My Man Pendleton(28)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

Kit dropped her gaze to her wine again. “Yeah. Pretty tacky, huh?”

“And your fiancé actually took it?”

The chuckle that emerged from her mouth was obviously forced and false. “Gee, Pendleton. You almost sound surprised.”

“Well of course I’m surprised. That’s outrageous.”

“Yeah, I guess a guy like you would have held out for a cool million. But Michael came from humble beginnings and all that. He’d never seen that many numbers in front of a decimal point in his life.”

“That’s not what I—”

“In fact,” she interrupted him again, “Michael was so eager to take the money, that Daddy figured later he probably could have gotten off with a hundred gees instead of two hundred and fifty. But, hey, that’s my dad. Always overdoing things.”

When she finally seemed to be through talking, Pendleton tried to jump into the conversation again. “What I meant was, it was outrageous for your fiancé to take any amount of money in exchange for abandoning you.”

She glanced up again, her eyes dark and troubled and sad. “Why was that so outrageous? Any other guy would have done the same thing.”

Pendleton refused to dignify the latter part of her objection with a comment. Instead, he said, “It was outrageous, because in the long run, he could have had the money and you.”

For a long moment, she only observed him through narrowed eyes, as if she wasn’t quite sure what to think of him. Then, slowly, she began to smile. It wasn’t a big smile. But it wasn’t bad. “Why, Pendleton,” she said. “I’m not sure, but I think you just paid me a compliment.”

He was as surprised by the realization as she seemed to be, but said nothing to retract his statement. “At any rate,” Kit hurried on, her gaze skittering away again, “my father’s now paying about ninety-nine-point-four million more for that bribe than he thought he would.”

“Excuse me?”

The question seemed to be Pendleton’s response to everything that night, but honestly, he couldn’t help but excuse himself. He’d never been more bewitched, more bothered, more bewildered in his entire life. Unfortunately, when Kit spoke again, he realized that he was nowhere near as befuddled as he was going to be.

“Unless I’m married in two months,” she told him, “my family will lose everything.”

“Excuse me?”

Kit chuckled at Pendleton’s echo of bewilderment. Dearie dear. What to tell the poor boy that wouldn’t overwhelm him. Maybe she should do something different for a change and tell him all about it. Obviously, no one else had. She twisted her wineglass by the stem and decided, What the hey? If nothing else, maybe it would make her feel better to finally talk about it.

“As you know,” she began, “my family is very wealthy.”

“I did rather notice that the night I was at your house.”

She nodded. “What you may not know, however, is that the McClellan wealth comes entirely from my mother’s side of the family.”

“No, I assumed your father—”

“Daddy started off as a laborer for Hensley’s, working in the bottling plant for union wages. He and my mother met at some big function Granddaddy threw for the workers one summer. Mama was immediately smitten. And Daddy knew a good opportunity when he saw it. They got married six months later. Mama was pregnant with Holt at the time.”

“Whoa.”

Kit smiled at Pendleton’s slip into the vernacular, then continued. “For what it’s worth, Daddy was a relatively decent husband to her. To the best of my knowledge, he was never unfaithful, and he always came straight home from work. But he never loved her.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do,” she said quickly before hurrying on. “And so did Mama. And I guess Granddaddy did, too, because he made my father sign a pre-nup, back in 1969, when such things were unheard of.”

“No way.”

Kit smiled again at his second lapse. “Way, Pendleton. Granddaddy wasn’t about to condone the marriage, bastard child or no, unless Daddy agreed to enjoy the Hensley lifestyle without getting his grubby hands on the Hensley money. Daddy lived at Cherrywood, drove the cars, wore the clothes, walked the walk, talked the talk. But he never owned any of it. Mama did. He was groomed to take over the company, but the company—and everything else—always belonged to my mother.”

“Get out.”

This time, Kit chuckled out loud at Pendleton’s exclamation. For some reason, telling the story tonight didn’t make her feel quite so empty inside as it usually did. “It’s true,” she assured him. “It wasn’t the outcome Daddy expected when he deliberately knocked up the boss’s daughter. But, in the long run, he realized he could do a lot worse. So he agreed to play by Granddaddy’s rules.”

“He married your mother for her money, even though it would never be his.”

“Not while Granddaddy and my mother were alive. Granddaddy made sure of that.”

The wheels of thought seemed to be turning in Pendleton’s brain, so Kit waited before continuing so he could catch up.

“But since your mother passed away,” he finally said, “your father must have ultimately come into her fortune, right?”

She shook her head. “Mama changed her will a while back without telling any of us. We didn’t find out the details until after she died.”

“Why would she change it?”

Kit would have thought by now that voicing the next part wouldn’t be quite so painful these days as it used to be. Funny, though, how the prospect of revealing it to Pendleton now hurt even more than usual. “Because Mama knew it was the only way I would ever snag a husband.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m still not following you.”

A band kicked up in another room then, a lively, lovely number rich with horns and piano that roused her from what was fast becoming a sullen mood. Seeking to put an end to their conversation as quickly as possible, Kit concluded her story in a rush of words.

“In order for my father to get his hands on the Hensley millions, he has to make sure I’m married within two months. That’s what it says in my mother’s will. At this point, Daddy figures any available guy has son-in-law potential, and you’re unfortunate enough to be his latest acquisition. For that, as much as anything else, I apologize. But don’t worry. You’re not my type, so there’s no reason why we can’t just be friends. Now, with all that said, dance with me.”