Perfect Touch (4 page)

“You could have just given the damn paintings to her,” Barton said.

“I followed JD's wishes. He was real clear about the paintings.”

“So? He's dead.”

“I gave my word,” Jay said.

“How the hell would JD know? He's dead!”

Sara felt the tension in Jay's hand on her arm and waited for the explosion. But when he spoke, his deep voice was calm.

“It's done,” he said to Barton. “Get over it and get on with your life.”

“It takes money to live,” Barton said in a rising voice.

“That's why people work. Any time you want it, you have a job on the ranch.”

Barton looked down, visibly fighting not to lose his redheaded
temper. “Look,” he said finally, meeting Jay's waiting eyes. “I found a guy who could help us sell those paintings.”

“Was he wearing seersucker and a purple tie?” Jay asked.

For a moment Barton visibly wondered if the answer should be yes or no. “Uh, I didn't notice.”

“Did he give you a card?” Jay asked.

“Uh, yeah.” Barton fished the card out of his suit pocket. “Masterwor—”

“No,” Jay cut in. “He already approached me. I turned him down.”

“But this guy's the real deal. Knows a lot of Hollywood types, closes big deals.”

“Not with me.”

Tension simmered for a long moment before Barton shrugged. “Okay, you don't want him. That's cool. How about I handle the paintings then?”

Jay studied his brother. Barton alternated between careless and relentless, yet Jay felt a stubborn obligation to help out the kid who had once shrieked with laughter while he rode Jay's shoulders through the rambling ranch house.

“You mean it?” Jay asked.

“Sure. I do big deals all the time.”

Jay's gut told him to refuse. The perennial hope that Barton would turn out to be something more than hot air urged Jay to agree.

“I'll think about it,” he said finally.

“I could totally handle it.” Barton straightened for the first time. “You'll see. I'm good at business.”

“Would you do an auction or a consignment?” Sara asked quietly. “Sotheby's or Christie's? Or would you choose an auction house that specialized in western genre painters?”

Barton blinked. “Huh?”

“I was just wondering what your experience in art sales was,” she said. “If the Custers are going to be sold, they need to be handled properly.”

“And you think I can't? I've got a degree in management, Harvard. I know business.”

“Then you know that the art business is as idiosyncratic as they come. This isn't the same as finding angel investors for a start-up. Selling art is part show business, part poker game, and part craps.”

“And you're just the gal to handle it?” Barton asked. “The only guy who knows those paintings better than me is dead now.” He flushed and jabbed a finger at her. “I've got a
personal
connection.”

“That will be very useful in selling the paintings if the time comes,” she agreed, smiling professionally. “Collectors like to have a personal link to the history of a painting. It helps add a glow to the narrative, to the legend of a painter, and, of course, to the artistic taste of the owner.”

“Can't pay bills with a legend,” Barton said.

“No, but you can make it work to your advantage. That's a medium-long game if you want to play it right. Sellers like that seersucker guy just pump and dump, but don't give the audience enough time to really get into the work.”

“Legends aren't built overnight,” Jay said quietly.

“Overnight sensations brought on by years of work are a lot more common,” she said, nodding.

“Years?” Barton laughed roughly. “Who has the time?”

“A professional willing to invest in the future has the time,” she said. “If you have any interest, we can talk about the process and the kind of work it will take to properly market paintings such as the Custers.”

“And you're just the professional to show me how, right?” Barton said sarcastically.

“Glad you realize that,” Jay said, glancing at his watch. “When the paintings are sold, I suspect that Ms. Medina will be a big part of it. Assuming, of course, that she wants to be hired for the job.”

Relief snaked through Sara. “Thank you. If you want, I'd be happy to help you sell the Custers. Did you have a time line in mind?”

“No guarantees on handling the sale,” Jay said. “Not yet. I need to know someone—in person—before I trust them.”

“Understood.”

Liza's voice called impatiently, “Barty, come here!”

Barton grimaced. “A minute,” he yelled.

