A Place to Belong

by RaeAnne Thayne

  He dropped the wrench and raced toward the house. Not yet, he prayed as he ran. Not when Brant had only just arrived at Winder Ranch and when his people hadn’t managed to find Cisco yet.

  His heart pounded frantically as he thrust open the door to Jo’s room. The IV pump was beeping and the alarm was going off on the oxygen saturation monitor.

  He frowned. Jo was lying against her pillow but wild relief pulsed through him that her eyes were open and alert, though her features were pale and drawn.

  Just now, Easton looked in worse shape than Jo. She stood by the bedside, the phone in her hand.

  “I don’t care what you say. I’m calling Dr. Dalton. You were unconscious!”

  “All this bother and fuss,” Jo muttered. “You’re making me feel like a foolish old woman.”

  Despite her effort to downplay her condition, he could see the concern in the expressions of both Brant and Easton.

  “She was out cold for five solid minutes,” Easton explained to Quinn. “She was hugging Brant one moment, then she fell back against her pillows the next and wouldn’t wake up no matter what we tried.”

  “I should have called to let you know I was on my way.” Brant’s voice was tight with self-disgust. “It wasn’t right to rush in like that and surprise you.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you today, that’s all,” Jo insisted. “Maybe I got a little excited but I’m fine now.”

  Despite her protestations, Jo was as pale as her pillow.

  “The clinic’s line is busy. I’m calling Tess,” Easton declared and walked from the room to make the call.

  “Tess?” Brant asked.

  Just when his heart rate started to slow from the adrenaline rush, simply the mention of Tess’s name kicked it right back up again.

  “Tess Claybourne. Used to be Jamison. She’s one of the hospice nurses.”

  The best one, he had to admit. After several days here, he knew all three of the home-care nurses who took turns seeing to Jo. They were all good caregivers and compassionate women but as tough as it was for him to swallow, Tess had a knack for easing Jo’s worst moments and calming everybody else in the house.

  Brant’s blue eyes widened. “Tess Jamison. Pom-pom Tess? Homecoming Queen? That Tess?”

  Okay, already. “Yeah. That Tess.”

  “You’re yanking my chain.”

  “Not this time.” He couldn’t keep the grimness out of his voice.

  “She still hotter than a two-dollar pistol?”

  “Brant Western,” Jo chided him from her bed. “She’s a lovely young woman, not some...some pin-up poster off your Internet.”

  When they were randy teenagers, Jo had frequently lectured them not to objectify women. Brant must have remembered the familiar refrain as well, Quinn thought, as the deep dimples Quinn despised flashed for just a moment with his smile.

  “Sorry, Jo. But she was always the prettiest girl at PG High. I used to get tongue-tied if she only walked past me in the hall.”

  She was still the prettiest thing Quinn had seen in a long time. And he didn’t even want to think about how delectable she tasted or the sexy little sounds she made when his mouth covered hers...

  Easton walked in, jarring him from yet another damn flashback.

  “I reached Tess on her cell phone. She’s off today but she’s going to come over anyway. And I talked to Jake Dalton and he’s stopping by on his way up to Cold Creek.”

  Pine Gulch’s doctor had been raised on a huge cattle ranch at the head of Cold Creek Canyon, Quinn knew.

  “Shouldn’t we take her to the hospital or something?” Brant asked.

  Quinn and Easton exchanged glances since they had frequently brought up the subject, but Jo spoke before he could answer.

  “No hospital.” Jo’s voice was firm, stronger than he had heard it since he arrived. “I’m done with them. I’m dying and no doctor or hospital can change that. I want to go right here, in the house I shared with Guff, surrounded by those I love.”

  Brant blinked at her bluntness and Quinn sympathized with him. It was one thing to understand intellectually that her condition was terminal. It was quite another to hear her speak in such stark, uncompromising terms about it. He at least had had a few days to get used to the hard reality.

  “But it’s not going to happen today or even tomorrow,” she went on. “I won’t let it. Not until Cisco comes home. I just need to rest for a while and then I want to have a good long talk with you about what you’ve been doing for the army.”

  Brant released a heavy breath, his tired features still looking as if he had just been run over by a Humvee.

  Quinn could completely sympathize with him. He could only hope Jo held out long enough so his people could track down the last of the Four Winds.

  Chapter 9

  “What’s the verdict?” Jo asked. “Is my heart still beating?”

  Tess pulled the stethoscope away from Jo’s brachial artery and pulled the blood pressure cuff off with a loud ripping sound.

  She related Jo’s blood pressure aloud to Jake Dalton, who frowned at the low diastolic and systolic numbers.

  “Let’s take a listen to your ticker,” Pine Gulch’s only doctor said, pulling out his own stethoscope.

  Jo responded by glaring at Tess. “Dirty trick, bringing Jake along with you.”

  “I told you I called him,” Easton said from the doorway of the room, where she stood with Quinn and the very solemn-looking Major Western. Tess purposely avoided looking at any of them, especially Quinn.

  It was a darn good thing Jake wasn’t checking her heart rate right about now. She had a feeling it would be galloping along faster than one of the Winder Ranch horses in an open pasture on a sunny afternoon.

