Perfect Touch: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “All right,” Liza said huskily. “All right. Just give me one of them to remember my younger years by. You have so many paintings. Surely you can spare one for the woman who was once your mother.”

  My God, Sara thought, biting her tongue. The woman is relentless.

  “Peace for one painting, is that it?” Jay asked.

  “Yes. I choose the painting.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No,” Jay said. “It’s time you learned that I’m not JD. I won’t be wheedled, cajoled, or worn down by words.”

  Silence echoed in the room for several long breaths.

  “So that’s it?” Liza asked finally in a quavering voice.

  Jay could see that she was like the tide going out in advance of a truly monster wave coming back and hammering down on the beach.

  He really wasn’t in the mood for one of her tantrums.

  “You just give a royal no and expect everyone to accept it?” Liza’s voice was as high as her color. “God damn you, Jay Vermilion, just like he saw fit to damn your father to—”

  “That’s enough,” Jay cut in. “You’ve had your say, I’ve had mine. The judge had hers. We’re done with the subject.”

  “I expected this kind of behavior from JD, but never from you.” Suddenly Liza fell in on herself, shoulders rounded and slumped forward. Her words tumbled down to the floor, not to Jay. “I thought you were better than that.”

  “It’s over, Liza.” Jay’s voice was flat. “You tried every trick, burned every bridge along the way, and you’re still on the wrong side of the river. Get on with your life and leave me to get on with mine.”

  Her head snapped up. “It’s not over. Not until I say it is. You’ll learn, just like JD did. One of those paintings is mine.”

  “Good-bye, Liza,” Jay said, and turned to Sara.

  Barton stood to the fullest height he could manage. “Some of us like to live in the real world. The one where resources can be developed into something really worthwhile and not ignored just so you can play cowboy with everyone’s money.”

  Jay turned to him. “You want reality? What do you think paid for your failed education in acting, your failed restaurant in Miami, your failed gallery in Boston, and your failed delivery service in Baltimore?”

  “It’s not my fault the economy tanked,” Barton began.

  “Vermilion Ranch money paid for all your bad bookkeeping, failed businesses, and back taxes,” Jay said. “You want more money, earn it the way Vermilions have for six generations. Work on the ranch.”

  “Cow shit isn’t my style,” Barton said.

  Finally, Sara thought. Something we agree on.

  Liza stood. “Come, Barty. We have lawyers to talk to.”

  “Beck recommended some Boston attorneys who specialize in just our problem,” Barton said, following her.

  “You’ll be paying them, not the ranch,” Jay said. “Judge made that real clear, too.”

  “There are other judges,” Liza said.

  The front door slammed behind her and Barton, a loud period to the argument.

  “I apologize for my relatives, ex and otherwise,” Jay said.

  Sara shrugged. “They’re not the first ill-behaved adults I’ve ever dealt with. Won’t be the last.”

  He just shook his head.

  Impulsively she touched his shoulder. The heat and power of him through the cotton shirt startled her. “Don’t let either of them manipulate you with guilt. Families are way too good at that. You’re a good man. Don’t let them drag you down.”

  Jay shuddered lightly at the feel of her hand’s warmth sinking into his skin. “If you knew what I was thinking right now, you wouldn’t call me a good man.”

  His voice dropped in tone, and the heat in his eyes was unmistakable.

  “I didn’t say you were a saint,” she said, slowly lifting her hand away from his shoulder.

  For a long moment he watched her watching him.

  “They gone yet?” Henry called from the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” Jay said without looking away from Sara. “It’s safe for you to slide off to your cabin.”

  “You cooking tonight?”

  “Did you bring fresh stuff back from town?” Jay asked.

  “Sure did.”

  “Then I’m cooking.”

  “See you in a few.”

  The door shut smartly after the foreman.

  Jay stood up, pulling Sara lightly after him. “Let’s get your luggage out of the truck. Do you have something you can wear on a horse? If not, I’ll find something. Mother’s clothes are still packed away. She was about your height and build. I want to leave for Fish Camp around dawn. We’ll overnight there with the caretakers—Ivar and Inge Solvang—then push on to the summer pasture the next morning.”

  “I always pack something I can hike or ride or relax in. You said dawn?”

  “Crack of. The calves are just old enough to be stubborn. The mamas are better, except when they aren’t. It will take us some time to convince all of them to stay on the trail. It could be a long day. Cows like staying in one place.”

  “Stubborn beasts,” she said, remembering. “At least my horse will be doing the work rather than my own feet.”

  “You sure you’re used to riding?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Western saddle?”

  “I didn’t grow up in the East.”

  His half smile said they would find out for sure in the morning.

  CHAPTER 7

  HENRY DRIED THE last dinner plate and stacked it in the cupboard. “Since you’re not paying lawyers anymore,” he said, “you should have cash for a dishwasher that works.”

  Jay said, “It’s on my list.”

  “How high?”

  “Bottom of the top half.”

  Sara laughed softly. “I’ve heard that one before, only it was usually bottom of the bottom half. I made a religion out of ‘gently used’ whatever and grew a skin thick enough to ignore the snark at school when I wore some rich girl’s castoffs.”

