Long Shot Read Online Free Page A

moneymaker, not a performer. He only got nominated now and again to put a pretty face in the lineup.
    â€œSo,” he said, through the crackle of static, “you getting laid?”
    â€œNot really. And you?”
    â€œMe? I haven’t got the strength.”
    â€œNot even to fuck?”
    â€œIt’s not that,” he said, and he seemed to grope for a reason that would travel all that way. For a moment she thought they’d lost the connection. Then: “It’s the small talk, mostly.”
    Vivien fell into a lazy backstroke, covering thirty or forty yards from shore before she stopped to look around. In Harrington Sound, she was wholly without the fear of drowning. Not like the ocean she grew up on—the brute Pacific, chill as ice and churning riptide. In some unaccountable way, she felt safer here than anywhere, as if a place survived where she might recover the stillness she lived in as a child—where nothing seemed to happen unless she wanted, and never till she was ready. She paddled about in total darkness, under a sky that ached with stars, and puzzled out the paradox of being Jasper’s wife. She didn’t know she had it in her to think of the two of them tenderly. Reading the gossip day after day, forever avoiding questions, she thought she’d surrendered her opinion long ago.
    Jasper and I , she thought drowsily, turning wide and heading back to land. Jasper and I are only —
    Only what? Friends? Perhaps it was best to call them partners. Colleagues in a single profession, successful all on their own, who decided to get together to make a deal. A deal too big for one to carry off. How else was one to explain the clash of cultures? That he, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, should end up hitched to the zillionaire heiress whose every change of clothes was news. Between them, they had the cover of every magazine in the free world sewn up—and this before they even met. When they met, it was more of a merger than a meeting.
    Now, for the first time in over two months, she missed him and wished she was back in L.A., so they could be at loose ends together. They had these occasional days when they stuck together like a comedy team. It was them against everyone else, and they loved it. And when it worked, they could always count on being good for about five days—generous, giddy, and tuned to somebody else besides the face in the mirror. It didn’t matter what they did. They’d deck themselves in doubleknits and shades and order a platter of ribs at Bob’s Big Boy. They’d browse around in dirty bookstores, or stand around on corners and watch the hookers traffic. Anything not to be stars.
    The fucking was the least of it, right from the start.
    She was just twenty-four when her father, Jacob Willis, missed the hairpin turn at a hundred and five on a road he’d graded himself, between his ranch house and his landing strip. Vivien, in fact, was the one who was landing that day—as it turned out, into the arms of weeping ranch hands. Always after that, she had a certain horror of getting off planes. It was cars she should have been wary of, since her mother got picked off too, just eight months farther down the road, by a taxi in the Place Vendôme. The last thing she ever said to her only child was, like the lady herself, entirely sugarless: “Whatever else is out to break you, baby, don’t forget: You don’t have to marry money.”
    Three weeks later, the orphan Vivien, last of the Willis line, fell heir to about a third of Newport Beach.
    It was past time, meanwhile, for Jasper Cokes to take a wife. At twenty-eight, he ought to have had a first marriage over and done with. Not that the public suspected any irregularities. The public believed what it wanted to—that a man with everything ate up life like candy, girls included. Concern over Jasper’s waking hours in bed came down direct from the executive suite,