The Tycoon (44 page)

Drake’s memory spiraled backward. He had taken psychology in college. He must have studied co-dependency, but at the moment, nothing solid registered.

“Now that I’m away from the ranch,” she said, “I’m finally getting over those years and learning to live with his absence from my life.” She blew her nose and coughed and cleared her throat. “Unfortunately,” she muttered sourly, “the jackass still has the power to talk me into just damn near anything, even things that are out of character for me.”

And from out of the blue, Shannon Piper popped into Drake’s thoughts and the realization

that she had driven him to behave in an uncharacteristic way. Each get-together he’d had with her had been more bizarre than the last. Her failing to show up at Stone Mountain Lodge had driven him to get stinking drunk in the bar. When she was half an hour late arriving at his condo, Tuesday night, he had felt like a jealous fool and barely stopped short of interrogating her. He had walked to the jewelry store near his office and spent five hundred dollars on a pen for her when he hardly knew her. She might have already hocked it. And when she had scolded him about not wasting food, he had piled most of the contents of his refrigerator into a damn sack and hauled to the Double-Barrel.

Was Shannon Piper becoming his obsession? His hands tightened on the steering wheel. He made a vow that no woman would ever have control over him or manipulate him the way he had seen his mother maneuver his dad.

“I should’ve gone to Santa Fe with Barron,” his mom said, her nose stuffy from crying. “I just hope it isn’t too late for us to go on that cruise in January.”

Drake’s jaw clenched. The knot in his gut might not un-kink until spring. “Jesus Christ, Mom. You’re thinking about a cruise with your boyfriend after you and Dad upset the whole family and trashed Christmas?”

“I should’ve never believed your father. I should’ve remembered what a lying, cheating philanderer he is. And he’ll never be anything else.”

Drake couldn’t keep from remembering a few things himself, like the morning he and Pic had hauled Dad out of Mona Luck’s house and the shape he was in, and snippets of Pic’s words:
…waltzes him around…telling him she’ll come back, then not doing it…tells him she loves him… keeps living up there in Fort Worth…hanging out with her friends…

“Mom, give it a rest,” Drake said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

He soon pulled into her driveway. “Come inside,” she said. “I’ll make something to eat.”

He killed the engine and turned to her. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this, Mom, but why don’t you and Dad just get a divorce and be done with it? What you’re doing is unfair to everybody. And it keeps the family torn up all the time.”

Her head slowly shook. “I’ll never divorce your father, Drake. And he’ll never divorce me. Neither he nor I can afford it. For that matter, you children can’t afford for us to divorce, either. You know better than anyone how complicated the Lockhart family finances are. What Bill Junior and I have to do is learn to live without contacting each other. He needs to stay out of my life and I certainly need to stay out of his.”

“But he’s not in your life. Not much anyway.”

She didn’t reply, just turned her head to the right and looked out the window.

Drake had always suspected his parents saw more of each other than he and his siblings knew. He leaned forward, seeking eye contact. “Is he? Is he in your life? Is something going on that I don’t know about?”

After a pause, she looked back at him, her gaze direct and daring. “All right, I’ll tell you the truth about myself and about him. Sex was always a big part of our lives. Your father has a powerful libido. I was naïve. I excused his cheating for years by telling myself that one woman simply wasn’t enough for such a sexy man.”

Drake felt a flush of embarrassment on his cheeks. This was more information than he wanted to know about his parents. “Mom, c’mon, I don’t—”

“Be quiet, Son. I’m trying to tell you something you need to know if you haven’t already figured it out. Only in recent years did I face that it isn’t sex that drives Bill Junior to cheat on his wife. What motivates him, Drake, is arrogance and selfishness. The belief that because of who he is, he can have whatever he wants, whenever he wants it no matter who he hurts and he can clean up the mess later with charm or money or connections. That attitude was instilled in him by his own father who was an overbearing ass who rolled over people like a thrashing machine plows through wheat.”

Drake memories of his grandfather included a lot of liquor, loud talk and him constantly telling Grandma to shut up. He didn’t want to sit in his mother’s drive way talking about it on Christmas Day. “Mom, I don’t feel like—

“And I’m going to tell you about Christmas. It isn’t pretty. I had every intention of going to Santa Fe with Barron. I decided to go to the Double-Barrel instead because your father came up here last week and seduced me into it.”

Her head turned and she stared out the windshield  “He made me believe we could have things back like they used to be,” she said bitterly. “I succumbed. He knows how sentimental I am. Where he’s concerned, I’m weak in all areas. And those are the cold hard facts. As I said, he can talk me into almost anything.”

From out of the blue, an understanding came to Drake. Or maybe it wasn’t so unexpected. Maybe it had been present all along and he had ignored it. He sighed. “Damn, Mom. I don’t know where all of this leads.”

She looked at him again, a plea in her eyes. “Please, Drake. Come inside and let me make us supper.”

He was starved, he had to admit. Breakfast had been early and he hadn’t had anything since except eggnog and bourbon. Breakfast at the ranch this morning now seemed like last week. “I’m just going to go home and kick back, Mom. Let’s take your stuff inside.”

On a huge sigh, he pulled on the door latch.

