My Man Pendleton(69)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

McClellan, on the other hand, arrowed his eyebrows down. “Are they?”

Not that it was any of his business, Pendleton thought, but… “Yeah. They are. At least, I thought they were. You heard something I haven’t?”

His companion eyed him warily. “Are you sleeping with my sister or not?”

Pendleton gaped at him. “What the hell is it with you McClellan men?” he demanded before he could stop himself. “Did it ever occur to any of you that it’s none of your damned business who’s doing what to Kit?”

“Hey, there’s a hundred million dollars at stake, and my mother put it all in Kit’s hands,” McClellan said. “I’d say we all have a stake in Kit’s activities right now.”

“Ninety-nine-point-four million,” Pendleton corrected him, mainly because he knew it pissed off the McClellans to hear that.

“Whatever,” McClellan said. “Are you and Kit being intimate or what?”

“Maybe you should ask Kit.”

“Maybe I already did.”

Oh. Well. That sort of changed things. And it sort of stumped him for a response, too. So he asked, “And what did Kit say about it?”

McClellan eyed him thoughtfully. “She told me the two of you were sleeping in separate rooms.”

“When did she say that?”

“Two days ago. When she spent the night here during the blizzard.”

Pendleton fidgeted a bit nervously. “Yeah, well, um… Maybe you should ask her again.”

He braced himself for the fist of an outraged older brother that was certain to land in his face, but when he braved a glimpse at McClellan, he found a broad, white smile splitting the other man’s face.

“Pendleton!” he fairly shouted. “My man! That’s what I want to hear!”

Actually, Pendleton thought, he was Kit’s man, not McClellan’s. No need to dwell on that, though, he supposed. “Man, whatever happened to the days when a guy beat the hell out of anyone who compromised his sister’s virtue?” he asked.

McClellan shrugged. “We’ve been trying to compromise Kit’s virtue for almost two years now, Pendleton. Forgive me if I find the news of your conquest to be…” His smile broadened. “Incredibly good,” he finished.

“Jeez, I can’t figure you people out to save my life,” Pendleton muttered, biting back some of the choicer words he wanted to use. “I have a kid sister, too, you know.”

McClellan looked surprised, as if he’d never considered the possibility that there might be more to Pendleton than a corporate title. “Do you?”

“Yeah, I do.”

McClellan sobered suddenly, his smile falling, his eyes darkening, as if an entirely new subject were at issue. “And did you spend the better part of your youth, as my brothers and I did, making sure no guy ever got close enough to hurt her?”

Pendleton shook his head. “No, I didn’t. I let her live her own life. Make her own mistakes.”

“And how did that turn out?”

Pendleton fidgeted a bit more. “Well, she sort of got knocked up when she was sixteen by some sonofabitch stupid idiot jerk moron sonofabitch.”

“You said sonofabitch twice.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Oh.”

Pendleton waited to see vast disappointment and a total lack of respect on McClellan’s face at hearing that a big brother failed so egregiously in keeping his little sister safe from harm. But the other man only gazed at him speculatively in silence, as if he weren’t quite sure what to make of him.

“Carny’s done all right, though,” Pendleton said by way of defending his sister. “The mistake she made when she was a teenager, she took responsibility for it, even if the sonofabitch stupid idiot jerk moron sonofabitch didn’t. And her son has been the bright spot in her life ever since. She owns her own business now, and Joey is a straight-A student and major hockey fiend. The two of them have their share of problems with curfews and adolescent outrage, the usual stuff, but they do okay.”

McClellan only continued to look at him in silence, then, slowly, he nodded. “You’re saying we all should have left Kit alone to make her own mistakes instead of sheltering her from life. That she never had a chance to experience the good with the bad, so she has no way of knowing now exactly which is which. She hasn’t really grown up, because she simply never had a chance to. If she’s behaving like a child now, we have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Pendleton nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I’m saying.”

“That ultimately, she would have done all right if we hadn’t interfered.”

“Yeah.”

“That none of us would be in this mess right now if Kit had been left to her own devices.”

“Exactly.”

“Of course, that means she’d be married to that little prick Michael Derringer right now,” McClellan pointed out, “and not sleeping in your bed.”

Pendleton furrowed his brow at that. “I guess it would.”

“Or maybe not,” the other man conceded. “She probably would have come to her senses eventually when she realized how unhappy she was. Then again, I guess we’ll never know for sure, will we? Since she never had a chance to fall on her ass like the rest of us.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Pendleton said. “I think Kit’s fallen on her ass more times than anybody wants to admit. She just hasn’t had the opportunity to pick herself up and brush herself off, and lie and say, ‘I meant to do that,’ like the rest of us have. Someone else has always done that for her. I’m just saying maybe right now you guys should back off and see what happens.”

Again, McClellan only gazed at him in silence for a moment, as if he were weighing some matter of great import. Then he said, “Look around you, Pendleton. What do you see?”

The question was unexpected, but Pendleton did as he’d been asked and scanned his surroundings. “I see a big, beautiful house. Some primo real estate. A couple of expensive cars.” He turned to meet McClellan’s gaze levelly. “But I also see a beautiful sunset. A basketball hoop. A couple of birds who warble a mean tune. And inside that house, there’s a woman who’d like to be closer to her family than she is.”

“Meaning?”

Pendleton met the other man’s gaze levelly. “Meaning maybe you and your father and brothers are worried about losing the wrong thing.”