Sherryl Woods - Not At Eight, Darling

“If it takes you this long to reach a decision, Miss MacDonald, perhaps you’ve chosen the wrong career. Producers need to think on their feet.”

“Perhaps I could become a network vice president,” she suggested darkly. “They don’t seem to think at all.”

To her absolute amazement—and probable salvation—he laughed again. Her eyes widened as the hearty, unrestrained sound bounced off the studio walls. “Watch it, Miss MacDonald,” he warned with a wink as he headed toward the door with Kevin trailing along behind him like an obedient puppy. “Casting has a huge sheepdog that would be just perfect for this show.”

Barrie winced and took a deep breath. “Pick me up here at seven,” she called after him.

With her glasses clenched tightly in her hand, Barrie couldn’t quite see to the back of the studio, but Michael appeared to nod in satisfaction. “Six-thirty. My office,” he called back as the door slammed shut behind him.

“Smart…” she muttered under her breath.

She hated men who had to have the last word. She especially hated men who had irresistible thighs.

The studio was silent for exactly thirty seconds following Michael Compton’s departure. Then all hell broke loose. Though Barrie would have liked to believe they were above it, the women immediately—and probably predictably—began debating the man’s availability amid a chorus of heavy sighs. At the same time, the men’s grumbling remarks about interference in the creative process by self-important pompous jerks contained more than a hint of jealousy. The writer of the opening episode muttered something about cretins under his breath, while he crushed empty Styrofoam coffee cups one by one. And Danielle Lawrence, Barrie’s best friend and the director whom she’d chosen for the series’ premiere, was ignoring all of it and smirking at her.

“What’s your problem?” Barrie snapped.

“Nice looking, isn’t he?”

“Who?” It seemed to be a good time to be deliberately obtuse.

“Who? Attila the programmer, of course.”

“I didn’t notice.”

Danielle regarded her skeptically. “The woman who has taken a personal oath not to marry until she finds the perfect set of male thighs did not notice a man whose legs could have been carved by Michelangelo? I find that difficult to believe.”

Barrie’s eyes flashed dangerously. “There are other directors in Hollywood.”

“But I’m good,” Danielle retorted cheerfully. “I am also available, reasonably inexpensive, and I know all of your character flaws and love you, anyway. You can’t top that.”

Barrie sighed. “You’re probably right, but could we drop the subject of Michael Compton for now? We have to go over this opening scene again. The pacing is all wrong.”

An explosion of sound erupted just behind Barrie’s shoulder. “What do you mean the pacing is all wrong?” Heath Donaldson hissed. “I’ve been writing comedy since before you were born. If you’d hired actors who knew how to deliver a line, the pacing would be just fine.”

Barrie rolled her eyes at Danielle and turned around slowly. She put her arm around the short balding man who’d been huffing and puffing angrily in her ear. “Sweetheart,” she began soothingly. “Your script is just fine. We all know you’re one of the best in the business.”

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And you’re right about some of the cast being inexperienced. But, love, you know they’re just perfect for the parts. I think if you work with them and make just a few tiny adjustments to help them out, the opening scene will click right along.”

Heath blinked back at her, and the fiery red that had crept up his neck was fading away. He now looked a little less like a coronary waiting to happen. Barrie breathed a sigh of relief as he muttered more calmly, “Well, I suppose I could change a few lines just a little, tighten it up.”

“That’s it,” Barrie said with exaggerated enthusiasm. “I knew you could do it. Why don’t you and Danielle go over the first couple of pages of the script and see what you can come up with?”

For the next few hours Barrie felt like a firefighter who’d been asked to put out an entire county of brush fires with a pail of water. There was one crisis after another, none of them serious, but all of them requiring diplomacy, patience and a serenity she was far from feeling. The only possible advantage to a day like today, she decided, rubbing her throbbing temples, was that it had left her absolutely no time to work herself into a state over her impending dinner with Michael Compton.

At six-fifteen she sent the cast and crew home, touched up her makeup, took another stress-reducing deep breath that didn’t do a bit of good and walked across the studio lot to the nearby network facilities. At precisely six-thirty she presented herself to Michael Compton’s secretary, a cheerful woman with gray hair, rosy cheeks and sparkling, periwinkle blue eyes.

Mrs. Emma Lou Hastings looked as though she’d be perfectly at home in the kitchen making applesauce with an army of grandchildren underfoot. She also seemed like the type you could come to for motherly advice, Barrie decided, suddenly struck by the oddest desire to sit down and tell this perfect stranger that she was a nervous wreck because she was having dinner with a man who held the key to her future, a man who also had incredible thighs. She wondered what Mrs. Hastings would have to say about that.

Since Barrie kept her mouth clamped firmly shut, Mrs. Hastings only said, “You can go in now, Miss MacDonald. Mr. Compton is expecting you.”

Barrie had started toward the door when the secretary added softly, “Don’t worry, dear. He’s really a very nice young man.”

Very nice young man, indeed! Mrs. Hastings obviously didn’t know that Michael Compton had virtually threatened to cancel Barrie’s series unless she agreed to this dinner. What would she say about her nice young man if she found out about that? Barrie looked into her round, honest-looking face with the tiny laugh lines around the eyes and the encouraging smile and didn’t have the heart to tell her. After all, she defended herself, could you tell a mother that her son is rotten to the core? Of course not. No more than she could tell Mrs. Hastings that her obviously well-liked boss was a thoroughly obnoxious louse who indulged in emotional blackmail.

Instead she smiled back. “Thanks,” she said as she turned the brass doorknob and walked into Michael Compton’s office. Grateful for any reprieve, she was delighted to see that he was on the phone. He looked up and grinned at her with that sinfully sensual smile of his and motioned for her to sit down. She selected the chair farthest from his desk and sank down, tucking her legs back in a futile attempt to cover the run that displayed a pale white trail of skin from her ankle up, disappearing at last under the hem of her beige linen skirt. Why the hell hadn’t she remembered the damn run earlier? She couldn’t very well go tearing out of here now to buy new hose. Blast Michael Compton, she thought irrationally. Somehow this was all his fault.

She glanced over to discover that the object of her irritation was paying absolutely no attention to her. His head was bent to one side in order to keep the phone braced against his shoulder. If he did that long enough, he was going to have one heck of a neck ache, Barrie noted. She was torn between a perverse delight at the prospect and an even stranger desire to massage the soon-to-be-knotted muscles. She blinked and looked away, but, as though she’d been hypnotized, her eyes were drawn back time and again.

As Michael listened to his long-winded and apparently irate caller, he tapped a pencil idly on his huge rosewood desk. With his other hand he shuffled through a stack of papers, sorting them into two compulsively neat piles. Periodically he jabbed at another of the lit buttons on the phone, rumbled directives first into the receiver and then into the intercom on his desk. Two assistants scurried in and out, handing him papers to sign, waiting as he jotted notes on them, then rushing back out. A clerk from the mailroom came in with a half-dozen videotapes, piled them up next to his VCR and the bank of television monitors and left. Mrs. Hastings hurried in with several bulging file folders, dropped them into his In basket and picked up one of the stacks he’d just created. On her way out, she smiled sympathetically at Barrie, who’d begun to feel as though she’d fallen into the rabbit hole and wound up in the middle of Alice in Wonderland . Never in her life had she seen such perfectly orchestrated chaos. Never in her life had she felt so blatantly ignored.