“Your wife?” Kit exclaimed. “You’re married?”

It took a moment for Pendleton to realize how badly he’d misspoken. “My ex-wife,” he quickly corrected himself. “Sherry and I have been divorced for almost three years.”

Kit looked absolutely stunned by the news. “In Veranda Bay,” she said, her voice as quiet as the breeze blowing into the shed, “when you said you were in love once, but that she left you … that’s who you were talking about, wasn’t it? Your wife?”

“Ex-wife,” he corrected her, stalling instead of answering her question.

“But that’s who you were talking about, wasn’t it?” she persisted.

“Yes.” He uttered the single word through teeth clenched so hard, his jaw hurt.

“But you said then that you didn’t know if she loved you.”

He sighed, amazed that Kit McClellan, of all people, would try to defend Sherry. Of course, she’d never met Sherry. She didn’t know her the way Pendleton did. “I’m not sure Sherry loved me so much as she loved what I could do for her,” he said.

The look that filled her eyes, so dark, so lonely, so obviously in sync with his own feelings, was simply too much for him to bear. So he dropped his gaze back down to the disassembled parts of his motorcycle and tried to focus on those instead. Suddenly, though, the last thing he wanted to do was work on his bike. Not surprisingly, his focus was elsewhere, on a time in his life that was as broken up and scattered as the pieces of his motorcycle.

Although he told himself he didn’t want to discuss that time with Kit, he heard himself say softly, “Sherry and I grew up together in the same neighborhood in New Jersey. According to our moms, we started talking about getting married when we were six years old.”

“Oh, that’s so sweet.”

When he glanced up, he saw that Kit hadn’t moved an inch from the spot where she was standing. Yet somehow, suddenly, she seemed much closer. Slowly, unmindful of the dirt, she dropped down to sit on the floor, crossing her legs before her, pretzel-fashion.

“Not really,” he said. “By fifth grade, we weren’t speaking to each other. In fact, we had kind of an on-again, off-again relationship until I graduated from college. But when I came home from Harvard with my MBA and a half-dozen job offers from some of the best corporations in the country, Sherry dumped Marv Polanski, who owned three very successful Chevron stations, and she took up with me again. We married about six months later.”

“So what makes you think she didn’t love you?” Kit asked, her voice sounding desperate somehow. Pendleton reached into his back pocket for a rag to wipe the grease from his hands. He took his time to perform the action, but his words were quick when he spoke. “As soon as I graduated from college, I entered the fast lane, way above the speed limit. I was twenty-four and found myself with a high-stakes job, a high-powered position, a high-stress lifestyle, and a wife with high-priced tastes. Are you getting the picture here?”

He braved a quick look at Kit again, only to find her still sitting transfixed. She did, however, nod in response to his question, so he figured she was keeping up with him.

“To be fair to Sherry,” he continued, “I knew that about her when we got married. In fact, we both spent a lot of our time as kids making plans on rising above the old neighborhood. We were both equally guilty in wanting the finer things in life, and I spent money as fast as she did.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Nothing, for about four years. We were very happy. At least, Sherry was. She was living the life of a corporate wife—lunching, shopping, and partying to her heart’s content.” He paused long enough to emit a derisive chuckle. “Oh, yeah. Sherry’s life was great. But after four years, I started to realize that I had no life at all. My job consumed nearly every waking hour. I was pretty much the big-wheeling corporate type you described at dinner that first night at your house,” he said. “My life was just a big, fat zero when it came to leisurely enjoyment. I was a complete loser in the game of life.”

She had the decency to look chagrined at that. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I had no right to—”

“You had every right,” he said with a shrug. “You were totally on the mark, at least where my old life was concerned.” But Pendleton wasn’t that man anymore, and he wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice.

“So what turned you into a winner?” Kit asked with a smile.

He forced a smile in response. “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself that,” he said. “But one day, right in the middle of an executive meeting, during a presentation about luring the middle-class family consumer, I realized I wanted to have kids. Not just that, but I wanted to spend time with my kids. Hell, I wanted to spend time with my wife. I wanted to have weekends at the shore, and backyard barbecues, and carpools and recitals. But the only way I was going to be able to manage that was with a job that demanded a lot less from me. So, after giving it some thought, I quit my megabucks job.”