Wind gusted, making Sara grab Jay's coat at the same time he did. Their fingers tangled. She admired the difference in texture and strength and heat between his fingers and hers. He had calluses, but the skin itself wasn't rough. She couldn't help wondering how those fingers would feel against her bare skin.

Then she wondered how he could stand around in his shirtsleeves in a cold Wyoming wind and have warmer hands than she did.

“Listen,” Barton said, leaning in to Jay. “Did you look over the new plan I sent you?”

“Ms. Medina is getting cold standing around in the wind,” Jay said. “I'll call you after—”

“You remember that guy I sent out to my quarter of the ranch last week?” Barton cut in hurriedly.

“The one who was three days late?”

Barton waved that away. “He's an important man. Got lots of irons in lots of fires. Anyway, the reports came back and it's looking good. But he wants to dig a few more holes to be sure before he offers a deal.”

Sara felt Jay go absolutely still.

“This is the land along Lash Creek?” Jay asked.

“That's right.”

“That creek feeds Crowfoot, which waters most of the ranch. That watershed is too valuable to risk mining activity.”

“Gold is valuable too, bro. Lash Creek is part of my land. I get a say in how it's used.”

“When you're thirty-one and meet the stipulations in JD's will, yes,” Jay said. “I had to do the same.”

“Hey, I'm trying to do this the nice way. I could sue.”

“Barty!” Liza's voice was more distant. “I'm leaving!”

Both men ignored her.

“You'd lose,” Jay said. “Liza already tried to have the land divided during the divorce. The judge didn't buy it then and won't buy it now. JD's will is clear. You have to be thirty-one to have any say in how the ranch is run.”

“BARTY!” Liza screamed above the wind.

Sara felt like hiding in her borrowed coat. Her family was poor, but they had too much pride to make a public scene.

“Fine,” Barton snarled. “Be like JD. Leave money on the table wherever you play. Millions hanging on the walls, millions in untapped mining rights, and nothing in the bank for the rest of us.”

With that, he stalked off after his mother.

Wind gusted again, making trees whip and groan. The smell of snow was stronger now, but the sky was nearly clear.

“Sorry that you had to witness that,” Jay said, watching Barton's retreat.

“No need to apologize,” Sara said. “Nothing argues like families.”

“The least I can do is take you back to your room. Where are you staying?”

The thought of her room put a hitch in her stride. “I was at the Lariat. I have to find another room.”

“Bad service?”

“A break-in. My coat and computer were stolen. The sheriff holds out little hope that the thieves will be found.”

Or another room, for that matter.

Jay's arm came around her shoulders. “You've had quite a morning, haven't you?” He led her toward a big silver pickup truck. “With the Norwegians in town, you won't find a decent place left to stay.”

“I'll—”

“Come to the ranch,” he suggested. “We have five bedrooms and only one of them is being used. Some of the Custers are there, and there are a lot more up at Fish Camp.”

“You're tempting me.”

He gave her a smile that warmed her as much as his coat.

“No temptation, just common sense,” he said, opening the passenger side of the truck. “You need a room and the Custers. I need to know more about you than a sexy voice talking to me while I make dinner and sneak bites.”

She laughed, remembering doing the same thing while listening to him on the phone. “You, too? Eating alone can suck.”

Navy blue eyes met hers. “Henry lives at the ranch, so we'll have a chaperone, if that concerns you.”

“Good.” She was too attracted to Jay for her own comfort. Having sex with a client was bad business.

Stupid, too.

“As long as you understand that Beck's sales pitch about the Custers being worth millions is a great wad of baloney, I'll come,” she said.

Jay smiled and squeezed her arm. “Never did like baloney, even when I was young enough to eat it.”

“And Sheriff Cooke said for me to say hello to you,” she remembered
as she climbed up into the passenger seat before Jay could blink.

“So you figure I'm safe,” he said.

Safe
wasn't a word she would have applied to Jay Vermilion, but she nodded. “Besides, I've traveled in places where staying with strangers and hitchhiking were the only way to see the country. You learn to trust your instincts.”
Plus a few really nasty moves my brothers taught me.

