Her Man Friday(51)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

Leo opted not to answer that one. He did still have a long night ahead of him, after all. In spite of everything he was learning about Miss Rigby and her employer, he wasn’t entirely ruling out some potential for boin… uh… for romance.

Eddie frowned with clear disappointment at Leo’s unwillingness to expound upon the level of boinking at the Kimball estate. With a sigh of resignation, he tipped the bottle to his mouth again before continuing. "At any rate, King Kimball and Princess Lily just seem to be good friends now. She’s worked for him in one way or another ever since he started the business. She’s got an MBA and all that, so I guess it makes sense that he’d hire her."

An MBA? An MBA?

"But she’s not using her MBA in the capacity of social secretary," Leo said with some distraction, having a bit of trouble getting past that MBA business. "If that was what she wanted to be when she grew up, then she should have majored in something like hotel management. Why would a woman with an advanced degree in business, not to mention a massive IQ, waste her talents working as a social secretary? Especially for Kimball and his household? He’d be better off employing a zoo keeper or a circus ringleader in that capacity."

Eddie shrugged. "Maybe he’s the one who dumped her, and she just wants to be with him however she can. Maybe she’s just trying to preserve the fading bloom of a love that wilted long ago. Some women are like that, ya know, Leo. Pining after men they can’t have, men who don’t want them anymore. Deluding themselves into thinking that if they diminish themselves in one area of life, they’ll have gained so much more in another area of life."

Leo eyed the other man warily. " ‘Preserve the bloom of a love that wilted long ago?’ " he repeated incredulously. "What the hell are you talking about? What would you know about any of that stuff?"

"Hey," Eddie cried indignantly, straightening to a sitting position. "I watch ‘Oprah,’ too, ya know. And I think women like that are tragic. I feel their pain—I really do. And I think somebody oughta publish a directory of women like that, so those of us who would appreciate them could call them up on Friday nights. It would save a hell of a lot on nine hundred numbers."

Leo shook his head and somehow refrained from comment. "Miss Rigby’s too smart for that. I don’t get the impression at all that she’s suffering from a case of unrequited love where Kimball is concerned."

Involuntarily, he recalled the scene from the afternoon before, those all-too-brief moments when he’d lost control of himself and succumbed to his desire to simply touch her. He remembered the way her scent had taunted him, and the way her soul had beckoned to him. He recalled the heated, silky flesh beneath his fingertips when he’d stolen up under her sweater, and the whisper of fabric as he’d urged her skirt up her thighs. He recalled the look in her eyes when she’d turned to him and tangled her fingers in his hair, and the way her heart had pounded beneath his thumb when he’d settled it on the front closure of her bra.

So close. They’d been so close…

He bit back a groan. On the contrary, unrequited love for Schuyler Kimball was the last thing Miss Rigby seemed to be suffering from these days.

"Okay, so she and Kimball were an item once upon a time," Leo conceded reluctantly.

"A hot item," Eddie interjected. "A steaming item. A spontaneous combustion item."

Leo ignored him. "And okay, so she comes from money," he added further, collecting his thoughts.

"Buckets of money," Eddie elaborated. "Olympic-sized swimming pools of money. Grand Canyons of—"

"And, okay, so she’s… she’s… she’s above average in intelligence," Leo tossed out further, unwilling to wait around while Eddie dug a pit for the Rigby fortune the size of the Pacific Ocean.

"Oh, I think you’re understating the facts most egregiously there, Leo, old man," Eddie interrupted again. "A hundred and forty-seven on the noodle scale, well… That’s even higher than you, pal." At Leo’s sharp look of censure, he added, "Though I’m sure she can’t bench press her IQ the way you can."

The realization brought little comfort.

What brought even less comfort was the fact that Miss Rigby had a few hidden aspects to herself that Leo hadn’t anticipated at all. She was irrevocably tied to Schuyler Kimball—in a way that no one seemed capable of defining, a way that went beyond what most people enjoyed together. She came from a moneyed background—one she had lost at an age when she’d probably been most enjoying the benefits of wealth. She laid claim to an enormous intellect—that she kept concealed and didn’t use to its potential.

Where Leo had been hoping that Eddie’s snooping might provide a few answers, it appeared that the man’s findings were only going to launch a host of new questions instead.

And a host of new suspicions, too, he realized. Because if Lily Rigby had come from money—buckets of money, Grand Canyons of money—only to have watched it disappear, well… she might just be looking for a way to recoup her father’s losses, and her own. And if she was as smart as it appeared, then she’d certainly know how to go about siphoning off fifty million dollars from her employer, not to mention hiding it somewhere that no one would find it. Not until she’d found a nice little hacienda on the Brazilian coast somewhere, anyway. And, hey, who better to steal money from than an ex-lover who may have spurned her?

But this was Lily he was thinking about here, he reminded himself. Lily. Lily. She couldn’t possibly be capable of something like that.

Could she?

No, certainly not.

Leo’s thoughts left a bad taste in his mouth, so he lifted the beer for another swallow, in the hopes that it would both cleanse his palate and numb his brain. Unfortunately, it was going to take more than one lousy beer to do that. He glanced down at his watch. In forty-five minutes, Lily Rigby would be knocking on his front door. And if he’d thought he was ill prepared to greet her before, he was thoroughly unready now.

Only one thing to do for it, he thought. He was going to have to do what countless other men before him had done for the sake of king and country, what people throughout history had done in order to preserve honor, and integrity, and fidelity. He’d have to engage in that activity that kept the status quo safe. He had no choice. There was no way to avoid it. He would do what he had to do. Namely, turn tail and run like hell.

Chapter Fourteen

When Lily arrived at the address Mr. Freiberger had left for her on Schuyler’s desk, she was surprised enough by her surroundings that she double-checked everything to be sure. But this was definitely the place where she was supposed to be. Schuyler must be paying his bookkeepers a lot more than she’d realized. Either that, or else Mr. Freiberger was a big fat liar.