Her Man Friday (27 page)

"Yeah, yeah, assume away," Leo said, interrupting him. "I don't want the
People
magazine version. I want the ground-in dirt, too."

Eddie smiled with satisfaction. "Okay. Did you know he used to boink his social secretary, one Miss Lily Marie Rigby, of the Main Line Rigbys, on a regular basis?"

Leo winced at Eddie's command of the vernacular—
boink
, after all, didn't come close to what he suspected Miss Rigby was capable of doing—then snapped to attention at the wealth of information in Eddie's one simple question. "Used to? You mean he doesn't still? And Lily Rigby is from a Main Line family? Are you sure?"

"Yep and nope and yep and yep," Eddie replied. "She and Kimball lived together when they were in college, but evidently the
hot-hot-hot
went out of that relationship a
loooong
time ago. And the luscious Miss Rigby did, in fact, grow up in the lap of luxury, a member of one of Philadelphia's oldest and most illustrious families—until her old man blew the family fortune when she was in high school."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Leo said, dropping onto the sofa opposite Eddie. "What are you talking about?"

Obviously delighted to have Leo at a disadvantage, Eddie said, "Got any beer? I gotta wicked thirst been doggin' me all afternoon. And this is a
great
story."

Leo rose and made his way to the kitchen. Over his shoulder he called, "It better not be more than thirty minutes great. I need you gone by then."

"No
People
magazine version, I promise. I'll give you the
TV Guide
Fall Preview capsule review, instead—how'll that be?"

"Fine. Just get on with it."

Leo grabbed a beer for them both, relishing the wet hiss of each cap that signaled their opening, then returned to his seat on the sofa. Eddie enjoyed a healthy swig of the brew as he loosened his Valentino necktie, clearly gearing up for what he had to reveal. Then he leaned back comfortably, one arm folded behind his head.

"Once upon a time," he began, "there was a little princess named Lily Rigby who had everything a girl could ever want. Rich mommy and daddy. Big house on a hill in Ardmore. Sports car. White cotillion dress. You name it. Then, one day, when she was sixteen, her daddy lost everything. Now, mind you, Mr. Harrison Rigby was one helluva of a businessman. Talk about your self-made millionaires. He just panicked, and waited too long to try to recover. Something that sort of left his family, oh… Destitute."

Eddie smiled, as if proud of himself for using a word like
destitute
correctly.

"Anyway," he continued, "the Rigbys move into a homeless shelter in Philadelphia for a few months, and—"

"A homeless shelter?" Leo echoed, nearly choking on his beer. "Miss Rigby lived in a
homeless
shelter when she was a teenager?"

At his question, Eddie, too, nearly strangled on the slug of beer he'd pulled into his mouth. Wiping his chin with the back of his fist, he sputtered, "Jeez, Leo, you actually call her 'Miss Rigby?' What the hell have you been doing out at that estate for the last two weeks?" He arched his dark eyebrows in thought, as if something had just occurred to him. "Unless, you're using the 'Miss' part as a shortened form of 'Mistress,' in which case, I gotta hand it to ya, big guy, 'cause I ain't
never
had the nerve to let a woman dress up in black leather and tell me to—"

"Just get on with the story, Eddie."

Eddie shook his head, clearly disappointed in Leo's diminished sense of adventure. Then he shrugged, enjoyed another swallow of beer, and continued. "Okay, so Princess Lily may be poor, but she's got a brain on her that won't quit. Her IQ is a hundred and forty-seven, did you know that?"

Leo stiffened. Miss Rigby's IQ was higher than his? By five points?

"So she gets into Harvard on the Big Brain Scholarship, where she meets Schuyler Kimball, another penniless geek, whose way through the ivy halls is being paid by the Biggest Brain of All Scholarship. Are you still with me, Leo?"

"Oh, you bet." But somehow, he hadn't quite moved past the fact that Miss Rigby was smarter than he was.

"I guess when two big brains meet like that, their libidos can't be far behind," Eddie continued, "because the two of them shacked up the whole time they were in school together."

Leo choked on another swallow of beer. "
Shacked up
?" he repeated, his version a bit louder than Eddie's. "Miss Rigby and Kimball lived together for that length of time?"

"
College
time, too," Eddie clarified. "And you know how randy those years are, Leo. They musta been at it like rabbits."

Leo shook his head slowly in disbelief. Well, why was he so surprised? he asked himself. He'd
known
there was something more to Miss Rigby's relationship with Kimball than simple employment. He'd
known
that her feelings for the man went far deeper than a social secretary's should. He'd
known
that. And he was always,
always
, right about these things. So then why did he suddenly feel so cheated by the knowledge?
Why
?

Because, dammit, he'd wanted to be wrong about it, that's why.

"What else?" he asked, hesitant to hear any more, but knowing he had little choice. Not only was all this essential information, but when you got Eddie Dolan started on a story like this, it was impossible to shut him up until he was through.

Eddie swallowed some more beer before continuing. "The two of them have stayed together since college," he said, "but not always in the romantic sense. Nobody seems to know for sure exactly
what
their relationship is, but it doesn't look like they do much boinking these days. Not with each other, anyway. King Kimball certainly seems to be on the boinking tour of all the capitals of the world, but Princess Lily doesn't seem to be boinking anybody at all." He eyed Leo with much interest. "Unless you know something I don't know. Which isn't likely, seeing as how
I'm
the one with the big fat file folder. And you don't show up in there until almost the last page."

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.