Jay laughed softly. “I thought so.”

“What?”

“You're the adventurous sort.”

Sara smiled faintly. She was hoping that handling the sale of the Custers would get her out of the adventure travel business.

W
HILE SARA WATCHED
Jay walk around the hood of the truck to reach the driver's side, part of her felt like she was fifteen, wearing fashionably ripped jeans, a midriff top, teased hair, and purple eye shadow, standing in the movie theater parking lot with someone blasting trash rock from their cassette deck.

Back before I learned that having a man wasn't as good as having my freedom to be and do what I want to do and be.

“That's an interesting smile,” Jay said as he climbed in.

“Just remembering how young I once was.”

“Bet the boys chased you.”

“You'd lose. I was plain as a fence post.”

The engine revved, an echo of his laughter. “You'll have to show me pictures before I believe that.”

“I burned them.”

Shaking his head, he drove her the few blocks to the Lariat motel. When he saw the mess that someone had made of her room, his enjoyment vanished.

“I hope Cooke catches whoever it was,” Jay said.

“I'm not holding my breath.” She handed his jacket back to him and got to work.

With the efficiency of someone who spent too much time traveling, she put clothes and toiletries back into her suitcase, packed up the orphaned computer plug, and gave the room a final check.

“Do you have an uplink on the ranch?” she asked.

“Hard to do business without one.”

“Good. I'll download what I need of my records onto my tablet.”

“You're lucky it wasn't stolen, too,” Jay said.

“It's in my purse, along with my cell phone. Where I go, my purse goes.”

“I've seen smaller rucksacks,” he said, eyeing the big purse.

“Some people lift weights. I lift my purse.”

He smiled.

She reminded herself not to stare.

“I'm out of here,” she said.

Pulling her wheeled suitcase behind, Sara headed for the door, eager to see the last of the motel room. Jay caught up with her just by lengthening his stride.

“I'll take it,” he said, reaching for her suitcase.

With an easy motion he stashed the suitcase behind the driver's seat of the truck.

“How far is it to the ranch?” Sara asked.

“Depends on which pass is open. Twenty miles if Wolf Pass is open, almost twice that if we have to take the long way.”

“And the winner is?”

“Us,” he said. “Wolf Pass is open. Or it was when I came in this morning. Around the Tetons, weather changes when you blink, especially in the high country.”

“You can't scare me unless it's a bear.”

“Usually we only get them at the outer edges of the ranch,” he said, “on leased grazing lands. Or sometimes up at Fish Camp, if the garbage smells particularly tempting before we get around to burning it.”

“You're joking.”

“No, we burn garbage. Burying it just gives the bears something to dig up, and they're a lot better at digging than a man with a shovel.”

“You really do have bears.”

He looked at her big eyes. “Yes, city girl, we really do. Cougar, deer, antelope, elk, and Henry swore he saw wolf tracks during the melt. Does that change your mind about staying at the ranch?”

“Are the Custers there?”

“Yes.”

“I'll let you know after I see them.”

He smiled.

Sensation shivered up and down her spine.

Forget the bears,
she thought.
He's lethal.

Good thing I spent my childhood raising my younger siblings, washing the smell of cow crap and baby barf out of my hair, and cooking for nine. I'm inoculated against his brand of rough-and-ready charm. I worked too hard getting out of the country to want to go back again for more than a brief visit.

Very quickly, the streets of Jackson bled into a strip of commercial development on either side of the road. A few minutes later buildings stuttered out and mostly grass grew. Trees lined small creeks and sagebrush
thrived on exposed slopes. Barbed wire fences marked off small ranches, while narrow asphalt or dirt roads snaked off up the shoulders of ridges dressed in grass or sage and aspen.

After some miles, the top of the highest grassy ridges sprouted giant mansions placed above old ranch structures farther down the slopes. The old homes were all but falling down now. The new homes were supersized, decked out in finery that was sometimes restrained and more often looked like a TV reality show in waiting. She'd bet that ninety percent of the mansions were uninhabited.

