Perfect Touch by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online Page A

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.”
    â€œNo time for it. The ranch is two full-time jobs and then some.”
    â€œAnother 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, onlyto realize in the end that the ranch is exactly the challenge and peace that I need.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œWhen 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.”
    â€œMaybe 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.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI always thought the coastal hills above our farm were as ghostly and wild as anything on earth,” she said. “This is more. Much . . . bigger.”
    â€œMake you feel small?” he asked.
    â€œNo. Should it?”
    â€œNot everyone likes this much openness.”
    â€œThen they’d hate the Pacific Ocean,” she said. “Now that is one wild and restless place.”
    He smiled.
    She looked at the mountains again. Clouds formed and re-formed as she watched, tossing like the manes of countless wild silver horses.
    â€œCuster must have painted that,” she said. “It’s the kind of powerful collision of land and sky and cloud that he loved.”
    â€œWe have a painting like this of his.”
    A chill snaked over Sara’s skin at the thought of seeing Custer’s earlier—and in her opinion—far superior works.
    She watched the clouds and wind for a long time. They looked free as only things of the air could be. Below the arching sky, where the Tetons zigzagged down into tall hills and rolling hillocks, wind rushed over the pastures, green and grassy and rumpled like the back of an endless herd.
    â€œCuster must have painted that, too,” she said. “There are so many ghosts and echoes in his work. That’s why it fascinates me.”
    â€œPlenty of ghosts and echoes in you, too,” he said.
    Startled, she looked away from the scenery to him. “What do you mean?”
    â€œYou’re a city girl who rides horseback in the mountains for fun and you remember helping a cow give birth.”
    â€œThat’s why I’m a city girl. No