Demon Rumm (11 page)

He shrugged. “Cheryl didn’t want any outside interference.”

“And you settled for that?”

“I didn’t have any choice. When she makes up her mind about something, she means it.”

“Dylan will never live with you?”

He laughed. “Oh, I seriously doubt it.”

“Marrying Cheryl is out of the question, of course.”

“Of course. Brothers don’t marry their sisters.”

He watched her adorable mouth fall open as though her jaw had come unhinged. He waited for a moment, then reached out and lifted her chin with his index finger until her mouth clicked shut. “You were jealous, weren’t you?”

He guessed that as soon as she recovered from her shock, she would be furious. He was right. He braced himself for the storm brewing in her eyes.

“Jealous?”
She shot out of her chair as though it had bitten her. “Hardly. I’m just finding it hard to believe that the big bad boy of Hollywood actually has a sister.”

“A whole family in fact. My sister Cheryl, my brother-in-law Griff, their son Dylan, Mom and Dad. Cheryl and her family live in San Diego, but we don’t get to see each other very often. I called her yesterday. She was delighted to find out I was this close, so she brought my nephew up to see me. Our visits are too few and far between. Dylan tends to forget me from one to the next.”

“Your parents?”

He was glad to see that she had calmed down and seemed genuinely interested in his family. Only a very few close friends knew his background. He had no hesitancy in sharing it with Kirsten. Indeed, he wanted to.

“They live in a small town in Arizona, which has and shall remain nameless to protect its citizens from overzealous fans. The people there don’t advertise it as my hometown because they think too much of my parents and want to protect their privacy. Dad is the high school principal; Mom taught freshman English until a couple of years ago when she took an early retirement.”

Kirsten, having sat back down, now leaned over her desk, supporting her shaking head in her hand. “The high school principal. Freshman English. I can’t believe it.” Her head came up suddenly and she looked at him suspiciously. “You’re not making this up, are you?”

He lifted the telephone receiver and extended it toward her. “Call them. Area code—”

“All right, I believe you,” she said, irritably snatching the phone out of his hand and replacing it. “It’s just that I never pictured you with parents. It’s so—”

“Ordinary?”

“Yes. Not at all—”

“Sordid? Sleazy?”

Her shoulders slumped in an admission of guilt. “Why are we always willing to believe the worst about people?”

He dismissed her pertinent question with a smile. “Which story did you fall for? The one about my mother being a hooker on the Vegas strip? Frankly, I liked the one about the blind gypsy better.”

Kirsten had the grace to laugh before asking him seriously, “You go along with those ridiculous stories in order to protect them, don’t you?”

He nodded, thinking that her face, with the oversized glasses perched on her nose, was one he wouldn’t mind seeing across his breakfast table for the rest of his life. He felt a kernel of emotion growing inside his chest until it was a solid pressure against his heart. Damned if it didn’t feel like love was supposed to.

“Thank you for understanding that, Kirsten,” he said huskily.

“Don’t credit me with sensitivity. When I first saw Cheryl on the terrace, and you holding the boy, I—”

“You were jealous.”

“So you said before,” she said with annoyance. “I ignored the allegation then, but I categorically deny it now.”

Like the Mafia heavy he’d once played, he grabbed a handful of her pullover and hauled her to her feet, practically dragging her across the desk to accommodate his hungry lips. He kissed her soundly, rubbing his mouth against hers until her lips parted. His tongue slipped inside and wasn’t satisfied until it had thoroughly sampled her.

Her lips were rosy and wet when he finally released her to sink back into her chair.

Complacently he repeated, “You were jealous.”

Six

Someone had done some housekeeping in his trailer. To that unknown being he was grateful. He’d left it looking like storm damage, but during his absence clothes had been picked up and laundered, the dishes in the tiny sink had been washed and put away, the waste-baskets had been emptied. All in all it was a cool, comparably quiet place to seek respite from the confusion and noise that constituted the location movie set.

The location wasn’t too far from the Rumm house, actually. He’d driven it in an hour on his motorcycle. But it could have been on the other side of the world for all its desert remoteness. The landscape, which was supposed to be Abilene, Texas, was barren. Not a single tree provided shade from the glaring sun.

Rylan’s trailer, parked on the perimeter of the set, was dim. The air conditioner hummed like a religious meditator. He had sought out the serene solitude while the director and technicians were setting up the scheduled scene.

“Come in,” he called when someone knocked.

The director’s assistant, a heavyset young woman named Pat, who figuratively, if not literally, took everyone on the crew to her large breasts and mothered them, came in.

“Are they ready for me?” he asked.

“Are you kidding?” Pat chortled. “It’ll be a while yet. Need anything? Beer? Food? A girl?”

Such procurements had been handled discreetly before. Everyone in the business, including himself, took them in stride. Since when had the nonchalant system come to sound so shabby? Since Kirsten.

“No thanks.”

