Her Man Friday (10 page)

Oh, and God forbid someone who was as pure and untainted as Chloe obviously was should fall in with the wrong crowd, Leo thought. But he said nothing, only watched the by-play, impressed by Miss Rigby's success with the girl.

"In your room," she commanded. "Now."

"But, Lily," Chloe whined.

Miss Rigby steeled herself for battle, and through gritted teeth, stated without so much as a hint of doubt, "Don't you front me, girl dude. I know the real. Your stilo today is
off
."

Whoa
, Leo thought, even more impressed. Miss Rigby appeared to be fluent in Teenspeak. How very extraordinary.

"You are so harsh," Chloe muttered.

"Go to your room, change your clothes and wash your face," the secretary told her, reverting back to standard English usage. Her voice softened some, however, as she added, "And get rid of the hardware. Schuyler called and said he's coming home tonight, and you know how he feels about all that."

"Oh, epic," Chloe grumbled. "Like it matters what
he
thinks."

But she reached for the hoop in her nose and deftly removed it, an action that quite frankly made Leo's flesh crawl. He glanced away when he saw her go for the one in her eyebrow. But not before a shudder of distaste wound through him.

"Now go upstairs and change out of that outfit," he heard Miss Rigby say again. "Where did it come from, anyway? I thought we gave all of your mother's things to charity."

To charity? Leo echoed to himself. What self-respecting charitable organization would take such things? Unplanned Parenthood, maybe, or Promiscuity International, but that was all he could think of.

And then it occurred to him that if they'd given all of her mother's things to charity, then it could only be because Chloe no longer had a mother who needed things. For the first time, it occurred to Leo that maybe, just maybe, all this piercing behavior—both verbal and physical—might be the result of a kid who was lost in more ways than a kid should be. When he glanced at the pair again, Chloe had turned around, so her back was to him and she was facing Miss Rigby.

"I just wanted to keep a few of her things, all right?" she said with what was obviously only a half-hearted effort to recapture some of her earlier antagonism. "So sue my ass, why don't you." But there was absolutely no venom in her voice now.

Miss Rigby's expression eased up some then, and her voice gentled when she told the girl, "just go upstairs and change, all right? Schuyler will be home in time for dinner, so try to find something appropriate to wear."

Without another word, and with a docility Leo wouldn't have guessed she could manage, Chloe left the room. Her exit was anticlimactic, almost disappointing, really. Somehow, there should have been discordant music and pyrotechnics and the rumble of faraway thunder. Certainly, at the very least, there should have been a puff of smoke and a lingering smell of sulfur. But all that was left in the girl's wake was an awkward silence and unsatisfied speculation.

Lily Rigby, too, remained behind, but her attention was focused on some point on the wall behind Leo. In any case, she didn't look at him square on, and fidgeted almost imperceptibly, as if it were she, and not Chloe, who had just behaved abominably.

"Chloe has, um, well, she's been having trouble at school lately," Miss Rigby announced lamely, as if that explained everything.

Oh, now there was a news flash, Leo thought. "Has she?" he replied blandly, thinking that he'd heard this conversation a dozen times on "Leave It to Beaver" reruns, but he couldn't recall a single episode where the Beave had been called to the mat for body piercing or red vinyl, platform thigh boots.

Miss Rigby nodded. "The headmistress of her school has been trying to arrange a meeting with Mr. Kimball for some time now, but they can never seem to get their schedules to coincide."

Meaning, Leo thought, that Kimball didn't have even the smallest interest in the fate or welfare of his ward.

"Chloe hasn't had an easy time of it," Miss Rigby added, still obviously trying to cover for the girl. "She's actually surprisingly well adjusted, all things considered."

Leo hesitated only a moment before responding, " 'All things' being that she's lost her mother, and found a father who evidently doesn't want to claim her."

Miss Rigby did turn to face him then, but her expression belied nothing of what she might be thinking. "Did Chloe tell you that Mr. Kimball is her father?"

Leo nodded.

Her gaze remained steady and unflinching as she said, "Yes, well, Mr. Kimball doesn't necessarily agree with her on that particular assumption."

He wasn't sure why he cared, but Leo heard himself asking, "And just what does Miss Rigby think?"

She dropped her gaze to the back of her hand and inspected her fingers with a thoroughness that few manicurists would bother to perform. It was the same gesture she'd completed the day before, when she had skirted the issue of Chloe in the first place.

"What I think in that regard, Mr. Freiberger, is not important. Whatever is or is not, Mr. Kimball has taken on the care and feeding of Chloe until a time when she is able to manage those things herself. We do our best with her. Unfortunately, our best has met with mixed results."

"We? Our?" Leo repeated. "I wasn't aware that Chloe was your responsibility, too."

