The Tycoon (2 page)

He pulled himself together and tried to sound as if he hadn’t been running a marathon. “Hey, baby,” he said into the receiver.

Breath-hitching sobs came at him from the other end of the line. His gut kinked. He pushed Gretchen’s hand away, swung his feet to the floor and sat up. “Kate. Baby, what wrong?”

She launched into an explanation, but her speech was no more coherent than the Swedish that came out of Gretchen’s mouth.

He leaned forward and braced his elbow on his thigh. “Calm down, sweetheart. And tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s Mama and Daddy, Drake. They had this big fight and Mama’s moving out.”

Drake frowned. “She’s what?”

“She’s moving away from the ranch.”

Jesus Christ.
His parents, the king and queen of melodrama. They were no strangers to loud, cussing brawls.
“Why now? It’s not like she hasn’t been pissed off at him before.”

“But it’s different this time. She went to town to get her hair done and she heard the women in the beauty shop talking about Daddy sleeping with Marilyn Bilberry. You know how much Mama hates her.” Kate began to cry and her voice began to hitch again. “Mama says that’s the...the last straw. She’s through...with him.”

“Calm down, sweetheart,” Drake said again, closing his eyes and rubbing his forehead with his fingers. “I can’t understand what you’re saying when you’re so upset.”

Kate gained control of her voice. “She told Daddy she hopes he doesn’t forget that she raised his bastard son, because it’s the last thing she’ll ever do for him. Oh, Drake, I’m just glad Troy wasn’t here to hear her say such a mean thing about him.”

Drake never thought of their half brother as a bastard. “She’s just pissed off again, right? She doesn’t mean it.”

“Yes, she does, Drake. She’s bought this big house in Oakwood in Fort Worth. Nobody even knew she’d done it. She’s been sleep—sleep...dating some real estate agent up there.”

At that, Drake’s eyes popped wide. He couldn’t imagine his mother sleeping with anybody, not even his dad, though they had three kids. “Where’s Dad now?”

“At his desk in the den. He’s got a bottle of Wild Turkey and his forty-five. A moving van came and picked up most of our furniture and he shot the tires out from under it. Then he threatened to shoot the driver and Mama both.” She broke into sobs again. “Now—now he says he’s go—going to shoot himself.”

Drake had been refereeing his parents’ upheavals since he was a teenager, had largely become immune to them. This one didn’t sound much different from some of the others. He got to his feet. Cradling the phone against his ear with his shoulder, he pulled on his shirt. “He didn’t

hurt anyone, did he?”

“No. But he scared that poor van driver and his helper to death. And now his truck’s stuck in the driveway. Mom took the van people to town to get the sheriff. The driver wants Daddy arrested, Drake. He says his company will bring charges against him.”

Drake wasn’t worried about Bill Lockhart Junior being arrested in Treadway County, nor about charges being brought against him. The sheriff knew who had handed him his election to office. While the arrest of their father might be unlikely, the thought of the possibility still brought a new knot to Drake’s gut. “Are you there all by yourself? I assume Pic’s taken a powder.”

Since Drake had moved to Fort Worth, conflict resolution had been left to his younger brother, Pic, who still lived in the ranch house. More often than not, Pic handled the various eruptions by getting into his truck, driving to town and staying at his girlfriend’s house until the tempest passed.

“He’s here.” Kate sobbed again. “He’s scared Daddy really might do something crazy….And Jordan’s here.”

At that news, Drake’s jaw clenched. “Kate, stop crying. What’s Jordan Palmer doing there?”

“I ca—called him...and he came down…from Fort Worth.”

Jordan Palmer would slit his own mother’s throat for a dollar. Drake
had
to get to Drinkwell. He yanked up his pants, stuffing in his shirttail. “He has no business being there. This is a family matter.”

“He’s my fiancé, Drake. He practically
is
family.”

Drake rolled his eyes.
Shit.
He had never figured out his little sister’s attraction to a flakey guy ten years older than she was. Kate had met him hanging out with the cutting horse crowd. Drake was surprised Pic hadn’t already run his ass off. “Okay, okay, but—”

“You can come home, can’t you? Mama always listens to you. And the sheriff will listen to you, too.”

Probably true. Drake knew he was his mother’s favorite son as well as the reluctant family arbiter. And he’d had conversations with the sheriff before. “I’m on my way, Kate. The weather’s a mess, but I think we can still fly out of here. I’ll find my pilot. I’ll call you back if he says we can’t.”

He disconnected, dropped the phone on the bed, He hadn’t yet removed his jeans, so he straightened them and hooked his belt. His companion, posed on the bed with one knee cocked and bent, watched him. She looked up at him, no longer smiling. “You are leaving?”

“I’ve got to go.”

She let her cocked knee fall wide, exposing her sex, pink and glistening with moisture.

He paused to look, tension straining low in his belly. “I’ve really got to go, darlin’.”

“You do not know what you miss.” She slid her middle finger in and out of her mouth, then moved it down and began to stroke herself, her eyes all the while giving him a lazy-lidded invitation.

He shook his head and turned away, trying to clear his mind. He picked up his wallet and shoved it into his back pocket. “Stay here if you want. The room’s paid for. Checkout time’s around noon tomorrow.” The unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s sat on the bedside table, still in its brown sack. “And keep the whiskey,” he added.

