My Man Pendleton(9)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

And before Pendleton had a chance to comment—or to say goodbye to the enigmatic Miss McClellan and her gorgeous legs—his boss was leading him away.

Chapter 3

All things considered, dinner didn’t go nearly as well as happy hour, Kit decided. She drummed her perfectly manicured, coral-lacquered fingernails silently on the linen tablecloth, gazed at Pendleton sitting on the other side of the wisteria centerpiece, and pondered the benefits of lobbing a dinner roll at him. Ultimately, she decided it would have been frightfully impolite. Plus, she hadn’t gotten a rise out of her father when she’d thrown summer squash at Novak last month, so why should a dinner roll make any difference tonight?

She sighed heavily, poked a fork into her ratatouille and guided the eggplant from one side of her plate to the other for aesthetic purposes. Seated on her left was the youngest of her older brothers, and on her right was a vacant chair. That was where she sat in the McClellan hierarchy. Just below Bart, right above the furniture.

She supposed it was something.

She snuck another peek at Pendleton from beneath her lowered lashes, and wondered why he intrigued her so much more than the others had. Probably because he was the first one who actually passed her test, she told herself. He answered her questions honestly, and now she wasn’t sure what to make of him.

Although he appeared to be exactly like every other man her father had paraded before her in the last two years—each of them bearing an uncanny resemblance to Michael Derringer—there was still something very unsettling about Pendleton. Worse, he unsettled her in a way that she hadn’t been unsettled for a very long time now. She hadn’t been lying when she told her father that his new VP was really cute. Although, now that she thought about it, maybe cute didn’t exactly suit this particular suit. Cute suggested a certain boyishness, and there was nothing boyish about the man seated opposite her now. On the contrary, he seemed to possess a maturity that even her father lacked.

Then again, that wasn’t necessarily a compliment.

With a quick mental shove Kit swept the thoughts out of her mind. Pendleton, for all his cuteness and maturity was corporate. Simply put, ick. And he was Hensley’s corporate, at that. Double ick. Like she was really going to fall for one of those.

She would have thought by now that, in spite of his desperation, her father would have learned his lesson and stopped dragging her out to meet his latest acquisition. But Holt McClellan, Sr. would stop at nothing to save the family fortune, even if it meant finally marrying off his daughter after years of chasing off—or paying off—every man that ever dared come near her. He wasn’t even holding out for the highest bidder these days. He was entertaining any and all offers for his only daughter’s hand in marriage.

Too bad for him that Kit wouldn’t entertain even one.

Hey, her father had his chance years ago, and he blew it. All of them did. If the McClellan men had just left her alone to marry Michael Derringer, none of this would be happening now. Hensley’s would be well in her father’s hand, her brothers wouldn’t be starving for female companionship, and Kit would be as happily married as she was ever likely to be.

Instead of sitting here at her father’s dinner table, wondering if a big ol’ marinara stain would come out of a one-hundred-dollar necktie, or if Pendleton would just have to toss the expensive accessory in the garbage.

“So, Pendleton,” she said as she fingered her spoon with idle interest, “have you gotten all settled in?”

He leaned easily back in his chair. “Actually, Miss McClellan, no. I’ve barely had a chance to unpack.” Telling herself that her curiosity about her father’s new VP was no different from her curiosity about oh, say, the molecular structure of boron, she asked, “Where did you find a place to live?”

He met her gaze levelly, looking far too confident for her comfort. “I bought a house in Old Louisville.”

Kit nodded, thinking the neighborhood suited him for some reason. The East End and Oldham County, where most of the suits settled, were too new, too hip, too happening for someone like Pendleton. Old Louisville, with its big brick Victorians and big, inner-city trees seemed a more likely choice. She could somehow see him fitting into an old, urban setting far better than a shiny, new suburban one.

“St. James Court?” she guessed.

He shook his head. “Two blocks over.”

She uttered a soft tsk . “Newcomer. Ah, well, it’s something you can work on.”

“Actually, it is,” he agreed with a broad smile that went way beyond boyish, and right into the realm of hubba-hubba. But he said nothing more to clarify his remark.

So she steered the conversation down a new route. “You’re not from Louisville originally, are you?”

He chuckled, a rough, masculine sound reminiscent of a wind-swept canyon, and all Kit could think was, Ooooh, wow. “Is it that obvious?” he asked.

“No,” she told him honestly. “But Daddy hasn’t hired anyone local for almost a year.” She thought for a moment. “In fact, I think he’s pretty much ruled out the entire Midwest now, haven’t you, Daddy?”

At the head of the table, her father wiped his mouth with a linen napkin, glared at his daughter, and ignored her question by taking a sip of his wine.

So Kit returned her attention to the man seated across from her, and lowered her voice to a stage whisper before confessing, “I have a reputation for being oh…rather, unpredictable, shall we say? By now, it’s reached as far as Chicago, Cincinnati, and Atlanta, thereby diminishing significantly the potential pool for Daddy to choose from.”

To his credit, Pendleton offered no discernible reaction whatever. “Do you? I have a cousin who has a reputation like that.”

Kit returned to her regular voice as she asked sweetly, “And is she an embarrassment to her family, too?”

Pendleton shook his head. “Not at all. We just love her to pieces on the weekends they let her out of the home.”

Kit drummed her fingers more restlessly on the table. This wasn’t going at all the way she had planned. “So where are you from?” she asked.

He hesitated only a moment, but it was long enough for her to see that he was stalling. “Before coming to Hensley’s, I worked in Philadelphia,” he told her.

“Doing what?”

He shrugged, but she got the impression the gesture was anything but negligent. “Pretty much the same thing I’m doing now.”