My Man Pendleton (41 page)

Less than two months had passed since he'd last seen his sister, but she suddenly looked so much older than he remembered. Her brown eyes crinkled at the corners with the smile that lit her whole face, and her dark hair, half-in and half-out of a stubby ponytail, was kissed with bits of silver. Jeez, when had Carny started to go gray? he wondered. And if she was starting to show signs of aging herself—however appealing they were on her—how must he, three years older than she was—be faring himself?

He pushed the thought aside. "So Kit's here? She's safe?" he asked.

Only now was he beginning to realize how worried he'd been that Kit might be gone for good. At best, he had thought she'd taken off for the
Caribbean
again. Over and over, he had imagined her standing behind a bar in her sarong, being hit on by some jerk who wouldn't have a clue how to handle her. Or worse, who would have
more
than a clue how to handle her. The week and a half that had passed since she'd left felt more like a decade and a half to Pendleton, and even now, he couldn't quite believe he had her back.

Of course, he reminded himself, he didn't have her back. Not completely. Not yet. But once they talked, once he explained everything, once he told her how he felt about her, he was certain everything would be all right. And somehow, it was just so appropriate that she had turned up here, at his parents' house. Kit being with his family somehow made perfect sense, felt totally right.

Besides, he recalled with some distaste, Sherry's wedding was only three days away. And, hey, Kit had been invited, after all. Social creature that she was, he was sure she was planning on making an appearance. Or a spectacle. Whatever.

Carny chuckled, jerking him out of his ruminations. "Kit's safe enough for the time being," she said. "But if she keeps telling Dad how to cook ribs, he's gonna send her straight to the moon."

Pendleton laughed, too. His father was generally a good-natured, easygoing man, the kind of person who made immediate friends with everyone he encountered. Unless you tried to come between him and his barbecue. Do that, and Axel Pendleton of
Deptford
,
New Jersey
became more temperamental than a Paris-dwelling, cordon bleu chef.

"She's actually a very good cook," he told his sister. "She could probably teach him a thing or two."

Carny chuckled some more. "Yeah, I know. Mom says Kit hasn't let her cook a meal since she arrived."

For some reason, that didn't surprise him at all. For all Kit's wealthy, upwardly mobile upbringing, there was an earthiness, a down-home quality about her that was completely inborn. Her mother's doing, he supposed. As well as Kit performed in high-brow social settings, she was still too real a human being to ever be too good for something like a blue-collar, South Jersey kitchen.

"I'm sorry no one called you before now," Carny said. "I just found out about it myself last night. Evidently, she's been here since Monday, but somehow she talked Mom and Dad into not telling you she was here. Said she wanted to surprise you."

Pendleton could believe that. Kit could probably talk Queen Elizabeth into abdicating her throne and giving it to Izzy the charwoman. "She's been staying here at the house?" he asked his sister. Somehow, that didn't surprise him, either. Hey, he'd seen for himself that she had a propensity for such things.

"She started off up at the Holiday Inn," Carny told him, "but Mom talked her into checking out a couple nights ago and taking your old room instead."

Pendleton paled.
"My
old room?" he demanded. "Kit's been sleeping in
my
old room? Why not
your
old room? Those pink ruffled curtains are more appropriate for her than my race car wallpaper."

Carny gaped at him as if his brain had just come oozing out his ears. "'Cause Mom knows how I am about my Barbie collection, you big jerk."

Oh, yeah. He'd forgotten. Anybody who came between Carny and her Barbies, even now, wound up with a little plastic high heel sticking out of their nose.

Reluctantly, Pendleton released his sister. "It's good to see you again," he said. "I've missed you and Joey, and Mom and Dad. A lot."

"We've missed you, too. But be warned—Joey's still majorly pissed at you for moving away before the end of hockey season."

"I'll make it up to him. He can come visit in a couple weeks for the Kentucky Derby. Apparently, it's something of a big deal down there."

"So, you liking it all right in your new town?" she asked, the question carrying far more importance than her voice let on.

So Pendleton took a moment to really think about it.
South Jersey
was in his blood, and
Philadelphia
was, to his way of thinking, the greatest city ever erected on the planet. Every milestone of significance in his young life had occurred within a few miles of the very spot where he now stood. He'd taken his first step, ridden his first school bus, cracked his first bat, copped his first feel, all within blocks of his parents' house.

Yet somehow, this place didn't quite feel like home anymore. He didn't know exactly why that was. It just felt different now. There was no longer a pull on his soul toward the history he had here. Instead, he felt tugged toward the future, wherever Kit McClellan called home.

"Yeah," he finally told Carny. "I like it just fine."

She nodded. "Maybe I'll come down with Joey and go to that
Derby
thing. And Mom and Dad, too." She smiled one of those all-knowing sister smiles. "Or maybe we'll all just wait and come down this summer. Like for the wedding, maybe."

He smiled back. "Wedding? What wedding? Whatever could you be talking about, Carny?"

Carny wiggled her brows playfully. "Yours. Kit's. Whatever."

He was about to comment when a cry from the direction of the backyard silenced him. His father was yelling at the top of his lungs, something about
…
cumin?

Carny rolled her eyes. "Not again," she muttered. "Mom says they've been having this argument ever since the night Kit arrived."

Even knowing Kit as well as he did, Pendleton found this news to be a trifle confusing. "They've been arguing about cumin?"

Carny nodded. "Yeah."

But she said nothing more to elaborate, only spun around and made her way through the living room toward the kitchen, with Pendleton following helplessly on her trail.

"Will you just trust me on this, Axel?" Kit's voice rose from the backyard. "For once in your life? Don't be such a Pendleton."

