The Tycoon (53 page)

“I learned to play, too. Turned out I enjoy the game. It has nothing to do with her. Golf is a head game. And I like that. I’m pretty good at it.”

She couldn’t keep from grinning. “I’ll bet. Something tells me your whole life is just one big head contest.”

“I’m a competitive guy. Can’t help it.”

“So now you like golf, but you don’t trust women. Is your ex still married to this golfer?”

“Must be. I haven’t heard otherwise.”

“Are your families still friends?”

“Not anymore. Her parents quit ranching and leased out their place. Moved to Arizona.”

“Why? Texas wasn’t hot enough for them?”

“The guy she married lived in Arizona. She’s an only child. Her folks wanted to be near her, so they moved there, too. Pic says she hasn’t been back to Drinkwell since they left.”

“You still keep up with her?”

“No. It’s just local gossip you hear.”

But Shannon wondered. Being with someone six years was longer than she had ever been with anyone, including the guy she married. An unexpected emotion surged within her. Possessiveness. Dark and powerful. She wished she hadn’t questioned him about his ex-fiancé. Now he might be thinking of her. Shannon wanted all of his thoughts and desires focused on Shannon Piper. She clutched the sides of his head between her palms and kissed him fiercely. “Make love to me,” she whispered.

Perhaps she was manipulative after all.

****

The next day, the final round began. The golf course was a painting of brilliant green grass, turquoise ocean and blue sky. In a perfect balmy temperature, Shannon was in paradise with her prince. Life had never been better. They would fly home tomorrow and the fairy tale would end.

They followed the leaders quietly. He often reached for her hand, watched from behind her with his hands on her shoulders and her leaning back against him. Sometimes one of the golfers would stop, shake hands and exchange a greeting with Drake.

That evening, they had more conversation over exotic drinks with Drake’s sophisticated friends and acquaintances. Then they returned to the condo. The day, the entire trip had Shannon in a state of euphoria. Her chest almost wouldn’t hold all of the emotions swirling inside it. She couldn’t keep from thinking that this was probably as close to a honeymoon as she had ever known. Or would ever know.

They had already undressed when Drake said, “Want to walk on the beach before we go to bed?”

“How could I leave Hawaii without walking on a beach? Will anyone see us?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good.” She picked up her thin lacy bathing suit cover-up and pulled it on. “I always wanted to walk on a beach naked.”

He grinned. “With that thing, you’re pretty close.”

In creamy moonlight, they strolled holding hands, the soft sand oozing between her toes. Covered only by her bathing suit cover-up, she felt wicked and free in a way she couldn’t recall ever feeling before. A naked native on a tropical island.

A gentle breeze touched her face and ruffled her hair, made her nipples peak. The lushness of their surroundings swallowed her up, as if she had entered another woman’s body or some other alternate reality. For a long while, they walked in silence.

This seemed like the perfect moment to tell him thank you, but that cranky alter ego spoke up.
What are you thanking him for? He’s getting what he wants from you. Isn’t unlimited sex enough?

She shunned that cynical voice because her better angel believed he wanted more than that from her. He had told her so.

“Having a good time?” he asked at last.

“Me having a good time? You forget what a hick I am. This trip has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me.”

“You’ve made it special for me, too.”

Another statement that sent a thrill all the way to her toes.
Why?
she wanted to ask, but didn’t want to sound like a needy fool. “Remember what we talked about New Year’s Eve, about trying to make this work and being open and honest?”

“Hm.”

“Since you shared something honest with me about your engagement, I think I should tell you I’ve sort of dropped the ball about myself. I think I owe it to you to let you know something about me.”

“I’m all ears. I’ve been trying to find out about you since the first night we were together.”

She didn’t say anything right away, trying to sort through just how much she wanted to reveal about the person she had been. “I’m far from being a perfect person.”

“Then you’re just like me and everyone else I know. You said you used to be a free spirit. I’m guessing you still are.”

“Maybe a little.” On a phony laugh, she bumped his arm with her shoulder. “Like going to that Realtors’ Christmas party where I was way out of my league and going home with a man I didn’t know. That was the old Shannon Piper, for sure.”

“Hmm. And I thought it was Sharon Phillips. How would I have met you if you hadn’t done it? I don’t leave much to chance, but I do believe there’s a reason for everything that happens.”

“As in fate?”

He shrugged, then dropped her hand and looped an arm around her shoulder, pulled her close to his side.

“Anyway,” she said, “I hate having things hanging, so I’m just going to tell you. Mostly because I don’t ever want to face the day that someone else tells you.”

“I’m listening.”

She drew a deep breath. “I was married once. And I was pregnant.”

She glanced up at his profile, seeking a reaction, but she could see only his profile in the moonlight. He didn’t reply, as if he was waiting for her to tell the rest of the story, so she blundered on. “I got pregnant when I was seventeen. I got married and never finished high school.”

“You have a child?” Shock was not what she detected in his question. Curiosity was closer to what she heard.

