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

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.”