A Cold Creek Homecoming

“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 sunshine 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.”