The Tycoon (36 page)

“But I would have if you’d meant it.”

Oh, God. Had she been that transparent?
She gave another nervous laugh. “Thanks for reminding me how weak I am.”

“I don’t know you that well yet, but I suspect being weak had nothing to do with it.”

She hesitated, letting her aim to be tough go ahead and collapse. “Okay. You got me.” She looked down and fingered the hem of the napkin in her lap. “I felt the attraction, too. I still do. But acting on every wacky impulse that comes up can get you into trouble.”

Stacy halted the conversation by showing up and asking if they needed anything else. Shannon welcomed the interruption and a chance to change the subject. After Stacy walked away, Shannon said,  “I saw your car in the parking lot. It’s a beautiful car. I didn’t hear you say what it is.”

“Aston Martin.”

She didn’t know the exact cost of an Aston Martin, but she suspected it was six digits. “Ah. No wonder you parked so far away. If I owned a car like that, I might carry a plastic bubble to put around it when I parked it somewhere.”

He grinned. “Wanna hear its story?”

“Sure.”

“I was valedictorian my senior year in high school. In Drinkwell, there weren’t that many kids in my class to compete with, but still…”

After what she had read about him earlier, this wasn’t surprising information. She put down her spoon, tilted her head and gave him rapt attention. She would much rather hear personal information about him than eat soup. She already believed he was the smartest man she had ever known personally.

 “…my parents were so proud,” he went on. “I was afraid Dad’s shirts weren’t going to hold his puffed up chest. You know that small town gossip you’re worried about? Everyone in Drinkwell said my dad bought me that honor. I hated people saying that about me. And about him. I got it because I studied and worked my ass off for it.”

He swallowed a spoonful of soup, then continued to talk. “My parents knew I had earned it. One day when I came home from school, a new Corvette was parked in the driveway in front of

the house.” His face broke into a beaming smile. “It was shiny as a diamond and fire engine red. I knew it was for me. I nearly tore the front door off getting into the house.”

“Wow, how nice,” Shannon said, returning to her own soup, and suddenly wondering how it would be to have a father who would reward you with even a small something. As far as she could remember back, even before hers died, he had hardly known she existed.

“What I didn’t know at the time was that before I got there, my dad and mom had a big fight over Dad buying it. I barely got through the front door before Mom said, ‘Do not get used to that car. It’s going back where it came from tomorrow.’ I thought she’d lost her mind.

“Score one for Mom because Dad didn’t offer a word of argument. Sure enough, the next morning, she drove the Corvette back to Fort Worth, I followed her in my old truck and she returned the car to the dealership. I had all I could do to keep from bawling.”

“So you never got over it and now you own a sports car.”

He lifted a finger. “Ah, but the one in the parking lot I bought myself, with my own money. That day, on our way home from the dealership, Mom told me something important, something I want to tell my own kids someday.”

Remembering the engagement photo she had just looked at online, Shannon looked up. “How many kids do you have?”

“None. I’ve never been married.”

A little happy dance erupted in Shannon’s chest. “So what did your mom tell you?”

“She said, ‘Son, you have to understand, our pride in you doesn’t call for an extravagant material reward. It lives in our hearts and always will because we love you, whether you’re the smartest boy in Drinkwell or not.’”

Shannon smiled, liking his mother. “Aww. Your mom sounds like a wise woman.”

He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “I was pretty pissed off at her that day. I pouted all the way back to the ranch. She told me something else I’ve never forgotten. She said, ‘I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t have a sports car. You can have any extravagance you want so long as you earn it and pay for it yourself.’”

He paused a few beats as if waiting for a reaction, but Shannon had no clever remark.

“You see, my mom wasn’t like my dad,” he continued. “She didn’t grow up with the material advantages he did. Her parents—my grandparents—were hard-working blue collar types. My grandpa was a handyman around Drinkwell. He got called on to fix damn near everything. And my grandma cooked in the school cafeteria.

“Dad always wanted to help them financially. He could’ve made their lives easier, but they refused his help. They’re proud, common-sense people. Coming from that environment, Mom saw life in a different way from Dad. Or at least she did back then.”

“You mean she’s changed?”

“She and Dad have been married thirty-five years. I don’t think you could live in the Lockhart family that long without its influence rubbing off on you.”

“Ah, I see,” Shannon said, nodding. But she didn’t see at all. Was something wrong with the Lockhart family?

“So that’s the story of my sports car,” he said. “It’s a prize I gave myself. But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago I thought I’d earned it.”

Thanks to his mother, perhaps he hadn’t grown up a spoiled rich kid after all. “When you opened Lockhart Tower, you believed you had earned it?”

“Not even then. I had some heavy obligations at that time. I didn’t dare declare success until they were settled. Only after the last unit was sold, the deal closed and my debts paid did I

buy that sports car. So now, it’s your turn. Tell me a story about you.”

Most of the Shannon Piper tales of the past were dark, with nowhere near the cheery flavor of his. Nor the happy outcome. She didn’t want to share them. “Don’t know one,” she said.

