered inside her. Even after she forced herself to look away—to focus instead on the rare beauty of the night settling in more deeply across the mountainside—she couldn’t ignore that tangled mix of fierce attraction and dawning respect.

As they descended the trail, Winder Ranch came into view, sprawling and solid in the night.

“Home,” Jo said in a sleepy-sounding voice that carried across the darkness.

“We’re nearly there,” he assured her.

When they arrived at the ranch house, Quinn dismounted and then reached for Jo, who winced with the movement.

Worry spasmed across his handsome features but she watched him quickly conceal it from Jo. “Tess, do you mind holding the horses for a few moments while I carry Jo inside and settle her back in her bedroom?”

This time, she was pleased that she could dismount on her own. “Of course not,” she answered as her feet hit the dirt.

“Thank you. I’ll trade places with you in a few moments so that you can get Jo settled for bed while I take care of the horses.”

“Good plan.”

She gave him a hesitant smile and was a little astonished when he returned it. Something significant had changed between them as a result of one simple horseback ride into the mountains. They were working together, a team, at least for the moment. He seemed warmer, more approachable. Less antagonistic.

They hadn’t really cleared any air between them, other than those few moments she had tried to offer an oblique apology for their history. But she wanted to think perhaps he might eventually come to accept that she had become a better person.

CHAPTER SEVEN

AFTER QUINN CARRIED Jo inside, Tess stood patting the mare, savoring the night before she went inside to take care of Jo’s medical needs. Quiet moments of reflection were a rare commodity in her world.

She had gotten out of the habit when she had genuinely had no time to spare with all of Scott’s medical needs. Perhaps she needed to work at meditation when she moved to Portland, she thought. Maybe yoga or tai chi.

She was considering her options and talking softly to the horses when Quinn hurried down the porch steps a few moments later.

“How’s Jo?”

“Ready for pain meds, I think, but she’s not complaining.”

“You gave her a great gift tonight, Quinn.”

He smiled a little. “I hope so. She loves the mountains. I have to admit, I do as well. I forget that sometimes. Seattle is beautiful with the water and the volcanic mountains but it’s not the same as home.”

“Is it? Home, I mean?”

“Always.”

He spoke with no trace of hesitation and she wondered again at the circumstances that had led him to Winder Ranch. Those rumors about his violent past swirled through her memory and she quickly dismissed them as ridiculous.

“I’m sorry. Let me take the horses.” He reached for the reins of both horses and as she handed them over, their hands brushed.

He flashed her a quick look and grabbed her fingers with his other hand. “Your fingers are freezing!”

“I should have worn gloves.”

“I should have thought to get you some before we left.” He paused. “This was a crazy idea, wasn’t it? I apologize again for dragging you up there.”

“Not a crazy idea at all,” she insisted. “Jo loved it.”

“She’s half-asleep in there and I know she’s in pain, but she’s also happier than I’ve seen her since I arrived.”

She smiled at him, intensely conscious of the hard strength of his hand still curled around her fingers. Her hands might still be cold from the night air but they were just about the only thing not heating up right about now.

He gazed at her mouth for several long seconds, his eyes silvery-blue in the moonlight, and for one effervescent moment, she thought again that he might kiss her. He even angled his head ever so slightly and her gaze tangled with his.

Her pulse seemed abnormally loud in her ears and her insides jumped and fluttered like a baby bird trying its first awkward flight.

He eased forward slightly and her body instinctively rose to meet his. She caught her breath, waiting for the brush of his mouth against hers, but he suddenly jerked back, his expression thunderstruck.

Tess blinked as if awakening from a long, lovely nap as cold reality splashed over her. Of course he wouldn’t kiss her. He despised her, with very good reason.

With ruthless determination, she shoved down the disappointment and ridiculous sense of hurt shivering through her. So what if he found the idea of kissing her so abhorrent? She didn’t have time for this anyway. She was supposed to be working, not going for moonlit rides and sharing confidences in the dark and fantasizing about finally kissing her teenage crush.

Since he now held the horses’ reins, she shoved her hands in the pocket of her jacket to hide their trembling and forced her voice to sound cool and unaffected.

“I’d better go take care of Jo’s meds.”

“Right.” He continued to watch her out of those seductive but veiled eyes.

“Um, good night, if I don’t see you again before I leave.”

“Good night.”

She hurried up the porch steps, feeling the heat of his gaze following her. Inside, she closed the door and leaned against it for just a moment, willing her heart to settle down once more.