  Knowing Quinn was only a few feet away watching her out of those silver-blue eyes was enough to tangle her insides and make her palms itch with nerves.

  “And I told you I don’t need a doctor,” Jo replied.

  “Be careful or you’ll hurt my feelings,” Jake teased.

  “Oh, poof. Your skin is thicker than rawhide.”

  “Yet you can still manage to break my heart again and again.”

  Jo laughed and Tess smiled along with her. Jake Dalton was one of her favorite people. He had been a rock to her after she moved back to Pine Gulch with Scott. Though her husband had a vast team of specialists in Idaho Falls, Jake had always been her first line of defense whenever she needed a medical opinion about something.

  He was a good, old-fashioned small-town doctor, willing to make house calls and take worried phone calls at all hours of the day and night and treat all his patients like family.

  She had been thrilled four years earlier when he married Maggie Cruz, a nurse practitioner who often volunteered with hospice. She now considered both of them among her dearest friends.

  “This is all a lot of nonsense for nothing,” Jo insisted. “I was a little overexcited when Brant arrived, that’s all.”

  Jake said nothing, only examined her chart carefully. He asked Jo several questions about her pain level and whether she had passed out any other times she had neglected to tell them all about.

  When he was finished, he smoothed a gentle hand over her hair. “I’m going to make a few changes in your meds. Why don’t you get some rest and I’ll explain what I want to do with Tess, okay?”

  Tess knew it was an indication of Jo’s weakened condition that she didn’t argue, only nodded and closed her eyes.

  Jake led the way out into the hall where the others waited. He closed the door behind him and headed for the kitchen, which Tess had learned long ago was really Command Central of Winder Ranch.

  “What’s happening?” Easton was the first to speak.

  Jake’s mouth tightened and his eyes looked bleak. “Her organs are starting to shut down. I’m sorry.”

>   Even though Tess had been expecting it for days now, she was still saddened by the stark diagnosis.

  “Which means what?” Brant asked. He looked very much the quintessential soldier with his close-cropped brown hair, strong jaw and sheer physical presence.

  “It won’t be long now,” Jake said. “A couple of days, maybe.”

  Easton let out a long breath that wasn’t quite a sob but probably would have been if she had allowed it.

  Tess reached out and gripped her hand and Easton clutched her fingers tightly.

  “I think it’s time to think about round-the-clock nursing,” Jake said. “I’m thinking more of her comfort and, to be honest, yours as well.”

  “Of course,” Quinn said. “Absolutely. Whatever she needs.”

  Tess’s chest ached at his unhesitating devotion to Jo.

  Dr. Dalton nodded his approval. “I’ll talk to hospice and see what they can provide.”

  Tess knew what the answer would be. Hospice was overburdened right now. She knew the agency didn’t have the resources for that level of care.

  “I’ll do it. If you’ll let me.”

  “You?” Brant asked, and she gave an inward flinch at the shock in his voice. Here was yet another person who only saw her as the silly girl she had been and she wondered if she would ever be able to escape her past.

  “Right now the agency is understaffed,” she answered. “I know they don’t have the resources to have someone here all the time, as much as they would like to. They’re going to recommend hospitalization in Idaho Falls for her last few days.”

  “She so wants to be here.” Easton’s voice trembled on the words.

  “Barring that, they’re going to tell you you’ll have to hire a private nurse. I’d like to be that private nurse. I won’t let you pay me but I want to do this for Jo. I’ll make arrangements for the others to cover all my shifts and stay here, if that’s acceptable to you all.”

  Tess refused to look at Quinn as she made the offer, though she could feel the heat of his gaze on her.

  Part of her wondered at the insanity of offering to put herself in even closer proximity with him, but she knew he would be far too preoccupied to spend an instant thinking about a few regrettable moments of shared passion.

  “I think it’s a wonderful idea, if you’re sure you’re up to it,” Brant said, surprising her. “Quinn and Easton both tell me you’re the best of her nurses.”

  “Are you sure?” Easton asked with a searching look.

  “Absolutely. Let me do this for her and for you,” she said to her friend.

  “What do you think?” Easton turned to Quinn, and Tess finally risked a glance in his direction. She found him watching the scene with an unreadable expression in his silver-blue eyes.

  “It seems a good solution if Tess is willing. Better than bringing in some stranger. But we will pay you.”

  She didn’t argue with him, though she determined she would donate anything the family insisted on back to hospice, which had been one of Jo’s favorite charities even before she had need of their services.

  “I’ll need a little time to make all the arrangements but I should be back in a few hours,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Easton squeezed her fingers. “I don’t know how we’ll ever repay you.”

  “I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  She said goodbye to Dr. Dalton and headed for the door. To her shock, Quinn followed her.

  “I’ll walk you out,” he said gruffly, and her mind instantly filled with images from the last time he had walked her outside, when they had given into the intimacy of the night and the heat simmering between them.

  She wanted to tell him she didn’t need any more of his escorts, thanks very much, but she didn’t want to remind him of those few moments.

  “Why?” Quinn asked when they were outside.

  She didn’t need to ask what he meant. “I love her,” she said simply.

