The Last Chance Ranch (31 page)

If it had been Daniel standing next to her, Jessie would have shot him an amused glance. Since it was Luke, she pressed her lips together.

“Why don’t we all sit down in my office?” Wilkes suggested, signaling a clerk. “Have a cup of coffee?”

“Fine.” Luke lifted his chin toward the window, where Jessie’s daughter peered anxiously inside. “What about your daughter? It’s gonna snow.”

Jessie lifted her eyebrows, about to comment on the intelligence levels of a seven-year-old. She thought better of it and lifted a hand to indicate Giselle should come in. The girl bounced in eagerly, her eyes alight with curiosity and excitement as she came to stand beside her mother. She threw a coquettish glance toward Luke.

In turn, his icy calm melted and he grinned almost helplessly at the child. His daughter. A fact both father and daughter had obviously figured out.

Great.

Once again, Jessie thought she’d like to faint. Or grab Giselle’s hand and run as fast as she could away from this man, away from the past, away from the confrontation she could feel brewing.

But she’d made a commitment to this project, so she dutifully followed Wilkes into his office and took a seat in one of the richly upholstered leather chairs. Giselle sank gracefully to the floor, her hair surrounding her like a cape. Luke took the chair next to the girl, winking at her as he sat down.

Luke’s physical presence, so vivid and close, slammed Jessie suddenly. In the strong light of the office she could see him well. His hair was the same thick, heavy black, a little too long. It flowed like river water when he moved. His eyes were the same—penetrating, dark, expressive beyond measure. A few time-etched lines fanned from the corners into his broad cheekbones.

The yellowish cast to his skin was gone, and he no longer carried the extra weight around his middle. All she smelled was the curiously foresty scent of his skin. The booze, then, was gone.

She wondered with a pang how long it had been.

The hands and mouth were still much too clear in Jessie’s mind. She’d seen them in miniature every single day since Giselle was born and didn’t care to renew her acquaintance with those details.

Wilkes sat down behind his broad desk. “What kind of money are we talking here?” he asked, cutting straight to the chase.

Luke folded his hands loosely. “Half the price you ask for the rug. And we’ll deliver.”

To his credit, Wilkes didn’t erupt in outrage as so many of the gallery owners had done. He absorbed the information for a minute, then looked at Jessie. “And I imagine your presence here signifies a little inducement?”

“You imagine correctly,” she replied and handed him a list. “These are the artists who will pull their work from galleries that refuse to pay a more equitable price for the weavings.”

“Has anyone given any thought to what will happen to all these artists if they can’t display their work?” He gave her a measured stare. “Your paintings, for example, Ms. Callahan. They’ve only been selling well for what—two, three years?”

“There are other methods of displaying our work,” she returned calmly. “And other ways of earning a living.” But he’d struck at her secret terror. What if, after all this was over, she could no longer sell her own work? It was a dream that had been long and hard in coming, and she’d hate to see it die.

“What about all those little old ladies out there weaving on the reservation?” Wilkes asked, leaning back in his chair. “Anybody ask them how they feel about giving up the tidy little sum they’re already getting for a rug? I understand it goes quite a ways out there.”

“In the first place,” Luke said in a deadly quiet voice, “they aren’t little old ladies. They are young women and old women and in-between. Many of them are the primary breadwinners in their families—as they should be with such talents. In the second place, you stand to make a profit of eight to ten thousand dollars on every one of those big rugs. And all you do is put it on your wall.”

Jessie knew she should be concentrating, but Luke’s dark honey voice flowed seductively around her. In the four years they’d spent together, she’d never once heard him raise his voice, except to call a dog. Grimacing in wry amusement, she remembered, too, how alarming that had been to her at first. Her own family had been unable to discuss the weather without a boisterous, loud argument.

She sobered as Luke continued. “Even at the new rates, you’ll make almost obscene profits.”

Wilkes dropped forward, arms on the desk. “I’ll tell you something. There’s no way I’ll pay a dime over twenty percent of my gross on those rugs. And from what I’ve been hearing through the grapevine, I’m not alone.” He gave Jessie a cool glance. “No artist on that list of yours will cause me any real loss of revenue, so you can take all your toys and go play somewhere else.”

