My Man Pendleton(79)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

“Oh, and hey,” Kit interrupted, “with me, you got three out of four, anyway, didn’t you?”

His smile fell some, but his eyes were still warm and affectionate as he watched her. “I didn’t come up here to go to Sherry’s wedding, either. Frankly, that’s the last place I want to be.”

Kit nodded. “Yeah, I bet. So then if you didn’t come up here for that,” she rushed on, “I guess you wanted to rescue your folks from the crazy McClellan daughter, didn’t you? But I promise you, Pendleton, although I might do some crazy stuff, I’d never hurt anyone.”

“Oh, sure. That’s what you say.”

Uncertain what he meant by the comment, Kit let it slide. “I just needed to get away from Louisville for a little while, that’s all. After hearing you talk about your family, your hometown, I was kind of curious. It sounded…nice.” She lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “I wanted to see for myself.”

“Why did you need to get away from Louisville for a while?” he asked. “Things were just starting to…to…” He waved a hand restlessly in front of himself, as if he were trying to pull the proper word out of thin air. “To go right. Between us, I mean.”

Her eyes began to sting again, so she dropped her gaze back down to the barbecue. Axel seemed to realize where her attention lay, because he suddenly appeared at her side and snatched the tongs out of her hands.

“Why don’t you and Rocky go talk?” he said, nudging her aside with an elbow that was in no way subtle. “I can handle things here.”

Instead of arguing with Axel, Kit dropped her arms to her side and her gaze to the ground and wandered toward the back stoop. Not surprisingly, Pendleton followed right behind her. With Carny and Irene having retreated into the house, the two of them were left pretty much alone.

“Mind if I ask what you’re doing here at my parents’ house?” he asked again.

There was really no easy answer, Kit thought. She was doing a lot of things here. She was taking a little vacation, enjoying a small break from her usual reality. She was visiting a part of the country she’d never seen before, observing a slice of life she hadn’t known existed. She was making friends and having some truly enlightening conversations. She was feeling like a human being, living life instead of struggling with it for a change.

And she was falling in love with Pendleton’s family in much the same way that she had fallen in love with Pendleton.

Which was the last thing she intended to do. Thinking about it now, she wondered if maybe her whole reason for heading north instead of south this time wasn’t simply that she wanted to exorcise Pendleton from her system by witnessing the source of his genesis. With some of his mystique removed, she thought, maybe the man himself would cease to be interesting.

Naturally, the maneuver backfired, just as everything else in her life had backfired since Pendleton entered it. Instead of disdaining his origins, she found herself charmed by them. Instead of viewing his family as alien life forms with whom she couldn’t possibly ever relate, Kit found herself feeling more comfortable with them than she did with her own relatives. Instead of demystifying and commonizing Pendleton, her visit to his hometown only made him that much more intriguing, that much more appealing.

Dammit, nothing worked the way it was supposed to anymore.

“Kit?”

With an impatient sound, she snapped her head around. “What?” she demanded.

“What’d I do?” he asked. “Just tell me that. What did I do that made you run off without a trace to, of places, Deptford?”

She expelled a restless sigh, then returned her attention to the backyard. “I can’t decide what’s made me feel more foolish,” she said softly. “The fact that you and Daddy cut a deal, the fact that I didn’t even see it coming, or the fact that I let myself fall in love with you.”

He said nothing in response to her revelation, so she braved a glimpse in his general direction. His face, she saw, was impassive, completely devoid of any expression. And his voice was nearly silent as he asked, “What did you say?”

For a moment, she only stared at him. Then, corralling what little moxie she had left, she said, “True or false, Pendleton? My father offered to pay you a substantial amount of money if you married me before the deadline stipulated by my mother’s will, thereby ensuring that the family would keep the Hensley millions.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw, and his eyes darkened dangerously. “Why do you ask that?”

“Just answer the question. True or false?”

For a moment, she didn’t think he was going to respond. Then, very, very quietly, he said, “True.”

If she’d thought it hurt to hear her father say that, she’d been way, way off. Nothing could have prepared her for the slash of pain that twisted in her heart hearing Pendleton verify it.

“Oh, God,” she said, nearly choking on the words.

“Kit, you don’t under—”

“True or false?” she interrupted him, before he could say anything to make matters worse. “You flat-out turned the offer down, said you were outraged by such a proposal, and told my father to go to hell.”

Her question was met with another unsettling silence, then, even more quietly than before, Pendleton said, “False.”

She swallowed hard as a chill wound through her body. “True or false?” she said softly, having no idea where she found the strength to continue. “You never loved me at all.”

“Absolutely false. Kit, I—”

“Oh, Pendleton,” she said. “You’ve never lied to me. Why start now?”

“Kit, I’m not lying to you. I do love you. Don’t you see that?”

“No. I don’t see that. What I see is a man just like Michael Derringer.”

His eyes went flinty cold. “I’m nothing like Michael Derringer.”

She didn’t—couldn’t—say anything in response to that.

“How did you find out about your father offering me money to marry you?” he asked. “Did he tell you that?”

She folded her denim-clad knees up before her and wound her arms tightly around them, as if doing so might keep her from falling apart. Then, because she suddenly felt restless—and because she wanted to be removed from Pendleton—she scooted her body backward until she felt the cool roughness of the bricks abrading her back through her sweater. Strange that she even noticed the sensation outside her body, seeing as she’d gone so numb inside.