Kit gasped at the announcement. “Just like that?”

He nodded. “Just like that.”

“You just turned your back on all that money and power? All that prestige?”

He shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t exactly enriching my life. I wasn’t happy.”

Kit only gazed at him in silence for a moment, as if she simply could not understand his motivation. Then she asked, “And what did Sherry do?”

He chuckled morosely. “Oh, Sherry wasn’t too happy about the new development at all. Especially when I told her I did it because I wanted a family. Turns out, she wasn’t so hot to have kids.”

“Um, color me presumptuous,” Kit said, “but wasn’t that something the two of you should have discussed before you got married?”

“Hey, we did discuss it,” Pendleton told her, indignant that she would suggest such a thing. “At some length, as a matter of fact.” Then he conceded reluctantly, “Of course, we were only thirteen at the time, but…I just assumed that having kids was a foregone conclusion, you know? That’s what people in our neighborhood did. They got married. They had kids. Granted, most of them weren’t working seventy or eighty hours a week like I was, but still…” He shrugged again. “I just thought Sherry would want what I did. Turns out, she didn’t. So she left.”

“And what did you do?”

Pendleton glanced back down at his hands, rubbing hard at one particularly stubborn smear of grease on his thumb that refused to budge. “I took a job with a small, nonprofit organization that was trying to raise awareness about inner-city kids at risk. Where before I’d just been making, as you yourself said, some rich, greedy corporation richer and greedier, my new job made me feel like I was actually doing something worthwhile. But it left me without the family I had taken it for. Sherry never came back. The divorce was final a year later.”

“How come you didn’t just ask for your other job back?” she asked. “If that would have made Sherry stay?”

He stared at her incredulously. “Because by then, the damage was done. I mean, would you have taken Michael Derringer back if your father changed his mind and offered him more money to come back and marry you?”

For a moment, she said nothing. Then, very quietly, she told him, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because then, at least I wouldn’t have been alone.”

He expelled a single, humorless chuckle. “Yes, you would. You would have known he didn’t really love you.”

“But he would have pretended to.”

“And that would be okay with you?”

She shrugged, a gesture so nonchalant, so unconcerned, it gave Pendleton goosebumps. As if she truly didn’t care whether or not someone loved her, as long as he at least pretended to.

“Oh, come on, Pendleton,” she said. “Do you honestly think I ever believed Michael really loved me?”

“You don’t think he did?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why the hell did you agree to marry him?”

That careless shrug again then “Beats being alone.”

“If you’re going to go to all the trouble to marry a man, to spend the rest of your life with him, don’t you think that man ought to honestly love you?” His words were more forceful than he intended, his feelings more intense than he’d realized.

Kit threw him a look of disbelief. “Pendleton, no man is ever going to honestly love me.”

The way she tossed off the pronouncement, so casually, so matter-of-fact, as if it were something she’d said every day of her life, chilled him. She genuinely believed that, he thought. She was as convinced of the truth in that statement as she was convinced of her own name. She wasn’t fishing for a contradiction or reassurance from him. She really didn’t believe any man could fall in love with her.

“You really believe that, don’t you?” he asked, speaking his thoughts aloud. “You really don’t think a man could love you.”

She only gazed at him in bemusement, as if she couldn’t understand why he would even ask her such a thing.

“What would it take to make you believe a man was in love with you?” he asked, wondering why he was even bothering to continue with a conversation that had degenerated so badly.

His question obviously stumped her, because her eyes widened, and her lips parted slightly in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what would a man have to do to convince you that he was in love with you?”

“Silly question, Pendleton,” she said. “I just told you no man is ever going to—”

“Just answer me,” he insisted. “What would it take to convince you that someone loved you?”

For a moment, he thought she would try to change the subject, but instead, she seemed to give his question some serious thought. Finally, her expression lightened, as if she’d come to a conclusion.

“A tattoo,” she said simply.

He frowned. He should have known she wouldn’t take him seriously. In spite of that he echoed, “A tattoo?”

