The Pines Of Winder Ranch: A Cold Creek Homecoming / A Cold Creek Reunion

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.