She flounced off the bed and started for the bathroom. “Asshole,” she spat. “I do not like American whiskey.”
Crash!
She slammed the bathroom door.

While disturbed by her being so angry, Drake didn’t have time to deal with it today. He puffed his cheeks and blew out a long breath. Then he picked up his phone, reattached it to

his belt, picked his coat off the floor and shrugged into it. He snagged the duffel he had already packed in anticipation of tomorrow’s early morning departure and hooked it over his shoulder.

He made one quick perusal of the room and let himself out, locking the door behind him. As much as he hated to leave the hot and gorgeous Gretchen, at the moment, nothing else was as important as quashing the latest crisis at the Double-Barrel Ranch in Drinkwell, Texas. No way would he let his little sister battle it alone.

Chapter 2

Camden, Texas

Seven Years Later...

On a forty-four degree Monday morning after the long Thanksgiving weekend, bundled up to their earlobes, Realtors Shannon Piper and Kelly Thompson stood outside Kelly’s SUV staring at the object of Shannon’s greatest desire—a weedy 500 x 450-foot corner tract of land at the edge of the city limits of Camden, Texas. A huge FOR SALE sign towered in the middle of it, touting in bright red letters the name of a Dallas real estate company and a phone number.

“My God. It’s finally for sale.” Kelly’s breath made little vapor puffs in the air.

Shannon’s excitement had vaulted the minute she had seen the sign. She scarcely noticed the cold north wind that ruffled tendrils of her hair and made her eyes tear. She had waited so long for this 5.17-acre tract, this postage-stamp-size corner, this diamond in a golden crown, to come on the market. Because adjoining it on two sides were three other parcels directly in the path of Camden’s growth pattern—roughly thirty acres—that Shannon already owned outright or was buying.

Kelly, as well as all three of Shannon’s other teammates, and even the receptionist at Piper Real Estate Company, knew how desperately Shannon needed to own this five acres. It would square up a thirty-five-acre parcel and amp up the value of the total package.

A crumbling vacant house almost hidden by huge old live oak trees hunkered in the far corner of the largest piece. This parcel had been a small farm many years back. It had been the most expensive of the three properties Shannon had already bought. She’d had to use most of her business emergency fund as a down payment. At one point, she considered fixing up the house to rent and offset the monthly payments. She gave up the idea after calculating that the costs to make it livable rendered the rental option unfeasible. Thus, she had been making the payments out of her skimpy income.

“Should we walk over it?” Kelly asked.

Shannon would love to walk out onto the property and, as she had done many times, let her imagination bask in the delight of selling it to a Walmart or a Costco or a Target. But she and Kelly both had on high heels and the ground was wet from the past weekend’s rain.

She shook her head. “No need. I’ve already walked over it a dozen times. Believe me, I know every little bump and swale.”

“I wonder why they listed with a Dallas broker,” Kelly complained. “Why wouldn’t they have listed with
us
? We’d do a better job than an out-of-towner.”

As the owner of Piper Real Estate Company, Shannon appreciated Kelly not being a passive agent who sat at her desk and waited for the phone to ring. “We aren’t associated with a national chain,” she replied. “And we aren’t part of the big boys’ club.”

Kelly huffed a laugh. “What club is that? It sounds naughty.”

“Commercial Realtors. They’re a breed all their own. And they’re worse than naughty. Most of the ones I’ve met are snobs. They look down their noses at us residential agents.”

Busy pressing the information from the sign into her phone, Shannon’s thoughts traveled to where they always did when they came to this five acres. If she could bring a major retailer to Camden, she would finally be considered a real player in the real estate game. The company she had started in an abandoned store that belonged to a friend of her grandmother’s would become
the
real estate office to call in Camden, for both buyers and sellers. She and her agents would

never be beggars again in a profession that ate its young.

“The owner lives in Dallas,” she said. “He’s a speculator. I tried to buy it from him before, but he wouldn’t sell.”

“You know him?”

“No, but I’ve talked to him on the phone.”

“Do you know how much he’s asking?”

“He would never say. A lot, I suspect.” Shannon couldn’t keep her mouth from tipping into a huge grin. “But then, that’s what negotiation is all about, isn’t it?”

Kelly grinned, too. “You got it. Does he know you own all the property around it?”

“If his agent is worth his salt, he’s researched the neighboring properties. So it’s my guess that he does.”

When Shannon and Kelly had seen the new FOR SALE sign, they had been on their way to evaluate the sales potential of an upscale home Kelly wanted to list. Homes valued at a quarter-million and up were Piper Real Estate’s specialty. Shannon and her team diligently cultivated such homeowners and homebuyers. With Kelly being a newcomer in Camden and the newest member of the Piper Team, Shannon took pains to assure her how much she valued her efforts to bring new business into the office. She turned her attention to her now. “Do you think your house would wait until this afternoon? Of course we can go now if someone’s expecting us.”

“Oh, any time’s okay,” Kelly replied. “The owners aren’t home. I’ve got their key. We can take care of this five acres first.”

“Let’s get back to the office then,” Shannon said, turning and opening the SUV’s passenger door. “We’ll go look at your house after lunch.”