The Pines Of Winder Ranch. RaeAnne Thayne
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.
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.