Her Man Friday (42 page)

Kimball sighed dramatically. "It's actually quite simple, Friday, if you think about it."

"Is it?"

The other man nodded, then took a few steps forward, pausing beside one of the leather-bound sofas to strike a nonchalant pose. And then, very clearly, very matter-of-factly, he said, "Leo. Darling. Lily runs the company. She always has."

Leo opened his mouth to reply, but absolutely nothing emerged. He could only stare in silence at Schuyler Kimball, feeling certain that he must have misunderstood.

Seeming to take pity on his inability to speak, the billionaire flicked a piece of lint from his lapel and continued with a careless explanation. "She's been the one in charge of Kimball Technologies from the start. We just never exactly got around to telling anyone about it, that's all."

If Leo had thought he was confused before, he had been mistaken. Because with this newfound knowledge, he was suddenly, completely, utterly… well, still befuddled. "I'm afraid I'm not following you."

Kimball sighed again, even more dramatically. "I was afraid of that," he muttered. He glanced down at his watch. "Damn. Dinner will be served in fifteen minutes. Let's see if we can make this quick, shall we?"

"Oh, that would be fine with me," Leo assured the other man. "Let's just make it understandable, too, okay?"

Kimball took another step forward, rounding the sofa that was situated perpendicular to the fireplace and facing an identical one on the other side of a wide coffee table. "Have a seat, Leo," he said, following his own advice. "No sense standing on formality."

Leo obeyed the billionaire's instructions, not because of any feeling of obligation or courtesy, but because the command was the first statement that had made sense all night. Lily, too, crossed to the sofas, but instead of aligning herself with Kimball on his, she sat at the opposite end of the one Leo occupied. Somehow, that went a long way toward making him feel as if maybe they would recover from all this.

Depending on just what the hell
all this
was. Unfortunately, the answer to that was looking murkier all the time.

"Schuyler's intention to create Kimball Technologies started in an apartment we were sharing at the time," Lily said. "All the creative power, all the design work, even the labor, he performed himself. I kept track of the paperwork and records for him, more as a favor to him than anything else." She offered the billionaire a brief smile, then turned back to Leo. "Schuyler, for all his brilliance, can't even balance a checkbook, let alone keep track of a business. Even a small one. So the responsibilities for that fell to me. Because he was my friend, and because I was well suited for running a business, I was happy to take them on."

Leo shook his head slowly, unable to believe he was hearing what he was hearing. "Are you trying to tell me that, all these years, it's been you, not Kimball, who's been running Kimball Technologies? That you're the man in charge?"

Lily nodded, but smiled sadly at his wording. "I'm afraid so."

Finally, Kimball jumped in. "She's been the CEO of Kimball Technologies in everything but title," he said without a trace of resentment. "When I decided to go into business for myself, Lily was, quite simply, the best man for the job. She still is." He threw her a look of weary resignation. "I don't know what I'll do without her. I don't know what the company will do without her. Lily, darling, I wish you'd reconsider."

She shook her head and smiled with something Leo could only liken to melancholy. "Schuyler, you know what's going to happen when word of this gets out. If you keep me in charge, the stock will plummet, the board of directors will be outraged… It's better I quit now, before things go sour. You'll find someone to take my place. Someone with a Y chromosome to make it all more palatable to everyone."

Leo gazed at both of them in silence for a moment, completely at a loss for something to say. Finally, he managed to get out, "You, uh, you'll excuse me if I have just a little bit of trouble believing all this. Not that you couldn't run the business," he hastened to add when he saw her expression change to one of prim offense, "but because keeping something like this a secret all these years would be next to impossible."

"Not really," she said, her pique evaporating, once she understood his objection. "What would probably have been impossible, at least where the American business and financial communities are concerned, would have been launching Kimball Technologies with a woman in charge. A girl, really, was what they would have considered me," she amended. "Because I was only twenty-one at the time."

"I'm sorry, but I'm still not following you," Leo said.

