Her Man Friday (15 page)

"Right now, I have other plans," he continued without removing his attention from his escort, who brightened considerably as a result. "You, Mrs. Beecham, may call my secretary tomorrow and make an appointment to see me at a time when I'm available. Until then…"

He tossed her a final—and very careless—scrap of attention as he strode by her. "Until then, I have some personal business to attend to."

He thought that would be the end of it, but he heard Janey cry, "Wait! Mrs. Beecham!" and he hesitated, fearing what would come next.

True to form, Janey asked her standard question of greeting when faced with a new acquaintance. "Mrs. Beecham," she said, "can you spell
evapotranspiration
?"

Schuyler closed his eyes and waited to hear what Mrs. Beecham's response would be, though why he cared, he honestly couldn't have said.

"Well, of course I can spell evapotranspiration," Mrs. Beecham replied. He had to hand it to the headmistress. She didn't even sound surprised by the question. "E-v-a-p-o-t-r-a-n-s-p-i-r-a-t-i-o-n." Then, before Janey could get her licks in, she added, "Evapotranspiration. Noun. The transference of moisture from the earth to its atmosphere by water's evaporation and plants' transpiration. I minored in biology," she added by way of an explanation.

"What's your IQ?" Janey asked further.

Schuyler waited, hoping, for some reason, that Mrs. Beecham would reply that her IQ was nothing out of the ordinary, that she only knew about evapotranspiration because she was an avid gardener. Unfortunately, what she said was, "One hundred and eighty-five, why?"

One hundred and eighty-five
? he repeated to himself, shocked. Amazed. Intrigued. Oh,
fine
. She
would
have an IQ large enough to compete with her… other endowments. Dammit.

"
Mother
!" Janey exclaimed. "When are you going to talk to Schuyler about—"

"Janey?" Schuyler interjected without turning around, and with a surprisingly tepid tone.

For a moment, she didn't respond. Then, in a very small voice, she asked, "Yes, Schuyler?"

"Go to your room."

"But—"

"Go to your room. And your library privileges are suspended until further notice."

"But—"

"You will write an essay entitled Why I Won't Harass My Brother's House Guests About Their IQs Anymore,' and you will place it on my desk tomorrow morning."

"But—"

For the last time, he hoped, Schuyler turned to Vivian and conjured the most licentious smile in his arsenal. Strangely, though, he felt as if he were rousing the smile not for Viveca, but for Mrs. Beecham. Stranger still was his realization that he was no longer as interested in page seventy-two of
How to Leave a Man Groaning with Satisfaction Every Time
as he was in the hidden chapters of the headmistress.

Because as he dipped his head in farewell to the entire dinner party, his expression lingered only on her. And he hoped she knew what she was missing out on by being so damned intelligent and tightly bound. Unfortunately, somehow, Schuyler suspected that
he
was the one who was missing out on something. And that maybe, just maybe, he wasn't quite as smart as he thought.

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God
. When was it going to stop?

As she did every night, Caroline Beecham awoke from sleep at precisely 3:22 a.m., to find that she lay curled in a tiny ball, in her tiny bed, in her tiny bedroom, in her tiny apartment. 3:22 a.m. She rolled over in her bed and tried to think of something—anything—else.

Unfortunately, when she did that, the first thought that wandered into her head was of Schuyler Kimball.

Of course, that wasn't surprising, seeing as how she'd been thinking about him a lot over the past week. Ever since she had barged into his home and grabbed him by the throat, only to discover that she was making a really big mistake—not to mention a really big fool out of herself—in the process. All things said and done, she supposed something like attempted homicide on a man
would
rather permanently etch the intended victim's image into a woman's brain.

Oh, God, had she actually done that? she asked herself for perhaps the hundredth time since it had happened. Had she truly snatched up Schuyler Kimball—
Schuyler Kimball
!—by the throat and threatened him?

She groaned and rolled over in her bed again. The glowing red letters on her clock read 3:24 now, and she felt her heart rate slow some in response to the realization that she had survived 3:22 a.m. for one more night.

Her slowing pulse accelerated again, however, when she recalled once more her escapade with Schuyler Kimball. She had called his secretary the first thing the following morning to set up an appointment to see him. After much hemming and hawing and alleged rearranging of his schedule, Miss Rigby had managed to pencil Caroline in for an impressive twenty minutes the following Saturday morning—which was only a few hours away from right now. Caroline swallowed hard as she rehearsed yet again what she intended—what she needed—to say to Mr. Kimball.

They were losing Chloe. And he had to help her bring the girl back. It was that simple.

Never had Caroline met a more remarkable child than Chloe Sandusky, but every day the teenager was slipping farther and farther away. Caroline was beginning to fear that, unless there were some vast and immediate changes made to the girl's life, she would be lost to them forever. And the world—yes, the world—might potentially suffer as a result.

