by Sandra Brown
“Yes.”
To the marrow of his bones, Rylan knew she was lying. Her fingers were mindlessly flexing against the front of his shirt, as though grasping for something that had always eluded her. There was a giveaway unsteadiness in her voice, a trace of desperation that told him she herself wanted badly to believe what she was telling him.
“I think you wanted him to, but I don’t think he did,” Rylan said softly.
She started to protest, but no words came out of her mouth. For a long moment her eyes remained locked with his. Eventually her glance fell away. “You’re right. Charlie dismissed my nightmares because he couldn’t relate to my fear. He sympathized, but he treated the bad dreams like some childhood quirk that I would eventually outgrow.”
Rylan drew her shivering body against his and rubbed his hands up and down her back. “So last night, when you reached for me, you thought it was Rumm. You wanted it to be him, finally giving you the comfort and understanding he’d previously withheld.”
“I suppose so.”
“Kirsten?”
“Hmm?”
“At what point did you realize it was me you were making love to and not Rumm?”
She looked up at him with a mix of pain and bewilderment. Then she flung off his embracing arms and fled the room.
“Don’t let him drop you, Dylan, don’t let him drop you.”
Rylan, looking up into his victim’s face, laughed. The child’s brown-speckled, hazel eyes were much like his, and were rimmed with spiky black lashes. The child’s hair, too, was dark, straight on the crown, but slightly wavy in the back and around his forehead, almost identical in color and texture to Rylan’s.
Rylan was lying flat on his back on a chaise by the pool, his knees raised. With his arms held straight up, he was supporting a squirming, kicking little boy. Every few seconds, Rylan would make like he was going to drop the child and let the tension in his arms go slack. The boy would squeal, then convulse into wet, sputtering, slobbery giggles.
And every time Rylan’s elbows would unlock a fraction, the child’s mother, standing nearby, would gasp and say, “Oh, no! Oh, no, he’s going to drop you!”
She was leggy and blonde. Dressed in a long peasant skirt and ankle-strap sandals, with her long hair swinging free each time she clapped her hands and playfully skipped around Rylan and her son, she looked extremely pretty in a free-spirited, sensual way.
“Pardner, you’re gettin’ too heavy and rambunctious to play this game,” Rylan said, expelling a big gust of air and swinging the child down to the deck. He rolled to a sitting position and swatted the boy on the bottom.
That’s when he saw Kirsten hovering just inside the terrace door. She had left the house hours ago, ostensibly to run errands. It had been three days since he’d confronted her about her nightmares and Rumm’s indifference to them. She had avoided him ever since. During the day she stayed sequestered in her office while Rylan pored over journals and photo albums in Rumm’s study. After virtually silent dinners, she retreated into her bedroom, leaving Rylan to entertain himself.
This morning, she’d been as chilly as the freshly squeezed orange juice Alice had foisted on them. Kirsten had drunk hers, then made a hasty escape in her Mercedes convertible.
Now, across the sunny terrace, their eyes met fleetingly before she disappeared into the shadows of the house.
“You’ve worn him out, Dylan. It’s time to go,” the blonde woman said, scooping up the child. She’d been unaware of Kirsten’s clandestine appearance and withdrawal. Rylan wasn’t sure why he hadn’t waved Kirsten out and introduced them. There really wasn’t any reason not to. But his avoidance of that had been for Kirsten’s sake, not Cheryl’s.
“Why do you have to go so soon?” he asked in a plaintive tone. “I don’t get to see him often enough, Cheryl.”
“I know. It’s just that with my busy schedule and yours, it’s almost impossible to get you two together.”
Arguing was pointless. She was right, and he couldn’t ask her to adjust her schedule around his. That wouldn’t be fair.
He lifted the boy out of her arms. “Come on,” he said, draping his free arm around her slender shoulders. “I’ll carry him to the car for you.”
A few minutes later he found Kirsten behind her desk, shuffling through the pages of her manuscript. She had changed out of the dress she had worn shopping and was now wearing all black: black slacks, black sleeveless pullover, black flats. He started to ask “Who died?” but caught the quip just in time. Under the circumstances that joke would have been in very poor taste. Besides, she looked great in black.
He passed up the opportunity to tease her about her somber attire and settled for a safe, hopefully peacemaking, “Hi.”
“Hello,” she said stiffly.
So much for peacemaking. “I wish you had come out. I wanted to introduce you to Cheryl and Dylan.”
“I didn’t want to intrude.” She stacked several sheets together and thumped them on the desk with far more emphasis than was necessary to align them.
“You seem angry,” he remarked. He was actually glad that she was keeping her head down so she wouldn’t see the amused grin he couldn’t keep from breaking across his face.
“I’m not.”
“Could have fooled me. You didn’t even comment on my clothes, and I thought you’d be pleased to find me in something besides—”
“Rags.” She gave his pleated designer slacks and sports shirt a negligent glance. “I’m sure you didn’t dress up on my account.”
“Say, you’re not upset because I had guests, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s a relief.”
“That is, not as long as you . . .”
“As long as I . . . what?”
Looking as stern as a schoolmarm, she glared up at him through her glasses. “You know what I mean.”
Enjoying her agitation, he propped one lean hip against the edge of her desk and folded his arms across his chest. “No, I don’t. Tell me. As long as I what?”
“As long as you stay out of the bedrooms. This isn’t a hot sheets hotel.” She was busy moving objects on the desk from one spot to another with no apparent reason for the repositioning. “I don’t want women running through here like there’s a turnstile on the door.”
“We didn’t go into any of the bedrooms.”
“Well . . . good. Then we don’t have a problem.”
“I don’t. I think you might.”
“As usual I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s more, I don’t care. Will you excuse me, please, I haven’t written a paragraph all day and—”
“What did you think of Cheryl?”
She clamped her teeth over her bottom lip as though trying to get a grip on herself. “Cheryl? Is that her name?”
“Uh-huh.”
She placed the stapler in a drawer, and slammed the drawer closed as though everything inside might try to escape. “From what I could see she’s very pretty. Tall, blonde, and pretty.” She spoke the three adjectives as though they were difficult words for her mouth to form.
“And Dylan? Cute little cuss, isn’t he?”
“He looks just like you.”
“You think so? Everybody who sees us together says that.”
“How old is he?”
“Two. He’s a dynamo. Cheryl can barely keep up with him.”
“Maybe she could use some help.”
“She’s got help.”
“I meant yours,” she said with asperity.
“She doesn’t need my help.”
“Have you ever offered it?”
“Yes, and Cheryl flatly refused it.”
“Don’t you think you should have some input in Dylan’s upbringing?”
“No way. That’s strictly Cheryl’s business.”
“That ’s . . . that’s idiocy,” she sputtered.
He shrugged. “Cheryl didn’t want any outside interference.”
&
nbsp; “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.