I’m closing in on the home stretch of Written on Your Skin, by Meredith Duran, and while this particular novel doesn’t actually play with the typical romantic tropes of the bad boy and the pure-of-heart lady who gets past his defenses, I’ve still got The Bold and the Beautiful‘s Bill and Katie on the brain. Blame today’s episode, which featured some stuff that feels like it could’ve been lifted out of a classic romance novel…

Bill: I pay my employees well. I pay them to work for me. If they don’t do their jobs, I fire them. Better off that I know them as numbers on a page, salaries, responsibilities. I don’t know about their personal lives, and I don’t want to know.
Katie: That is so sad. I mean, that… you must be missing so much. No wonder you’re so lonely.
Bill: Did I ever say I was lonely?
Katie: Well, I think you are. You don’t talk to your employees. You don’t talk to your associates. I mean, do you even have any friends?
Bill: Friends are overrated. They try to take advantage.
Katie: That’s a terrible way to live. And how do you know if you’ve never let anyone get close enough to find out? Someone convinced you a long time ago that nice guys finish last, and you wanna win. You equate money with winning and emotion with weakness.
Bill: Look, Katie, you can’t make decisions with your heart if you want to be successful in the business.
Katie: That’s ridiculous. Look, I may not know you very well, but I know that you’re never gonna be happy if you’re purely motivated by money. You may think you will be, but you won’t, because you have way too much going on inside that heart. I can tell.
Bill: You overestimate me.

It loses a little something without the performances attached, because Don Diamont has this incredible way of smoldering… of looking dangerous and wolfish and predatory… and then his eyes soften just a tad when Katie gets to him. And Heather Tom, whose Katie has been all over the place since she joined the show, looks like she’s having a blast…being sweet, feisty and funny and yet driven enough to match Bill’s relentless passion. And they had a whole hilarious bit about doughnuts leading up to the more serious conversation above that could’ve been taken right out of a Jennifer Crusie novel. (And I wouldn’t say no to doughnuts being revisited and Katie feeding Bill some ala Cal and Min in Bet Me.  Because…yes.)

I love this trope, I really do. I love watching a woman get the best of a bastard and show him there’s more to life than existing in a cold, hard shell. I think I even told Diamont that during one of our interviews for WEEKLY. I love it because it’s always a beautiful case of the characters’ strengths and weaknesses filling in the spaces in each other. And the woman, despite being smaller or younger or poorer or less empowered or what have you, inevitably holds the power, because she has his heart in the palm of her hand. Whether it’s Nicholas and Clare in Mary Jo Putney’s Thunder and Roses or Calder and Francesca in Brenda Joyce’s Deadly series, I’m a sucker for it.

And I’m a sucker for Bill and Katie, too.

Plus, dude, they’re hot. Yesterday’s episode made me fear for his office furniture, because despite absolutely nothing happening, I could’ve sworn Bill wanted to ravish Katie on his desk.