The Tycoon

by Anna Jeffrey

  He looked at her directly, the crease between his brows a deep dark line. “And this is what I’m here to make a decision about. When Pennington first approached me for seed money, the plan was for the turbines to be made in the USA and employ hundreds of locals. Somewhere along the way, that changed. So now I have to decide if I want to put my family’s money into something that employs damn few Americans in America. My dad and brother have strong feelings about that.”

  “I’ve never heard about the turbines being made in China,” she said.

  “As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the biggest holes in the scheme. I was on board with

  Pennington two years ago. Now I’m not sure where I am. It’s been pestering me for months. I’ve thought about it so much, my perspective is screwed up.”

  She hadn’t expected to ever see him unsure of anything. Was his lack of confidence the source of his anxiety? The longer he talked, the less certain she was how to respond. “How many windmills are they going to build?” she finally asked.

  “Good question. Are they going to cover the whole Texas Panhandle with a forest of windmills? I’m not thrilled about that either. I’d rather see the blue sky without looking through steel columns.”

  “Are they fireproof?”

  “Fireproof?”

  “The windmills. They have wildfires out here. It’s on the news all the time. Thousands of acres at a time. What happens then?”

  “Nothing’s fireproof.”

  “You’re stewing over so many negatives,” she said. “Yet you and your family are leasing your land for the windmills to be built on. You don’t think that’s hypocritical?”

  “I faced up to that a long time ago. Lockharts haven’t survived cattle ranching for a hundred years without being pragmatic. Or opportunistic. These leases have given the Double-Barrel badly needed cash flow.

  “These green energy people are zealots. They’re going to build these friggin’ things no matter what and they have to lease land to put them on. If not from Lockhart Farms, then from somebody else. My family and I figure it might as well be from us. Fortunately for us, in Texas, private land is where the wind blows.”

  She made a little huff of sarcasm. “Aren’t you the cynical one.”

  He gave her a wink. “Have you found a part of the real estate business that’s not cynical?”

  She had no answer for the question, so she dropped the argument. She, too, had given up many ideals, even before she got into home sales where her hard work often became victim to silly squabbles between buyers and sellers over dumb things like toilet seats and towel bars, where hard-earned deals and commissions got wiped out by unscrupulous mortgage bankers or arrogant lawyers. “I know what you mean,” she told him.

  “I wanted you to see this,” he said. “I want your opinion.”

  “Why? And about what? I don’t know anything about all of this.”

  “That’s why I want your opinion. I want to benefit from your gut instincts. Mine are confused.”

  Shannon’s stomach jumped. He had never asked her opinion about his work and for sure, not something that involved his family. She hesitated grasping for a reply. Finally, she found the frank honesty that had served her well in the past. “Well…if it was me, I wouldn’t put a bunch of money behind something I wasn’t a hundred percent sold on. And if your family objects to the turbines being made in China, why get involved? It isn’t like there’s no other place to invest money.”

  He looked at her a few beats, then smiled and gazed out at the horizon. She wanted to say, A penny for your thoughts, but she had already said enough.

  Chapter 37

  When Shannon awoke the next morning, the room was dark and Drake was gone. She knew he had an early meeting with the company that wanted to build more turbines. In China.

  She switched on the lamp and found a note on his pillow: Order room service for breakfast. Back by noon. DL

  After showering and styling her hair, she opened the draperies and let bright sunlight drench their room. She ate breakfast listening to TV news and wondering what was going on in her office back in Camden. She took her time with her makeup, then put on a black sweater and jeans so she could wear the turquoise bear claw necklace Drake had bought her at the rodeo a couple of weeks back.

  They left the hotel and ate a delicious barbecue lunch in a place someone had recommended to him. “Palo Duro Canyon is up the road from here. Ever been there?” She shook her head. “Let’s drive up there,” he said. “I need to think.”