Sara would have expected this sort of growth in upstate New York or even outside Atlanta, where she'd been decorating and appointing the inside of a house not unlike these. But not here, in the middle of ranching country.

I probably shouldn't look at it this way, but are these new places really such an improvement on the landscape? Were the old ranch houses so bad that they had to be left to rot from neglect while empty mansions are built?

Nothing answered her question except the complex reality that life changed.

Below the ridgetops, the flat land was empty of all but ranch fencing, occasional cattle, and the grass that bent beneath the wind. Silver ripples gleamed in irrigation ditches.

“I don't see many cows,” she said finally.

“It's been a hard winter and a late spring. Price of hay was so high a lot of the small ranchers had to sell off stock.”

“Did you?”

“Vermilion Ranch has its own hay meadows. We weathered it better than most.”

“You're lucky,” she said, remembering. “My father had too much family and too few milk cows to make ends meet anywhere near the middle.”

“Hard work and plenty of it,” Jay agreed. “When I was young, I couldn't wait to leave the ranch and see the world.”

“And you did,” she said, remembering fragments of previous conversations.

“Yes. I left when I was eighteen. Didn't come back until a few years ago. A long time.”

“I'm still gone. Can't think of anything that would drag me back. What changed your mind?”

“Afghanistan.”

She knew a conversation closer when she heard it, yet she said, “One of my younger brothers feels the same. He—Look out!”

Before the words left her mouth, Jay had braked and swerved to avoid the deer bounding across the road. He missed it by inches.

“Deer have to be the dumbest thing on hooves,” he said, quickly guiding the truck back into the correct lane. “Wonder what ran it out of daytime cover.”

“A bear?” Sara asked, her voice thinned with adrenaline.

“More likely stray dogs.”

His voice hadn't changed. She had a feeling that it would take more than a kamikaze deer to lift his blood pressure.

She forced herself to look away from his compelling features to the scenery outside.

The road climbed, wound around, and climbed some more. For a time there were aspen groves in every crease and sometimes on the ridgeline itself. High-end houses disappeared. Though ranch fences remained, the country looked wilder. Some of the fences were very old, made of wood that had turned pale gray beneath relentless weathering.

When they left the highway, the surface of the road went from asphalt to graded gravel.

“How far does this road go?” Sara asked.

“About thirty miles before it dead-ends at Mitchell's ranch gate. There are some nice moose bogs down in the bottoms along the way.” Jay slowed. “Hang on, hard turn coming.”

“More deer?”

“Narrow road and a tourist riding my bumper. Damn fool is in a city car. If he keeps going, he'll get stuck in the mud holes ahead.”

Despite Jay's turn signal, the car kept riding his bumper. He said something under his breath as he turned sharply onto another gravel road. This one was posted as Vermilion Ranch, private property, no hunting, no trespassing, and no turnaround. A locked gate was set back just far enough to keep the pickup truck from blocking the larger dirt road where the tourist zoomed eagerly past, spraying gravel, unaware of the muddy bottomland and huge tow bill waiting a few miles farther on.

Jay swung down out of the truck cab, opened the combination lock, and pushed the gate wide.

“Want me to drive through?” Sara called.

“Thanks. Appreciate it.”

She scrambled over the console into the driver's seat, took the truck through, and then slid back into the passenger seat.

“Agile lady,” he said, giving her an appreciative glance as he got back in. “Don't tell me it's yoga.”

Laughing, she shook her head. “I ride horseback in the Sierra Nevada every chance I get. BLM and national forest lands are full of gates.”

“Hear they have bears, too.”

“Not where I ride. My horse wouldn't put up with it.” Then, “Why are all the big estates up on the grassy ridgelines? There was flat land closer to Jackson.”

“City people like the view up there. When Liza hounded JD for more money, he leased off some of the more useless ridgeline pasturelands to rich folks. Resorts, condos, miniature estates, whatever.”

