My Man Pendleton(72)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

“I’m not going in to work today,” he said, removing his hands from her face.

“Of course you’re going to work,” she said, her voice lacking all the sparkle it normally held.

“Not with you sick like this, I’m not.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s nothing I haven’t had before. I’ll get over it.”

“You look terrible.”

She closed her eyes, then folded her forearm across them. “Oooh, Pendleton, you sweet-talker, you. You sure know all the right things to say to a woman when she’s feeling down.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’ll be fine,” she assured him again. “Go to work. I need some rest, and you’ll just be in the way if you stay home. I’ll feel obligated to spend time with you.”

He smiled. “Now who’s sweet-talking?”

She inhaled feebly, but kept her arm over her eyes. “Go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

Although he didn’t believe that for a minute, he figured he probably ought to do as she said. She did need to rest, and he probably would just be a hindrance if he stayed with her.

“I’ll come home on my lunch hour to check on you,” he told her.

She nodded. “Oh, I don’t doubt that for a moment. Got to keep an eye on those investments, after all.”

Great. Now she was becoming delirious. What next? Hallucinations? “What investments?”

She shook her head and repeated, “Go.”

He bent forward to press a kiss to her forehead and was surprised when she turned away before he had the chance to complete it. He reminded himself she was sick, that he shouldn’t take her withdrawal personally. But it stung that she wouldn’t even allow him that small gesture of affection.

He lifted a hand to stroke it over her hair, thought better of the action, and dropped it back down to his lap. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

She nodded.

“And I’ll be home in a few hours for lunch.”

Another nod, then she rolled over to her side, effectively turning her back on him.

Hoo-kay, he thought. Message received loud and clear. He pushed himself off the bed, strode across the room, and closed the door behind himself as quietly as he could. Somehow, he had a bad feeling that whatever was ailing Kit went beyond the physical. He just wished he knew what to do.

Lunch, he reminded himself. They could talk more about it then. By then, she’d have gotten a few more hours rest, and maybe she’d be up for a little conversation. Making a mental note to stop by Heitzman’s for one of those butter kuchens she liked so much, Pendleton headed off for work.

Unfortunately, he never made it home for lunch. In fact, he didn’t make it home for dinner, either. An accident at the distillery in Bardstown had the entire executive staff on the road by ten A.M., and they didn’t make it back to Louisville until nearly six-thirty. By then, Pendleton was exhausted, overwrought, and dispirited. Not because anything had gone wrong at the distillery that couldn’t be fixed with minimal expense and trouble, but because he’d called home a half-dozen times that day, only to have the answering machine kick on every time. And although he left a brief message each one of those times, asking Kit to call his cell, she never did.

Now it was after seven, and as he passed through the back door, stepping aside to let a very anxious Maury out for his evening uproar, he saw the little light on the answering machine flashing six times in quick succession, an indication that Kit never even replayed any of his messages.

“Kit?” he called out as he headed for the dining room.

Funny, how quiet the house was, he thought as he strode through the dining room and into the living room. There was no eardrum-crushing singing of rural Kentucky folk songs, no equally abrasive a-pickin’ and a-grinnin’ banjo music shaking the stereo speakers. Nor was there an indistinguishable, alleged foodstuff on the stove spitting and crackling in its deep fat pit. The house was utterly, unhappily, deadly silent.

Actually funny wasn’t the right word at all to describe the complete lack of life in the house, Pendleton thought as he topped the last stair. Scary was more like it. Real scary. “Kit?” he tried again.

But again, all he received in reply was a stone-cold silence that made his flesh crawl.

The bedroom door was ajar, he noted, a faint light spilling from within. Carefully, he pushed it open and peeked inside, and saw much to his relief that the bedclothes were rumpled and piled in the middle of the mattress, not covering the lifeless body of a late, lamented, madcap heiress. But as soon as that relief shot through him, it was replaced once again by fear. Because if Kit’s lifeless body wasn’t lying on the bed, then it must be living somewhere else.

Don’t panic, he told himself. A quick survey of the room told him she wasn’t completely gone. Her discarded clothes of the night before were still slung across a chair, and her underwear and stockings were still on the floor, where she had an annoying habit of leaving them. For some reason now, though, Pendleton wasn’t annoyed at all, and he found himself wishing she’d hurry home so she could toss as much underwear on the floor as she wanted.

Too, the nightstand on her side of the bed was still accessorized by a crossword book and a romance novel she just finished reading, and the photograph of herself and her brothers that had been taken at her high school graduation still sat on the dresser. Nevertheless, a sick sensation settled in Pendleton’s gut as he crossed to the closet. Immediately after opening the door, he realized something was missing. Most of Kit’s clothes, to be exact, along with two of the suitcases she brought with her the day she invaded his house.

Yeah, she was sick that morning when he left for work, all right. But evidently not sick enough to keep from bailing on him.

“Dammit,” he hissed under his breath.

What the hell went wrong? he wondered. What could he have done or said that would make her take a powder this way? Granted, men tended to be a little more clueless than women did when it came to the whole relationship thing—and, hey, throw a woman like Kit into the mix, and that cluelessness was magnified a good five-, six-hundred percent—but still…

“Dammit,” he muttered again, louder this time.

Where could she have gone? He tried to tell himself she must have just packed up a few things and returned to her father’s house. That she would be coming back to his place to gather the rest of her stuff—like every stick of furniture and every pot and pan—later, when she had more time, not to mention a moving van at her disposal. Maybe, he thought, her recent visits to Cherrywood stirred up her need for luxurious surroundings and finer things, and now his fixer-upper in Old Louisville—even if it was coming along nicely, thanks, if he did say so himself—just wasn’t good enough for her anymore.