Jessie shot Luke a glance. A thin smile curved his lips. “I forgot to mention something else,” Luke said, shifting the weavings on his shoulder. “We’ve taken an option on a shop around the corner here. You’ve got six months, and then we open—just in time for tourist season. When your customers find out they can get the same rug for half of what you charge, I bet I know where they’ll shop.” He stood up and tossed a card from his shirt pocket onto the desk. “You know where to find us.”

Hastily, Jessie scrambled to her feet, gesturing toward Giselle.

Wilkes laughed. “It’s been tried before, you know. It never works.”

“This time it will,” Luke promised quietly, and walked out.

Giselle skipped after him, leaving Jessie behind. Jessie picked up her scarf and purse from the chair. “I hope you’ll give this some thought, Mr. Wilkes,” she said. “It is going to work this time.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Lifting her purse and scarf to her chest like armor, Jessie headed outside—for the second confrontation of the day.

* * *

Luke patted his shirt pocket for the bag of tobacco he kept there, wondering if he had time to roll a cigarette before Jessie reappeared. He could use one.

He decided to try and pulled the makings out—a single thin sheet of paper, a perfect pinch of moist tobacco, a deft roll and quick lick. Done. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

“You shouldn’t smoke, you know,” said the little girl beside him. “My teachers told me it can give you cancer or heart attacks. I convinced my mom to quit.”

Luke pursed his lips, then squatted beside her. Such a beauty, he thought again with a twinge in his chest. His child.

“I don’t smoke a whole lot,” he told her. “That’s what’s hard for people to remember—a little tobacco, a little beer, a little cake, they’re all okay. If you smoke a pack a day or drink a bottle of whiskey or eat a whole cake, then you get sick.”

Her enormous topaz eyes rested on his face. “You’re my father, aren’t you?”

Luke held her gaze. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Are you mad at my mother?”

He took a kitchen match from his pocket and scratched the tip with his thumbnail. Mad? He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply before he spoke. “No,” he lied, to spare the child who had nothing to do with anything between her mother and father.

The door swung open and Jessie pushed outside, a swirl of color and glitter and fragrance. Luke saw her spy him and Giselle cozily talking together on the sidewalk; then he watched as she planted her feet and crossed her arms in a fighting posture. Squatting as he was, Luke was at a disadvantage.

There was also the small matter of his breath, which seemed to have deserted him.

Damn. He searched for his fury. She’d hidden from him for eight years, not only herself, but her daughter. There should be nothing but fury in him.

He had loved this woman once with an almost scorching intensity. Seeing her again so suddenly unnerved him, tangled him up inside like a can full of rubber bands.

How could anyone remain so unchanged? She was as beautiful as she had been the first time he’d seen her, almost twelve years ago. It was a beauty as wild and tender as the stubborn roses that grew by the sea in her father’s California garden. Her skin was pale and pure, her hair a rich chestnut that spilled in abundance over her shoulders, catching around the rise of one breast as if in a caress.

But it was her eyes that had bewitched him the first time, so many years ago, the same extraordinary eyes her daughter had inherited—eyes the color of the first golden fingers of morning sunlight. They bewitched him again now.

“Come on, Giselle, let’s go,” she said, and turned.

Luke was on his feet instantly. “Jessie,” he called in a harsh voice.

She whirled, ready to battle. He could see it in her stance, in her fisted hands, in the blaze of her eyes. She was scared stiff and as unsettled as he, but battle she would. “What?”

“You can’t just walk away.”

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “Can’t I?”

That brought his fury rushing back, clean and pure as a mountain stream. “Well,” he said quietly, “I guess you can. You’ve done it before.”

She just looked at him.

He crushed the stub of his cigarette under the heel of his boot, exhaling in an effort to curb his anger. “I’m asking you not to.” He touched Giselle’s hair in wonder, and she looked up at Jessie with hope, a hope and pleading that broke his heart.