“No. I had a miscarriage about a month after we got married. The whole thing was…stupid. Just stupid.”

They reached the condo’s wooden deck and stepped up onto it. She sank to a lounge chair, glad for the shadows while she dragged out her dirty laundry. He sat down in the chair beside her and picked up her hand.

“After all of the commotion my getting pregnant caused and the hurry-up wedding we had, we decided to stay married. We didn’t have a plan for the future, but I did make sure I got to a doctor and got birth control pills. I sure didn’t want to find myself pregnant again.”

“You don’t like kids?”

“It wasn’t that. I wasn’t very bright back then, but I was smart enough to figure out that neither one of us had any business being a parent. We were kids ourselves.”

“Good instincts, huh? We have that in common, don’t you think?”

She glanced across her shoulder at him, still couldn’t clearly see his face in the shade of the deck. “Really? You think so?”

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. “We have more in common than you think. Finish your story.”

“It has a predictable ending. We stayed married a couple of years, then we gave up and got a divorce. It became final on my twenty-first birthday. There. End of story.”

And she intended for it to be the end. No way did she want to talk about her struggling single days in Fort Worth and her various affairs. The marriage and divorce were what, in the far reaches of her mind, she had worried about his discovering. There were
public records
of those events. They sat in more silence for a few beats.

“You left out the part between your twenty-first birthday and now,” he said.

“I’d have to be a little drunk and in a really bad mood to talk about that. I call those years the lost years.”

He interlaced their fingers. “Okay, skip that. So tell me about your husband. You didn’t love him?”

I’ve never loved anyone but you
, she wanted to say, but feared where vocalizing that might take them.

“That’s as good an explanation as any,” she said instead. “He was two years older than me. Rode a motorcycle. Wore leather clothes and earrings. I thought he was too cool. We dated almost from the time he enrolled in school.

“When I got pregnant, he was already out of school, but he didn’t have a job. There weren’t any jobs in Camden, so we moved up to Fort Worth to set up our happy home. We bounced from one minimum wage gig to another. It took both of us to make enough to pay rent and eat. If I had actually had a baby, I don’t know what we would’ve done. After a few months, we started fighting. And then we started fighting a lot.”

“What about?”

“Everything. Kevin felt trapped being married. And so did I.”

“That’s his name? Kevin?”

“Kevin Barton. He was unstable, but I didn’t realize it until we started sharing the same apartment. I sure couldn’t see it when I was a high school kid. Back then, I thought the off-the-wall stuff he did was daring and cute. Later, I learned he was bi-polar.

“Was he abusive?”

“He didn’t beat me up or anything like that, but he had a mean streak and a bad temper and he drank a lot. Plus, he was a lot bigger than me. And really unpredictable. He scared me. If we’d stayed married, he might’ve gotten around to physical abuse.

“Even if he hadn’t had the affliction of being bi-polar, he’d never learned how to behave or how to deal with something that didn’t go his way. He was sort of one of society’s throwaways. His mother did drugs and he’d lived in and out of foster homes. He didn’t talk about it much, but I always wondered if he’d been abused himself.

“Anyway, it didn’t take long for me to figure out I wasn’t in love with either him or with marriage. And his problems were just too big for us to deal with.”

“You didn’t have any help? Parents?”

She shrugged. “He just had his mother and she couldn’t help herself, much less anyone else. I was alone, too, for all practical purposes. My dad and mom got a divorce when I was around ten. Then my dad passed on when I was fifteen. My mother and I just never got along. She’s a lunatic. A hippie a generation too late. Too self-centered to ever rely on. Soon after we got married, she moved to California with some guy my sister and I didn’t even know. She’s still there. But I have to say, as nutty as she is, she’s head and shoulders above Kevin’s mom.

“So you see, Drake—and I guess this is what I’m really trying to get around to
—
I’m in that white trash category. Or at least I was until, thanks to my grandmother, I moved back to Camden and started over. That’s the deep-down reason my grandmother means so much to me. She didn’t do much for me or Colleen when we were kids, but after I got grown, she saved me.”

He lifted their interlocked fingers and kissed the back of her hand again. “I don’t recall that I’ve ever used that term ‘white trash.’”

Perhaps not
, she thought. But after hearing her tacky story, he probably wondered what kind of mess he had gotten himself into. But he was making such an effort to get down on her level, she couldn’t keep from laughing. “It’s okay, Drake. I’ve used it myself.”

“I’m serious. I don’t pigeon-hole people that way. I believe we’re all what we want to be. We’re all what we
work
to be.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Just a lot of people don’t work to be anything.”

“That’s my point. Stop and think about it. Out of ashes, so-to-speak, you chose to educate yourself and become a successful businesswoman. You could’ve continued to live a life of low expectations and making bad choices, but you didn’t. An inner strength drove you to do what you instinctively knew was the best thing. The first time we talked, I saw that in you. I have the same instinct. We’re lucky that way.”