Blast the man for stirring up all these hormones she tried so hard to keep contained. She so did not want to be attracted to Quinn. What a colossal waste of energy on her part. Oh, he might have softened toward her a little in the course of their ride with Jo, but she couldn’t delude herself into thinking he was willing to forgive and forget everything she had done to him years ago.

She had work to do, she reminded herself. People who needed her. She didn’t have time to be obsessing over the past or the person she used to be or a man like Quinn Southerland, who could never see her as anything else.

* * *

SHE DID HER best the rest of the night to focus on her patients and not on the little thrum of desire she hadn’t been able to shake since that almost-kiss with Quinn.

Still, she approached Winder Ranch for her midnight check on Jo with a certain amount of trepidation. To her relief, when she unlocked the door with the key Easton had given her and walked inside, the house was dark. Quinn was nowhere in sight, but she could still sense his presence in the house.

Jo didn’t stir when Tess entered her room, which worried her for a moment until she saw the steady rise and fall of the blankets by the glow of the small light in the attached bathroom that Jo and Easton left on for the hospice nurses.

The ride up to the lake must have completely exhausted her. She didn’t even wake when Tess checked her vitals and gave her medicine through the central IV line that had been placed after her last hospitalization.

When she was done with the visit, she closed the door quietly behind her and turned to go, then became aware that someone else was in the darkened hallway. Her heart gave a quick, hard kick, then she realized it was Easton.

She wasn’t sure if that sensation coursing through her was more disappointment or relief.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Tess said.

The other woman’s sleek blond ponytail moved as she shook her head. “I’ve still got some pesky accounts to finish. I was in the office working on the computer and heard the door open.”

“I tried to be quiet. Sorry about that.” She smiled at her friend. “But then, Jo didn’t even wake up so I couldn’t have been too loud.”

“You weren’t. I’m just restless tonight.”

“I’m sorry.”

Easton shrugged. “It sometimes knocks me on my butt if I think about what things will be like in a month or so. I’m trying to get as much done now on ranch paperwork so I have time to...to grieve.”

Tess placed a comforting hand on her arm and Easton smiled, making a visible effort to push away her sadness. “Quinn told me about your adventure tonight,” she said.

Tess made a rueful face. “I’m nowhere near the horsewoman you are. I felt like an idiot up there, but at least I didn’t fall off.”

“Jo was so happy when I checked on her earlier. I haven’t seen her like that in a long time.”

“Then I suppose my mortification was all for a good cause.”

Easton laughed a little but her laughter quickly faded. “It won’t be much longer, will it?”

Tess’s heart ached at the question but she didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “A week, maybe a little more. You know I can’t say exactly.”

Her friend’s blue eyes filled with a sorrow that was raw and real. “I don’t want to lose her, Tess. I’m not ready. What will I do?”

Tess set her bag on the floor and hurried forward to pull Easton into her arms. She knew that ache, that deep, gnawing fear and loss.

“You’ll go on. That’s all you can do. All any of us can do.”

“First my parents, then Guff and now Jo. I can’t bear it. She’s all I have left.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

Easton didn’t cry aloud, though Tess could feel the quiet shuddering of her shoulders. After a moment, the other woman pulled away.

“I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

“You need to sleep, honey. Everything will seem a little better in the morning, I promise. Midnight is the time when our fears all grow stronger and more vicious.”

Easton drew in a heavy breath, then stepped away, swiping at her eyes. “Brant called from Germany earlier. He’s hoping to get a flight any time now.”

She remembered Brant Western as a tall, serious-minded boy who had always seemed an odd fit to be best friends with both Quinn, the rebellious kid with the surly attitude, and Cisco Del Norte, the wild, slightly dangerous troublemaker.

“Jo will be thrilled to have him home. What about Cisco?”

Easton’s mouth compressed into a tight line and she focused on a spot somewhere over Tess’s shoulder. “No word yet. We think he’s somewhere in El Salvador but we can’t seem to find anything out for sure. He’s moving around a lot. Seems like everywhere we try, we just keep missing him by a day or even a few hours. It’s so aggravating. Quinn has his assistant in Seattle trying to pull some strings with the embassy down there to find him.”

“I hope it doesn’t take much longer.”

Easton nodded, her features troubled. “Even if we find him, there’s no guarantee he can make it back in time. Quinn has promised to send a plane down to bring him home, even if he’s in the middle of the jungle, but we have to find him first.”