  His gaze narrowed and she could tell he wasn’t convinced.

  “Have you done this before? Round-the-clock nursing?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You mean besides the six years I cared for my husband?”

  “I keep forgetting that.”

  She sighed, knowing he was only concerned for his foster mother. “I won’t lie to you, it’s always difficult at the end. The work is demanding and the emotional toll can be great. But if I can bring Jo a little bit of comfort and peace, I don’t care about that.”

  “I don’t get you,” he muttered.

  “I’m not that complicated.”

  He made a rough sound of disbelief low in his throat. He looked as if he wanted to say more but he finally just shook his head and opened the car door for her.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Tess set her small suitcase down in the guest room on the first floor, right next door to Jo’s sickroom.

  “This should work out fine,” she said to Easton. It was a lovely room, one she hadn’t seen before, filled with antiques and decorated in sage and pale peach.

  She found it restful and calm and inherently feminine, with the lacy counterpane on the bed and the scrollwork on the bed frame and the light pine dresser.

  Where did the others sleep? she wondered. Her insides trembled a little at the thought of Quinn somewhere in the house.

  Why did sharing a house with him feel so different, so much more intimate, than all those other days when she had come in and out at various hours to care for Jo?

  “I hope I’m not kicking someone else out of a bed.”

  “Not at all.” Easton smiled, though she wore the shadow of her grief like a black lace veil. “No worries. We’ve got room to spare. There are plenty of beds in this place, plus the bunkhouse and the foreman’s house, which are empty right now since my foreman has his own place down the canyon.”

  “That’s where you were raised, wasn’t it? The foreman’s house?”

  Easton nodded. “Until I was sixteen, when my parents were killed in a car accident and I moved here with Aunt Jo and Uncle Guff. The boys were all gone by then and it was only me.”

  “You must have missed them.”

  Easton smiled as she settled on the bed, wrapping her arms around her knees. “The house always seemed too empty without them. I adored them and missed them like crazy. Even though I was so much younger—Quinn was five years older, Brant four and Cisco three—they were always kind to me. I still don’t know why but they never seemed to mind me tagging along. Three instant older cousins who felt more like brothers was heady stuff for an only child like me.”

  “I was always jealous of my friends who had older brothers to look out for them,” Tess said.

  “I loved it. One time, Quinn found out an older boy at school was teasing me because I had braces and glasses. Roy Hargrove. Did you ever know him? He would have been a couple years younger than you.”

  “Oh, right. Greasy hair. Big hands.”

  Easton laughed. “That’s the one. He used to call me some terrible names and one day Quinn found me crying about it. To this day, I have no idea what the boys said to him. But not only did Roy stop calling me names, he went out of his way to completely avoid me and always got this scared look in his eyes when he saw me, until his family moved away a few years later.”

  Easton smiled a little at the memory. “Anyway, there’s plenty of room here at the house. Eight bedrooms, counting the two down here.”

  Tess stared at her friend. “Eight? I’ve never been upstairs but I had no idea the house was that big!”

  “Guff and Jo wanted to fill them all with children but it wasn’t to be. Jo was almost forty when they met and married and she’d already had cancer once and had to have a hysterectomy because of it. I think they thought about adopting but they ended up opening the ranch to foster children instead, especially aft
er Quinn came. His mother and Jo were cousins, did you know that? So we’re cousins by marriage, somehow.”

  “I had no idea,” she exclaimed.

  “Jo and his mother were good friends when they were younger but then they lost track of each other. From what I understand, it took Jo a long time to get custody of him after his parents died.”

  “How old were you when they moved here?”

  “I was almost ten when Quinn came. He would have been fourteen.”

  Tess remembered him, all rough-edged and full of attitude. He had been dark and gorgeous and dangerous, even back then.

  “Brant moved in after Quinn had been here about four months, but you probably already knew him from school.”

  She knew Brant used to live on a small ranch in the canyon with his family. He had been in her grade and Tess always remembered him as wearing rather raggedy clothes and a few times he had come to school with an arm in a sling or bruises on his arms. Just like Quinn, Brant Western hadn’t been like the other boys, either. He had been solemn and quiet, smart but not pushy about it.

  She had been so self-absorbed as a girl that she hadn’t known until years later that the Winders had taken Brant away from his abusive home life, though she had noticed around middle school that he started dressing better and seemed more relaxed.

  “And then Cisco moved in a few months after Brant.” Easton spoke the words briskly and rose from the bed, but not before Tess caught a certain something in her eyes. Tess had noticed it before whenever Easton mentioned the other man’s name but she sensed Easton didn’t want to discuss it.

  “Jo and Guff had other foster children over the years, didn’t they?”

  “A few here and there but usually only as a temporary stopping point.” She shrugged. “I think they would have had more but...after my parents died, I was pretty shattered for a while and I think they were concerned about subdividing their attention among others when I was grieving and needed them.”

  Her heart squeezed with sympathy for Easton’s loss. She couldn’t imagine losing both parents at the same time. Her father’s death a few years after Scott’s accident had been tough enough. She didn’t know how she would have survived if her mother had died, too.