Her Man Friday(14)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

This time she shook her head. "As in… not there."

"Not there?"

She sighed fitfully. "Well, all right, if you must know, she’s having her tea with Hedy Lamar."

"Oh."

"At any rate," Miss Rigby hurried on, "in spite of that, Miranda Kimball is, in fact, a card-carrying member of Mensa. Mensa just doesn’t like to advertise the fact, that’s all."

Leo nodded, but his thoughts circled back to Janey Kimball instead of her mother. His own brothers had certainly used his accelerated IQ as an excuse to beat the hell out of him on more than one occasion. Oh, but only in the nicest possible way, naturally, and only for his own good, and only because they loved him so much. Their animosity had only been compounded when Leo wound up being the first—and so far, only—Friday who had attended college, and that was only because he’d earned full scholarship privileges, and that was only because of his stratospheric test scores.

The rest of the family—except for his mother, of course—had always kept their distance from Leo in one way or another, simply because he wasn’t much like the rest of them. This in spite of all his efforts to fit in, efforts which had, one after another, backfired bigtime. Still, he thought, of all the things that might cause alienation among family members, smarts wasn’t a very bright one.

And speaking of not very bright, that reminded him of something else he wanted to ask her about.

"And just what, exactly, is it that you do for Mr. Kimball, Miss Rigby?" he asked, voicing what was really uppermost in his thoughts today. "Aside from stealing his sangria recipe, I mean."

She had bitten into the pink cookie, but gagged a little as he completed his question. The gag, however, resulted in a gasp, the gasp segued into a cough, and the cough turned into a full-blown dry hack. With no small effort, she reached for her tea and downed a hefty swallow in an effort to halt what was fast becoming a serious respiratory failure.

Okay, Leo was fully aware that he made women nervous sometimes. He was bigger than the average guy, and, all modesty aside, not a bad-looking sort. It wasn’t unusual for a woman to react to him with some degree of attraction, mixed with a healthy dose of wariness. But he couldn’t ever recall making one gag and hack until tears squeezed from her eyes.

"Miss Rigby?" he asked, standing. He reached across the desk and opened his hand over her back to give her an idle pat.

But instead of helping, the action only seemed to increase her discomfort, because she jumped up from the desk and took a few steps backward in retreat. Holding up one hand palm out in surrender, she enjoyed another healthy sip from her tea. Gradually, she got her coughing under control, then she dragged a finger beneath each eye to swipe away the moisture that had collected there.

"I’m sorry," she mumbled roughly. "I… That bite just went down the wrong way."

"Boy, I’ll say it did."

She cleared her throat one last time, then returned to her seat on the desk. This time, however, she tugged her skirt down before sitting.

"I’m, uh… I’m Mr. Kimball’s social secretary," she said, her voice still a little ragged from all the coughing. "I’m sorry. Didn’t I tell you that earlier? I could have sworn that I did."

"Oh, you told me your title," he said. "I just wasn’t sure what all that involved. Why a social secretary would be any different from a regular secretary and everything." He sipped his coffee and waited for a reply. When he didn’t receive one, he added, "I mean, just how many secretaries does a man need, you know?"

Lily eyed Mr. Freiberger with what she hoped was a benign expression. However, benign was the last thing she felt at the moment. For one thing, considering his aptitude in finding Schuyler’s top secret sangria recipe a few minutes ago, this man was obviously no ordinary lowly bookkeeper. He clearly knew his way around a computer better than the average pencil pusher. She’d spent the better part of the summer trying to figure out where Schuyler had hidden that recipe, and she’d never been able to find it.

Of course, neither had Schuyler, when she’d asked him to locate it, but that wasn’t saying much. Schuyler frequently misplaced his files, especially the really important ones. In fact, his master’s thesis from college was still out there in cyberspace somewhere, where he had accidentally jettisoned it shortly after completing it—he had been trying to access an adult-oriented bulletin board at the time. Fortunately, Lily had had the foresight to store the work on diskette before allowing Schuyler use of the modem. For someone who was so astoundingly brilliant, Schuyler Kimball had absolutely no idea how to get around a basic home computer.

But there was more than Mr. Freiberger’s amazing facility with computers that bothered Lily. She still couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t presenting himself in a way that was particularly, oh… honest. His frumpy awkwardness had only lasted as long as it had taken him to overrun Schuyler’s office, and now, suddenly, he was like a man who was in total control. Of his professional role, of his thoughts, of his surroundings. Somehow Lily couldn’t quite put aside the sensation that he was trying to overrun her, too.

But what was genuinely mind-boggling was that, truth be told, she really wouldn’t mind being overrun by the man. And that, furthermore, she kind of wanted to overrun him in return. It made no sense. Certainly she had experienced immediate attractions to men before, and she’d enjoyed one or two intimate relationships in her life. But those relationships had come about after she’d gotten to know the men in question, not the moment she had opened the door to them. She didn’t know the first thing about Leonard Freiberger, except that she didn’t think he was being honest about something. Yet she found herself responding to him on a level that was anything but professional.

And now he was asking the oddest questions. Wanting to know the most unusual things. Giving her looks that went well beyond suspicious and into outright accusation. What on earth was going on?

When she remembered that he was still awaiting a response to his question about what she did for Schuyler—and how could he have possibly made such an inquiry sound so blatantly sexual?—she lifted one shoulder and let it drop in what she hoped looked like a careless gesture. Even though careless was the last thing she felt at the moment.

"I run things for Mr. Kimball here," she said simply. "I keep things organized, keep track of what needs to be taken care of. Although he also has a secretary at his office who attends to the things that come up there, I make sure that all the things that need to get done here at Ashling do in fact get done. And sometimes, when it’s needed, elsewhere."