“It’s a lovely dress,” she said, wishing her voice didn’t hold the echo of tears. “It’s the exact shade of blue as my eyes. It would cling to my curves, give a teasing glimpse of the tops of my breasts and... It’s subtly sexy.
“Oh, and let’s not forget the other part of the surprise, Taylor. The certificate for a complete makeover. My hair was to be cut and styled to best accentuate my face, my makeup applied to perfecttion. I was even to receive a cute little cosmetic bag to carry my makeup in. My goodness, you thought of everything.”
“But?” Taylor said, turning his hands palm up. “You’re obviously upset. What did I do wrong here?”
“Oh, nothing,” Janice said, her voice ringing with sarcasm. “Nothing at all. You just lied to me, betrayed me, ended up being like everyone else who I’ve ever trusted and believed in.”
“What?” he said, obviously confused.
“Was it Brandon who pushed you over the edge of your tolerance? Was that what you two were glaring at each other about at the restaurant? Did he give you a bad time about being with a drab and unattractive woman? Was that the last straw, Taylor?”
“Janice, for God’s sake, I didn’t send you these things for me.” He swept one hand in the direction of the glittering box. “I did it for you.”
“Please, you’re insulting my intelligence.”
“It’s true, damn it! Yes, Brandon jabbed at me, but not the way you’re thinking. I was forced to admit that I liked the idea that I was the only one to see how incredibly beautiful you really are.”
“I hate being beautiful,” Janice said, nearly shrieking. “Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“Only in bits and pieces, because you haven’t shared your secrets with me. I know you’ve been hurt in the past somehow because of your beauty, but—”
“And now I’ve been hurt in the present because of it,” she interrupted. “You wanted a beautiful woman on your arm at that gallery tonight, didn’t you, Taylor? Didn’t you?”
“This isn’t about me,” he said, his volume rising. “You deserve to enjoy your femininity to the fullest. I was attempting to encourage you, be supportive of that. Lord, Janice, I never meant to hurt you. I just wanted you to be...”
“beautiful,” she yelled, getting to her feet.
“Calm down. Please? I’m totally lost here. I just don’t understand what I’ve done to cause you such pain, to upset you like this.”
Janice sank back onto the chair and took a steadying breath. When she spoke again, her voice was flat and low, void of emotion.
“Then allow me to enlighten you, Mr. Sinclair. I’ll tell you a bedtime story. Yes, this is the story of Janice Jennings, who was never a child, not really. From the time she was three years old she was dragged from one beauty pageant to another, put on display, judged by strangers, who would determine if she was beautiful enough to be accepted, to win the prize.”
Taylor stared at Janice, hardly breathing, his heart thundering.
“My mother,” she went on, “saw me as an object, a means to an end. My beauty, she informed me continually, was all that mattered, was all that was important. My beauty would get me what I deserved to have. She never hugged or kissed me, never said that she loved me. She just told me how beautiful I was.
“I had no friends, wasn’t allowed to play with other children for fear that I might skin my knee or get a bruise. I never...I never even got to play hopscotch. I’d press my nose to the window and watch the kids on the sidewalk. Oh, how I wanted to play hopscotch.”
Taylor’s heart ached for the child he could see so vividly in his mind’s eye. The lonely, unloved, manipulated child. He could feel the flash of fury consuming him, directed toward the mother who had exploited her daughter, hurt her so damn much. “I never dated,” Janice went on, bringing Taylor from his raging thoughts, “didn’t go to the mall with giggling girlfriends, didn’t talk on the telephone about boys in adolescent whisperings. I just went to school, came home and prepared for the next beauty pageant. Maybe, maybe, I thought, if I was judged beautiful enough, my mother would love me.”
This wasn’t a bedtime story, Taylor thought as a strange tightness gripped his throat. It was a horror story. He wanted to go to Janice, hold her, comfort her, make everything all right.