Her stomach gave a strange little quiver at the idea of Quinn having planes at his disposal.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” she said, then picked up her bag and headed for the front door. Easton followed to let her out.

“Get some rest, honey,” she said again. “I’ll be back for the next round of meds around three. You’d better be asleep when I get back!”

“Yes, Nurse Ratched.”

“I mean it.”

Easton smiled a little, even past the lingering sadness in her eyes. “Thanks, Tess. For everything.”

“Go to sleep,” she ordered again, then walked out into the night, with that same curious mix of relief and disappointment that she had avoided Quinn, at least for a few more hours.

* * *

HE AWOKE TO the sound of a door snicking softly closed and the dimmer switch in the bathroom being turned up just enough to jar him out of dreams he had no business entertaining.

In a rather surreal paradigm shift, he went from dreaming about a heated embrace on a warm blanket under starry skies near the lake to the stark reality of a sickroom, where his foster mother lay dying.

Oddly, the same woman appeared in both scenes. Tess stepped out of the bathroom, looking brisk and professional in her flowered surgical scrubs.

He feigned sleep and watched her through his lashes as she donned a pair of latex-free gloves.

He could pinpoint the instant she saw him sprawled in the recliner, purportedly asleep. Her steps faltered and she froze.

Probably the decent thing would be to open his eyes and go through the motions of pretending to awaken. But he wasn’t always crazy about doing the decent thing. Instead, he gave a heavy-sounding breath and continued to spy on her under his lashes.

She gazed at him for several seconds as if trying to ascertain his level of sleep, then she finally turned away from him and back to her patient with a small, barely perceptible sigh he wondered about.

For the next few minutes, he watched her draw medicine out into syringes, then she quietly began checking Jo’s blood pressure and temperature.

Though her movements were slow and careful, Jo still opened her eyes when Tess put the blood pressure cuff on her leg.

“I’m so sorry to wake you. I wish I didn’t have to,” Tess murmured.

“Oh, poof,” Jo whispered back. “Don’t you worry for a single moment about doing your job.”

“How is your pain level?”

Jo was silent. “I’m not going to tell you,” she finally said. “You’ll just write it down in your little chart and the next thing I know, Jake Dalton will be increasing my meds and I’ll be so drugged out I won’t be able to think straight. My Brant is coming home. Should be any day now.”

As Jo whispered to her, Tess continued to slant careful looks in his direction.

“Easton told me earlier that he was on his way,” she said in an undertone.

“They’ll be good for Easton. The four of them, why, they were thicker than thieves. I can’t tell you how glad I am they’ll still have each other.”

Quinn swallowed hard, hating this whole situation all over again.

Tess smiled, relentlessly cheerful. “It’s a blessing, all right. For all of them and especially for your peace of mind.”

He listened to their quiet conversation as Tess continued to take care of Jo’s medical needs. He was still trying to figure out how much of her demeanor he was buying. She seemed to be everything that was patient and calm, a serene island in the middle of a stormy emotional mess. Was it truly possible that this dramatic change in her could be genuine?

He supposed he was a cynical bastard but he couldn’t quite believe it. This could all be one big show she was putting on. He had only been here a few days. If he stuck around long enough, she was likely to revert to her true colors.

On the other hand, people could change. He was living testimony to that. He was worlds away from the bitter, hot-tempered punk he’d been when he arrived at the Winders’ doorstep after a year in foster care and the misery that came before.

He pushed away the past, preferring instead to focus on today.

Tess finished with Jo a few moments later. After fluffing her pillow and tucking the blankets up around her, she dimmed the light in the bathroom again and moved quietly toward the door out into the hallway.

He rose and followed her, careful not to disturb Jo, who seemed to have easily slipped into sleep again.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said, his voice low, just as she reached the door.

She whirled and splayed a hand across her chest. She glared at him as she moved out of the room to the hallway. He followed her and closed the door behind him.

“Don’t do that! That’s the second time you’ve nearly scared the life out of me. How long have you been awake?”

“Not long. Here, let me help you with your coat.”

He took it off the chair in the hallway where she had tossed it and stood behind her. Her scent teased him, that delectable peach and vanilla, that somehow seemed sweet and sultry at the same time, like a hot Southern night.

She paused for a moment, then extended her arm through the sleeve. “Thank you,” she said and he wondered if he was imagining the slightly husky note to her voice.

“You’re welcome.”

“You really don’t need to walk me out, though. I’m sure I can find the way to my car by myself.”

“I could use the fresh air, to be honest with you.”

