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he appeared to be caught up in a very important conversation with McClellan, Jr.
    "Hey, Daddy!" she sang out. When her father's head snapped up at the summons, she called further, "Gosh, he's really cute and everything, and he seems to be more intelligent than the last two you got me, but I couldn't possibly keep him. Thanks, anyway. "
    Her father inhaled a deep breath, excused himself from the company of his oldest son, and strode across the room as if nothing in the world was wrong. Then he completely ignored his daughter and said, "Pendleton, would you mind joining me and Holt? We're discussing the new trade agreement with Canada ."
    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.

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    Chapter 3

    « ^ »
    A ll 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 had actually passed her test, she told herself. He'd 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'd 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 them.
    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 nooooo. 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 had ever dared to come near her. And 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 had his chance years ago, and he'd blown it. All of them had. 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