  They motored up to Amarillo and Palo Duro Canyon, another spectacular landscape. They spent the afternoon like every other tourist. As they clung to each other’s hands, moving from one exhibit to another, he wore a grim expression. She could almost see gears grinding in his head. His mind was somewhere else and decisions of some kind were being made.

  That evening, dinner with Robert Pennington, was scheduled at Mr. Pennington’s private club. Shannon put on an outfit she would wear to work—black slacks, a white top splashed with a few crystal beads and a lavender blazer. Lavender was one of her best colors. As she added crystal earrings to her earlobes, Drake came behind her, slid his arms around her waist and kissed her neck. “You look beautiful,” he said softly.

  And his attention made her feel beautiful. She turned in his arms, rose to her tiptoes and kissed his lips. “Thank you, kind sir.”

  At the dinner table, Robert Pennington announced that his daughter would be joining them. An expression Shannon could only define as anxious flitted across Drake’s face. She was as sure as sunrise that the daughter’s presence was unexpected.

  She had heard Heather Pennington’s name, knew she was an engineer like her father. But Shannon was unprepared for the glamorous woman who entered the dining room alone and took the fourth seat at the table.

  Structural engineering might be seen as a man’s field, but there was nothing mannish about Heather. Like Donna Schoonover, she was tanned and long and lean, with the look of hours spent in a gym. She had startlingly blue eyes. Her dark brown, waist-length and straight-as-a-string hair, draped over her shoulder like a shiny silk shawl. Bangs just covered her brows. Tonight she looked striking in sexy, plain but clingy black. Other than being roughly the same age, Shannon and she had zero physical features in common.

  Shannon strained discreetly to check Heather’s left hand, but saw no wedding ring. Alarms sounded. Now she knew the explanation for the odd expression on Drake’s face when he heard the Pennington daughter was joining them for dinner. She also knew without a doubt that Heather was a woman on the hunt. And the man that Shannon was beginning to think of as hers was the prey.

  The woman’s high regard for Drake was as glaring as the nose on her face. She talked only to him, looking into his eyes as if no one else were present. She even openly flirted with him. Her remarks held a teasing intimacy and her behavior toward him revealed that they had shared more than a business acquaintance.

  Shannon couldn’t keep from wondering just how much Heather had had to do with Drake even considering investing in wind turbine manufacturing in the first place. From the first time he mentioned it, Shannon had thought that particular venture was out of his realm.

  Drake kept his cool dude persona, behaving as if he didn’t notice Heather’s wheedling. Either he truly did not or he was a damn good actor. He might be an expert at reading people, but Shannon knew a little about human behavior herself. No man could be as unconscious of a beautiful female’s attention as Drake appeared to be. He was working at it.

  Sitting at the table with him and a woman Shannon was sure had the same carnal knowledge of him as she did, who had no doubt heard him utter the same words of intimacy, was as paralyzing as a straitjacket. Shannon couldn’t keep from imagining them together in bed.

  Time dragged on. The dining room’s walls began to close in and she wondered if she could last through dinner. Anyone could see that Heather had much in common with Drake. She was a graduate of A&M, wi
th a masters in engineering, like her father, she mentioned once. She and Drake traded college rivalry jokes.

  The conversation veered to school days and football games. Shannon had never attended a college football game, had no particular loyalty to any school. For that matter, her only brush with college was night classes she had taken to qualify for the real estate exams and those she continued to take to keep her license active. The evening became ever more tense and uncomfortable, swamping her insecurities.

  At the end of dinner, over coffee and brandy, Drake declined to partner with Pennington Engineering on the wind turbine manufacturing project. Shannon was aghast. Though she had seen his skepticism, she had heard him say nothing that led her to believe he would tack in that direction.

  She had deduced from scattered conversation that the Penningtons expected—and needed—a large amount of money. Their disappointment at not getting it from Drake was palpable. Robert Pennington rose at once and left the table. Snatching up her evening bag and rising, Heather leaned down and spoke near Drake’s ear, telling him she wanted to speak to him privately later.

