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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.”
