Authors: Elizabeth Lowell
“Love isn't a weakness,” Jay said. “It's the greatest strength there is.”
“And you call
me
crazy.” Barton flicked the lighter to life and held it to a corner of the canvas where fluid dripped down to the floor.
“No,” Sara said. “No! You're burning something that can neverâ”
With a soft whoosh, a cloud of fire billowed up into Barton's face. He leaped back, sending a chair crashing into Henry, who looked reflexively to see what had happened.
Two shots rang out like one. Henry was dead between one breath and the next.
The instant the grip in her hair loosened, Sara leaped away, grabbed a sheet from the floor, and ran to the painting. Hurriedly she began snuffing out the fire.
Jay bent to pick up Henry's pistol.
When he straightened again, he found himself looking at a gun held by the smiling stranger who had once been his younger brother.
“This isn't a pussy gun,” Barton said. “It's bigger than yours. I just wanted to use Mother's for any killing.” He shrugged. “Now I'll have to think of another story.”
“Give it up,” Jay said.
“Not a chance. You're too weak to shoot your little brother, but I'm not too weak to shoot you. Chooka-chooka, bro.”
Two more shots snapped out as one.
“Jay!” she screamed, running toward him.
But it was Barton who fell to the floor, a surprised look on his face.
With movements too swift for Sara to follow, Jay kicked the gun out of his brother's hand and tested his neck for a pulse.
“Is he . . .” Her voice faded.
“Dead. Like Henry. The army didn't teach me to miss.” Jay closed his brother's eyes with a sweep of his hand and looked up.
Sara saw the tears streaming down his face and held out her arms to him.
The gallery door slammed open. “Nobody move!”
She choked off a scream.
Will it ever be done?
“Easy, Cooke,” Jay said, his back to the sheriff. “It's over.”
Three deputies piled in behind Cooke, guns drawn.
“Any weapons?” the sheriff asked.
“Three that I know of,” Jay said. “I'll put mine down if you tell your deputies not to shoot.”
Cooke looked at his deputies. “Stand down. Go ahead, Jay.”
He put his pistol on the floor and turned around slowly.
The sheriff looked at Jay's face and sighed. “Damn, son, I hoped you wouldn't have to be the one.”
Jay didn't say anything.
“It's not his fault,” Sara said quickly. “Barton was going to kill me and then Henry was going to kill me and then Barton was going to kill Jay andâ” Her voice broke into a sob.
Jay pulled her close and held her, just held her.
With a low curse, Cooke swept off his hat and then resettled it with a snap. “Benson, you protect the scene. It will be a while before Davis gets here. He has to wait for the ambulance to pick up Liza.”
“Liza?” Jay asked. “Her bruise didn't look that bad.”
“It was the bullet in her gut that killed her, but not before she talked.”
“Henry,” Jay said bleakly, remembering what his foreman had said about
cleaning up after Barton
.
“That's what she said, along with enough other stuff to make me want to kick some sociopathic ass. What the hell happened, Jay?”
“It's a long story,” he said. “I'd just as soon only tell it once.”
“M-Me too,” Sara said.
Shivers wrought havoc on her equilibrium, but they had little to do with cold.
“Adrenaline overload,” Jay said softly against her ear. “Hold on to me.”
He lifted his head and said to Cooke, “Can we take care of the formalities at the Vermilion suite? Sara spent too long running through the snow wearing only a blouse and jeans and was dunked in ice water twice along the way. She needs a warm bath, hot soup, and a chance to come down from the terror of being hunted like an animal and then having a gun held to her head. Send a deputy along with us if you have to.”
“After what Liza said, you're the last one I'm looking to arrest,” Cooke said, glancing at Henry. “Son of a bitch. I wouldn't have expected it from him.”
“They were going to sell the ranch after Barton inherited, using my blood for the DNA test.”
“Barton isn't a Vermilion?” Cooke asked, startled.
Behind him, his deputies talked in excited whispers.
“No,” Sara said. “Custer was Barton's sperm donor.”
“I'll be damned,” Cooke said. “Liza didn't say anything about that. Now it makes more sense, in a twisted up kind of way.”
Jay closed his eyes for a moment, thinking about the irretrievable past. Then he tilted Sara's face up and kissed her gently.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he said. “Let's go home.”
He only wished it was her home, too.
Six Months Later
T
HE JACKSON GALLERY
was filled with swirls of well-dressed people holding champagne glasses and munching canapés. Beautiful color catalogs of previously unknown paintings by Armstrong “Custer” Harris were stacked on an elegant table. For those who actually had bought a painting at the auction earlier, there was also a complimentary, and very expensive, illustrated coffee-table book describing Custer's life and paintings. Studded throughout the text were anecdotes of his life on Vermilion Ranch.
Sara circulated through the crowd wearing a black sheath and the antique Indian jewelry that Vermilion women had worn for well over a century. In an irony that still burned as much as it amused, Jay had inherited Liza's and Barton's “material goods.”
In addition to the jewelry, Sara wore a professional smile over the
turmoil churning in her mind.