  “It would have done Barton good to be raised that way,” Jay said.

  “Maybe,” Henry said. “But he still would have had the Wicked Bitch of the West as his mother. Everything she touches turns to shit. Pardon, Sara.”

  “We called it cowsh when we were growing up,” she said. “Less punishment that way.”

  Henry snorted and set the last dish in the cupboard. “I’m turning in. Seems like dawn comes earlier every year.”

  With a slight frown, Jay watched Henry leave.

  “What?” Sara asked.

  “Henry’s so active that I don’t think about him aging. But he’s years older than JD was when he died.” Jay shook his head. “Time is a tricky thing. So long and so short at once.” He drained the sink and dried his hands. “Now let’s get some art education in me before we turn into cowhands in the morning.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Sara said, quickstepping out to the living room.

  By the time Jay caught up with her, she was already lost in the painting that hung over the fireplace.

  “What are you seeing?” Jay asked.

  “Vast space,” she said almost absently. “And maybe, just maybe, Custer’s perverse sense of humor.”

  Jay made an encouraging noise.

  “Do you know if JD commissioned this painting?” Sara asked.

  “JD wanted him to paint the ranch, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean. But instead of painting the ranch house set against the lush pastures and rugged peaks of the Tetons, Custer chose to view the ranch from a location that diminishes everything to the point that the ranch looks like a tiny lifeboat all but lost at sea, the sky and land ready to swallow it whole, leaving no trace of the legendary cattlemen who carved Vermilion Ranch from the wilderness.”

  Silently Jay studied the painting that for him had always been part of his home life.

  “And yet,” she
said, “at the same time the painting shows the immensity of the task awaiting every generation of Vermilions. One man overseeing the well-being of everyone and everything that goes into keeping the ranch alive. The land serves your needs, but the land doesn’t need you.”

  “A fact I learn every dawn,” he said. “I’m transient. The land is forever. That’s why I came back home. I wanted to be a part of something that endures. Cities, cultures, empires—they all come and go. The land remains.”

  “Barton and Liza don’t feel that way,” Sara said. “To them, the ranch is just a stubborn ATM.”

  “Now they think the paintings are another ATM. Are they?”

  “Properly handled, they’re worth good to really good money.”

  “How much?” he asked bluntly.

  “Undetermined short of an actual sale.”

  “They must have a hell of a value for Liza, considering how much time and effort—and ranch money—she burned up in a legal wrangle over paintings she once walked away from.”

  Sara’s eyes widened. “She walked away from them? Before the divorce?”

  His mouth flattened. “Think of this as divorce phase two. Evidently she had a change of heart several years back. Maybe she thought the Custers would be valuable today. Not that she ever has to worry about cash. As long as Vermilion Ranch makes money, she does.”

  “She would have needed a crystal ball to see this Custer buzz coming. Value comes from an audience. Custer’s potentially widened audience came from luck as much as anything else.”

  “How?”

  “Didn’t I tell you about the movie?” Sara asked.

  “Probably,” he admitted, “but sometimes I got to dreaming while I listened to your voice.”

  She blinked.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “you have a voice that makes a man think of tangled sheets and slow, hot sex.”

  She laughed even as heat flushed her core. “You’re talking about your own voice. Midnight and velvet. Annnnd we’re getting off track. Value versus money. Art in general, Custer in specific.”

  “I can multitask,” Jay drawled.

  “Excellent. Put your multitasking mind to work on what it feels like to see Custer’s paintings for the first time. The impact.”

  A long pause, then, “No can do.”

  “Okay, try to imagine how it would feel to be in Custer’s territory for the first time.”

  “South Dakota is that way,” he said, pointing due east.

  “You passed geography,” she said, wide eyed. “Good for you.”

  “Let’s try it this way,” he said. “Why is Custer’s world so different from yours?”

  While Sara thought, she absently ran a hand through her hair and stretched her shoulders and torso, trying to shake off the long day.

  He watched her through narrowed eyes. Even though she wasn’t trying to turn him on, the tightness in his groin increased. Pretty soon he’d have to hang his hat off his belt buckle.

  He forced himself to look at the painting rather than the woman.

  “Custer’s world is vast and quiet,” she said slowly. “Cities have no reality in his early work. Neither do humans. The land is . . . everything. Godlike.”

  After a moment, Jay nodded. “Custer knew that cities are big to men, but small in the larger scheme. Full, but empty of the things I’m looking for. I guess Custer and I have that much in common.”

  “Value comes from cities,” she said. “From having an audience. That’s where I come in. Or any good art seller. I bring my understanding of Custer’s work and his potential audience, add in everything I can learn about the man and his life, then I create a narrative around each painting for the audience I have identified.”

  Jay studied the painting that had been part of his life. “Are we talking art or legend or plain old hype?”

  “Yes.”

  Silently he digested the unexpected aspects of selling art. “You’re saying it’s not just the painting.”