She exhaled a quick breath. "No one would have taken us seriously, had mine been the face they saw as the one in charge when we approached businesses for investment. A young woman, they would have all assumed, would never be able to cut it, wouldn't have the sense or the wherewithal to build a business from the ground up. A young
man
, however," she added, dipping her head toward Schuyler, "well… that was perfect. A young hotshot mechanical designer with a brilliant mind, fresh out of college? Schuyler was all the rage.

"We used the prejudices of the business community to our advantage," she said. "The reason it was so easy to keep secret the fact that I was running things was because no one ever bothered to question Schuyler's position. We said he was the CEO, and he was, in fact, the CEO—on paper. Then we let them assume whatever they wanted after that. We let them assume he would be the one in charge, the one with the final say, when in fact, I was the one making all the decisions and keeping the business running. And, naturally, everyone did indeed make that assumption. It was a very effective smoke screen."

"But—"

"No, no buts," she interrupted him. "The hard fact of business is that women simply are not given the same treatment or recognition that men are. And I wanted Kimball Technologies to be a rousing success. Maybe even more than Schuyler did. In order to accomplish that,
I
needed to be the one who was in charge, but we needed for other people to
think
that Schuyler was. Otherwise, it never would have worked."

"But why would you be content to stay behind the scenes that way?" Leo asked. "Why would you let Kimball take credit for your hard work?"

"Well, for one thing, Schuyler was working every bit as hard as I was. He was just doing it in a different area. And for another thing, I got something out of the arrangement that was far more important to me than recognition for my contribution."

"What's that?"

"Money," she said succinctly. "And lots of it."

Leo's gut twisted again when he heard her say it flat out that way. So she really was driven by greed. She really had been motivated by personal gain.

"It's not what you think," she said calmly, clearly having read his nausea on his face. "The money I wanted—and received—from the arrangement was never meant to make my life better. Well, not in the way you're interpreting it. All of that money, Leo, every last nickel, went to worthy causes. And in seeing it distributed that way, I did, in fact, receive quite a lot of personal gratification."

"But she never received any money," Kimball threw in. "No more than was required for her to live on." He smiled at her in a way that said he would never, in a million years, understand her, but would always, always respect her decision. "She's an odd duck, is our Lily," he continued.

"Always wanting to do for others, never letting anyone do for her."

"What's so odd about wanting to help other people?" she asked.

"It's odd because so few people share your opinion," Schuyler said.

"Oh, you might think so, Schuyler," she responded, "but you haven't met the people I have working with different charities. You'd be surprised how many people
do
care."

Kimball sipped his martini, feigning—somehow Leo knew he was faking it—boredom. "Yes, I think I would be surprised," he said.

"I'm not going to get into this with you tonight," Lily said. But there was something akin to amusement mixed with the bemusement in her voice. "You already know my stand on this. Whether you believe it or not, there really are some things in life that are more important than money."

Kimball rolled his eyes, and Leo got the feeling that this was an old argument with the two of them. "Very easy for you to say, Lily. You grew up with every comfort a person could have. Mondo houses, private academies, convertibles on your sixteenth birthday, cotillions, yachts, and Chateaubriand for dinner every night."

This time Lily was the one to roll her eyes, something that only reinforced Leo's conviction that they were playing out an old scene. "Converti
ble
," she corrected the billionaire. "Singular. I only got
one
convertible for my sixteenth birthday. Which, I'll remind you, got repossessed three months later. Along with everything else we owned. And we did
not
have Chateaubriand
every
night."

"Oh no?" Kimball asked.

She shook her head, but smiled devilishly. "Only Wednesday was Chateaubriand night."

"And I suppose you're going to tell me you ordered pizza from Domino's every Friday night."

"Of course not," she retorted with a haughty sniff. "We had Cook whip us up a prosciutto-and-shitaake pizza from scratch, just like any other self-respecting Main Line family would."

"
We
couldn't even afford Domino's in
my
family."

