Heartbeat Read Free Page B

would only let her help him. She also hated kids, and kept putting away the photographs of his children. Remarkably, it took him a full six months to catch his breath and let her have it. It took six months because she was great in bed, treated him like a six-year-old at a time when he desperately needed nurturing and liked it, and she seemed to know everything about the television industry in L.A. But when she told him he ought to stop talking about his kids, and forget about them, he rented a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a month, gave her the key, told her to have a great time, and not to bother to call him when she found an apartment. He moved her things to the bungalow the same afternoon, and didn't run into her for the next four years until they saw each other at an awards ceremony, where she pretended not to know him.
    And what had come after that had been intentionally lighthearted and easy. Actresses, starlets, walk-ons, models, girls who wanted a good time when he was free, and enjoyed going to an occasional party with him when he wasn't in a period of high stress due to some change on the show, and they wanted nothing more from him. They fitted him in among the other men in their lives, and seemed not to care when he didn't call them. Some of them cooked dinner for him occasionally, or he for them since he loved to cook, and the ones who were good with kids were sometimes called on to go to Disneyland with him when the boys were in town, but more often than not he enjoyed keeping the boys to himself during their visits to California.
    More recently, Bill had gotten involved with one of the actresses on the show. Sylvia was a pretty girl from New York, and she had an important part on the show. And it was the first time in a long time that he had allowed himself the indulgence of getting involved with someone who actually worked for him. But she was a sensational-looking girl, and she had been hard to resist. She had come to the show via years as a child actress and model, the cover of Vogue , a year in Paris working for Lacroix, and six months in L.A. doing bit parts in an assortment of unsuccessful movies. She was a fairly decent actress, surprisingly enough, and a sweet girl, which came through on the air, and Bill was surprised himself by how much he liked her. Liked. Not loved. Love was something he reserved for Adam and Tommy, who were, respectively, nine and a half and seven. Sylvia was twenty-three, and sometimes he thought she behaved like a child herself. Along with her sweetness there was a kind of simplicity and naiveté that both touched him and amused him. Despite her worldly experiences, acting and modeling for the past nine years, she seemed to have remained relatively unsophisticated through all of it, which was at times both refreshing and annoying. She was singularly unaware of the inevitable politics that went on behind the scenes on the show, and some of her performances were superb, but she was also easy prey for the more jaded women with whom she acted. And Bill found himself constantly warning her to be more alert to the games they played and the trouble they surreptitiously tried to cause her. But childlike, she floated through all of it, and seemed to keep herself amused when Bill was too busy to entertain her, as he had been for weeks, working on the addition of two new characters, and the surprise removal of yet another. He was always careful to keep the show fresh, and keep the audiences fascinated with the never-ending plot turns.
    At thirty-nine, he had become the king of daytime soaps, as his row of Emmys lined up on a shelf on his office wall clearly attested. But he was, as always, totally unaware of them, as he returned to his office and began to pace, wondering how the actors in today's show would react to the unexpected last-minute changes. Two of the women usually handled it well, but one of his male actors frequently blew his lines when surprised at the last minute,