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What were you supposed to do, lie to him?
True, not telling him about Jillian’s instructions in the first place wasn’t the same as lying in words, but lies of omission were sometimes worse. Like when her mother let her go on thinking she was staying sober only for her to get that tearful phone call that revealed she’d been drinking again for months.
They had sat her down on a chair facing the bed, and she had immediately spotted the painting on the wall above it. As with all the others, there was no mistaking the hand that had produced it. But where the others she’d seen poured out love for this place, this Hill Country, this one exploded with love, adoration and devotion to one thing. One person. The beautiful woman in the portrait, unmistakable even now, two decades later.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ariel had said softly.
Kaitlyn was speechless.
“When I first saw it,” Sydney said, “I thought I could die happy knowing a man with that kind of talent had seen me that way.”
“Yes,” Kaitlyn had whispered before her throat knotted up altogether.
And I almost had that.
It had taken everything she had to keep herself even slightly steady while the two other women went to work.
They’d worked on her hair, her face—especially her eyes—with makeup she didn’t even know the name of, and then put her in a dress, a flippy little gold number she would have laughed at the very idea of wearing if she’d seen it in a store. Not to mention the heels they apparently expected her to wear, something she hadn’t done in years. But Ariel, who was loaning them since they were the same size, promised they were more comfortable than they looked, because she insisted on it.
And through it all they wouldn’t let her look in the mirror above the dresser.
“Now,” Sydney pronounced, “one more thing.”
“What else could there be?” she asked, almost plaintively. She couldn’t help the undertone; she’d already lied by omission by not telling them there was every likelihood Ry would want her disinvited to this whole thing now.
“Something you have to understand,” Ariel said quietly. “That this has nothing to do with how you look every day. This does not mean you’re unattractive or as I hear you think, plain and ordinary. You’re neither.”
Sydney picked it up there. “All what we’ve done here means is that a woman can be anything she wants, whenever she wants. And for whoever she wants.”
“Helps if he’s a drop-dead hunk, though,” Ariel said, with a quiet smile.
Ry. They were doing this for Ry. Or rather, to make her attractive for him. She would have gone along with this eagerly had they only shown up five minutes earlier. Before she’d blurted out what Jillian had told her. Ordered her.
But she knew she wasn’t wrong about how angry he’d been. Angry enough that she’d been glad of the escape.
“Done yet?” Maggie Rafferty’s voice came from the doorway. Kaitlyn couldn’t help herself, she jumped to her feet.
“Yep,” Sydney said cheerfully.
Maggie stepped into the room. And stopped. She looked Kaitlyn up and down, as if she were a horse she was looking to buy. And given how she’d spent the last two days with the woman’s son, she could have done without that being the simile that popped into her head.
“Ah,” the woman said, a wide smile spreading across her face. “Now that’s the woman I knew was in there.”
Kaitlyn blinked. And to her shock Maggie Rafferty crossed over to her and enveloped her in a hug. A warm, welcoming, almost loving hug. The kind she’d known so rarely in her life.
“You need to know this is foryou,” Maggie said firmly. “Rylan doesn’t want or need you to do this, or to be anyone other than who you are. That’s who he fell for. This, he would tell you, is just window dressing. Now. Come look.”
As if her words were the final approval on this project they’d embarked on, Sydney and Ariel finally walked her over to where a full-length mirror hung on the back of a door. With every step all she could think of were Maggie’s words.
That’s who he fell for…
A stranger looked back at her from the mirror. A woman in a sexy gold dress and shoes, with huge, warm brown eyes flecked with gold the dress seemed to make pop, fringed with impossible lashes, cheekbones that wouldn’t quit, and a riot of waves in thick, shiny, sun-kissed hair that looked anything but like her plain brown.
She had the inane thought that she was lucky they’d had sex before this transformation, because at least she knew it had been, in that moment, real. If this had come first, she would have always assumed that was why.
Because this was a woman worthy of Rylan Rafferty.
This was the woman he’d drawn in that sketch.
