Demon Rumm by Sandra Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

.”
    “. . . and after my friend deserted me to dance with this jet pilot, I was sitting alone at the table, trying not to look conspicuous. I noticed this guy across the room.”
    A smile broke across her face. A genuine, unguarded, natural, beautiful smile. Rylan’s gut was wrenched by a spasm of jealousy for Charlie Rumm.
    She continued. “He was tall, blond, good-looking, broad-shouldered, and he had a smile as arrogant as all get out. It said, ‘Eat your hearts out, girls.’ ”
    “And you hated that type,” Rylan said intuitively.
    “With a passion. But he wove his way through the crowd over to my table and sat down.”
    “How?”
    “How?”
    “How did he sit down? Did he slide into the chair? Drop into it? What?”
    “Actually he turned it around and straddled the seat, then folded his arms across the back of it.”
    “Okay, thanks. Pardon the interruption. Go on.”
    “Well, he didn’t say a word. He just sat there, wearing this sappy grin and staring at me. I said, ‘Stop staring at me.’ And he said—”
    “ ‘No way.’ ” They laughed together. “Then what happened? Did he buy you a drink?”
    “He offered. I declined.”
    “How cruel.”
    Kirsten jumped as though she’d been shot. Her reflective smile was replaced by a look of astonishment. “That’s almost exactly what Charlie said. He pressed both hands against his heart like Romeo and said, ‘You wound me, fair damsel.’ ”
    Rylan grinned. “Maybe I’m getting to know him better than I thought. Go on. What happened next?”
    “His silliness made me laugh.”
    “That was the ice breaker.”
    “Yes, and during that weak moment, I agreed to let him buy me a glass of white wine.”
    “White wine, huh?” Rylan asked with amusement. “Were you wearing your glasses as you prissily sipped white wine amidst the hard Scotch and beer drinkers?”
    Knowing that by now she was feeling more relaxed, he 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