Her rapt fascination with her cuticles continued as she told him, "There's more to Chloe than the side you just witnessed. And in spite of what you may be thinking about her, she deserves something better than what's she's received from life. Her mother was an alcoholic, and from what I gather, she dated men who were anything but pleasant, some of whom made overtures toward Chloe that were anything but fatherly. To put it far more politely than it actually was." She dropped her hand to her side and met Leo's gaze intently. "Let's just say that, speaking as a human being, I'd like to see her happy."

From the expression on her face, he knew that any further query he might request into the matter of young Chloe would be in no way tolerated. So he kept the numerous questions he had about the girl to himself. She was a troubled kid who was undoubtedly bound for more trouble before there was any improvement in her life. A rebel without a cause, a kid without a country, a searcher without a clue. The oldest story in the world, and all that jazz.

She was none of Leo's concern. So he nudged his curiosity about Chloe to the back of his brain, and focused on Lily Rigby, who was infinitely more interesting anyway.

"How's your search coming?" she asked, nodding toward the computer on Schuyler Kimball's desk. "Have you found the problem?"

He shook his head. "Not yet."

"I thought you said it would be a routine search of the files," she said. He hoped he only imagined the thread of suspicion that laced her voice.

"It is routine," he assured her, striving for a blandness he was nowhere close to feeling. "But Mr. Kimball has an awful lot of files here. And as you said, they're in a bit of a mess."

She nodded, but didn't pursue the matter. "How long do you plan to be today, Mr. Freiberger? As you undoubtedly heard me tell Chloe, Mr. Kimball will be returning to Ashling tonight by dinner time. If you'd like, I can see that an extra place is added, so that you have a chance to speak to him about all this. I don't know how receptive he'll be, however. It takes him some time to… decompress… after he's been traveling. He may very well take his meal in his room."

There was no way Leo would turn down an invitation like that. Not just because he was eager to make Schuyler Kimball's acquaintance, and not just because, even after only two days on site, he'd become completely caught up in the little daytime drama that was the billionaire's life. It wasn't even because he was starting to feel a little hungry.

No, the real reason Leo wanted to stay for dinner at the Kimball estate was actually quite ordinary. Having come from rather meager beginnings himself, he was just naturally curious to see more of how the other half lived. He wanted to find out if money really could buy happiness. He wanted to see if a man who claimed more assets than some sovereign nations picked up his fork the same way everyone else did. And he wanted to know if the man's appetites were any more exotic or unquenchable than a normal guy's were.

But more than that, deep down inside, Leo had to admit that the biggest reason he wanted to have dinner at Ashling, the real impetus that spurred him on, the actual explanation for his desire to stay…

Well, it was because Lily Rigby would be there, too.

Deep down inside, Lily had been hoping that Leonard Freiberger—what on earth had his parents been
thinking
to name him that?—would decline her invitation to remain at Ashling for dinner. And really, when she got right down to it, she had no idea why she'd extended such an offer to him in the first place.

Schuyler hated having guests for dinner, even people he considered close friends—
close
being a relative term, naturally, seeing as how Schuyler fairly drove people away in, well, droves. And where common workers like Mr. Freiberger were concerned… Heavens, Schuyler would just as soon entertain a rabid badger as he would a laboring drone for Kimball Technologies. He was bound to be unhappy to discover a lowly bookkeeper sharing his dinner table. And he would likely take Lily to task for including the man.

So just why, precisely, had she included him?

Unfortunately, she was no closer to an answer to that question now, as she considered her options for appropriate dinner wear, than she had been when she'd issued the invitation to Mr. Freiberger some hours before. Even more vexing than that, however, was why she was feeling such angst over what to wear. Although Schuyler, for some reason, insisted that everyone Dress for Dinner—with a capital D… no,
two
capital Ds—whenever he was in residence at Ashling, Lily had never given much thought to what she put on. She only had two dresses that were appropriate, anyway, and she generally just alternated between the two.

Tonight, however, neither held any appeal for her. The long-sleeved, black velvet cocktail dress that she'd always considered timeless and elegant suddenly seemed dated and unremarkable instead. And the dark green, off-the-shoulder number that had served perfectly for whatever formal occasion presented itself, now seemed a bit too revealing.

Maybe it was time she did a little shopping, she thought, and spent a little money on herself, instead of squirreling it all away, as had become her habit. It had been so long since she'd splurged on something luxurious and unnecessary, for the simple purpose of making herself feel good.

Somehow, though, Lily couldn't quite bring herself to part with her money for frivolous pursuits. Certainly, there had been a time in her life when she wouldn't have given a thought to doling out hundreds of dollars for a new dress that she would wear only once. But those days were long gone, never to return. Because they'd taught her a lesson she would never forget.

Her father's financial woes had begun while Lily was still in junior high school, but Harrison Rigby hadn't told his family about the downturn until it was too late to bring it back around. Instead, he'd spent years trying to recover all by himself, then had panicked when things hadn't gone according to plan. Ultimately, he had waited too long, had tried too little, had lost too much. And before any of them had known it, everything they'd owned was just… gone.