Safe Harbor: A Cold Creek Homecoming

by Sherryl Woods

  “Just the opposite, actually. I took a job in labor and delivery at one of the Portland hospitals.”

  “Bringing life into the world instead of comforting those who are leaving it. There’s a certain symmetry to that.”

  “I think so, too. It’s all part of my brand-new start.”

  “I suppose everybody could use that once in a while.”

  “True enough,” she murmured, with an unreadable look in her eyes.

  “Will you miss this?”

  “Pine Gulch?”

  “I was thinking more of the work you do. You seem...very good at it. Do you give this same level to all your patients as you have to Jo?”

  She looked startled at the question, though he wasn’t sure if was because she had never thought about it before or that she was surprised he had noticed.

  “I try. Everyone deserves to spend his or her last days with dignity and respect. But Jo is special. I can’t deny that. She used to give me piano lessons when I was young and I’ve always adored her.”

  Now it was his turn to be surprised. Jo taught piano lessons for many years to most of the young people in Pine Gulch but he had never realized Tess had once had the privilege of being one of her students.

  “Do you still play?”

  She laughed. “I hardly played then. I was awful. Probably the worst student Jo ever had, though she tried her best, believe me. But yes, I still play a little. I enjoy it much more as an adult than I did when I was ten.”

  She paused for a moment, then gave a rueful smile. “When he was...upset or having a bad day, Scott used to enjoy when I would play for him. It calmed him. I’ve had more practice than I ever expected over the years.”

  “You should play for Jo sometime when you come out to the house. She gets a real kick out of hearing her old students play. Especially the hard ones.”

  “Maybe. I’m worried her hearing is a little too fragile for my fumbling attempts.” She smiled. “What about you? Did Jo give you lessons after you moved here?”

  He gave a short laugh at the memory. “She tried. I’m sure I could have taught you a thing or two about being difficult.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a moment,” she murmured.

  She gazed at him for a moment, then she shifted her gaze up and he could swear he saw a million constellations reflected in her eyes.

  “Look!” she exclaimed. “A shooting star, right over the top of Windy Peak. Quick, make a wish.”

  He tilted his neck to look in the direction she pointed. “Probably just a satellite.”

  She glared at him. “Don’t ruin it. I’m making a wish anyway.”

  With her eyes screwed closed, she pursed her mouth in concentration. “There,” she said after a moment. “That should do it.”

  She opened her eyes and smiled softly at him and he forgot all about the cold night air. All he could focus on was that smile, that mouth, and the sudden wild hunger inside him to taste it.

  “What did you wish?” he asked, a gruff note to his voice.

  She made a face. “If I tell you, it won’t come true. Don’t you know anything about wishes?”

  Right now, he could tell her a thing or two about wanting something he shouldn’t. That sensuous heat wrapped tighter around his insides. “I know enough. I know sometimes wishes can be completely ridiculous and make no sense. For instance, right now, I wish I could kiss you. Don’t ask me why. I don’t even like you.”

  Her eyes looked huge and green in her delicate face as she stared at him. “Okay,” she said, her voice breathy.

  “Okay, I can kiss you? Or, okay, you won’t ask why I want to?”

  She let out a ragged-sounding breath. “Either. Both.”

  He didn’t need much more of an invitation than that. Without allowing himself to stop and think through the insanity of kissing a woman he had detested twenty-four hours earlier, Quinn stepped forward and covered her mouth with his.

  Chapter Eight

  She gave a little gasp of shock but her mouth was warm and inviting in the cold air and he was vaguely aware through the haze of his own desire that she didn’t pull away, as he might have expected.

  Instead, she wrapped her arm around his waist and leaned into his kiss for more.

  A low clamor in his brain warned him this was a crazy idea, that he would have a much harder time keeping a safe distance between them after he had known the silky softness of her mouth, but he ignored it.

  How could he possibly step away now, when she tasted like coffee and peaches and Tess, a delectable combination that sizzled through him like heat lightning?

  Her lips parted slightly, all the invitation he needed to deepen the kiss. She moaned a little against his mouth and he could feel the tremble of her body against him, the confused desire in the slide of her tongue against his.

  The night disappeared until it was only the two of them, until he was lost in the unexpected hunger for this woman in his arms. Her kiss offered solace and surrender, a chance to put away for a moment his sadness and embrace the wonder of life in all its tragedy and glory.

  He lost track of time there in the moonlight. He forgot about Jo and about his efforts to find his recalcitrant foster brother and his worries for Easton. He especially refused to let himself remember all the reasons he shouldn’t be kissing her—how, as he’d told her, he wasn’t even sure he liked her, how he still didn’t trust that she wasn’t hiding a knife behind her back, ready to gut him with it at the first chance.

  The only thing that mattered for this instant was Tess and how very perfect she felt in his arms, with her mouth eager and warm against his.

  A coyote howled from far off in the distance, long and mournful. He heard it on the edge of his consciousness but he knew the instant the spell between them shattered and Tess returned to reality. In the space between one ragged breath and the next, she went from kissing him with heat and passion to freezing in his arms like Windy Lake in a January blizzard.

