Loe raamatut: «A Cold Creek Homecoming»
“What did you wish?” Quinn asked,
a gruff note to his voice.
Tess made a face. “If I tell you, it won’t come true. Don’t you know anything about wishes?”
Right now, he could tell her a thing or two about wanting something he shouldn’t. That sensuous heat wrapped tighter around his insides. “I know enough. For instance, I know sometimes wishes can be completely ridiculous and make no sense. For instance, right now, I wish I could kiss you. Don’t ask me why. I don’t even like you.”
Her eyes looked huge and green in her delicate face as she stared at him. “OK,” she said, her voice breathy.
“OK, I can kiss you? Or, OK, you won’t ask why I want to?”
She let out a ragged-sounding breath. “Either. Both.”
He didn’t need much more of an invitation than that. Without allowing himself to stop and think, he stepped forward and covered her mouth with his.
Available in July 2010
from Mills & Boon®
Special Moments™
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The Family He Wanted by Karen Sandler
Baby By Surprise by Karen Rose Smith
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Daddy by Surprise by Debra Salonen
A Kid to the Rescue by Susan Gable
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Then Comes Baby by Helen Brenna
The Sheikh and the Bought Bride by Susan Mallery
A Cold Creek Homecoming by RaeAnne Thayne
A Baby for the Bachelor by Victoria Pade
The Baby Album by Roz Denny Fox
A Cold Creek
Homecoming
BY
RaeAnne Thayne
RaeAnne Thayne finds inspiration in the beautiful northern Utah mountains, where she lives with her husband and three children. Her books have won numerous honours, including three RITA® Award nominations from Romance Writers of America and a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times BOOKreviews magazine. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website at www.raeannethayne.com.
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In memory of my dear aunt, Arlene Wood,
for afghans and parachutes and ceramic frogs.
I only wish I’d dedicated one to you before!
And to Jennifer Black, my sister and hero,
for helping her pass with peace and dignity.
Chapter One
“You’re home!”
The thin, reedy voice whispering from the frail woman on the bed was nothing like Quinn Southerland remembered.
Though she was small in stature, Jo Winder’s voice had always been firm and commanding, just like the rest of her personality. When she used to call them in for supper, he and the others could hear her voice ringing out loud and clear from one end of the ranch to the other. No matter where they were, they knew the moment they heard that voice, it was time to go back to the house.
Now the woman who had done so much to raise him—the toughest woman he had ever known—seemed a tiny, withered husk of herself, her skin papery and pale and her voice barely audible.
The cracks in his heart from watching her endure the long months and years of her illness widened a little more. To his great shame, he had a sudden impulse to run away, to escape back to Seattle and his business and the comfortable life he had created for himself there, where he could pretend this was all some kind of bad dream and she was immortal, as he had always imagined.
Instead, he forced himself to step forward to the edge of the bed, where he carefully folded her bony fingers in his own much larger ones, cursing the cancer that was taking away this woman he loved so dearly.
He gave her his most charming smile, the one that never failed to sway any woman in his path, whether in the boardroom or the bedroom.
“Where else would I be but right here, darling?”
The smile she offered in return was rueful and she lifted their entwined fingers to her cheek. “You shouldn’t have come. You’re so busy in Seattle.”
“Never too busy for my best girl.”
Her laugh was small but wryly amused, as it always used to be when he would try to charm his way out of trouble with her.
Jo wasn’t the sort who could be easily charmed but she never failed to appreciate the effort.
“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?”
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.
“You’re the hospice nurse?” His voice rose with incredulity.
She fingered the silver stethoscope around her neck with her free hand. “That’s what they tell me. Hey, Quinn. How have you been?”
He must still be upstairs in his bed, having one of those infinitely disturbing dreams of high school, the kind where he shows up to an advanced placement class and discovers he hasn’t read a single page of the textbook, knows absolutely none of the subject matter, and is expected to sit down and ace the final.
This couldn’t be real. It was too bizarre, too surreal, that someone he hadn’t seen since graduation night—and would have been quite content never to have to see again—would suddenly be standing in the hallway of Winder Ranch looking much the same as she had fifteen years earlier.
He blinked but, damn it all, she didn’t disappear and he wished he could just wake up, already.
“Tess,” he said gruffly, unable to think of another thing to say.
“Right.”
“How long have you been coming here to take care of Jo?”
“Two weeks now,” she answered, and he wondered if her voice had always had that husky note to it or if it was a new development. “There are several of us, actually. I usually handle the nights. I stop in about every three or four hours to check vitals and help Jo manage her pain. I juggle four other patients with varying degrees of need but she’s my favorite.”
As she spoke, she moved away from Jo’s bedroom door and headed toward him. He held his breath and fought the instinct to cover his groin, just as a precaution.
Not that she had ever physically hurt him in their turbulent past, but Tess Jamison—Homecoming Queen, valedictorian, and all-around Queen Bee, probably for Bitch—had a way of emasculating a man with just a look.
She smelled not like the sulfur and brimstone he might have expected, but a pleasant combination of vanilla and peaches that made him think of hot summer evenings out on the wide porch of the ranch with a bowl of ice cream and Jo’s divine cobbler.
She headed down the hall toward the kitchen, where she flipped on a small light over the sink.
For the first time, he saw her in full light. She was as lovely as when she wore the Homecoming Queen crown, with high cheekbones, a delicate nose and the same lush, kissable mouth he remembered.
Her eyes were still her most striking feature, green and vivid, almond-shaped, with thick, dark lashes.
But fifteen years had passed and nothing stayed the same except his memories. She had lost that fresh-faced innocent look that had been so misleading. He saw tiny, faint lines fanning out at the edges of her eyes and she wore a bare minimum of makeup.