“He,” she said, referring to the director, “sent me in to ask you one more time to let your double do this scene. He’s costumed and standing by, waiting for you to come to your senses.”

“The script calls for close-ups. I need to do it.”

“It’s going to be tricky, Rylan.”

“That’s what they’re paying me for.”

Sighing in resignation, she asked, “Does this shirt need washing?”

“Please,” he replied automatically.

Pat draped it over her shoulder. “How’s everything going over at the Rumm residence?”

“Okay.”

She frowned at him. “No elaboration?”

“No elaboration.”

“The widow has been conspicuous by her absence,” she remarked as she piled several of his garments in front of the door so she wouldn’t forget them when she left. “Can I have a doughnut?” She took one from the open box without waiting for his permission and plopped down on the built-in sofa that faced the one he was lounging on.

“She says the book and movie are about Demon Rumm, not her,” Rylan said. He would have been surprised to know that he was frowning. The inverted
v
-shaped brows were pulled close together. “She wants as little to do with us as possible.”

“Hmm.”

He slid a knowing glance toward the director’s assistant. “That’s the most loaded ‘hmm’ I’ve ever heard. But if you think I’m going to appease your curiosity and discuss Mrs. Rumm with you, you’re wrong.”

Pat heaved herself to her feet, licking doughnut glaze off her fingers. “Unfortunately I know that. You never kiss and tell.”

“Who says I’ve been kissing?”

It was her turn to give him a knowing look. Picking up the pile of laundry that would be driven into town and washed, she said, “Before I forget, let me have your script. Some changes have been made that need to be noted.”

He sat up straighter. “What changes?”

“Relax, Shakespeare. You’ll approve. The changes involve camera angles, not dialogue.”

“They’ll have to wait. I left my script at Kirsten’s house. I knew I wouldn’t need it today.”

“We really should get the changes jotted down because they affect the blocking.”

“Later,” he said dismissively, and slouched back down. “Call me when they’re ready.”

“Sure you don’t want your double to do this?”

He shook his head, his mind already elsewhere. Pat left the trailer unnoticed while Rylan was lost in thought about Kirsten’s reaction to Cheryl’s visit last week.

She’d been peeved and had unsuccessfully tried to hide it. Her jealousy had been as blatant to him as a fire truck with all sirens blaring and lights flashing.

And if she hadn’t felt it so deeply, she would have laughed it off.

No, she wasn’t indifferent to him. He had ruled out frigidity as the cause of her aversion. After Cheryl’s visit, he had mentally scratched out the hypothesis that Kirsten liked men, but not particularly him. She worked hard at pretending she didn’t, but the evidence was there, behind every glance she had directed at him over the past week. It had been behind that last tempestuous kiss over her desk. He had refrained from kissing, or even touching, her since.

His plan had been to let her stew for a while and reflect on what she was missing.

It had backfired. He was the one who was really suffering. He had no self-imposed restrictions to match hers. He wanted her. Badly. But he knew the value of perfect timing. And the right time for him to make his big move hadn’t presented itself.

In the meantime he had slowly gone mad with desire. It had almost been a relief to leave her house this morning. The time spent away would give his brain and his body a much needed rest from the constant stress of wanting and not being able to have.

Now, while waiting for them to call him, he stretched out as far as the short sofa would allow and dozed as he daydreamed of Kirsten and how sweet it was going to be when she finally let him make love to her.

His ability to nap was almost obscene when he was about to be filmed sitting in a burning airplane.

In costume, Rylan wove through the trucks and trailers, the miles of cable, the milling crowd of people, all of whom seemed to be busy at getting absolutely nothing accomplished. Finally he reached the director, who was still in earnest discussion with the technician who had set the explosive charges beneath the mock-up airplane.

Gnawing on his trademark cigar, the director turned to Rylan and looked him over. “You’re a god-damn fool for doing this,” he growled. “That’s why we’ve got stunt men on the payroll, you idiot.”

“Which way to the airplane?” Rylan asked blandly.

He ignored the director’s florid language and concentrated on the technician’s explanation of how the explosions would be set off, how the one-take shot would be captured on film, and how he was to eject himself safely afterward. Timing was critical. The actor, the cameramen, the special effects technicians, all had to be synchronized and had to rely on each other’s expertise.

“Okay?” the director roared. “Is everybody ready? Let’s do it.”

As it turned out, it was another full hour before they did it. During that hour, the director repeated Rylan’s directions to him at least a dozen more times. The wardrobe mistress checked his flight suit to make certain it was “grimy” enough. The makeup man oiled and “sweated” him.

“I don’t need that,” Rylan said with star-status querulousness, pushing the squirt bottle out of his face. “It’s hotter than hell out here.”

“They’re about to set your ass on fire, and you’re complaining about a little sweat?”

Finally Rylan climbed into the cockpit of the fake jet and pulled on the helmet with DEMON printed in bold red letters across it. Camera angles were checked and rechecked in the video monitors mounted on them. Everybody stood clear; the director gave the signal to roll the cameras.