The Edge of Never
had become one of the most talked-about and nominated movies of the year. That, and the buzz around the newly discovered Custersâto say nothing of the scandal of JD's ex-wife and her child by Custerâhad driven the price of the paintings higher than Sara had expected.
Once the press began to breathlessly report on stories of murder and mayhem in the well-heeled Wyoming resort town of Jackson, the resulting perfect storm of publicity meeting notoriety had made the furor around Wyeth's Helga paintings look like the kind of teenage hair-pulling that might occur when two girls wore the same dress to their small-town junior prom.
The effects of all of those factors combined had seen the restored
Muse
sell for over a million dollars.
Every one of the other Custers Jay had chosen to liquidate at auction had a sold sticker beside it. The cheapest painting, a small study of intersecting wooden fences that had once been stored in a cardboard box, brought seventy thousand dollars.
Nothing like a hot auction to wring out wallets,
Sara thought.
Despite the unqualified success of the last six months, leading up to the gala evening, she felt like she was being torn apart. Though she and Jay had alternated flying between Wyoming and San Francisco, saying good-bye had become harder each timeâfor both of them.
Tomorrow it would be the same.
Suddenly needing to touch Jay, she looked around the room, searching for a man with black hair and the muscular ease of an athlete or a predator. She spotted him trapped between two svelte matrons in designer clothes.
They reminded her of Liza. From the tension beneath his polite veneer of interest, Sara knew that Jay felt the same.
Even now, sometimes she woke up at night with her heart beating
too fast and screams throttled in her throat. When Jay was with her, she curled into his heat and held on until the worst was past. When he wasn't with her, she got up and worked until she was tired enough to sleep again.
Get over it,
she told herself.
It's past. Nobody is hunting us now.
“You put together a first-class auction,” someone said to her.
“Thank you. Custer is a first-class painter,” she said automatically, smiling and moving on.
Only belatedly did she realize she had all but snubbed the man who was her newest client, a man who had bought three Custersâall of them among the artist's best works. She thought about going back, but the lure of standing next to Jay was greater than any client, no matter how wealthy.
“Excuse me,” she said to the designer matrons. “There's a call for you, Jay.”
“Ladies,” he said, nodding to the disappointed women.
He followed Sara as she wove expertly through the crowd, greeting half the people without inviting anyone to linger.
She's good at this,
Jay realized anew.
Really good. She handled all the endless details and never lost patience or interest. Now she's getting calls to do the same thing all over the country.
The realization that they would once again be saying good-bye tomorrow was a cold heaviness in him that had grown greater each time they separated, no matter how brief the trip.
Each time it became harder, tearing up both of them.
This has to end,
he thought starkly.
It's costing too much.
For both of us.
Sara unlocked her office door at the back of the gallery. Moments later she locked it again behind herself, a new habit she saw no point in breaking.
“Is it about the ranch?” he asked.
“No. I just needed to hold you.”
He gathered her against him carefully, completely, letting her female warmth and fragrance drive away the sinking cold that thinking about tomorrow had brought.
“I love you,” he said against her cheek.
She brushed her lips over his neck and tightened her arms. “I love you so much it's tearing me apart,” she admitted, her voice hoarse with pain at the thought of yet another separation.
“It's the same with me.” The muscles in his arms flexed as he held her even closer. “I didn't want to say anything until I knew for sure, but this week I talked to a big corporate cattle operation. They offered me a good price for the ranch.”
She pulled back to look into his navy blue eyes. “Do you want to sell?”
“I want a life with you,” he said simply.
“Don't sell,” she said, pressing her face into his neck. “The city isn't a place I want to be more than I need to be with you. San Francisco is lonelier than I ever imagined it could be when you're at Vermilion Ranch.”
Sara felt his arms wrap around her until she could hardly breatheâor maybe it was fear of the unknown that made her breathing unsteady. When she heard Jay repeat her name and his love against her ear, it gave her the strength to meet him more than halfway.
She turned her head to brush Jay's lips repeatedly with her own, breathing in his words and returning them with her own between hungry kisses. “Can I take over a room or two at the main ranch house for an office? The way my business is going now, I'll have to hire an assistant.”
“You can have the whole damn house for an office,” he said roughly.
She smiled. “We have to leave room for our children.”
He put his cheek against her hair while emotion shook him. “You don't have to have kids. I know you don't wantâ”
She put her fingers over his mouth. “I didn't want to be like my mother. I'm not. I want children, Jay. Your children.”
“Marry me.”
The raw need in his voice made her eyes sting. “Yes. Oh, yes.”
Jay lifted Sara into a kiss that sent heat racing through them, a fire that would grow through the months and years together, the future they would share.
And that fire was love.
As always, the landscape of my novel is real, but within that reality, I create something wholly fictional. Thus, Jackson and the Tetons exist in all their glory, but to my knowledge, Vermilion Ranch exists only in my mind. It is the same for the characters, alive only in my mind.
And now in yours.
New York Times
bestselling author
ELIZABETH LOWELL
has more than eighty titles published to date with over twenty-four million copies of her books in print. She lives in the Sierra Nevada Mountains with her husband, with whom she writes novels under a pseudonym. Her favorite activity is exploring the Western United States to find the landscapes that speak to her soul and inspire her writing.
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