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by SANDRA BROWN
On sale in hardcover January 2005
Read on for a preview. . . .
Demon Rumm
On sale in hardcover January 2005
Knowing that by now Kirsten was feeling more relaxed, Rylan lay down on his back in front of the sofa, resting his head on his hands. Using his toes, he slipped off his shoes. His stomach was drastically scooped out to form a concave bowl beneath his rib cage, and he realized that he was hungry. Also slightly aroused. He wondered if Kirsten was aware of the bulge behind the fly of his jeans. Probably not. That had been his normal state since entering her house, that semifullness that hadn’t reached the uncomfortable stage yet. If she had looked at him at all, she probably simply figured he was well endowed. The thought made him smile.
To justify that cocky smile, he asked, “What did you and Rumm find in common to talk about?”
“We talked mostly about him. Oh, he asked me polite questions, and was impressed when I told him I’d just gotten my master’s degree in English. But he wanted to talk about airplanes and flying to the exclusion of almost everything else. He always did.”
“Do I detect a trace of resentment?”
“Of course not!”
Her flare-up caused one of his eyebrows to v eloquently.
“I mean, flying was Charlie’s life,” she said defensively. “He’d been born to do it. For him not to fly was equivalent to not breathing. I understood that from the beginning, from that first night.”
Demon Rumm had been a fanatic about flying and airplanes, Rylan thought. Men of his ilk were by nature required to be. But living with a zealot for anything wouldn’t be easy or enjoyable. Wouldn’t it tend to make the partner jealous of the fanaticism? Was that what Kirsten Rumm was trying so desperately to conceal, that she had been jealous of Rumm’s obsession with aerobatics?
Rylan studied her for a moment, weighing the advisability of bringing up another touchy subject on the heels of that one. He decided that postponement would never make it easier to verify this point. “According to the script, Rumm told you that he regretted the end of the Vietnam war.”
“He did,” she confessed quietly. “He was a fighter pilot without a war to fight. I think he was actually frustrated when all our spats in the Persian Gulf were peaceably resolved. Not that he wanted to kill people. It was just that flying fast airplanes was what he felt destined to do. That’s why he didn’t extend his time in the Navy or become a commercial airline pilot, as most of his friends did when their stints were up.”
This was a facet of the man’s character that Rylan wanted to explore further, but not just yet. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “Back to that night, did he come on to you?”
“Naturally.”
“I’d have thought he was crazy if he hadn’t. What was his line?”
“What do you think?”
She was challenging him. How well did he know his character? He squinted and tilted his head to one side. “Will you go to bed with me?”
She sucked in her breath quickly. “No.”
“Is that what you’re telling me or what you told him?”
The room grew very quiet, with only the logs in the fireplace cra
ckling.
“You weren’t asking for yourself,” she said finally. “You were asking for him, weren’t you?”
He grinned obliquely and was pleased to see that she was unnerved.
Without pursuing it, she rushed on. “He said I didn’t look like the one-night-stand type and I assured him that I wasn’t.”
Rylan supplied the next line. “ ‘Good. Because I have something much more permanent in mind.’ ”
“You got that from the script.”
He nodded. “He was a smooth operator. Seduction through the commitment angle.”