Rylan smiled and waved through the dusty canopy of the airplane as the script called for. They were recreating an airshow at which Rumm had successfully landed a malfunctioning plane, to the wild appreciation of the crowd. Shots of that would be edited in later. But even after landing, Rumm wasn’t out of the woods.

They had all warned him, but Rylan was surprised by the impact of the first explosion. It rattled his insides and, for a moment, gelled his brain. He didn’t even feel the second and third charges when they went off.

Goda’mighty!

His eyes reflexively squeezed shut against the flash of brilliant light. When he opened them again, he was certain that something had gone wrong and that he’d died and gone straight to hell. All he could see in front of him was a solid wall of red-orange flames, from which rose an equally impenetrable curtain of black smoke.

The heat was so intense it seared his eyeballs and melted his flesh. He was sure his skin was dripping off his skull like the most hideous special effects in horror movies.

Really dumb thing to be thinking about now,
he chided himself.
But what am I supposed to do? What am
I supposed to do? Oh, yeah. I’m supposed to open the
canopy and get the hell out of here before I fry.

He groped for and found the release lever immediately. But, unlike the run-throughs they’d done, it didn’t respond to his touch. He pulled on it. Harder. It didn’t budge.

He fought down the sour panic that filled his throat like vomit. God, it hurt to breathe. The air was so damn hot. He tried the lever again, his teeth clenching with the effort.

Jesus!

The director knew down to the split second when that canopy was supposed to fly off and Rylan was to climb out and roll clear of the burning aircraft. When it didn’t happen, he exploded out of his chair, throwing his cigar on the ground. Screaming for fire extinguishers, he led the swarm of people that began running toward the burning aircraft.

Pat nearly choked on the undigested doughnut that rose into her throat. She screamed.

The wardrobe mistress was thinking that it was a damn shame she’d never slept with Rylan North, who was going to die in his prime, and therefore become a Hollywood legend that she would one day tell her grandchildren about.

The makeup man clutched the crucifix around his neck and, with this sudden reminder of mortality, regressed to his childhood fear of hell and damnation and begged God’s forgiveness for the ménage à trois he’d been engaged in the night before.

And the petite, dark-haired woman, who was standing beside her Mercedes convertible, saw the reenactment of her worst nightmares.

She was witnessing the burning death of the man she loved.

Somehow Rylan spotted her. Later, he wondered about that. It was a miracle that he had picked her out of the scores of people who were all hysterically shouting instructions he couldn’t hear above the roar of the fire and frantically making gestures he couldn’t interpret.

Kirsten wasn’t moving, only standing in the open door of her car, hugging to her chest something that inexplicably looked like a movie script. Tears, running copiously from beneath her sunglasses, had made her cheeks wet.

At first he thought she was only a figment of his imagination, that his life was flashing before his eyes as it was reputed to do moments before death. But he knew from the stark terror on her face that she was real.

“Get her away from here!”
he shouted through the canopy. But of course no one could hear him. “God, no, don’t do this to her,” he prayed.

Impervious to the heat of the metal lever and the flames that were voraciously licking at his gloved hands, he pulled on the lever with superhuman strength. It gave way and the canopy popped off as easily as the top of a beer can.

Reacting on sheer reflex and the desperate need to get to Kirsten, he scrambled out of the burning aircraft and launched himself away from it, sailing several feet through the air in a daring escape that would make moviemaking history. He landed on his side and rolled to his feet as he’d been directed to do.

But Rylan wasn’t thinking about directions. He was thinking only about the woman, the roiling black column of smoke behind him, and the living hell it represented to her.

He was immediately surrounded by people. Throngs of them. So many he couldn’t fight his way through.

“Don’t panic, Rylan!” someone shouted.

“The suit is asbestos. It’s only smoking, not burning.”

“Get to Kirsten,” he yelled. “Kirsten. Help her. Let me—”

“He’s not making any sense.”

“He’s hysterical, you jerk. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Kirsten!”

He fought like a madman for them to release him, but they wrestled him to the ground. Kirsten was lost to his view.

“Get those damn gloves off. They’re smoldering.”

“Wrap his hands in something.”

“No. Don’t wrap them.”

“Whatever you do, hurry, hurry, before he’s scarred!”

He gazed down at his hands and with amazing detachment realized that smoke was rising out of his sleeves and that the flesh on the backs of his hands was abnormally red and puckered.

Someone nearly broke his neck yanking the helmet off his head. “Somebody go tell Kirsten—”

“Did anyone think to call a damn ambulance?” the director bellowed. “Damn imbeciles.”

Rylan struggled to sit up. “Kirsten,” he croaked, and ineffectually pointed his burned hand in her general direction.

“Lie down, Rylan.” Pat applied a restraining hand to his shoulder, demonstrating more composure than anyone else. “You’re going to be all right.” She told the director, “There’s an ambulance already here. Remember you ordered it just in case an accident like this happened.”