She nodded. “If a man really loved a woman, he’d get a tattoo with her name.” As if further inspired, she opened her right hand over the upper swell of her left breast. “Right here. Where kids put their hands when they say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Some guy gets a tattoo with my name on it, I know he’s serious about me. Especially if it’s a really big one with hearts and flowers and a big ol’ nasty cupid playing a harp. And my name,” she added. “Not ‘Kit,’ but ‘Katherine.’ The pain level would be significantly greater, and therefore the proof more positive.”

For a long moment, he only stared at her. She couldn’t possibly be serious. “I can’t believe that’s what would prove a man’s love to you,” he said.

She shrugged. “Hey, love hurts.”

He shook his head. “Love doesn’t hurt. And you should be able to take it on faith that a man loves you.”

“Yeah, well… I never promised anybody a rose garden, Pendleton.”

“Not without the thorns anyway.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that every time I start thinking maybe you and I could—” Thankfully, he stopped himself before he said something he knew he’d regret later.

“Could what?” she asked.

“Nothing. Never mind. I just don’t understand why you have to strike out like some wounded animal every time we—”

“Every time we what?”

Pendleton only shook his head and refused to answer. Hell, he wasn’t even sure what he was going to say. Something stupid, no doubt. Something Kit would have totally misconstrued and turned around later to mess with his head. What had gotten them on to this line of conversation anyway? he wondered. Oh, yeah. Sherry. Man, even after being divorced for years, his ex-wife was still messing up his life.

“Well, if you were so happy with your last job,” Kit said, interrupting his thoughts and reading his mind—boy, he hated it when she did that—”then why did you come to work for Hensley’s?”

He didn’t want to tell her. Hell, he didn’t like to admit it to himself. In spite of that, he found himself saying, “Because the last thing Sherry told me when she walked out the door was that I couldn’t cut it, that’s why.”

God, he wished he hadn’t said that.

“What?” Kit asked.

“Just before she left me, Sherry accused me of quitting my job because I couldn’t handle the pressure. She told me I wasn’t man enough to hack it.”

Kit stared at him so intently that he could almost see the little wheels in her brain turning. Finally, she said “You took the job at Hensley’s just to prove to your ex-wife, after all these years, that you can still big wheel with the best of them?”

He nodded silently.

“And she knows about your new life change, does she?”

“She may have heard through the grapevine,” he said.

For a moment, Kit said nothing. Then, very softly, she asked, “And has she come running back to you, Pendleton?”

This time he shook his head. “No. As a matter of fact, she’s getting married again at the end of April. To one of my former colleagues. One of my former coworkers. One of my former best friends.”

Kit nodded slowly, knowingly, as if she now understood everything. Which was a lot more than Pendleton could say for himself.

“And I assume,” she said, “that this former colleague, this former coworker, this former best friend, is still right there in the thick of the corporate game, hacking it in a manly manner?”

“You assume correctly.”

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

As with every other question about Sherry, Pendleton simply was not sure how to answer. So he replied honestly, “I don’t know.”

“What are you planning to do?” Kit asked. “Run up to New Jersey to crash the wedding? Walk in at the last minute with a few manly paycheck stubs and try to win her back?”

He dropped his gaze back down to the floor. “Can we talk about something else?” he asked.

He saw that Kit was about to say something else, but Maury tumbled into the shed and proceeded to attack her fingers. Smiling, she pushed the puppy away, only to have him crouch comically with his entire back hemisphere wagging like a live wire before assaulting her right ankle.

“You crazy mutt,” she said, chuckling halfheartedly as she scooped him up into her arms.

Pendleton couldn’t help but smile at the scene, relieved that the glacier floating around in his chest began to melt at the sight of Kit going all gooey over an inept, overzealous puppy. The only thing weirder than that was the way he was suddenly going all gooey over Kit. But there it was, all the same, and for some reason, the realization wasn’t quite so scary as he would have thought it would be.

She nuzzled the dog’s nose with hers, and when Maury nipped her playfully, she squealed with feigned outrage. “Maury! You big doofus! You don’t bite the nose that feeds you. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

But the dog only licked her nose this time, with much affection, and somehow, Pendleton found himself wanting to repeat the gesture himself.

“Why did you name him Maury?” he asked.