Simply put, Chloe Sandusky was the most gifted, most brilliant, most incredibly minded person Caroline had ever met. And having worked with gifted, brilliant, incredibly minded children for more than a decade now, that was saying something. Yet no one but her seemed to care about Chloe. Even the teachers at Van Meter—who'd been trained to deal with gifted, and often difficult to manage, children—had pretty much washed their hands of Chloe.

Because in addition to being the most brilliant child Caroline had ever met, Chloe was also the most self-destructive. There could be any number of reasons for that—and, having finally met Mr. Kimball, Caroline could easily conceive of one really
big
reason—but that didn't mean she was ready to give up on Chloe. Not yet. Not now. Not ever, if she could help it.

Unfortunately, that was less and less up to Caroline, and more and more up to Chloe. And if Chloe didn't give a damn about her future—or her present, for that matter—then how was Caroline supposed to help her?

The words she had rehearsed so meticulously to recite to Schuyler Kimball tumbled through her head, sounding stilted and stunted and sterile. Twenty minutes, she reminded herself. That was all the time she had to save a girl's life. Twenty minutes to convince a man who may or may not be her father that Chloe Sandusky's was a life worth living, a brain worth nurturing, a soul worth saving. God alone knew what the girl was capable of achieving if given even a tiny injection of self-worth. She might become a research scientist who would ultimately rid the world of disease. She might become a composer who created music to calm even the most restless spirit. She might become a leader who ran a government that would bring peace to a weary planet.

But none of that would happen unless someone could make Chloe understand how very important she was. Not just as a brilliant individual, but as a decent human being. Caroline had tried so hard to make the girl see how amazing and abundant her gifts were. But Chloe would be blind to those gifts forever unless someone else—someone she cared about more than she did the headmistress of her school—pointed them out to her, and praised her for possessing them.

Caroline flopped over onto her back again and tried not to look at the empty space on the other side of the bed, the space that had been empty for almost a year now. Instead, she thought about the morning to come. Twenty minutes, she reminded herself. How could she find enough words in that brief span of time to save the life of a child who didn't consider herself valuable enough to rescue?

The moment his secretary led her into Schuyler Kimball's library, Caroline knew she was about to undertake a battle for a lost cause. To say that the billionaire looked uninterested in her arrival would have been a gross understatement. In fact, as he closed his book and rose formally from a leather-clad sofa, what he looked to be was hostile. And immediately, instinctively, she shifted into self-preservation mode.

Strangely, though, she recognized at once that the reason her defenses leapt so utterly to alert
wasn't
because of his clear animosity toward her. Antagonistic parents—and guardians—were part of the terrain where her job was concerned. But Caroline was fully confident in her ability to manage such situations when they arose. She was, after all, a professional. No, the reason every last one of her personal shields hurtled up now was, she was certain, to keep her safe from Schuyler Kimball as a man. Because Caroline Beecham, for all her self-assurance as an educator, was in no way confident of her abilities as a woman.

Particularly when she was faced with a man like this.

She found it odd that someone who worked at home would bother dressing in a power suit, complete with Windsor-knotted tie. She would have thought that would be one of the perks of self-employment—billionaire self-employment, at that—the freedom to wear whatever one wished when performing one's job. Schuyler Kimball had so much power and so much money, she couldn't conceive of a single person who might tell him what to do. Had she been in his place, she would have worn her pajamas every day.

Yet here he stood, in his own home, looking as if he had just risen from the head of an executive boardroom table. Then, for some reason, it struck her that perhaps this was the only way Schuyler Kimball could maintain his authority over his personal empire. By treating it the same way he would his professional one. Still, he seemed out of place here, dressed as he was. And certainly all the more formidable. She had rather been hoping she might catch him between tennis sets, when he would be more relaxed, more exhausted, more malleable. And, naturally, more amenable to seeing things her way.

Ah, well, she thought as she took a reluctant step forward. Might as well get this over with. Tally ho. Half a league onward. Mine eyes have seen the glory, and all that.

"The headmistress of Chloe's school is here, Schuyler."

Miss Rigby's announcement from directly behind her made Caroline flinch, simply because, for an instant, she had completely forgotten that she and Mr. Kimball weren't alone in the room—or in the universe, for that matter. What was worse than her reaction, however, was the fact that he had obviously noticed her quick recoil, because he smiled slightly, almost, she thought, triumphantly.

"Thank you, Lily darling," he replied coolly, his gaze fixed not on his secretary, but on Caroline.

No one moved for a moment, then the soft click of the door closing behind her made Caroline flinch again. Because then she and Schuyler Kimball truly were alone—in the room and in the universe. For twenty minutes. Whether she liked it or not.