“Leased, huh? That's smart.”

“The only thing JD was stupid about was Liza. Every time I look at the fake rustic estates crouched on the heights, I see more proof that when an older man marries a much younger woman, money always changes hands. A lot of it.”

Jay drove on down the road at a good clip, slowing only when fence lines gave way to sunken cattle grates that worked as barriers for hoofed animals. Some dust rose behind the truck, but not much because it had rained the night before.

When Sara caught herself admiring his profile or lean, strong hands too often, she forced herself to look out at the land. She was here for the Custers, period.

Custer painted this land. What did he see that moved him to set up an easel? The shadows of aspens on a rough slope? The sharp angles of fence meeting fence? The racing line of the wind across the grass?

“Do you have many memories of Custer?” she asked after a time.

“Some. I was twelve when my mother died and JD married Liza. Custer took off about that time. He didn't like kids much, especially when I got taller than him, which happened when I was about ten. From what I learned after I grew up, Custer had an eye for the ladies and they returned the favor.” Jay shook his head. “Never could understand it. Maybe it was the smell of oil paints and turpentine, or whatever the hell it was that he used for cologne. Or maybe he was hung like a prize bull.” Then, “Sorry, don't mean to be coarse.”

Sara bit her lip against a laugh. “When I was twelve years old, I spent more than a few hours up to my armpit in a cow's birth canal,
trying to grab the second slippery little hoof so that dad could put a rope around both of them and pull. I know all about birds, bees, and how bulls hang.”

He glanced away from the road and smiled. “You're one surprise after another. You sure you live in San Francisco?”

“Very sure. I love it there—the taste of so many different cuisines, the color of faces from white to black and every shade in between, fog like a cold cat winding around my ankles, the horns of cars and big ships, clothes and goods and art from all over the world. It's exciting, energizing. Always something new to discover. And the only cows are hanging in upscale butcher shops.”

“Yeah, I used to feel that way.” He shrugged. “I changed.”

“Did Custer love the land?” she asked.

“Love, hate . . . there's a real fine line between. I don't know. He and JD fought like old marrieds. Custer always lost. He'd tear out and go painting and not be around for days. Sometimes I wonder if he didn't fight just to get his blood up to paint.”

She tilted her head. “Another nugget from the personal history of an artist. You'll have to write down your memories.”

“No time for it. The ranch is two full-time jobs and then some.”

“Another thing I hate about cows. No time off for good behavior.”

Jay gave Sara a glance that looked casual and missed nothing.

She is really something,
he thought.
Strong handshake, slender female body, yet plenty tough. She didn't scream at the deer or leave town because of a small-time burglar. She's smart, too, or the rest wouldn't be nearly so appealing.

Too bad she's a city girl and there's nothing left in the city for me. My roots are planted in Wyoming, and that will never change. The land is part of my DNA. How stupid I was to fight my roots most of my adult life, only
to realize in the end that the ranch is exactly the challenge and peace that I need.

“I'm really eager to see those paintings,” she said. “The only Custers I've seen in person were his later works, after his move to Roanoke.”

“When I was old enough to think about adults being people like me,” Jay said, “I wondered why he went that far away. Nobody knew him in Virginia, and Custer was a man who liked to be known.”

“Maybe he got sick of the West. Whatever the reason, he was sure done with everything western, including landscapes. Odd, though. His later paintings were more technically polished, certainly more accessible, but they all lack the raw energy and emotion of his earlier ones.”

“You want raw energy, look over there,” Jay said, gesturing with his chin.

She looked to her right. The wind had stripped most of the clouds away from the Tetons. They thrust into the air, jagged and bright with ice on the north slopes. The south-facing slopes gleamed with water in patches where the snow had melted. The forest was a dark, dark emerald where trees grew, with ghostly streamers of naked aspen trees running up the ravines. At lower elevations the grass was fiercely green, supple as water beneath the wind.

“I always thought the coastal hills above our farm were as ghostly and wild as anything on earth,” she said. “This is more. Much . . . bigger.”