"Innocent as Sin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lowell Elizabeth)

3

Five years later

Near Phoenix, Arizona

Late March

Thursday

Kayla Shaw walked out of the little adobe house and put the last of her mementos into the Ford Explorer. It wasn’t much of a load, really. Some photos, her grandmother’s prize bridle, her mother’s barrel-racing trophies, her father’s favorite hunting rifle. Small things rich with memories. After work, she’d come back and pack up her clothes.

Technically the place was hers to use for another month, but it felt melancholy to be a tenant rather than an owner.

As Kayla found a safe spot for the small, unframed landscape painting she carried, she remembered her excitement at discovering the piece in a garage sale. It had been just after her parents had died, when she’d been making the difficult adjustment from beloved child to adult orphan. Something in the painting of a predawn forest had whispered to her of time and loneliness and the faintly shimmering hope of a sunrise that might be more imagined than real. When she’d turned the painting over and seen “Maybe the Dawn” written on the back, she’d known she would buy it.

She touched the name slashed in the lower left of the painting. “R. McCree.” The artist had helped her through a bad time. She’d been looking for his-or her-paintings ever since, but hadn’t found any.

Leaning against the cool metal frame of the vehicle’s door, she glanced around at the ten acres of Dry Valley Ranch that had been her home for her whole life. The adobe walls of the house were the dusty color that came of age and Arizona weather. Sun had turned the timber fence of the corral a lovely shade of gray. The lean-to barn looked lonesome and enduring, like a windmill at a remote cattle tank-like the windmill that still supplied water to the house and corrals.

Ten acres of memories.

Sadness curled around her with the cool morning breeze. She hoped the new owner would love Dry Valley as she and her parents had. She hoped, but she didn’t know. She’d sold the ranch to someone she’d never met, never seen, and knew only through his agent.

“Change, change, change,” she said, pushing her dark hair away from her eyes. “Hello, good-bye, hello to something new. And good-bye, always good-bye.”

Despite her lingering sorrow, Kayla knew that selling the little ranch was the right thing to do. The grazing leases on federal lands had lapsed long ago. Without the leases, there was no way to make a living. Even one cow would starve on Dry Valley’s ten acres. The ranch was a tiny piece of desert at the farthest fringe of Phoenix’s urban sprawl. The house was as spare as the land and needed expensive repairs. Yet taxes had steadily risen as the county assessor reappraised the ground for its potential, instead of its reality.

Good-bye, ranch.

Hello, career in private banking.

Too bad she really wasn’t happy in her work. But every request she’d made to transfer out of private banking had been met with a polite, firm refusal.

It was enough to make a girl think of hitting the road.

I’m not a girl. I’m an adult. Lots of people don’t like their jobs, but they suck it up and get the job done anyway.

“Think of tomorrow as going to another continent,” Kayla told herself. “Everything fresh and undiscovered.”

The thought of distant horizons made her restless. Her job as a private banker was demanding, often fascinating, but it didn’t ease her wanderlust.

Okay, so don’t think about new continents and of years backpacking around the globe. I’m an adult now, with an adult’s responsibilities.

Grow up.

Kayla slid into the driver’s seat, made sure that the pile of escrow documents she’d signed earlier wouldn’t spill off the passenger seat, and admired the check clipped to the big folder. As a private banker she’d handled much larger checks, but none of them had been her own. Her clients’ money was just that-theirs, not hers. If she thought of their money at all, it was simply as numbers to be moved from one place to the next.

The check clipped to the folder was hers-$246,407.

Exactly.

Without meaning to, she looked at the battered backpack stuffed into the passenger foot well.

I could go anywhere in the world.

Until the money ran out. Then I’d have nothing.

Grow up.

It was a good chunk of money, but Phoenix’s red-hot housing market would gobble it up and not even burp.

Looking away from the backpack, Kayla started the vehicle. She hoped her next real estate deal would be as clean and easy as this one had been. On the real estate agent’s advice, she’d offered the ranch at a high price, “looking for the market.”

She’d found it, at full price.

The buyer’s agent had handled the transaction with the dispatch of the lawyer he was. She’d gotten her price, subtracted the closing costs and rent for the next month, and driven to the ranch to begin packing.

Today she’d have her own money to deposit in her American Southwest account. It wasn’t the answer to all her problems, but it was a financial security she’d never had before.

Maybe that security would help her to deal with Elena Bertone, the most demanding client in the history of the demanding world of private banking.