Chapter 26

Daylight. Drake fumbled around his kitchen brewing coffee. He threw in an extra scoop, needing the caffeine jolt. He had left his mother’s house yesterday, come home and gone straight to the refrigerator, only to remember that he had taken most of the food that had been in it to the ranch. He had found some cheese and made a sandwich with stale bread and mayonnaise. After that, mind-numbed, he had watched TV until late, followed by fitful sleep.

He thought he had consigned the memories of his parents’ past battles to a locked emotional closet, but last night, all night, they had escaped and come full frontal. He had been through many a storm between them, but until yesterday afternoon, he had never heard anything like what his mother had said in her driveway. He suspected that brief conversation hadn’t even scratched the surface of their problems. Some psychologist could spend the rest of his career trying to straighten them out.

He wondered how his attitude toward marriage—and that of his siblings—might be different if his parents had been different. Observing his parents, it was hard to have positive thoughts about settling down with one woman.

He rummaged through the refrigerator again looking for food. Today being Monday, usually his housekeeper would come and do the grocery shopping, among other things, but with today also being the day after Christmas Day, he had given her the day off.

He had no desire to dress and trip off to some restaurant for breakfast and this morning, he was in no mood for stumbling through culinary endeavors. If he had the right woman in his life, she would know how to deal with this situation. She would simply cook something edible.

In the freezer, he found a box with a picture of sausage and scrambled eggs on it. While it turned in the microwave, a visual of his mother from years back came to him. When he, Pic, Kate and Troy were kids, she had been on their asses constantly….
Just because you’re a Lockhart doesn’t mean you can do this or do that…Being a Lockhart doesn’t make you immune from common courtesy….Just because your father said you can do it doesn’t make it right…. blah, blah, blah…

She’d had a different mindset from dad who was of the if-it-feels-good-do-it crowd. According to Silas, Mom’s parents hadn’t wanted her to marry Bill Lockhart, even though she was pregnant. Drake didn’t know why the Picketts felt that way and might never know, but he suspected that they, like most of the citizens of Treadway County, believed everything Bill Lockhart Senior did was crooked, so they believed the same about his son. And they were intimidated by the Lockhart wealth and influence.

Even now, after all these years, his mother’s family had little to do with her. Drake had admired and respected from afar his only uncle who had been a fighter pilot.

He couldn’t remember his mom ever having many friends. He had sometimes thought of her as floating in a moat, with the castle on one side and a barren field on the other. He now could see that back when he and his siblings were kids, though she appeared to be wrapped up in Dad and the family, a part of her must have been lonely. He related. He didn’t have a long roster of friends himself. His company and the family’s business consumed most of his waking hours.

Bottom line, Mom had worshipped Dad, but never felt quite good enough to be his wife, even after giving birth to his three children. Drake believed that until Barron Wilkes, she had never slept with another man.

The coffeemaker
pinged
and he poured a mug, his thoughts switching to his dad. Drake adored him. The man had always had an aura. Always had more energy, more stamina, more

charisma about him than anyone else Drake knew. He filled a room. Until recent years, Drake himself had been intimidated by the sheer size of his dad’s personality.  As far as he was concerned, though his dad had might have failed as a husband, he couldn’t have been a better father. With a steady, but gentle hand, he had raised his children to be good citizens.

Pic, Kate and Troy felt the same. None of them, including himself, had ever given much thought to the disconnect between their love for him and the way he had abused their mother’s affection and disrespected her as his wife.

It had taken some time, but Drake had eventually come to see that her leaving him was the only thing she could figure out to do. He was sure he was the only one of her children who came close to understanding that.

The microwave chimed, halting his musing. He took out his breakfast and carried it and a fork to the table. He sat in the same chair he had sat when he and Shannon had had dinner on Tuesday night and an image of her sitting to his right came to him. She was different from any of the women he knew. She was down-to-earth. So far, he had seen no evidence that she wanted to manipulate him or use him.

He wondered what her Christmas had been like. Not like his, for sure, though it might have been unpleasant if she shared it with her sister and brother-in-law, whom she seemed not to like very much. Fucked-up family was something they had in common. They should have spent Christmas together, just the two of them.

Not enjoying either breakfast or his thoughts, Drake picked up his mug and left the table. He ambled over to the window wall and looked out. The streets were deserted, but the sun was shining and the daytime temperature still hovered in the sixties. With such good weather and the holiday continuing through today, no doubt activity would pick up later. Off-work people would drift into downtown to go to the movies or eat in the restaurants. The downtown merchants would have a good day.

As Drake sipped at his coffee, he couldn’t keep his thoughts from swerving back to his parents. He believed Dad when he said he was miserable without Mom and wanted her to return to the ranch. But if he ever persuaded her to do it, would he consider the war won and go back to carousing, staying away from home days at a time and having strange women show up unexpectedly on his doorstep? Mona Luck wasn’t the first.

Feeling a profound surge of sympathy and warmth toward his mother, Drake returned to the bedroom, picked up his phone and called her. “Hey, Mom, whatcha doing?”

“Just getting up and around. How are you this morning?”

“I’m good, Mom”

“I’m so glad the holiday is over. Next year will be different. I will not be at the Double-Barrel. Have you spoken to your brothers? Or Kate?”