A Cold Creek Homecoming

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 Web cam’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 e-mail 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.