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 The
stereotype of the handsome and muscular shy and big-hearted seducer
finds his embodiment in Santa
Barbara through the character of Jake Morton at this beginning
of January 1987. Stable boy at the Abernathy stables, Jake appears at
first as a counterweight in front of Abernathy's new recruit, Ted
Capwell, very distant from his modest and laborious origins. Jake so
declares an immediate hostility to Ted, whom he does not stop bullying.
But the growing and competitive place which the young heir Ted takes at
the stables obliges Jake to leave his job to move as a waiter at the bar
Johnny's Place.
Jake's
temperament loses then of all its initial sourness when he gets
acquainted of Hayley, Ted's wife. He becomes the confidant of the one
who, unfortunate in her marriage, looks unfavourably the return in town
of her husband's first girlfriend, Laken Lockridge. Jake quickly falls
in love with Hayley and, thanks to his insistence, succeeds in making
her admit the feelings that she also feels for him. But it will be
necessary to wait for the divorce between Hayley and Ted so that Jake
can finally see his dreams of common life with Hayley coming true.
Jake
knows a first drama when his father, an alcoholic and coward man, comes
to visit him, before dying a few days later of a heart attack. Jake is
angry at himself to have never succeeded in surmounting the young years
of suffering and poverty which his father imposed him and to have let
him die without having been able to forgive him. But a new professional
fate allows him to recover.
Spotted
by Kelly Capwell and Jeffrey Conrad, Jake agrees to become a stripped
model for a new eau de toilette called The
Beast. At first embarrassed to see revealed his muscular body on
all the advertising hoardings of the city, Jake eventually gets to like
to be a model when he realizes all the cash he gets from it. He so
agrees to use a part of his money to invest in the night-club project
that his new friend T.J. Daniel wants to open in Santa Barbara, The
Lair. But if he refuses at first to listen to Hayley's warnings, Jake
eventually realizes that T.J. has a certain tendency to dishonesty and
to use the gains of The Lair for personal purposes.
The
year 1988 begins with a tragic event for Jake, when the love of his
life, Hayley, dies a few meters away from him having been collided by a
reckless driver. In the incapacity to get over it, Jake will then not
cease from then on to haunt bars and to fall out with his friends, Ted
(whom he accuses of being responsible for the death of Hayley) and T.J..
With Pearl Bradford, he agrees to play for a while the nursemaids for
the baby of Rita Grant, a waitress of Johnny's Place who became
infatuated with him. But nothing changes. And when Jake gets proposed an
unexpected contract to be a model in New York, he accepts straight away
and leaves Santa Barbara with a heavy heart, but opened to a new life...
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Operation charm
succeeded,
1988
