My Man Pendleton(23)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

“Thank you,” he said.

“No problem,” she assured him. “That’ll be eighteen bucks. And don’t forget to tip your bartender at least fifteen percent. You want I should just charge it to your room?”

He had begun to reach for the glass, but now his fingers hesitated. “Eighteen dollars?” he echoed incredulously. “For one drink?”

She shook her head as she returned the bottle to its shelf. “Pendleton. Honey, sweetie, baby, cookie. That’s Abelour Scotch. You wanna play the resort game, big guy, you gotta pay the resort prices. Don’t you get around much? I mean, where were you brought up? A barn?”

“No, New Jersey,” he responded before thinking. She emitted a sound that was a mixture of disbelief and delight, and he knew at once that Kit McClellan was almost certainly envisioning him as the product of a Bruce Springsteen video, complete with vacant lots, crumbling row houses, factory smokestacks, and Lady Liberty’s backside in the background. “South Jersey,” he felt compelled to clarify.

But all she said in response was, “New Jersey? Really?”

“Yes, really.”

She eyed him with much speculation. “Funny, but I don’t picture you as coming from New Jersey.”

He sipped his Scotch, enjoyed the smoky, mellow flavor, and felt his testosterone levels surging mightily. “Why is that?”

As she considered him in silence, it occurred to Pendleton that for a woman who wasn’t beautiful, Kit McClellan was certainly very attractive.

“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “You just don’t seem…”

“What?”

Her—naked—shoulders lifted and dipped again, but she only shook her head slowly in silence. So he sipped his drink once more, rolling the warm liquid around in his mouth, and focused on Kit McClellan’s striking face as she watched him. Her lips parted softly as he relished the dusky flavor of the liquor on his tongue, and her eyes darkened dangerously when he took his time to swallow it. A hot splash of lightning ignited in his belly, long before the Scotch ever got there.

“Actually,” he said, the word coming out a bit strangled for some reason, “the part of New Jersey I come from isn’t much different from your part of the country.”

Except, of course, he amended, for the funny way of talking people had in Kentucky. For instance, no one in New Jersey had ever asked him if he was brought up in a barn. And he still wasn’t sure which of the half-dozen different pronunciations of “Louisville” he’d heard was correct, although the garbled, nearly incomprehensible version seemed to be the one used most frequently.

For a long, intriguing moment, Kit only continued to stare at him with dreamy eyes, as if she were thinking of something totally unrelated to the conversation at hand. Finally, however, she said, “Funny, but I have trouble seeing you as a product of my part of the country, too.”

This time Pendleton was the one to remain quiet and thoughtful for a bit too long. He gazed down into the depths of the liquid he swirled nonchalantly in his glass, and wondered if he should even bother to clarify any conclusions—whether accurate or not—that the boss’s daughter might be drawing about him.

Ultimately, his curiosity—and surely it was nothing more than that—got the better of him, and he heard himself ask, “Well, then, Miss McClellan, just where do you picture me as coming from?”

That mystified expression cluttered her face once more, and she expelled another nervous chuckle. “I don’t know,” she repeated.

She continued to scrutinize him, and it occurred to Pendleton that she was expending an inordinate amount of energy trying to figure him out. It seemed to bother her that she couldn’t easily peg him and send him on his merry way. For some reason, it irritated the hell out of him that she was trying so hard to peg him, because he knew he shouldn’t care one way or another what Kit McClellan thought about him. Oddly enough, though, he did care. A lot.

“I believe you were going to tell me my reason for being here.”

She nodded. “Right. I almost forgot. Buy me dinner tonight. La Belle Mer, the restaurant here, does a fabulous buffet. You’ll love it.”

The quickness of subject change dizzied him for a moment. “My reason for being here is to buy you dinner?”

She smiled. “No, Pendleton. Buy me dinner tonight, and I’ll tell you what you’re doing here. I can’t right now. I’m working. Sheesh.”

She folded her elbows on the bar, leaned forward again, and smiled a very tempting little smile. Though why exactly it was tempting, Pendleton couldn’t have said. It was her mouth, he finally decided. The sight of her mouth was what kept blurring his thoughts and making him forget the things he knew he should be remembering. For all the planes and angles of her face, Kit’s mouth was red and ripe and rich with curves, full and lush and sexy. It distracted him, her mouth, because he kept wondering what it was going to do next. She was as quick to smile as she was to frown, and she had a habit of snagging her slightly crooked eyetooth at one end of her lower lip whenever she was lost in thought. Like right now.

God help him, he really, really liked it when she did that. He kept thinking about that mouth—and that eyetooth—nibbling on other body parts besides her lip. And not necessarily her body either.

“The meaning of your life, Pendleton, for the price of a seafood buffet,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “It’s the deal of the century.”

The warm breeze kicked up again, but they only gazed at each other in silence, each oblivious to the beauty and tranquillity of the sunny, tropical afternoon surrounding them. Not far away, a steel drum band began to warm up, the soft trilling of felt against metal singing through the air. A squawky bird cried out from a palm tree above them, and a woman on the other side of the bar called for another sloe gin fizz.

Finally, finally, Pendleton broke the silence. He had no idea what spurred the question in his brain, but, out of nowhere, he asked, “Will you wear your sarong?”

As questions went, that one clearly wasn’t at the top of Kit’s “Things Pendleton Will Be Most Likely To Ask Me” list. As a result of her surprise, she lost her momentum a bit.

“Wh-what?” she stammered.

And just like that, he felt the upper hand slip comfortably back into his grasp.

“I’ll meet you in the hotel lobby at six o’clock,” he said, “in front of the concierge desk.” Then, without further ado—or further adieu, for that matter—he spun on his heel and walked away.