A Cold Creek Homecoming

“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 e-mail 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?”