She looked as if she wanted to argue but she only shrugged and turned toward the door. He held it open for her and again smelled that seductive scent as she moved past him on her way out.

The scent seemed to curl through him, twisting and tugging an unwelcome response out of him, which he did his best to ignore as they walked out into the night.

The moon hung huge over the western mountains now, the stars a bright glitter out here unlike anything to be found in the city.

The October night wasn’t just cool now in the early morning hours, it was downright cold. This time of year, temperatures in these high mountain valleys could show a wide range in the course of a single day. Nights were invariably cool, even in summer. In spring and fall, the temperature dropped quickly once the sun went down.

His morning spent in the garden soaking up sunshine with Jo seemed only another distant memory.

“Gorgeous night, isn’t it?” Tess said. “I don’t ever get tired of the view out here.”

He nodded. “I’ve lived without it since I left Cold Creek Canyon, but something about it stays inside me even when I’m back in Seattle.”

She smiled a little. “I know I’m going to miss these mountains when I move to Portland in a few weeks.”

“What’s in Portland?” he asked, curious as to why she would pick up and leave after her lifetime spent here.

“A pretty good basketball team,” she answered. “Lots of trees and flowers. Nice people, from what I hear.”

“You know what I mean. Why are you leaving?”

She was silent for a moment, the only sound the wind whispering through the trees. “A whole truckload of reasons. Mostly, I guess, because I’m ready for a new start.”

He could understand that. He had sought the same thing in the Air Force after leaving Pine Gulch, hadn’t he? A place where no one knew his history in the foster-care system or as the rough-edged punk who had found a home here with Jo and Guff.

“Will you be doing the same thing? Providing end-of-life care?”

She smiled and in the moonlight, she looked fresh and lovely and very much like the teenage cheerleader who had tangled the hormones of every boy who walked the halls of Pine Gulch High School.

“Just the opposite, actually. I took a job in labor and delivery at one of the Portland hospitals.”

“Bringing life into the world instead of comforting those who are leaving it. There’s a certain symmetry to that.”

“I think so, too. It’s all part of my brand-new start.”

“I suppose everybody could use that once in a while.”

“True enough,” she murmured, with an unreadable look in her eyes.

“Will you miss this?”

“Pine Gulch?”

“I was thinking more of the work you do. You seem...very good at it. Do you give this same level to all your patients as you have to Jo?”

She looked startled at the question, though he wasn’t sure if was because she had never thought about it before or that she was surprised he had noticed.

“I try. Everyone deserves to spend his or her last days with dignity and respect. But Jo is special. I can’t deny that. She used to give me piano lessons when I was young and I’ve always adored her.”

Now it was his turn to be surprised. Jo taught piano lessons for many years to most of the young people in Pine Gulch but he had never realized Tess had once had the privilege of being one of her students.

“Do you still play?”

She laughed. “I hardly played then. I was awful. Probably the worst student Jo ever had, though she tried her best, believe me. But yes, I still play a little. I enjoy it much more as an adult than I did when I was ten.”

She paused for a moment, then gave a rueful smile. “When he was...upset or having a bad day, Scott used to enjoy when I would play for him. It calmed him. I’ve had more practice than I ever expected over the years.”

“You should play for Jo sometime when you come out to the house. She gets a real kick out of hearing her old students play. Especially the hard ones.”

“Maybe. I’m worried her hearing is a little too fragile for my fumbling attempts.” She smiled. “What about you? Did Jo give you lessons after you moved here?”

He gave a short laugh at the memory. “She tried. I’m sure I could have taught you a thing or two about being difficult.”

“I don’t doubt that for a moment,” she murmured.

She gazed at him for a moment, then she shifted her gaze up and he could swear he saw a million constellations reflected in her eyes.

“Look!” she exclaimed. “A shooting star, right over the top of Windy Peak. Quick, make a wish.”

He tilted his neck to look in the direction she pointed. “Probably just a satellite.”

She glared at him. “Don’t ruin it. I’m making a wish anyway.”

With her eyes screwed closed, she pursed her mouth in concentration. “There,” she said after a moment. “That should do it.”

She opened her eyes and smiled softly at him and he forgot all about the cold night air. All he could focus on was that smile, that mouth, and the sudden wild hunger inside him to taste it.

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

She 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. 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. “Okay,” she said, her voice breathy.

“Okay, I can kiss you? Or, okay, 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 through the insanity of kissing a woman he had detested twenty-four hours earlier, Quinn stepped forward and covered her mouth with his.

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