  “That’s fine,” Drake said to her. “I’ll be back in my office on Monday. Or call me on my cell.”

  His last sentence struck Shannon like a slap. His Blackberry was his business cell phone; his personal phone was “his cell.” Heather Pennington had Drake’s private cell phone number. The one always labeled Unknown Number when a call came from it to Shannon.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Heather said and hurried after her father.

  Drake summoned their waiter and asked for the check. The waiter tried to explain that dinner would be added to Mr. Pennington’s account, but Drake insisted the bill be brought to him. After the waiter agreed and hurried away, Drake looked at her. “I don’t expect a guy to buy dinner after I cut him off at the knees.”

  Shannon nodded robotically. “I understand.”

  She thought the reason Drake had backed out of the deal was because of the turbines being manufactured in China, but she didn’t know that with certainty. She thought he would talk to her about it as well as what he had to discuss in private with Heather, but driving back to their hotel, he remained quieter than usual.

  In the silence inside the SUV, Shannon sought refuge in her own thoughts. . . . Call me on my cell….Call me on my cell….Call me on my cell….The echo wouldn’t stop. Nor would the question of how many other women had his private cell number?

  Staring into the black night, like an arrow shot to her heart, a hard truth struck Shannon. The conversation in Hawaii about trust notwithstanding, he was a thirty-five-year-old rich, good-looking, unmarried guy who had been single all of his life and he hadn’t lived like a monk. Besides being a highly-sexed man, he was a very experienced lover. She pictured a parade of women who had passed through his life—the Donna Schoonovers, the Heather Penningtons, the Tammy McMillans and who knew how many other nameless females ranging from buckle bunnies to career women.

  Even if the Texas Monthly’s “Most Eligible Bachelor” title had been purchased in a PR campaign, eligible was what he was. And desirable. On a list of ideals women sought in a dream man, he conformed to most of them. No matter where she and he went together publicly, there would always be a woman or women who either wanted him or, like Heather Pennington, had already had him.

  Shannon had battled low self-esteem and feeling unwanted her entire life, had only gained a satisfactory level of self-confidence after she became successful in real estate sales. But that achievement had done little for her self-assurance as a woman. The plain truth was, she was too unselfconfident to deal with all that Drake brought to the table. As happy as she was in his company at present, raw instinct told her that in time, she would be miserable.

  Though she asked him no questions, a low-grade anger began to build within her, at herself as well as at him. Him because he had convinced her that he wanted more than just sex from their affair. Herself because she had cast off her own resolve and followed along like the country mouse behind Pied Piper.

  Back in their hotel room, neither of them seemed to be able to get around a giant black cloud that had mushroomed between them. She knew what contributed to her own discontent, but she couldn’t guess what had him so disgruntled. For the first time, when they went to bed, they went to sleep.

  The next morning, they had sex that truly was just sex, ate breakfast, then flew back to Fort Worth.

  On the drive back to Camden, Shannon tried to sort out all that had happened since Tuesday—the desperate, possessive sex on Tuesday night, which had convinced her that something wasn’t right. She still wondered about it. But she had dismissed the question after they had two great days afterward. Then Heather Pennington showed up at dinner and he had changed again. He was a chameleon.

  After Hawaii, like a silly ninny, she had been floating in the clouds, had switched just sex to lovemaking. Now she had to reverse that classification in her mind. If she couldn’t, she had no business continuing to fool around with Drake. Only a naïve and foolish woman would cleave to a relationship with someone whom she could see that other women constantly pursued. It wasn’t that she had no faith—or trust—in Drake, but he was only human. And after all, they had made no firm commitment to each other.

  And into that stew dropped two new observations. Though he had always been charming, generous, affectionate and gentle with her, seeing him on this trip showed her a deadly serious and ruthless side of him. With her own eyes, she had seen him look Robert Pennington in the eye and demolish the man’s plans and perhaps his dreams.