As he followed the sound toward the open back door, some great weight in Pendleton's chest shifted aside. Yeah, he thought, it was definitely good to be home.

* * *

Kit studied Pendleton's father in the waning light of a day in the life of
New Jersey
, and marveled again at how much he looked like his son. A bit softer around the middle, maybe, a little grayer and thinner on top, but all in all, a striking likeness. In twenty-five or thirty years, she thought, this would be Pendleton. Man of the House. Head of the Household. Master of the Suburban Domain.

Keeper of the Holy Barbecue.

Axel stood on the minuscule cement patio, gripping a Rolling Rock beer in his bare hand and a pair of tongs in the one that was covered with a lobster claw oven mitt. The apron protecting his plaid shirt and sans-a-belt trousers read,
Who invited all these tacky people?
And somehow, even having spent only a few days in the man's company, Kit felt closer to him than she'd ever felt to her own father.

"Now, Axel," she said, "don't be so hasty. We've been over this before. I don't know why you refuse to even consider the possibility that just a touch of cumin might improve your special sauce."

"Don't nobody mess with my special sauce, little girl." He shook his tongs at her. "This barbecue sauce took ribbons eight years straight at the Deptford Township Fall Festival."

She adopted her most solicitous smile and tried again. "But a little cumin would go a long way toward—"

"No."

His reply was succinct, to the point, and final. Kit shook her head. Fine. She gave up. No cumin. "How about a little rosemary?" she asked.

"No. No cumin, no rosemary."

She opened her mouth to say something else, but he cut her off with a quick swipe of his tongs.

"And no marjoram, either. Foggiddabbuddit, Kit."

Foggiddabbuddit,
she had learned on her first day in
New Jersey
, was Northeastern for
Forget about it.
Kind of like
y'all
was Southeastern for
youse guys.

"But, Axel—"

"No," he said again. "My recipe ain't gonna change in this lifetime." He eyed her warily. "And it better not change after I go to my reward, either, you hear what I'm sayin'?"

"All right, all right," she conceded reluctantly. "Boy, you are so much like your son, you know that?"

That, at least, made Axel smile. "Rocky? Yeah, he's a good kid."

As if conjured by the comment, a familiar voice called from behind, "Yo, Dad!"

A huge grin split Axel's face at the same time Kit's smile fell. They spun around as one to find Pendleton striding casually across the backyard, one arm slung over Carny's shoulder, the hand of the other shoved deep into the pocket of his jeans. The sleeves of his faded blue sweatshirt were shoved up nearly to his elbows, exposing one of those incredibly sexy forearms that even now, in the middle of a family gathering, made Kit go hot and bothered inside.

"Sonny!" Axel cried, throwing his arms up into the air.

He set down his tongs and beer and went to meet his son, intercepting him halfway across the yard. Immediately, fiercely, both men embraced. And not one of those phony, he-man, homophobic embraces, either—the kind where the guys slap each other silly on the back for a few seconds before springing uncomfortably apart. But a truly heartfelt hug, both men gripping each other tightly for a solid minute before letting go.

In the meantime, Irene Pendleton cried out happily and jumped up from the chaise longue where she'd been reading a recent romance, and she thrust herself into what became a three-way, marathon hug. Behind them, Carny shook her head and laughed, before she, too, came forward and threw her arms around the lot of them as best she could. And then the Axel Pendletons of
Deptford
,
New Jersey
clung together as if their lives depended on it.

Something stung Kit's eyes suddenly, and she quickly swiped a hand across them. When she looked up again, it was to find Pendleton gazing at her over the top of his mother's head, and somehow she received the distinct impression that he wanted her to join in the fray.

Yeah, right, she thought. She'd probably suffocate in a huddle like that.

So she only picked up Axel's discarded tongs and flipped the ribs over to the other side. Hey, no reason to interfere in a family thing.

She felt, more than saw, the group disperse, and likewise only sensed Pendleton's approach. She told herself to be a man about it, to meet him head-to-head on his own turf. Just because she'd fallen in love with another guy who only wanted her for her money, hey, what was so terrible about that? It wasn't like she hadn't already traveled this road before, right? She ought to be used to it by now. Next stop, heartbreak. She should have seen it coming from a mile away.

Pendleton came to a halt with a good six feet of lawn and patio still separating them, then softly greeted her, "Hi."

She dropped her gaze back down to the grill. "Your folks promised they wouldn't call you until I told them it was okay."

"They didn't call me. Carny did."

Kit nodded. That's right, she recalled. Carny never had stated in so many words that she would abide by Kit's request. Sisters were always such troublemakers. She should know that by now.

"Well," she said softly, still forcing herself not to look at Pendleton. "I suppose I should apologize, but at least this way you get to visit with your family on Daddy's dime, don't you?"

"You
think that's the only reason I came?"

Unable to stop herself, Kit glanced up to look at him, and immediately wished she hadn't. He looked tired. Anxious. Sad. Then again, he'd had some dizzy dame turning his life upside-down for a couple of months now, hadn't he? How else was he supposed to look?

"That's right, I almost forgot," she lied, not even bothering to feign good humor.
"Your
ex-wife is getting married this weekend, isn't she? Wouldn't want to miss that, would you?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

His response stumped her. Hey, if
he
didn't know the answer to that one, she sure wasn't going to try and jog his memory. In spite of that, she heard herself say, "Well, there is that small matter of you still being in love with her. Of you wanting to show her that you've still got what it takes to flex PR and push pencils with the big boys."

He smiled, a wistful kind of smile unlike any Kit had ever seen from him. "Although I have to confess that there was a time not too long ago when I did indeed fantasize a nice little revenge about attending Sherry's wedding with some big, busty, bitchy blond—"