Demon Rumm Read Free Page A

spoke the words with the triumph of a gambler slapping down the winning ace. He’d waited until it was necessary for him to play that ace, keeping it to himself that he knew she had granted the very favor he was asking to the actress who was portraying her in the movie. She had spent several days with Kirsten in the house in La Jolla.
    “That was different,” she said defensively.
    “How?”
    “That should be obvious.”
    “Our respective sexes?”
    “For starters.”
    They were facing each other belligerently when a discreet knock came from the other side of the heavy double doors.
    “Come in.”
    “Go away.”
    They had answered at the same time, though in different ways. After giving him a dirty look, which he found cute instead of threatening, Kirsten crossed the carpeted floor and opened the door.
    “Well, what have we decided?” Rylan’s agent asked heartily.
    “I’d like to speak with Mel alone,” she said coldly.
    Rylan gave her a mocking bow before leaving the room with his agent. They waited in the outer office with the receptionist, a Barbie doll look-alike. They came a dime a dozen in Hollywood. She squirmed in her knit dress like a caterpillar trying to work its way out of its cocoon and gave him tentative smiles. He ignored her. She offered them coffee or drinks, both of which his agent declined for him.
    “How’d it go?” the agent asked under his breath.
    Rylan shrugged, wondering if the receptionist had any idea how ridiculous her posturing looked. She either had a back ailment or was trying too hard to impress him with the proportions of her chest.
    His agent continued. “It was probably a good idea for you to ask her yourself instead of getting her lawyer to do it for you. You do have a winning way with women.” There was a trace of envy in his agent’s voice.
    Rylan only snorted and closed his eyes. “Mrs. Rumm is immune to heartthrobs. She lived with one, remember?”
    “He was hardly of your caliber.”
    “Thanks, but sex appeal is all a matter of taste.”
    “What will you do if she says no?”
    Rylan tipped down the opaque sunglasses and peered at his agent over the top of them. “Nervous?”
    “As hell,” the other man admitted. “Don’t even think of walking off this picture. I haven’t settled that dispute with Steven Spielberg yet. For heaven’s sake don’t get me into another one.”
    “That’s what you get paid for. An astronomical amount, if I might be so crass as to point that out.”
    “Crass, my ass. Forgive the rhyme. Crass is the only way you operate.”
    That was unarguable. Rylan North had been known to leave a picture if he didn’t like the “tone” of the film, if he felt that his character’s integrity was being compromised. That was a word often associated with him. Integrity. More than any actor of recent memory, he strived for purity of character. To him that meant making no compromises for the sake of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating or box office sales or anything else.
    If it weren’t for the fact that he possessed incredible talent that had only begun to be tapped, that every camera in Hollywood was in love with his face, and that he had a box office draw that equaled and often surpassed Cruise’s and Pitt’s, no one in Hollywood would have touched him. He was considered by all to be a real pain. Yet he was everybody’s first choice when “important” films came along.
    “Before you start gnawing those bloody nubs that pass for fingernails,” he told his agent, “let’s see what Mrs. Rumm has to say.”
    He dozed. The agent chewed his fingernails.
    Finally they were summoned back into the inner office.
    She had said yes, and now he was here, floating in the Pacific Ocean behind her estate. After the grueling days spent on the set, two months without a single day off, the spontaneous swim felt wonderful.
    His eyes stung slightly when he opened them to gaze up at a cloudless sky. Kirsten Rumm’s eyes were a