“When I was eighteen,” Janice said, “my mother introduced me to a very wealthy man in his middle forties. Walter was captivated by my beauty and innocence. Within weeks after meeting him, he asked me to marry him. My mother accepted his proposal on my behalf.”
“What?” Taylor said, his voice a hoarse whisper.
“She took me aside and told me this was what it had all been for...to snare a rich husband, to have the world at my monied fingertips. She’d accomplished her goal and I should be grateful to her for the years she’d dedicated to me, all that she’d sacrificed in order that I would have what my beauty declared that I deserved.”
“You...you didn’t marry him,” Taylor said in the form of a statement rather than a question. “No.”
“Oh, yes, of course I did,” she said, her hands clutched tightly in her lap. “Legally I was a woman. Emotionally? I was a child, ,who wasn’t capable of defying my mother in any way. And in the back of my mind there was this tiny seed of hope that it just might be possible that Walter wanted me, me the person, not just the outer shell I presented.”
“What...what happened?”
“It was a sham, a cruel joke.” Janice laughed, a sharp bark of bitter sound laced with threatening tears. “I was a trophy to Walter, a doll he could dress up in expensive clothes and even more expensive jewelry, then show off in public, strutting his stuff as he displayed his prize.
“At home? He ignored me beyond the bedroom. If we weren’t having sex, I was to sit pretty, like a beautiful marionette, until such time as he wanted to parade me in public again.”
Taylor muttered an earthy expletive and his hands curled into tight fists on his thighs.
“When I was twenty, Walter went away for the weekend, which was a common occurrence. He disappeared quite frequently without a word of where he was going, or when he’d be back. But that time? He never returned. He was having an affair with my mother, you see. They’d been drinking heavily, Walter lost control of the car and they slammed into a tree. They were killed instantly.
“I waited for the tears to come, the grief, the sense of loss, but they never came. All I felt was free. For the first time in my entire life I was free to be me. I was a wealthy widow. There was nothing standing in the way of my own dreams. Nothing, I soon discovered when I went to college, except my damnable beauty.”
“So you diminished it as much as possible,” Taylor said quietly.
“Yes. I reverted to my maiden name and became the invisible woman, who no one ever looked at twice. I created a facade that brought me peace and contentment. There would be no man who would want me as I now presented myself, but I didn’t trust anyone to see past the beauty if I put it on display. But then?”
Tears filled Janice’s eyes and she struggled to retain control of her emotions.
“Then you, Taylor. I thought at first that I was a challenge to you, a mystery of sorts, something to relieve the boredom of your fast-lane, singlescene life. But time went on and you stayed with me. You were so caring, so tender.
“Then...then you said that you loved me, me, just as I was. Accepted me, just as I was. Oh, I was so happy. So very happy.”
Two tears spilled onto Janice’s pale cheeks and she wiped them away with jerky motions, her hands shaking.
“But it was all a cruel lie,” she whispered, a sob catching in her throat. “Another sham. You’d been embarrassed long enough by being seen with me in public. It was time to decorate the ugly duckling. No, no, it was time to awaken Sleeping Beauty, transform me into what you wanted me to be.”
Taylor lunged to his feet. “No! You’ve got it all wrong, Janice, I swear it.”
“There is the evidence!” She pointed
at the silver box. “Damn you, Taylor Sinclair. Outer appearance is just as important to you as it was to my mother, to Walter, as it is to society at large. You want me to be beautiful.”
“No. Yes.” Taylor dragged one hand through his hair. “But not for me, Janice, for you.”
“Stop it,” she said, covering her ears with her hands. “I won’t listen to any more of your lies.” She dropped her hands, got to her feet and moved behind the chair, gripping the top of it tightly. “Go away, Taylor. Just go away and leave me alone.”
“No, I can’t, not like this. Janice, our entire future is at stake here. I love you, want to marry you, spend the rest of my life by your side.”
Janice shook her head, unable to stop the flow of tears that streamed down her face and along her neck.