  “The paintings are the tree. Narrative is the leaves reaching out to the sun of the audience. The coincidence of an offbeat movie featuring Custer’s art, and then the movie going mainstream, is pure luck.”

  He listened to fabric whisper as she stretched some more.

  “What about finding a patron like JD?” Jay asked.

  “Luck. I’ve known landscape painters who have to paint houses to pay for their modest lifestyles, and still they die mostly forgotten. Luck comes in two flavors.”

  “Good and bad,” he agreed. “The difference between coming home on my feet or in a pine box. Got it. What about the part that has nothing to do with luck? What about the skill?”

  She wanted to ask him about his time in Afghanistan, but that was personal. She was here as a professional.

  “It’s easier to show you,” she said.

  Jay felt her grab his sleeve, warm fingers brushing against his exposed wrist. She vibrated with a controlled energy, every motion urgent as she led him toward the south wall of the big room.

  “By the way,” she said, “you really need to move these if you’re going to sell them. I can see they’ve gotten some sun, but not enough to damage their value yet.”

  “Sun?”

  “Sunshine is the enemy. Given enough time it can bleach anything, even oil paints. Any watercolors hung on this wall would have been ruined by now, even with protective glass.”

  “We always just enjoyed them,” he said. “Or ignored them.”

  “A crime.”

  “Does arrest involve handcuffs?”

  She had an instant vision of him handcuffed for sensual play. Heat streaked through her. “Ask the sheriff.”

  Sara stopped Jay in front of a painting of the eastern face of the Tetons, the legendary side, where the land got more and more dry as the mountains gave way to evergreen forest and then to the low scrub of the plains. The rocky peaks looked like they had been clawed from the earth during a violent birth. The snow that dotted the peaks was almost blood-red in the sunset. The Tetons themselves were laid out with strokes of purple and indigo, a cold contrast. At the feet of the mountains, the forests looked like a frozen wave captured in near black and crimson. The foreground was ablaze with wildflowers in orange and yellow and gold like a river flooding.

  “So what do you see in this?” she asked.

  Jay was overwhelmed by her female scent, a heat so close that he could feel her breath. Against a wild surge of desire, he struggled for words. “I hadn’t thought of it,” he managed. “I’ve passed by this painting hundreds, thousands of times.”

  “Okay, don’t pass it this time.”

  She leaned in even closer now, her elbow pressing in below his rib cage. She was half a step in front on him. His arm was just behind and all but around her now. And the painting was her focus.

  He tried to make it his.

  “Color,” he said finally. “Up close it’s all color and brushstrokes and energy. Across the room, it’s still color and energy, but the brushstrokes all add up to a view of the land.”

  “Good. Besides the incredibly bold use of color, Custer was a master at portraying space and making it real. Later on he did that with light, making it tangible. But this is an earlier piece, where he was making distance real.”

  “But the colors are wrong,” Jay said. “Nothing ever looks like that.”

  “If you want exact representation, go to photography. And even that lies. This painting is Custer’s impression of the land at the moment he painted it.”

  She leaned back a bit and studied the painting, not realizing that with every breath her body brushed his.

  He wished he’d worn something that would conceal his reaction to her. Maybe a kilt, he thought. Or not.

  “Photography lies?” Jay asked, grabbing onto anything that would get his mind above his belt.

  “Sure. All art is about showing what the artist wants to show. But that’s okay. These paintings are good lies. Custer’s art is as much about how he views th
e West as it is about the mountains themselves. Look at how magical he makes them.”

  “Even if it’s a lie?”

  Sara gave him a sideways look. “Surely you’ve looked at the mountains in this kind of light and felt something that you couldn’t put into words.”

  “All the time,” he said finally. “But they don’t look like this to me.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. Each painting is an individual vision.” She swept her hand across the surface of the painting, inches from it, fingers spread. “But it’s one that’s being completely shared.”

  Jay looked at the painting. “Okay. I see what you mean. I’ve just always taken it for granted, like the beams in the ceiling.”

  She watched him looking at the painting. His profile was a series of angular shadows softened by dense eyelashes and the hint of sensuality in his lips. Then he turned and looked at her.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “I’m finally understanding the appeal of portraits. And again, you’ve taken me off topic.”

  He gave her a slow smile. “Is that bad?”

  She shut her eyes for an instant, took a grip on her wandering attention, and turned back to the group of paintings on the wall.

  “There have been generations of western art, but each new one brings a different meaning,” she said. “Imagine looking at an unfamiliar landscape for the first time. You’ve been back east, right?”

  “West Point,” he said. “Can’t get much more east and still be in the U.S.”

  “Imagine describing the Rocky Mountains to someone back east. Someone who’s never seen a mountain bigger than the Adirondacks. Someone who’s never known a night sky without it being blocked by skyscrapers and city lights.”

  “I’ve tried. None of them really believed me until later, when we trained in the Sierra Nevada for mountain fighting overseas.”

  “Custer would have helped with the believing,” she said. “Training for war is another thing entirely. But looking at this painting, you know the feeling of being in the West, which for a very long time was an utterly alien part of America, one that many people couldn’t really believe was on the same continent, much less a part of the same country.”