She set the puppy on the ground, and he scampered happily over to the deconstructed motorcycle, sniffing each and every part as if they were delectable bits of kibble. Kit smiled, a gesture that softened all the sharp angles of her face.

“He reminds me of an old boyfriend,” she said.

“Maury? Turk? Michael? You sure have had a lot of boyfriends.” Pendleton told himself he did not sound jealous.

Kit switched her attention from the puppy to him, but her smile turned sad, and the light fled from her eyes. “I’ve had a lot of dates, Pendleton, not a lot of boyfriends.”

“What’s the difference?”

Still reeling from the news of Pendleton’s marital state—not to mention the fact that he was still very preoccupied by his ex-wife’s comings and goings—Kit expelled an errant breath and tried not to think about it.

“Boyfriend,” she finally said, “suggests a relationship of some length of time. Date, on the other hand, indicates a solitary event that may lead to another, but maybe won’t. In my life, there were many dates, many solitary events. Boyfriends, well…you’ve heard about all of my boyfriends now. All three of them.”

His surprise was evident. “Only three?”

She nodded. “Maury actually only made it through four dates,” she confessed, “but I let myself consider him as a boyfriend. Turk lasted nearly a month, and Michael…” She sighed as her voice trailed off, leaving unfinished a discussion of whatever feelings she still had for her ex-fiancé. It wasn’t important, she thought. Not anymore.

“Why so few boyfriends after having so many dates?” he asked, scattering her thoughts.

He plucked Maury up from the floor, then moved to sit down beside Kit and settled the puppy in his lap She watched as the little golden furball made mincemeat out of his boot laces, feeling a bit unsettled by Pendleton’s nearness. So she scooted away from him, ostensibly to make more room, but really because she just didn’t want him to get too close.

“Because Daddy always sent a watchdog along for the ride,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me go out with anyone unless one of my brothers went, too. And they tended to put a bit of a damper on any romantic developments. Either their presence frightened my dates so badly that they didn’t even speak to me, or else my dates wound up talking Cardinal basketball with my brothers all night. So, obviously, there was little chance for a relationship to blossom.”

Pendleton scratched Maury behind his ears, and the puppy yawned with much gusto. “Why would your father send your brothers on your dates?”

“Simple,” she said. “Because he knew the guys who asked me out were only after one thing.”

Pendleton nodded knowingly. “Sex.”

Kit shook her head. “Money.”

He arched his eyebrows in astonishment, but said nothing in response to her assertion.

So Kit took it upon herself to state the obvious. “Well, why else would any of them want to go out with me?”

Strangely, he still seemed startled by her train of thought, because he replied, “Um, just a shot in the dark, here, but…maybe because they were attracted to you and wanted to get to know you better?”

She almost laughed at that. Almost. “Oh, right. Attracted to me. That’s a good one.”

“Well, why wouldn’t they be?”

“Look, I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know I’m not beautiful.”

When he opened his mouth to comment, Kit stifled him with a quick wave of her hand. “You’ve never lied to me, Pendleton. And you’re about the only person I know who hasn’t. It’s one of the things I admire about you. Don’t start now.”

Without uttering a sound, he closed his mouth.

Saddened by his honesty, Kit continued, “And I know I don’t have the most tolerable personality, either. The only reason anyone asked me out was because of the Hensley millions. Hey, Daddy got Mama pregnant on purpose, just to get his hands on her money. There was no reason for him to think some guy wouldn’t try the same thing with me.”

For a long time, Pendleton gazed at her without speaking, studying her face, her eyes, her mouth. His scrutiny became so maddening, in fact, that Kit finally dropped her head to stare at the fingers she had tangled together in her lap. Why did he keep looking at her that way? He acted as if she were something worth looking at.

“If your father never gave you a chance to have a relationship with anyone,” he finally began again, “then how did you get so far as a rehearsal dinner with the notorious Michael?”

Kit was surprised to discover she didn’t feel nearly as angry about the Michael Derringer incident now as she had before. Before her mother put the fate of her family in her hands. Before she was offered the opportunity to extract a little revenge on her father. Before Pendleton came along and made all kinds of funny things go jumping around inside her.