“Listen to me. Please, please, listen to me,” Taylor said, his voice raspy with emotion. “I told you that I was afraid of loving, saw it as guaranteed heartbreak. To love was to lose that love, by death, or divorce.
“I was struggling with that belief, and I fought it, finally conquered that terror. I came to realize that the risk was worth it if I was with you.”
He took a shuddering breath.
“Brandon made me face the truth of what I was doing. A last shadow of fear kept me from encouraging you to be true to yourself as a woman. I couldn’t lose you to another man, if no man looked twice at you. I was so selfish, so damn wrong, to be doing what I did to you.”
Taylor stared up at the ceiling for a long moment in an attempt to gain control of his emotions, then he looked at Janice again.
“I love you, Janice. I love you enough to risk losing you. I love you enough to want you to be free to be who you really are. The gift I sent you was my way of declaring that truth. I never meant to hurt you. What I did by giving you the dress, the makeover certificate, I did for you. I don’t care about outer appearances, I swear I don’t. Do you believe me? Do you, Janice?”
Janice said one word in a voice filled with tears of sorrow, a voice echoing the sound of her shattering heart, a voice that sliced through Taylor like the blade of a sharp knife.
One word.
“No.”
Every muscle in Taylor’s body tightened as the realization hit him that he was losing, at that very moment, the only woman he had ever loved. He felt stripped bare, helpless.
It was over.
Tears of heartache and soul-deep despair filled his eyes.
Forcing himself to place one foot in front of the other, he made his way to the door, then opened it to reveal a dark, empty night that waited to swallow him up into a pit of chilling, black loneliness.
He hesitated, pleading silently with Janice to tell him not to go, to tell him she believed him, trusted him, loved him as he loved her.
Silence beat against him like angry, painful fists.
He stumbled from the house, closing the door with a quiet click.
Janice sank to the floor behind the chair, covered her face with her hands and wept.
Janice hardly remembered the remaining hours of the weekend as she barely functioned in a tear-filled haze of misery.
On Monday morning she was exhausted, having been only able to doze fitfully before waking again to relive that final scene with Taylor.
She opened the closet in her bedroom to reach for one of her regulation suits, then her hand stilled. She crossed the room and sank onto the edge of the bed.
What was the point in hiding her beauty? she thought. The camouflage had served no purpose. She’d been betrayed in the end anyway. Lied to. Manipulated. Trusted her heart to a man who had smashed it to smithereens.
She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders.
“No more tears,” she said aloud. “No more. And no more ugly clothes. I’m going to be me, who I really am from this day forward. I’m going to be true to myself. Yes. Wake up, Sleeping Beauty, this is the first day of the rest of your life. Alone. One hummingbird. Not two together. One. Fine.”
Tears threatened and she jumped to her feet, refusing to give way to them.
When she left the house to go to the boutique, she was wearing trim white slacks and a red silk blouse. Her hair was a golden cloud tumbling down her back.
That evening she went next door to Shirley’s, and in a rush of words poured out the tale of what had happened with Taylor. Before Shirley could express her sympathies, Janice grabbed her friend’s hand and said they were going shopping for a new wardrobe for Janice Jennings, the woman she now was and intended to remain.
The next day, Janice had her hair trimmed, leaving it long but cut into a more fashionable and flattering style. She purchased makeup that suited her taste, applying just enough to enhance her features.
During the following days, Janice slowly became accustomed to, and began to enjoy, the compliments she received on her appearance. She produced genuine smiles as she said “Thank you.”
Her new clothes started to feel as though they actually belonged to her, and she found herself looking forward to putting together an attractive ensemble each morning.
She was Janice Jennings and she was beautiful. she repeated in her mind like a mantra. Yes, that was fine, just fine.
And through it all she missed Taylor, ached for Taylor, couldn’t stop the flow of tears during the long, lonely nights without Taylor Sinclair.
On the eighteenth day since her dreams of a future with Taylor had ended, Janice was extremely busy at Sleeping Beauty, attempting to assist five women at once with their selections.