Jessie saw it, too. Luke saw her swallow—and for an instant, he felt pity for her. He and Giselle had nothing to lose, everything to gain. For Jessie, quite the opposite was true. “Giselle,” he said quietly, “give me a minute with your mother, all right?”

“I don’t want a moment with you, Luke,” Jessie whispered fiercely, but Giselle had already skipped away.

He set his jaw. “Looks to me like you got caught red-handed, me and her in the same place at the same time.”

She refused to look at him.

“Look, Jessie, we can let sleeping dogs lie or we can have a bloody, screaming fight in the middle of the street. I don’t really give a damn about the past, but you can’t expect me to just walk away from my only child without a second glance.” He crossed his arms. “Be fair.”

“Fair!” She spat the word.

Light glowed like wine in the rippling fall of her hair, danced like moonlight over her nearly translucent skin. Luke could smell her perfume, a deeply exotic mix of frangipani and sandalwood and something he couldn’t name. It made him dizzy. “Well, maybe fair is the wrong word,” he admitted.

Her gaze, frightened and wary, met his. Luke felt the impact as a fist to his gut and he glanced away. “I’m sober now, Jessie,” he said, looking at a piece of mica caught in the sidewalk just beyond the toe of his boot. In his ears, his voice was rough.

She didn’t say anything for a long time, and in the silence between them Luke felt a rush of things spring and whirl like dust devils. “I can see that.”

“Just come with me now for a little while,” he urged. “We’ll get a hamburger or something. You’ve had a long time to know her, Jessie. Give me an hour or two.” He licked his lips. “Please.”

For a moment, he thought she would refuse. Her chin jutted stubbornly toward the mountains. Suddenly, she capitulated. “All right. But only an hour.”

He found his gaze on the curve of her cheek, at once intimately familiar and completely strange to him. A sword of that old, familiar grief stabbed his gut. In a harsh voice, he asked, “You want to go in my truck?”

“We’ll just follow you.”

In the instant before she turned, Luke thought he glimpsed a tear.

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(Excerpt)

by
Barbara Samuel

One

D
aniel Lynch drove back to the ranch in a roar of spitting gravel, unable to fathom what had just happened. For nine months, he’d been waiting for this day, April 30, when he could legally claim the land that was his birthright.

For almost a year, he’d lived at El Durazno Ranch, refurbishing the abandoned adobe farmhouse, clearing irrigation ditches of tumbleweeds, pruning the peach trees that gave the land its name. Last June, after determining the peach trees occupying the warm, protected canyon were indeed the mythical Lost Orchard—the only Navajo peach orchard to escape Kit Carson’s burnings—Daniel had paid the two years’ back taxes owed on the property and moved in. All winter he’d been waiting for this day, when he could pay the third year of taxes that was were owed claim the land as his own.

It was his. The orchard had been planted by his great-great-grandmother in the mid-1800s, and members of his family had owned it until prejudice had forced them out. Now Daniel had worked the land for a year; he had begun to understand what it asked of him. He’d fixed the house...

His.

But someone had beaten him to the assessor’s office. By one day. Late yesterday afternoon, Winona Snow, to whom Jericho Snow, the previous owner, had left the land in his will, had paid the current year’s taxes.

Legally Daniel Lynch didn’t have a single recourse. Legally the precious, long-sought land and its orchard belonged to Winona Snow.

Daniel gnawed his lip as he turned into the long drive that led to the farmhouse. Against the whitish desert afternoon light, cottonwood leaves glittered, a dark, gray-green counterpoint to the mountains on the horizon. Below the sturdy branches of the cotton-woods, the farmhouse lay in a pool of cool, inviting shade, the deep porch in shadow.

Daniel cursed again. He hated to lose the fight now. Hated it as he’d never hated anything.

Maybe this woman, the heir to the ranch, had simply become aware that the taxes were in arrears and had paid the current year to maintain her claim on the land. It didn’t mean she wanted to live there; wanted to take it away. If worse came to worst, surely she could be convinced to allow him to live in the house and act as caretaker.

The thought made him feel marginally better. If he could get an address and phone number for her, maybe she’d even be willing to talk about a fair price for the land. At the very least, he had to maintain his temper until he could talk to her.