“I didn’t know you were back,” she finally said when he continued to stare. “Easton didn’t mention it before she went to bed.”
Apparently there were several things Easton was keeping close to her sneaky little vest. “I only arrived this evening.” Somehow he managed to answer her without snarling, but it was a chore. “Jo wanted to see all of us one more time.”
He couldn’t quite bring himself to say last instead of more but those huge green eyes still softened.
She was a hospice nurse, he reminded himself, as tough as he found that to believe. She was probably well-trained to pretend sympathy. The real Tess Jamison didn’t care about another soul on the planet except herself.
“Are you here for the weekend?” she asked.
“Longer,” he answered, his voice curt. It was none of her business that he planned to stay at Winder Ranch as long as Jo needed him, which he hoped was much longer than the doctors seemed to believe.
She nodded once, her eyes solemn, and he knew she understood all he hadn’t said. The soft compassion in those eyes—and his inexplicable urge to soak it in—turned him conversely hostile.
“I can’t believe you’ve stuck around Pine Gulch all these years,” he drawled. “I would have thought Tess Jamison couldn’t wait to shake the dust of podunk eastern Idaho off her designer boots.”
She smiled a little. “It’s Tess Claybourne now. And plans have a way of changing, don’t they?”
“I’m starting to figure that out.”
Curiosity stirred inside him. What had she been doing the past fifteen years? Why that hint of sadness in her eyes?
This was Tess, he reminded himself. He didn’t give a damn what she’d been up to, even if she looked hauntingly lovely in the low light of the kitchen.
“So you married old Scott, huh? What’s he up to? All that quarterback muscle probably turned to flab, right? Is he ranching with his dad?”
She pressed her lips into a thin line for just a moment, then gave him another of those tiny smiles, this one little more than a taut stretch of her mouth. “None of those things, I’m afraid. He died almost two years ago.”
Quinn gave an inward wince at his own tactlessness. Apparently nothing had changed. She had always brought out the worst in him.
“How?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, instead crossing to the coffeemaker he had assumed Easton must have forgotten to turn off. Now he realized she must have left a fresh pot for the hospice worker, since Tess seemed completely comfortable reaching in the cabinet for a cup and pouring.
“Pneumonia,” she finally answered as she added two packets of sweetener. “Scott died of pneumonia.”
“Really?” That seemed odd. He thought only old people and little kids could get that sick from pneumonia.
“He was…ill for a long time before that. His immune system was compromised and he couldn’t fight it off.”
Quinn wasn’t a complete ass, even when it came to this woman he despised so much. He forced himself to offer the appropriate condolences. “That must have been rough for you. Any kids?”
“No.”
This time she didn’t even bother to offer a tight smile, only stared into the murky liquid swirling in her cup and he thought again how surreal this was, standing in the Winder Ranch kitchen in the middle of the night having a conversation with her, when he had to fight down every impulse to snarl and yell and order her out of the house.
“Jo tells me you run some big shipping company in the Pacific Northwest,” she said after a moment.
“That’s right.” The third biggest in the region, but he was hoping that with the new batch of contracts he was negotiating Southerland Shipping would soon slide into the number two spot and move up from there.
“She’s so proud of you boys and Easton. She talks about you all the time.”
“Does she?” He wasn’t at all thrilled to think about Jo sharing with Tess any details of his life.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure she’s thrilled to have you home. That must be why she was sleeping so peacefully. She didn’t even wake when I checked her vitals, which is unusual. Jo’s usually a light sleeper.”
“How are they?”
“Excuse me?”
“Her vitals. How is she?”
He hated to ask, especially of Tess, but he was a man who dealt best with challenges when he gathered as much information as possible.
She took another sip of coffee then poured the rest down the sink and turned on the water to wash it down.
“Her blood pressure is still lower than we’d like to see and she’s needing oxygen more and more often. She tries to hide it but she’s in pain most of the time. I’m sorry. I wish I had something better to offer you.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said, even as he wished he could somehow figure out a way to blame her for it.
“That’s funny. It feels that way sometimes. It’s my job to make her as comfortable as possible but she doesn’t want to spend her last days in a drugged haze, she says. So we’re limited in some of our options. But we still do our best.”
He couldn’t imagine anyone deliberately choosing this for a career. Why on earth would a woman like Tess Jamison—Claybourne now, he reminded himself—have chosen to stick around tiny Pine Gulch and become a hospice nurse? He couldn’t quite get past the incongruity of it.
“I’d better go,” she said. “I’ve got three more patients to check on tonight. I’ll be back in a few hours, though, and Easton knows she can call me anytime if she needs me. It’s…good to see you again, Quinn.”
He wouldn’t have believed her words, even if he didn’t see the lie in her vivid green eyes. She wasn’t any happier to see him than he had been to find her wandering the halls of Winder Ranch.
Still, courtesy drilled into him by Jo demanded he walk her to the door. He stood on the porch and watched through the darkness until she reached her car, then he walked back inside, shaking his head.
Tess Jamison Claybourne.
As if he needed one more miserable thing to face here in Pine Gulch.
Quinn Southerland.
Lord have mercy.
Tess sat for a moment outside Winder Ranch in the little sedan she had bought after selling Scott’s wheelchair van. Her mind was a jumble of impressions, all of them sharp and hard and ugly.
He despised her. His rancor radiated from him like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Though he had conversed with at least some degree of civility throughout their short encounter, every word, every sentence, had been underscored by his contempt. His silvery-blue eyes had never once lost that sheen of scorn when he looked at her.
Tess let out a breath, more disconcerted by the brief meeting than she should be. She had a thick enough skin to withstand a little animosity. Or at least she had always assumed she did, up to this point.
