Natural Born Trouble Read Free Page B

facts he wanted. He would have been on a plane in a heartbeat, doing what he did best: finding oil and bringing it in, making them all richer.
    Not that he cared all that much about the money. Most of his life he hadn’t had a lot, hadn’t needed much. Now he just wanted to insure that his sons would have a good future, a college education if they wanted it, though getting them through elementary school was proving to be challenge enough.
    At any rate, he would trade the potential profits for the pure adrenaline rush of bringing in a new gusher any day.
    Instead, he was surrounded by paperwork, mounds of it, most of which didn’t matter a tinker’s damn in the overall scheme of things as near as he could tell.
    Oh, how he hated pushing papers around on a desk, he thought, staring irritably at the mostly untouched piles of it still awaiting some action or another. Well, today he’d had enough of it, he concluded, grabbing his jacket and heading for the door. If he hung around another few minutes, he might storm straight back into Jordan’s office and quit, something he didn’t have the right to do with two kids depending on him. The twins were the reason he’d made the move to Los Pinos in the first place. He had to give this major life-style overhaul a chance to work for their sakes.
    Twenty minutes later, he had the top on the classic convertible down, the car radio was blaring a George Strait tune and he was curving down the winding driveway to the white, ranch-style house he’d bought on the outskirts of Los Pinos. There was a little dip inthe land, then a rise. His house was nestled in that suggestion of a valley, surrounded by the pines for which the town had been named. A trickle of water that passed for a creek was the north boundary of the property. It looked like a picture-book image of what a home ought to be. He’d bought it at first sight because of that. It had triggered some sort of subliminal yearning within him.
    Not that he had much experience with real homes. He’d bounced from foster home to foster home as a kid, a born troublemaker, according to those in the system who’d had to deal with his belligerence.
    Used to being on the move, he’d seen no need to settle down once he’d grown up. Oil had been a way to stay on the go and pile up a decent bankroll.
    Given his total lack of experience with lasting relationships, he probably never should have married, but Caroline had convinced him that they could make it work. When she’d been whispering in his ear late at night, when her magical hands had been busy moving over him, he believed almost anything that came out of her mouth.
    Unfortunately, she hadn’t counted on his refusal to quit wandering wherever the excitement took him. At first, she had gone with him, but once the boys had come along, she’d insisted on staying in one place. A few years of that and she’d gotten lonely and frustrated. When he was home, there had been more fights than loving.
    A few months back, she had walked out, claiming that she’d had the twins to raise all alone for most of the past eight years, now he could see for himself how much fun it was. He could call her when he’d putin equal time and maybe they would work out a new arrangement.
    Duke wasn’t counting on it. He figured the divorce papers he’d received in the mail almost immediately pretty much countered any hopes he might have been harboring that things would eventually return to normal.
    Even so, for a solid month he’d tried to pretend that nothing had changed. He’d convinced himself that he could go right on working crazy hours, taking off at the drop of a hat. Reality had slammed in when the fourth housekeeper in as many weeks quit in a huff.
    Just in case the message wasn’t plain enough, Zachary broke his arm and Joshua brought home a report card that suggested he hadn’t cracked a book since his mother left.