A Cold Creek Homecoming. RaeAnne Thayne

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.

      How would she know, though? She had never had much opportunity to find out. Most of the good citizens of Pine Gulch treated her far differently.

      Alone in the quiet darkness of her car, she gave a humorless laugh. How many times over the years had she thought how heartily sick she was of being treated like some kind of venerated saint around Pine Gulch? She wanted people to see her as she really was—someone with hopes and dreams and faults. Not only as the tireless caretaker who had dedicated long years of her life to caring for her husband.

      She shook her head with another rough laugh. A little middle ground would be nice. Quinn Southerland’s outright vilification of her was a little more harsh than she really wanted to face.

      He had a right to despise her. She understood his feelings and couldn’t blame him for them. She had treated him shamefully in high school. Just the memory, being confronted with the worst part of herself when she hadn’t really thought about those things in years, made her squirm as she started her car.

      Her treatment of Quinn Southerland had been repre hensible, beyond cruel, and she wanted to cringe away from remembering it. But seeing him again after all these years seemed to set the fragmented, half-forgotten memories shifting and sliding through her mind like jagged plates of glass.

      She remembered all of it. The unpleasant rumors she had spread about him; her small, snide comments, delivered at moments when he was quite certain to overhear; the friends and teachers she had turned against him, without even really trying very hard.

      She had been a spoiled, petulant bitch, and the memory of it wasn’t easy to live with now that she had much more wisdom and maturity and could look back on her terrible behavior through the uncomfortable prism of age and experience.

      She fully deserved his contempt, but that knowledge didn’t make it much easier to stomach as she drove down the long, winding Winder Ranch driveway and turned onto Cold Creek Road, her headlights gleaming off the leaves that rustled across the road in the October wind.

      She loved Jo Winder dearly and had since she was a little girl, when Jo had been patient and kind with the worst piano student any teacher ever had. Tess had promised the woman just the evening before that she would remain one of her hospice caregivers until the end. How on earth was she supposed to keep that vow if it meant being regularly confronted with her own poor actions when she was a silly girl too heedless to care about anyone else’s feelings?

      The roads were dark and quiet as she drove down Cold Creek Canyon toward her next patient, across town on the west side of Pine Gulch.

       Usually she didn’t mind the quiet or the solitude, this sense in the still hours of the night that she was the only one around. Even when she was on her way to her most difficult patient, she could find enjoyment in these few moments of peace.

      Ed Hardy was a cantankerous eighty-year-old man whose kidneys were failing after years of battling diabetes. He wasn’t facing his impending passing with the same dignity or grace as Jo Winder but continued to fight it every step of the way. He was mean-spirited and belligerent, lashing out at anyone who dared remind him he wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old wrangler anymore who could rope and ride with the best of them.

      Despite his bitterness, she loved the old coot. She loved all her home-care patients, even the most difficult. She would miss them, even Ed, when she moved away from Pine Gulch in a month.

      She sighed as she drove down Main Street with its darkened businesses and the historic Old West lampposts somebody in the chamber of commerce had talked the town into putting up for the tourists a few years ago.

      Except for the years she went to nursing school in Boise and those first brief halcyon months after her marriage, she had lived in this small Idaho town in the west shadow of the Tetons her entire life.

      She and Scott had never planned to stay here. Their dreams had been much bigger than a rural community like Pine Gulch could hold.

      They had married a month after she graduated from nursing school. He had been a first-year med student, excited about helping people, making a difference in the world. They had talked about opening a clinic in some undeveloped country somewhere, about travel and all the rich buffet of possibilities spreading out ahead of them.

      But as she said to Quinn Southerland earlier, sometimes life didn’t work out the way one planned. Instead of exotic locales and changing the world, she had brought her husband home to Pine Gulch where she had a support network—friends and family and neighbors who rallied around them.

      She pulled into the Hardy driveway, noting the leaves that needed to be raked and the small flower garden that should be put to bed for the winter. Mrs. Hardy had her hands full caring for her husband and his many medical needs. She had a grandson in Idaho Falls who helped a bit with the yard but now that school was back in session, he didn’t come as often as he had in the summer.

      Tess turned off her engine, shuffling through her mental calendar to see if she could find time in the next few days to come over with a rake.

      Her job had never been only about pain management and end-of-life decisions. At least not to her. She knew what it was like to be on the other side of the equation and how very much it could warm the heart when someone showed up unexpectedly with a smile and a cloth and window spray to wash the winter grime she hadn’t had time to clean off because her life revolved around care taking someone else.

      That experience as the recipient of service had taught her well that her job was to lift the burdens of the families as much as of her patients.

      Even hostile, antagonistic family members like Quinn Southerland.

       The wind swirled leaves across the Hardys’ cracked driveway as she stepped out of her car. Tess shivered, but she knew it wasn’t at the prospect of winter just around the corner or that wind bare-knuckling its way under her jacket, but from remembering the icy cold blue of Quinn’s eyes.

      Though she wasn’t at all eager to encounter him again—or to face the bitter truth of the spoiled brat she had been once—she adored Jo Winder. She couldn’t let Quinn’s forbidding presence distract her from giving Jo the care she deserved.

      Chapter Three

      Apparently Pine Gulch’s time machine was in fine working order.

      Quinn walked into The Gulch and was quite certain he had traveled back twenty years to the first time he walked into the café with his new foster parents. He could clearly remember that day, the smell of frying potatoes and meat, the row of round swivel seats at the old-fashioned soda fountain, the craning necks in the place and the hot gazes as people tried to figure out the identity of the surly, scowling dark-haired kid with Jo and Guff.

      Not much had changed. From the tin-stamped ceiling to the long, gleaming mirror that ran the length of the soda fountain to the smell of fried food that seemed to send triglycerides shooting through his veins just from walking in the door.

       Even the faces were the same. He could swear the same old-timers still sat in the booth in the corner being served by Donna Archeleta, whose husband, Lou, had always manned the kitchen with great skill and joy. He recognized