  Her arms fluttered away from around his neck and he sensed she would have backed farther away from him if she hadn’t been pressed up against her car door.

  Though he wanted nothing more than to crush her to him again and slide into that stunning heat once more, he forced himself to step back to give them both a little necessary space.

  Her breathing was as rough and quick as his own and he could see the rapid rise and fall of her chest.

  Despite the chill in the air, the night seemed to wrap around them in a sultry embrace. From the trees whispering in the wind to the carpet of stars overhead, they seemed alone here in the darkness.

  Part of him wanted to step toward her and sweep her into his arms again, but shock and dismay began to seep through his desire. What kind of magic did she wield against him that he could so easily succumb to his attraction and kiss her, despite all his best instincts?

  He shouldn’t have done it. In the first place, their relationship was a tangled mess and had been for years. Sure, she had been great with Jo tonight and he had been grateful for her help on the horseback ride into the mountains. But one night couldn’t completely transform so much animosity into fuzzy warmth.

  In the second place, he had enough on his plate right now. His emotions were scraped raw by Jo’s condition. He had nothing left inside to give anything else right now, especially not an unwanted attraction to Tess.

  Maybe that’s why he had kissed her. He needed the distraction, a few moments of oblivion. Either way, it had been a monumentally stupid impulse, one he was quite certain he would come to regret the moment she climbed into her little sedan and drove down Cold Creek Canyon.

  She continued to gaze at him out of those huge green eyes, as if she expected him to say something. He would be damned if he would apologize for kissing her. Not when she had responded with such
fierce enthusiasm.

  He had to say something, though. He scrambled for words and said the first thing that came to his head.

  “If I had known you were such an enthusiastic kisser, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to fight you off in high school.”

  The moment he said the words, he wished he could call them back. The comment had been unnecessarily cruel and made him sound like an ass. Beyond that, he didn’t like revealing he remembered anything that had happened in their long-ago past. Apparently she still tended to bring out the worst in him.

  He couldn’t be certain in the darkness but he thought she paled a little. She grabbed her car door and yanked it open.

  “That’s funny,” she retorted. “If I had known you would turn out to be such a jerk, I wouldn’t have spent a moment since you returned to Pine Gulch regretting the way I treated you back then.”

  He deserved that, he supposed. Now he wanted to apologize—for his words at least, not the kiss—but the words seemed to clog in his throat.

  She slid into her driver’s seat, avoiding his gaze. “It would probably be better for both our sakes if we just pretended the past few moments never happened.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You think you can do that? Because I’m not at all sure I have that much imagination.”

  She cranked the key in her ignition with just a little more force than strictly necessary and he felt a moment’s pity that she was taking out her anger against him on her hapless engine.

  “Absolutely,” she snapped. “It shouldn’t be hard at all. Especially since I’m sorry to report the reality didn’t come close to measuring up to all my ridiculous teenage fantasies about what it might be like to kiss the bad boy of Cold Creek.”

  Before he could come up with any kind of rejoinder—sharp or otherwise—she thrust her car into gear and shot around the circular driveway.

  He stared after her, wondering why the cold night only now seemed to pierce the haze of desire still wrapped around him.

  Her words about teenage fantasies seemed to echo through his head. He supposed on some level, he must have known she had wanted to kiss him all those years ago. She had tried it, after all. He could still remember that day in the empty algebra classroom when he had been so furious with her over the false cheating allegations and then she had made everything much worse by thinking she could reel him in with a few flirtatious words.

  He had always assumed her fleeting interest in him, her attempts to draw his attention, were only a spoiled fit of pique that he didn’t fall at her feet like every other boy in school. Now he had to wonder if there might have been something more to it.

  Trust him to make a mess out of everything, as usual. She had been kind to Jo and he had responded by taking completely inappropriate advantage. Then he had compounded his sins by making a stupid, mocking comment for no good reason.

  She was furious with him, and she had every right to be, but he couldn’t help thinking it was probably better this way. He didn’t like having these soft, warm feelings for her.

  Better to remember her as that manipulative little cheerleader looking so sweet-faced and innocent as she lied through her teeth to their history teacher and the principal than as the gentle caregiver who could suppress her own fears about horseback riding to help a dying woman find a little peace.

  * * *

  Tess waited until she drove under the arch at the entrance to Winder Ranch and had turned back onto the main Cold Creek road, out of view of the ranch house, before pulling her car over to the side and shifting into Park with hands that still trembled.

  She was such an idiot.

  Her face burned and she covered her hot cheeks with her hands.

  She couldn’t believe her response to him, that she had kissed him with such heat and enthusiasm. The moment his mouth touched hers, she had tossed every ounce of good sense she possessed into the air and had fallen into his kiss like some love-starved teenage girl with a fierce crush.

  Oh, mercy. What must he think of her?

  Probably that she was a love-starved thirty-two-year-old who hadn’t known a man’s touch in more years than she cared to remember.