  For the first time in a while, her alter ego piped up: He didn’t get where he is because he isn’t a slick guy who’s too namby-pamby to make the tough calls.

  Indeed. He had the same edgy killer instinct, that same play-to-win-at-all-costs attitude she had observed in a few other competitive and successful people. So far she had seen the latter applied only to his business or issues related to making money, but did it eventually carry over into his personal associations? If it was a part of his makeup, how could it not?

  She believed she knew the answer. If he became tired of her or decided she was in his way, he wouldn’t agonize thirty seconds over dumping her. He would approach her in the same cold-steel way he handled his business. She could be the next Donna Schoonover. But at least Donna had the benefits of a fortune to fall back on. Shannon Piper would have nothing but a broken heart and a business that had gone to hell because she had ignored it. But for Drake, some new—or old—female would be, would always be, waiting in the wings.

  As soon as she reached Camden, as had become a routine, before leaving her car, she sent him a text: Home safe.

  As she was unloading her bags from the Sorrento, a text from him came back: K.

  Sometimes K stood for “Kisses.” Sometimes it simply meant “Okay.” Today, she didn’t know which.

  ****

  Drake shoved his phone into his pants pocket, glad to know Shannon was home safe. He had never liked her driving to and from Fort Worth alone to be with him. He preferred going down to Camden and picking her up himself, but she still didn’t want him to. Nor did she want him to send a car for her. The transportation situation was becoming oppressive.

  He was tired. The trip to Lubbock had taken a toll on him. He hadn’t enjoyed the decision he’d had to make about Pennington Engineering. He flopped into a reclining chair in front of TV, pondering all that had gone wrong with the turbine manufacturing deal.

  The fuck-ups had begun years back when he let his dick get in front of his brain. He had violated his one cardinal rule and let himself get too up close and personal with Heather Pennington. He still wondered how much that relationship had contributed to his ambiguity over the turbine manufacturing project.

  His thoughts drifted to Heather showing up unexpectedly at dinner. Had she done that for spite? Had she known a woman was with him? Shannon was too smart not to have picked up that he and Heather had had a fling. Once, a
long time ago, it had been almost serious between them. He had ended their affair because she had a willful streak and he couldn’t abide a woman attempting to exact what he had been unwilling to give.

  He hoped not to hear from her. No point in rubbing salt into her and her dad’s wounds. But he knew her well enough to know that she would call him. She would try to make him change his mind because that was the way she was. But nothing she could say would cause him to invest family money into something his dad and brother didn’t like and in which he himself had lost more faith every day.

  If it was me, I wouldn’t spend a bunch of money on something I wasn’t a hundred percent sold on. Shannon’s words. And she was right. That blunt, one-sentence opinion had helped him clear his head. Good natural instincts were just one more thing he admired about her.

  He picked up the remote and channel-surfed. He was rarely home during the day on a weekday, so he didn’t know what came on. TV programming didn’t matter because he couldn’t concentrate. Shannon kept popping in and out of his thoughts. She had become his focus much of the time—where he could take her, the things he could show her and do with her, what he could do for her. He loved being with her, loved bantering back and forth with her. She was so open he never had to guess what she was about. They thought alike. He had even started to listen to her ideas and opinions and be influenced by them.

  He no longer questioned how he felt about her. Things had been a little out of sync in Lubbock, which he chalked it up to the tension caused by Tammy’s sudden reappearance in his life, followed by Heather’s appearance at dinner. Women. They drove him crazy. Then there was the stress of dealing with the Pennington deal. He would smooth it over the next time he and Shannon saw each other.

  As all of those thoughts tumbled through his mind, his phone warbled and he keyed into his brother’s call. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “How’d it go in Lubbock?” Pic asked.

  Drake grunted. “Tell Dad that deal’s off. The wind turbine leases with TXE aren’t affected, but I pulled out of the manufacturing deal.”