“I don’t believe you. I’m thirty-five. You must be about my age.”

“Thirty-three,” she said, smiling and wagging her finger at him. “I’m only thirty-three.”

“Whatever,” he said on a laugh. “My point is, you’ve got a story. You own your own real estate brokerage. Not many thirty-three year-old women can claim that. Getting to where you are couldn’t have been easy, especially in a small town. Real estate, whether it’s commercial or residential, is a take-no-prisoners game with a high attrition rate. And the market’s been volatile for several years. Sounds like you’ve got what I call stickability.”

Indeed she had stuck it out, one plodding step at a time—when she had put in eighteen-hour days, working at a job full-time and going to school at night; when she had spent two years listing and selling houses, slogging through mud, dripping through rain, shivering through blue northers, learning everything she could about the business; when she had winged it through sticky-wicket deals involving big city lawyers; every time she had been crushed by the loss of a good listing or a buying customer to a competitor. And when she didn’t know where her next mortgage payment might come from and it looked as if she might lose it all.

“I
have
worked hard,” she said.

“And a story goes with that.”

“When you spend all your time working, you don’t have a life. So, no stories.”

“What about your family? Why do you live with your grandmother?”

“Not much to tell there either. Grammy Evelyn’s eighty-four. She’s spry, but she needs someone. She has only a small income from Social Security. I pay the bills and the taxes and take care of the house and she lets me have a place to live. She owns one of those rambling old houses that’s been designated a Texas historical home. It was built before 1900. Sometimes the upkeep on that thing gets to be a challenge. But so far, I’ve managed.”

She laughed, thinking back to when she first moved back to Camden, into Grammy Evelyn’s home.

“What’s funny?” he asked.

“It must have been, oh, a couple of weeks after I first moved in with Grammy Evelyn, that she got around to telling me she hadn’t been able to pay the taxes for several years and the house was in danger of being seized by the county.

“Oops,” he said.

“It was an oops moment, for sure. I was broke. I had just started working as an assistant to a real estate broker friend of hers. The friend would’ve known what to do, I thought, but I was afraid that if I told her, Grammy Evelyn would be embarrassed.

“I wasn’t making a lot, so I went to the tax assessor’s office and tried to work out a payment plan. But the county’s lawyers had run out of patience with my grandmother. They had no interest in an installment plan. And I had no way to get the money in a lump.

“If the county had taken the house, I could’ve gotten along living somewhere else and I could’ve taken Grammy Evelyn with me, but moving out of her home would’ve been a blow to her. She’s lived there since she first married my grandpa.”

“I know how it is with elderly people,” Drake said. “My dad’s mother is ninety. What did you do?”

“When I couldn’t think of any other solution, I had to go to my sister and brother-in-law and beg them to catch up the taxes. My brother-in-law’s a lawyer here in town. He had the

money to just pay the taxes and be done with it, which he did. But he put a lien on Grammy Evelyn’s house.”

“Why?” Drake asked.

“He and my sister Colleen are afraid that when Grammy Evelyn passes on, she might leave the house to me. They think I’m trying to undermine my sister. The lien was his way of making sure she gets a piece of it. I think they’re in a lather over nothing. I’ve never seen my grandmother’s will, but I doubt if she would leave my sister out.

“Anyway, him doing that pissed me off. Grammy Evelyn didn’t understand what was going on. She worried about it. She was afraid my brother-in-law might take possession of the house at any time and kick her out. I couldn’t make her understand that he couldn’t easily do that.

“And I couldn’t make him see, or care, that he was causing her stress. So I spent almost every extra penny I had for the next two years paying him back and getting that lien lifted. And pretty often, I had to hound him to get him to go to the county clerk’s office and acknowledge that he got the money.

“Nice guy,” Drake said.

A wicked pleasure slunk through Shannon. Gavin would be mortified if he knew she had told something so evil about him to a man of Drake’s status. “Something good came of it, though. As Grammy Evelyn’s told me about a million times, when a window closes, a door opens, or something like that. That experience and her nagging are what got me interested in the real estate business. And here I am. So there’s a story for you.”

“What did you brother-in-law think when you paid him back?”

“I’m not sure he wanted to be paid back. I think he would’ve rather had the lien. He’s controlling.”

“The rest of your family?”

“Um, my dad’s been dead for years. My mom lives in California. And that’s about it.”

She omitted saying that her mother was a fifty-year-old moon child on her fifth live-in to whom she wasn’t married.

“There’s bound to be more,” Drake said. “Everybody wants to talk about himself. Why don’t you?”

She frowned and cocked her head. “Because. Some stories are just better left untold.”

He lifted his chin, his golden-brown eyes alight with mischief. “A woman with a past?”

“Well…I haven’t killed anyone. Haven’t been in prison, if that’s what you might be thinking….Oh, and I haven’t done drugs either. Consumed my share of alcohol, but no drugs.”

Drake’s face broke into a huge, white-toothed smile. “Same here. I partied a lot when I was younger, but I hardly drink at all now.” He picked up his water glass and saluted her. “Someday.”