"Yes, yes, yes. So you've said a million times. And you couldn't afford ice cream, or new shoes, or a basketball, or a dog, either. Tell me, did you also have to hike barefoot for ten miles through five feet of snow to get to school everyday?"

Kimball shook his head before enjoying a thoughtful sip of his martini. Then he replied, "No. We couldn't afford snow."

"Poorboy," she said with a warm smile.

"Debutante," he retorted just as fondly.

The two of them exchanged a look that held a wealth of affection and understanding behind it, a look that made Leo wish he'd known Lily for as long as Kimball had. But he was beginning to realize that, although she shared a bond with the billionaire that was different from the kind of relationship she would ever have with anyone else, the one she shared with Leo was—and would always be—no less important.

"Besides, I've never needed anyone to do anything for me," she added imperiously, lifting her chin. "I've managed very well on my own."

"So you have," Kimball agreed. "But, Lily. Darling. You really are going to have to do something about your solitary status. And Mr. Friday here does seem to be a decent sort." He turned to throw Leo a meaningful look. "You are a decent sort, aren't you, Leo? Do assure me that I haven't misjudged you most profoundly."

"Depends on what you mean by 'decent,' " Leo said, his brain still buzzing from everything he'd learned here in the last several minutes.

"You won't take your findings to my—our—board of directors just yet, will you? You'll let me and Lily have a word with them first, yes? They do, after all, require a certain… handling. Surely you noticed that about them."

Leo didn't answer. Frankly, he had no idea what to say. He still couldn't quite believe that Lily Rigby had been instrumental in building Kimball Technologies into a multi-national, multi-billion dollar industry. He still couldn't quite believe that she had given all that money away—
given it all away
—to people and charities and organizations who might see their lives and situations improved as a result.

Could he?

"Just tell me this," he said.

"Anything," Lily assured him, and he knew that whatever it took to straighten all this out, she was willing to do it.

"Everything the two of you have done—the structuring of the business, the appropriation of the money, the donations to all the charities…"

"Yes?" she spurred him further.

"Has it been legal? Ethical? Moral?"

"It has most assuredly been legal," Lily told him. "We have all the documentation and records to prove that. And it's all moral, too," she continued. "We never lied to anyone, Leo. We just let them assume what they wanted to assume. Schuyler and I were a team from the beginning. We just never told anyone for sure that
I
would be the one making the final decisions and that I would be the one running things. They all drew their own erroneous—and sexist, I might add—conclusions. So none of it was illegal or immoral."

"How about ethical?" he asked.

She and Kimball exchanged glances that were none too casual.

"No, I don't suppose it was ethical," she conceded. "But it
was
necessary."

"Why?" Leo asked. "I mean, you've told me why it was necessary to put yourself in charge and keep that part a secret, but what about all the charitable donations? Why did you have to keep all that a secret? What was the big deal with giving away millions of dollars annually? I would have thought that would just make Kimball look better in the eyes of the public."

"Well, it
was
quite a lot of millions," Lily reminded him. "Considerably more than the average corporate philanthropy."

"So?" Leo asked, thinking it a very good, if very succinct, question.

Kimball was the one to supply the explanation this time. "So I didn't
want
to look better, that's why. I didn't want it getting out that I was a bleeding heart philanthropist. Especially since it's Lily, and not me, who's the bleeding heart philanthropist here."

Okay, so as explanations went, that one left a lot to be desired, Leo thought. "Why wouldn't you want to be viewed as a blee… as a philanthropist?" he asked.

Kimball exhaled a long, impatient breath, then, as if that hadn't been enough to dispel his restlessness, he rose and paced to the fireplace, setting his empty glass on the mantle. For a moment, he only stared into the dance of flame that leapt and crackled and shifted from gold to orange, from blue to red.

And then, without warning, he spun around, his eyes livid with discontent. "I absolutely detest poverty and anything even remotely associated with it," he fairly spat at Leo.