My Man Pendleton(40)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

“Ah.”

“Carmichael has since met a very nice orthopedic surgeon named Debbie, and the two of them are very happy together.”

Pendleton felt triumphant. “Then there’s a good chance your father won’t fire me if I throw you out, if he’s kept Carmichael on in spite of her not being a potential life mate for you.”

“Oh, please, Pendleton. Carmichael is positively incredible heading up advertising. Daddy would have to be crazy—in the medical sense, I mean—to let her go. You, on the other hand, are a new hire who hasn’t even proven himself,” she pointed out. “You are by no means irreplaceable.”

Pendleton naturally took exception to that, but he supposed Kit had a point. Certainly he could fight his dismissal, but such a battle would be time-consuming. He absolutely, positively, without question had to hang onto his job. At least until the last week of April. He had something very important to prove, after all.

“How long are you staying?” he asked halfheartedly.

She smiled brightly, but once again, he got the impression that she was forcing all this cheerfulness. “I haven’t decided yet. It’ll be fun, Pendleton. You’ll see. Just wait. Someday, we’ll look back on this, and we’ll laugh and laugh and laugh.”

He bit his lip as he gazed at her, telling himself to hold back the maniacal laughter he felt threatening until that day dawned. And he wondered for a moment if she really was crazy, or if she just had a very sophisticated sense of humor that people from South Jersey couldn’t understand.

Ultimately, what he decided on was, “You’re sick, Kit. You realize that, don’t you?”

Slowly, she retraced her steps, her high heels skimming softly across the hardwood floor, her smile thinning as she approached. In one fluid gesture, she plucked from his hand the martini refill he had yet to taste, then lifted it to her lips for a dainty sip. “Now, now,” she said after she swallowed. “Anyone will tell you that when you have as much money as my family has, my condition is what’s known as ‘eccentric.’”

He shook his head. “‘Eccentric’ suggests a certain, oh… disorganization. And you don’t strike me as being particularly disorganized.”

She held his gaze for a long time, and he detected something in her eyes that was almost yearning. “Then think of me as someone who has nowhere else to go,” she said softly. “Because in a lot of ways, Pendleton, that’s exactly what I am.”

He inhaled deeply and released the breath slowly as he pondered his choices. Either he could toss Kit out on her keester and risk losing his job and any potential chance he had to show a certain someone exactly what kind of stuff he was made of, or he could let her stay and allow his employer to think that the two of them were shacking up. For some reason, he discovered he rather liked that latter option. It would serve the bastard right.

“What’s your real reason for doing this?” he asked.

She sipped casually from the martini again, her gaze never leaving his. “If my father thinks the two of us are romantically involved, he’ll leave me alone and stop flinging undesirable men at me.”

Sidestepping the matter of his being undesirable—for now, at least—Pendleton asked, “And?”

“And I’ll have bought myself a little time to decide what I want to do.”

He eyed her thoughtfully for a moment. “I thought you said you had to be married within two months or your family would forfeit everything.”

“That’s true.”

“Then it sounds to me like you don’t have a lot of time left to buy.”

“Two months is more than enough time,” she assured him, though he detected something in her voice that told him she was in no way sure.

“So if you, wise as Solomon as you are,” he said, “conclude that your family should go broke for paying your fiancé to dump you, then you’ll just string them along for a couple of months, letting them think the two of us will be married before the deadline. Then you’ll back out at the last minute, thereby causing them to lose their inheritance.”

She dropped her gaze to the floor, nodding slowly. Her voice was a quiet monotone that revealed nothing of her thoughts when she replied, “Yes, that’s right.”

“And if, at the end of this two months, you decide they—and you—should keep the money?” he asked. “What will you do then?”

She snapped her head back up, her eyes clouded with confusion when she looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Well, if you want to keep the money, then you’ll need to be married,” he pointed out. “And what will you do then?”

Her eyebrows arrowed downward in consideration, as if she hadn’t quite thought that far ahead. “Well,” she began slowly, “I suppose… I mean if I do decide to do get married—which I’m not saying I will,” she hastened to qualify, “I guess…” She sighed fitfully. “Well, I guess Novak would do in a pinch.”

“Novak?” Pendleton exclaimed. She had to be kidding.

She shrugged. “Well, he’s made it clear more than once that he’d do anything for me.”

This time Pendleton was the one whose eyebrows arrowed downward in consideration. Then, immediately, he stopped himself. The last thing he wanted to do was consider Novak doing anything for—or with—Kit.

“Besides,” she continued, crossing her arms anxiously over her midsection, injecting a bit more vigor into her voice than he suspected she felt, “I might still decide to stay single. It would serve my family right.”

“And you?” he asked. “You’ll gladly surrender your share of the millions?”

Her shoulders rose and fell so quickly, Pendleton wasn’t sure the gesture qualified for a shrug. “Of course I would,” she said hastily. “It would be going to a good cause.”

She responded too quickly, he thought. She really hadn’t given much consideration to the prospect of being broke herself. He wondered for a moment if he should try to nudge her toward thinking along those lines. Ultimately, he decided it was none of his business. The McClellans dug this pit for themselves a long time before he entered the picture, and there was no reason for him to involve himself in the mess any more than he already was. Still, that didn’t answer his question about what to do with Kit, did it? Should he let her stay or make her go?