My Man Pendleton (13 page)

Without further comment—and before he had a chance to ask her to elaborate on the buckets-full state of his testosterone—she set a shorter glass on the bar and spun around to a veritable pyramid of liquor behind her.

Pendleton's heart sank a bit as he watched her fingers hover over a bottle of Hensley's Bourbon that was situated on the top row. But after a moment of consideration—not to mention a sly little smile that she tossed over her shoulder—she opted instead for a single malt Scotch for which he had always embraced a
very
fond affection. In one single, fluid maneuver, she uncorked it, spun around, and waved it over his glass, until it was half-full of the dark amber liquid.

"Thank you," he said.

"No problem," she assured him. "That'll be ten bucks. And don't forget to tip your bartender at least fifteen percent. You want I should just charge it to your room?"

He had begun to reach for the glass, but now his fingers hesitated. "Ten dollars?" he echoed incredulously. "For one drink?"

She shook her head as she returned the bottle to its shelf. "Pendleton. Honey, sweetie, baby, cookie. That's Abelour Scotch. You wanna play the resort game, big guy, you gotta pay the resort prices. Don't you get around much? I mean, where were you brought up? A barn?"

"No,
New Jersey
," he responded before thinking. She emitted a sound that was a mixture of disbelief and delight, and he knew at once that Kit McClellan was almost certainly envisioning him as the product of a Bruce Springsteen video, complete with vacant lots, crumbling rowhouses, factory smokestacks, and Lady Liberty's backside in the background.

"
South
Jersey
," he felt compelled to clarify.

But all she said in response was, "
New Jersey
? Really?"

"Yes, really."

She eyed him with much speculation. "Funny, but I don't picture you as coming from
New Jersey
."

He sipped his Scotch, enjoyed the smoky, mel
low flavor, and felt his testosterone levels surging mightily. "Why is that?" he asked.

As she considered him in silence, it occurred to Pendleton that for a woman who wasn't beautiful, Kit McClellan was certainly very attractive.

"I don't know," she finally admitted. "You just don't seem…"

"What?" he asked.

Her—naked—shoulders lifted and dipped again, but she only shook her head slowly in silence.

So he sipped his drink once more, rolling the warm liquid around in his mouth, and focused on Kit McClellan's striking face as she watched him. Her lips parted softly as he relished the dusky flavor of the liquor on his tongue, and her eyes darkened dangerously when he took his time to swallow it.

And a hot splash of lightning ignited in his belly, long before the Scotch ever got there.

"Actually," he said, the word coming out a bit strangled for some reason, "the part of
New Jersey
I come from isn't much different from your part of the country."

Except, of course, he amended to himself, for the funny way of talking people had in
Kentucky
. For instance, no one in
New Jersey
had ever asked him if he was brought up in a barn. And he still wasn't sure which of the half-dozen different pronunciations for "
Louisville
" he'd heard was correct, although the garbled, incomprehensible version seemed to be the one used most frequently.

For a long, intriguing moment, Kit only continued to stare at him with dreamy eyes, as if she were thinking of something totally unrelated to the conversation at hand. Finally, however, she said, "Funny, but I have trouble seeing you as a product of my part of the country, too."

This time Pendleton was the one to remain quiet and thoughtful for a bit too long. He gazed down into the depths of the liquid he swirled nonchalantly in his glass, and wondered if he should even bother to clarify any conclusions—whether accurate or not—that the boss's daughter might be drawing about him.

Ultimately, his curiosity—and surely it was nothing more than that—got the better of him, and he heard himself ask, "Well, then, Miss McClellan, just where do you picture me as coming from?"

That mystified expression cluttered her face once more, and she expelled another nervous chuckle. "I don't know," she repeated.

She continued to scrutinize him, and it occurred to Pendleton that she was expending an inordinate amount of energy trying to figure him out. It seemed to bother her that she couldn't easily peg him and send him on his merry way. And for some reason, it irritated the hell out of him that she
was
trying so hard to peg him, because he knew he shouldn't care one way or another what Kit McClellan thought about him. But oddly enough, he found that he did care. A lot.

"I believe you were going to tell me my reason for being here."

She nodded. "Right. I almost forgot. Buy me dinner tonight. La Belle Mer, the restaurant here, does a fabulous buffet. You'll love it."

The quickness of subject change dizzied him for a moment. "My reason for being here is to buy you dinner?"

She smiled. "No, Pendleton. Buy me dinner tonight, and I'll tell you what you're doing here. I can't right now. I'm working. Sheesh."

She folded her elbows on the bar, leaned forward again, and smiled a very tempting little smile. Though why exactly it was tempting, Pendleton couldn't have said. It was her mouth, he finally decided. The sight of her mouth was what kept blurring his thoughts and making him forget the things he knew he should be remembering. For all the planes and angles of her face, Kit's mouth was red and ripe and rich with curves, full and lush and sexy. It distracted him, her mouth, because he kept wondering what it was going to do next. She was as quick to smile as she was to frown, and she had a habit of snagging her slightly crooked eyetooth at one end of her lower lip whenever she was lost in thought. Like right now.

And God help him, he really, really,
really
liked it when she did that. He kept thinking about that mouth—and that eyetooth—nibbling on other body parts besides her lip. And not necessarily
her
body parts, either.

"The meaning of your life, Pendleton, for the price of a seafood buffet," she said, interrupting his thoughts. "It's the deal of the century."

The warm breeze kicked up again, but they only gazed at each other in silence, each oblivious to the beauty and tranquillity of the sunny, tropical afternoon surrounding them. Not far away, a steel drum band began to warm up, the soft trilling of felt against metal singing through the air. A squawky bird cried out from a palm tree above them, and a woman on the other side of the bar called for another sloe gin fizz.