She was wearing a pale pink, gauze peasant dress that was nipped in at her tiny waist by a gauze belt, and scooped low to the edges of her shoulders. The material swung as she moved, affording a glimpse of her long, shapely legs and the womanly slope of her hips.
She was standing behind the counter, placing a satin teddy into a tissue-lined box when the door to the shop opened yet again.
Janice glanced up, then did a double take, her eyes widening, her heart racing.
Taylor was there. But...but this was not a Taylor she had ever seen before.
He was wearing a slightly wrinkled, white dress shirt, black slacks that were several inches too short, white socks and brown shoes.
His hair was slicked down and parted in the middle. Clutched in one of his hands was a soggy paper towel wrapped around several wilting pink carnations.
Taylor was there, she thought incredulously, and he looked absolutely horrible.
“Janice Jennings,” Taylor boomed from where he stood in the center of the store.
Every woman in the boutique stopped and stared at the strange-looking man who was loudly demanding Janice’s attention.
“Janice Jennings,” Taylor repeated. “I love you. I will always love you. I’m asking you to be my wife, my soul mate, the mother of my children.”
One of the women dissolved into a fit of laughter.
“He’s got to be kidding,” she said to the friend next to her, but loud enough for all to hear. “Janice is gorgeous. She’d never make a commitment to a geek like that. Oh, this is hysterically funny.”
“He could be quite handsome if he tried,” her friend said. “But...good grief, he’s just awful.”
“I realize I’m not much to look at, Janice,” Taylor went on. “But outer appearances aren’t important, are they? Not to me. Not to you. Are they, Janice?”
“You bet your sweet bippy they are,” another woman said. “No offense, young man, but you are way out of your league. Janice is one of the beautiful people and you, dear boy, are not. And, oh, yes, that is, indeed, important.”
“Janice,” Taylor shouted. “Will you marry me? Will you? Please?”
Janice took a much-needed breath, only then realizing she’d stopped breathing.
Taylor loved her, truly loved her, her heart sang. He hadn’t lied to her. Everything he’d said that fateful night in her living room had been true, spoken from his heart and soul.
This ridiculous and endearing performance
he was putting on was declaring to the world, for all to see, that outer appearances meant nothing to him. He loved her, her, just as she loved him.
“Janice?” Taylor said.
She ran around the counter, across the floor and into Taylor’s arms, nearly toppling him over.
“Yes,” she said, smiling through tears of joy. “Yes, I’ll marry you. Oh, Taylor, thank you for loving me enough to show me you honestly understand, truly love me for who I am, not what I look like.”
“Thank God,” Taylor said, wrapping his arms around her as he dropped his meager bouquet to the floor. “Ah, Janice, I’ve missed you so much. I love you so damn much.”
“And I love you.”
“Is this a happy ending or something?” one woman said to another.
“I guess,” the other woman replied with a shrug. “They certainly are an...unusual-looking couple. Oh, well, love is blind, as the saying goes.”
“No,” Taylor said quietly, close to Janice’s lips. “Love sees beyond the trimmings, the outside packaging.”
“Yes,” Janice whispered. “And love has the power and wisdom to awaken Sleeping Beauty.”
Taylor captured Janice’s mouth in a kiss that sealed their commitment to forever.
They were two hummingbirds united, oblivious to the applause produced by the women in the boutique.
They were Janice and Taylor...together.
EPILOGUE
They were married a week later in judge’s chambers with Clem, Mary Alice and Shirley as witnesses.
The bride was stunningly beautiful in a lovely peach-colored suit and a short veil. The groom was devastatingly handsome in a dark suit, white shirt and a peach-colored tie.
The ceremony was repeated that afternoon in the charming gazebo on the town square in Prescott, with Taylor’s lifelong friends in attendance.
The next several days were a flurry of activity as they made arrangements for their respective businesses so they could leave on a two-week honeymoon cruise.
The Irresistible Mr. Sinclair Page 17