The Pines Of Winder Ranch: A Cold Creek Homecoming / A Cold Creek Reunion. RaeAnne Thayne

right then. Tess was young, just out of nursing school. She had enough medical experience that I have to think she could guess perfectly well what was ahead for them, but she stuck it out all those years.”

      He didn’t like the compassion trickling through him for her. Somehow things seemed more safe, more ordered, before he had learned that perhaps she hadn’t spent the past dozen years figuring out more ways to make him loathe her.

      “People in town grew to respect and admire her for the loving care she gave Scott, even up to the end. When she moves to Portland in a few weeks, she’s going to leave a real void in Pine Gulch. I’m not the only one who will miss her.”

      “She’s leaving?”

      He again tried to be casual with the question, but Easton had known him since he was fourteen. She sent him a quick, sidelong look.

      “She’s selling her house and taking a job at a hospital there. I can’t blame her. Around here, she’ll always be the sweet girl who took care of her sick husband for so long. Saint Tess. That’s what people call her.”

      He nearly fell off his chair at that one. Tess Jamison Claybourne was a saint like he played center field for the Mariners.

      Easton pushed back from the table. “I’d better check on Jo one more time, then get back to work.” She paused. “You know, if you have more questions about Tess, you could ask her. She should be back tonight.”

      He didn’t want to know more about Tess. He didn’t want anything to do with her. He wanted to go back to the safety of ignorance. Despising her was much easier when he could keep her frozen in his mind as the manipulative little witch she had been at seventeen.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      “YOU HAVEN’T HEARD a single word I’ve said for the past ten minutes, have you?”

      Tess jerked her attention back to her mother as they worked side by side in Ed Hardy’s yard. Her mother knelt in the mulchy layer of fallen leaves, snipping and digging to ready Dorothy Hardy’s flower garden for the winter, while Tess was theoretically supposed to be raking leaves. Her pile hadn’t grown much, she had to admit.

      “I heard some of it.” She managed a rueful smile. “The occasional word here and there.”

      Maura Jamison raised one delicately shaped eyebrow beneath her floppy gardening hat. “I’m sorry my stories are so dull. I can go back to telling them to the cat, when he’ll deign to listen.”

      She winced. “It’s not your story that’s to blame. I’m just...distracted today. But I’ll listen now. Sorry about that.”

      Her mother gave her a careful look. “I think it’s my turn to listen. What’s on your mind, honey? Scott?”

      Tess blinked at the realization that except for those few moments when Quinn had asked her about Scott the night before, she hadn’t thought about her husband in several days.

      A tiny measure of guilt niggled at her but she pushed it away. She refused to feel guilty for that. Scott would have wanted her to move on with her life and she had no guilt for her dealings with her husband.

      Still, she didn’t think she could tell her mother she was obsessing about Quinn Southerland.

      “Mom, was I a terrible person in high school?” she asked instead.

      Maura’s eyes widened with surprise and Tess sent a tiny prayer to heaven, not for the first time, that she could age as gracefully as her mother. At sixty-five, Maura was active and vibrant and still as lovely as ever, even in gardening clothes and her floppy hat. The auburn curls Tess had inherited were shot through with gray but it didn’t make Maura look old, only exotic and interesting, somehow.

      Maura pursed her lips. “As I remember, you were a very good person. Not perfect, certainly, but who is, at that age?”

      “I thought I was. Perfect, I mean. I thought I was doing everything right. Why wouldn’t I? I had 4.0 grades, I was the head cheerleader, the student body president. I volunteered at the hospital in Idaho Falls and went to church on Sundays and was generally kind to children and small pets.”

      “What’s happened to make you think about those days?”

      She sighed, remembering the antipathy in a certain pair of silvery blue eyes. “Quinn Southerland is back in town.”

      Her mother’s brow furrowed for a moment, then smoothed again. “Oh, right. He was one of Jo and Guff’s foster boys, wasn’t he? Which one is he?”

      “Not the army officer or the adventurer. He’s the businessman. The one who runs a shipping company out of Seattle.”

      “Oh, yes. I remember him. He was the dark, brooding, cute one, right?”

      “Mother!”

      Maura gave her an innocent sort of look. “What did I say? He was cute, wasn’t he? I always thought he looked a little like James Dean around the eyes. Something in that smoldering look of his.”

      Oh, yes, Tess remembered it well.

      After leaning the rake against a tree, she knelt beside her mother and began pulling up the dead stalks of cosmos. Every time she worked with her hands in the dirt, she couldn’t help thinking how very much her existence the past eight years was like a flower garden in winter, waiting, waiting, for life to spring forth.

      “I was horrible to him, Mom. Really awful.”

      “You? I can’t believe that.”

      “Believe it. He just... He brought out the absolute worst in me.”

      Her mother sat back on her heels, the gardening forgotten. “Whatever did you do to the poor boy?”

      She didn’t want to correct her mother, but to her mind Quinn had never seemed like a boy. At least not like the other boys in Pine Gulch.

      “I don’t even like to think about it all,” she admitted. “Basically I did whatever I could to set him down a peg or two. I did my best to turn people against him. I would make snide comments to him and about him and started unsubstantiated rumors about him. I played devil’s advocate, just for the sake of argument, whenever he would express any kind of opinion in a class.”

      Her mother looked baffled. “What on earth did he do to you to make you act in such a way?”

      “Nothing. That’s the worst part. I thought he was arrogant and disrespectful and I didn’t like him but I was...fascinated by him.”

      Which quite accurately summed up her interaction with him in the early hours of the morning, but she decided not to tell her mother that.

      “He was a handsome boy,” Maura said. “I imagine many of the girls at school had the same fascination.”

      “They did.” She grabbed the garden shears and started cutting back Dorothy’s day lily foliage. “You know how it is whenever someone new moves into town. He seems infinitely better-looking, more interesting, more everything than the boys around town that you’ve grown up with since kindergarten.”

      She had been just as intrigued as the other girls, fascinated by this surly, angry, rough-edged boy. Rumors had swirled around when he first arrived that he had been involved in some kind of murder investigation. She still didn’t know if any of them were true—she really couldn’t credit Jo and Guff bringing someone with that kind of a past into their home.

      But back then, that hint of danger only made him seem more appealing. She just knew Quinn made her feel different than any other boy in town.

      Tess had tried to charm him, as she had been effortlessly doing with every male who entered her orbit since she was old enough to bat her eyelashes. He had at first ignored her efforts and then actively rebuffed them.

      She hadn’t taken with