  How had she forgotten that incredible rush of sensations churning through her body? The delicious heat and lassitude that turned her brain to mush and her bones to rubber?

  She had nearly burst into tears at how absolutely perfect it had felt to have his arms around her, his mouth sure and confident on hers. Wouldn’t that have been humiliating? Thank the Lord she at least had retained some tiny modicum of dignity. But she had wanted to lose herself inside that kiss, to become so tangled up in him that she could forget the hundreds of reasons she shouldn’t be kissing Quinn Southerland on a cold October night outside Winder Ranch.

  If I had known you were such an enthusiastic kisser, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to fight you off in high school.

  His words seemed to echo through her car and she wanted to sink through the floorboards in complete mortification.

  What was she thinking? Quinn Southerland, for heaven’s sake! The man despised her, rightfully so. If she wanted to jump feet-first into the whole sexual attraction thing, shouldn’t she try to have the sense God gave a goose and pick somebody who could at least stand to be in the same room with her?

  The unpalatable truth was, she hadn’t been thinking at all. From the first instant his mouth had touched hers with such stunning impact, she felt like that shooting star she had wished upon, bursting through the atmosphere.

  She had been rocked to her core by the wild onrush of sensations, his hands sure and masculine, his rough, late-evening shadow against her skin, his scent—of sleepy male and the faint lingering hint of some expensive aftershave—subtle and sexy at the same time.

  To her great shame, she had wanted to forget everything sensible and sound and just surrender to the heat of his kiss. Who knew how long she would have let him continue things if she hadn’t heard the lonely sound of a coyote?

  Blast the man. She had everything planned out so perfectly. Her new job, relocating to Portland. It wasn’t fair that he should come back now and stir up her insides like a tornado touching down. She didn’t need this sort of complication just as she was finally on the brink of moving on with her life.

  She scrubbed at her cheeks for another moment, then dropped her hands and took a deep, cleansing breath. The tragic truth was, he wouldn’t be around much longer and she wouldn’t have to deal with him. Jo was clinging by her fingernails but she couldn’t hold on much longer. When she passed, Quinn would return to Seattle and she would be starting her new life.

  For a few weeks, she would just have to do her best to deal with this insane reaction, to conceal it from him.

  He didn’t like her and she would be damned if she would pant after him like she was still that teenage girl with a crush.

  * * *

  “Thanks a million for taking a look at the Beast,” Easton said. “I really didn’t want to have to haul it to the repair place in town.”

  Four days after his startling encounter with Tess, Quinn stood with his hands inside Easton’s temperamental tractor, trying to replace the clutch. “No problem,” he answered. “It’s good to know I can still find my way around the insides of a John Deere.”

  “If Southerland Shipping ever hits the skids, you can always come back home and be my grease monkey.”

  He grinned. “It’s always good to have options, isn’t it?”

  She returned his smile, but it faded quickly. “Guff wanted you to stay and do just that, didn’t he? You could always find your way around any kind of combustion engine.”

  True enough. He never minded other ranch work—roundup and moving the cattle and even hauling hay. But he had always been happiest when he was up to his elbows in grease, tinkering with this or that machine.

&
nbsp; “Remember that old ’66 Chevy pickup truck you used to work on? The blue one with the white top and all those curves?”

  “Oh, yeah. She was a sweet ride. I imagine Cisco drove her into the ground after I left for the Air Force.”

  Something strange flashed in her mind for a moment, before she blinked it away. “You could have stayed. You would have been more than welcome,” Easton said after a moment. “But I knew all along you never would.”

  He raised an eyebrow. Had he been so transparent? “Pine Gulch is a nice place and I love the ranch. Why were you so certain I wouldn’t stick around? I might have been happy running a little place of my own nearby.”

  She shook her head. “Not you. Brant, maybe. He loves his ranch, though you would have to use that crowbar in the toolbox over there to get him to admit it. But you and Cisco had wanderlust running through your veins even when we were kids.”

  Maybe Cisco, Quinn thought. He had always talked about all the places he wanted to see when he left Idaho. Sun-drenched beaches and glittering cities and beautiful, exotic women who would drop their clothes if you so much as smiled at them.

  That had been Francisco Del Norte’s teenage dream. Quinn had no idea how close he had come to reaching it, since the man was wickedly skillful at evading any questions about his wandering life.

  Quinn had his suspicions about what Cisco might be involved with, but he preferred to keep them to himself, especially around Easton. While she might love him and Brant like brothers, he had always sensed her feelings for Cisco were far different.

  “I haven’t wandered that far,” he protested, instead of dwelling on Cisco and his suitcase full of secrets. “Not since I left the Air Force, anyway. I’ve been settled in Seattle for eight years now.”

  “Your dreams were always bigger than a little town like Pine Gulch could hold. I think deep down, Guff and Jo knew that, even if they were disappointed you didn’t come home after you were discharged.”

  “They didn’t need me here. They always had you to run the ranch.” He sent her a careful look. “I always figured you were just fine with that. Was I wrong? You left for a while there, but you came back.”