“I met Michael when I went away to Vanderbilt for my master’s,” she told him. “Daddy sent Dirk with me to do his doctoral studies, but I was old enough by then to have developed a few evasive maneuvers. Plus, Dirk was totally consumed by his studies and extremely easy to elude.”

“You snuck out to meet with your beau.”

She nodded. “Usually under cover of darkness. But there would be the few stolen moments in the library, and once or twice, I managed to make a frat party. Michael even scaled the side of my sorority house once when my roommate was out of town, just to be with me. It was all very romantic.”

“Sounds like.” For some reason, Pendleton’s voice had gone a little rough around the edges. Before Kit could comment, he added, “And by ‘be with me,’ you mean…”

She laughed quietly. “Yes, Michael and I were lovers. I was twenty-three when I finally lost my virginity. Long overdue by some standards, don’t you think?”

“Depends on your standards.”

“Oh, really?” she retorted. “And how old were you when you lost your virginity, Mr. High Standards?”

He began to fidget, then leaped up from the floor and moved back to his motorcycle. But he never answered her question.

“Well?” she demanded.

He glanced back over his shoulder sheepishly. “Um, I was, uh…” He emitted a restless sound. “Fifteen.”

“Fifteen?”she asked incredulously. “You were having sex when you were fifteen? Pendleton! Are you crazy? You could have been arrested for statutory!”

“Um, no I couldn’t,” he assured her. “Because she was, uh…she was eighteen.”

“Eighteen?”Kit sputtered”. Eighteen? Then she could have been arrested for statutory. Jeez, Pendleton, what were you? The Casanova of South Jersey? Don PendletJuan?”

“No,” he said, obviously feeling defensive. “I was just an early beginner. Don’t get so bent out of shape. It didn’t happen again until I was seventeen.”

“Oh, really? And how old was that one? Thirty-two?”

He arched a dark brow and threw her a salacious smile. “No, only twenty-one. Why? You jealous?”

“Oh, please. Spare me the details. But then,” she hurried on, “we were talking about me, weren’t we?”

“We always are.”

She narrowed her eyes at that, then continued hastily, “When Michael proposed to me, I told him we should elope, because my father would only cause trouble. But Michael said I was entitled to a big, fancy white wedding, and he was going to see to it that I got one. At the time, I thought he was being terribly romantic and showing some real initiative. Later, I couldn’t help but wonder if by making our relationship known to my family, he wasn’t hoping for exactly the outcome he got.”

“Kit, surely you don’t think that he—”

“What I think,” she interrupted him, her voice quiet, contemplative, and controlled, “is that I’ll never be able to trust a man again.” She unclenched her fingers only long enough to curl them tighter. “And that’s why I can’t forgive my father, Pendleton. Not because he paid Michael off. Hey, I knew all he wanted was my money. I knew he didn’t love me. Like I said—I’m not stupid.”

“Kit—”

“But I could at least pretend that he loved me, no matter who my family was or how much money they had. I couldream that it was me, not the Hensley millions, that he really cared about. Once Michael took that check and left the restaurant, though, that fantasy was gone forever.”

“Kit—”

“So see, it isn’t the fact that my father bribed and banished my fiancé that I can’t forgive,” she interrupted him again. “What I can’t forgive is that by doing it, he robbed me of my dream. And that is why I will not get married before my mother’s deadline. So that my father and brothers will know what it feels like to lose what’s most important to them, just like I lost what was most important to me.” She met his gaze levelly. “They stole my fantasy, Pendleton. They stole my dreams.”

Tears were beginning to well up in her eyes, and suddenly, she didn’t want to talk to Pendleton anymore. So she pushed herself up from the floor, ignored Maury when he began to yip and bounce playfully around her feet, and stepped carefully over the puppy. Once she cleared that barrier, however, she realized another. Because Pendleton, too, stood, and he placed himself between her and the door.

“Kit, listen to me. I—”

She held up her hands, chest-high, palm out. “Don’t,” she said simply, tilting her head back in an effort to keep the tears from spilling. “Just…don’t.”

She surged forward, shouldering him out of the way as she hurried past. And as she made tracks over the frosty grass in a bee-line back to the house, she congratulated herself on making an escape that was, if not particularly clean, at least complete.