My Man Pendleton(12)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

“What the hell were you thinking to pass off the Louisville Temperance League to me?” he demanded of his father, seated nearby with his own laptop, also working late.

His father glanced up and frowned. “What do you mean, what was I thinking? It makes perfect sense for you to be the one who deals with them.”

“What if they find out about…” Holt dropped his gaze down toward his coffee again. “About my history?” At his father’s rough chuckle, he snapped his head back up again. “I’m serious, Dad. You might think it’s no big deal that the second-in-command of one of Kentucky’s biggest distilleries is a recovering alcoholic, but there are other people who might use the information in a way that is, shall we say, not sporting? And that could affect us all.”

His father grimaced. “Nobody knows better than I do what your… condition… has caused this family.”

This time Holt was the one to chuckle, but there wasn’t an ounce of good humor in the sound. “No, Dad, I think I can safely say that I do know better than you.”

His father glared at him. “I’m no more anxious for anyone to learn about your past than you are. All I’m saying is that, your perception of temperance being what it is, you can keep an open mind better than I could, and you’ll certainly be more tolerant of these people than anyone else would be.”

“Don’t count on it.”

His father uttered an exasperated sound. “Just take care of it, all right? And don’t screw up.”

“Yeah, right.” Holt shook his head and sipped his coffee and wondered what he’d done lately to piss off his father. Hell, usually Kit was the one who was the focus of all of the senior McClellan’s miscreant tendencies.

As if reading his mind, his father said, “So. What did you think of Pendleton?”

The quick change of subject jerked Holt out of his reverie, and he was thankful for the interruption. “He’s all right. But I don’t know why you think you’ll have success with him when none of the others have worked out.”

His father sipped his Bourbon slowly. “Pendleton is different.”

“In what way? Other than the fact that he left the house tonight without a food stain on some part of his person.”

“I’m not sure. I can just feel it. When I interviewed him to take over for Riordan, Pendleton came across as smart. Hungry. Plainspoken. The type to go after what he wants, but who doesn’t put up with any nonsense.” The older man glanced at his son with a knowing smile. “And did you see the way Kit was looking at him all through dinner?”

“Yeah. Like she wanted to strangle him.”

His father smiled. “Exactly.”

“And you think that’s good?”

The elder McClellan nodded. “Damned right it’s good. The way Kit was looking at Pendleton was just the way your mother used to look at me.”

Holt shook his head. “I’m not sure that’s such a good thing, Dad. By the time she died, Mama’d had it with you.”

McClellan, Sr. waved off his son’s concern. “She’d had it with all of us. That doesn’t mean she didn’t love us.”

Holt glanced down into his coffee and said softly, “But she loved Kit best. She always loved Kit best.”

“Kit was Lena’s only daughter,” his father replied softly. “Women always look out for each other.”

“To the exclusion of the rest of the family?” Holt asked, unable to quite mask the bitterness he felt. “Dad, we only have a little over two months to find someone to—”

“Pendleton is going to work out,” his father insisted. “He’s the man for Kit.”

Holt wished he could feel as certain. “You know, we wouldn’t be in this boat now if you’d just left her alone to marry Michael Derringer.”

His father spat out an angry sound. “Michael Derringer was a self-serving, egotistical, gold-digging sonofabitch.”

Takes one to know one, Holt thought.

“He would have made Kit miserable,” his father concluded.

And since when did you ever give a damn about Kit’s happiness? Holt wanted to ask. Aloud, he said, “She seemed happy enough to me when she was with him.”

His father waved him off again as he crossed to refill his glass. “Oh, what the hell do you know about it? Back then everyone seemed happy to you.”

Instead of rising to the bait, Holt steered the conversation back to the task at hand. “Mama changed her will because of what you did.”

“Lena changed her will because of what we all did. You can’t hold me alone responsible. I seem to recall you and your brothers chasing off more than your fair share of Kit’s boyfriends over the years.”

“Yeah, at your insistence,” he pointed out. “And because they were all creeps who couldn’t care less about her. Kit deserves somebody who loves her. Not some jerk who’s only after her money.”

Only problem was, Holt thought now, that kind of somebody had never materialized in Kit’s life. Or if he had, he’d never been given a chance by any of the McClellan men. And now, thanks to that, the McClellan women were having the last word.

“Do you think Mama really thought this was the best way to get us to leave Kit alone so her daughter could get married?” Holt asked his father. “Or do you think she just wanted to get even?”

That seemed to surprise the elder McClellan. “Get even? For the Michael Derringer thing you mean?”

Holt shrugged. “Or something else.”

“What else could Lena have wanted to get even for?”

For starters, how about the fact that you never loved her? Holt thought. And, of course, there was the fact that, where his father was concerned, family always came second to wealth. And on those rare occasions when he did take notice of the family, the old, man always had an obvious pecking order of preference. Even as the clear favorite, Holt had never felt quite comfortable with that. He could only imagine how his mother and Kit—at the opposite end of the spectrum—must have felt.

Not too great, obviously.

“Kit’s not going to go for it,” Holt said. “And I sure as hell hope you have someone else waiting in the wings. Because in two months—”

“Don’t worry about it,” his father interrupted him. “Pendleton is the man for Kit. Bank on it.”

As was invariably the case whenever her father and oldest brother segregated themselves to talk, Kit overheard every word they said. Not by accident, of course. But because she deliberately sought them out to eavesdrop on the conversation. It was a habit she had acquired as an eight-year-old, when she overheard—by accident, that time—her father discussing her performance at Louisville Collegiate Elementary compared to Holt’s performance at Louisville Collegiate High. Holt was a senior that year, and his grades had begun to fall drastically, in direct relation to the rise in his drinking. Kit, on the other hand, was, as always, making straight A’s. And on that day nineteen years ago, her father held her up as an example for her brother to follow, expressed his pride in her as a student.