And finally, finally, Pendleton broke the silence. He had no idea what spurred the question in his brain, but, out of nowhere, he asked, "Will you wear your sarong?"

As questions went, that one clearly wasn't at the top of Kit's "Things Pendleton Will Be Most Likely To Ask Me" list. And as a result of her surprise, she lost her momentum a bit. "Wh-what?" she stammered.

And just like that, he felt the upper hand slip comfortably back into his grasp.

"I'll meet you in the hotel lobby at
six o'clock
," he said, "in front of the concierge desk." Then, without further ado—or further adieu, for that matter—he spun on his heel and walked away.

* * *

The strangest thing happened to Kit as she was readying herself for dinner. The dull thump of melancholy that normally settled in her belly at the arrival of one of her father's emissaries wasn't there. Usually, an encounter with one of the Hensley's VPs only acted as a reminder to her that her worth to the McClellans, although substantial—ninety-nine-point-four million bucks, to be exact—was strictly financial in nature. Had it not been for her mother's will, Kit's father would have gleefully left her to rot in the tropical paradise of her choosing, wasting neither time nor effort to retrieve her. So naturally, whenever she found herself face to face with one of his minions, who had strict orders to bring her back to the fold, Kit felt a bit down.

But not tonight.

Tonight, in place of the cool feelings of dejection and abandonment, there was a warm fizzy sensation bubbling up inside her. It was a sensation so alien, so unfamiliar, that she almost didn't recognize it. Yet it had been her companion ever since she'd seen Pendleton that afternoon. For some reason, the sight of him sitting at the bar, looking so unbelievably attractive with the breeze ruffling his dark hair, the sun dappling his gentleman-vacationer duds, and laughter brightening his espresso-colored eyes when he'd asked her to wear her sarong
…

She bit back a wistful sigh. Well, the whole thing had just started to generate a very odd reaction inside her, one that felt strangely like
…
happiness? She wasn't quite sure. It had been so long since she had experienced such a thing that she'd almost forgotten what it felt like.

In spite of Pendleton's request, Kit didn't wear her sarong that night. However, taking pity on the poor boy—he would, after all, be saddled with her for an entire evening—she donned something only marginally less revealing: a brief, snug little turquoise miniskirt and an even briefer, even snugger, little cropped halter top to go with.

And heels. High heels. Really high heels that she'd bought that afternoon for just this meeting—she hesitated to call it a date—with Pendleton. For some reason, she wanted to be as tall as she possibly could be, despite the fact that, all her life, her accelerated height had made her feel like such a great, hulking ogre. Above all else, she wanted to make certain that she was sexy as all get-out tonight.

Why? Well, usually, when she donned such sexy little outfits, it was because she wanted to maintain control over the whole man-woman thing. And she knew she couldn't accomplish such a feat with her beauty alone, simply because she didn't
have
any real beauty. She did, however, claim truly phenomenal gams, and not a bad torso, in spite of its being bereft of any real bosom action.

As long as she could keep a man's interest lingering below her neck, Kit was fairly confident that she could eventually draw him in, lull him into a false sense of security, and then reveal him for what he was—an emissary of her father's whose sole purpose in life was to corral her into matrimony and collect a fat little reward for his trouble.

Pendleton, however, was threatening to be a bit more elusive than usual. For one thing, he spent far more time than other men did gazing at her face. And that, Kit decided, was something she simply could not have him doing. If she had any hope of exposing him, then she was going to have to direct his attentions elsewhere.

Hence, the little blue ensemble, tiny enough to bring even the most uncooperative man's eyes to the place a woman wanted to keep them. Away from the face. Always away from the face. As singular an impression as Pendleton made, she was certain that deep down he was no different from any other man. Shallow. Superficial. Greedy.

My, but she was looking forward to the evening. She glanced at her watch long enough to see that she was running the required fifteen minutes late and smiled. By now, Pendleton would be in the lobby, pacing like a caged animal, wondering where she was. Why, she could almost feel his sweaty palms and the anxious wrinkling of his brow from here. Men were just so predictable.

She spritzed perfume on her arms and neck and down the front of her top—well, you just never knew—gave her gold bangle bracelets an affectionate jingle, grabbed her tiny purse, and headed for the door. Thanks to the luminous full moon—which she simply
had
to pause to appreciate for a few moments when she exited her bungalow—she was running twenty minutes late by the time she reached the lobby.

But that was okay. Her date—or rather, Pendleton—would, of course, be waiting for her. His financial future depended on her, after all. So she fluffed up her dark blond curls—well, as much as she could fluff the unruly, chin-length mass—threw back her shoulders, and sauntered forward, immediately darting her gaze to the concierge desk. And, just as she'd expected, she found Pendleton—

Not there.

Wait a minute. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then opened them again, fixing her gaze on the concierge desk. That
was
the concierge desk, wasn't it? C-o-n-c-i-e-r-g-e. Yep, that was how you spelled
concierge.
She could have gotten that one even without four years of high school French. But there was no pacing, sweaty-palmed, furrowed-browed Pendleton in sight.

Okay, so maybe she'd misunderstood. Maybe he'd said he would meet her at the reservations desk. But there was no Pendleton there, either, sweaty, furrowed, or otherwise. Kit spun around in a full circle, taking in the entire lobby, from its polished pink marble floor to the skylights opening on the star-studded night above, scanning all the lush potted palm trees and tastefully arranged rattan furniture. There were lots of people milling about, but none of them was Pendleton.

The men's room, she thought then, reluctant to acknowledge the bubble of relief that burst in her belly. She gave her forehead a mental smack. Of course. He was probably in there throwing up because he thought he'd lost the boss's daughter, and his job was sure to be next on the list. Poor guy. She hadn't meant for him to become so overwrought as all that. She'd have to find some way to make it up to him.