Only Skin Deep

by Cathleen Galitz

  Having a spotlight cast into the deepest, darkest closet of her mind was illuminating—not to mention a little embarrassing. Suddenly, all Lauren’s fears seemed stupid and small as it became perfectly clear that the decision to take a chance on love was entirely her own.

  The fact that everybody she confided in seemed crazy about Travis should have made her decision to put her misgivings aside all that much easier.

  But for some reason it didn’t.

  And that in itself was testimony to the depth of her girlish attachment to fairy-tale endings and an aversion to reality when it came complete with warts. Clearly no one else had a problem with Travis’s proposal but Lauren herself.

  She had some serious soul searching to do. The chances of that occurring if she returned home and found Travis in her bed were highly unlikely. Thinking wasn’t something she did well around him, particularly when he was naked. So when she left her mother’s house and turned her car, not in the direction of the Half Moon Ranch but rather in the exact opposite direction, Lauren wasn’t worried about getting lost. She had enough money in her pocket to cover her expenses while she sorted out the doubts in her heart and tried to get her head screwed on straight. Any decent motel should be able to offer her what she needed most: solitude and room service.

  Driving helped soothe her frayed nerves. The open road embraced her. Lauren’s sense of foreboding rolled back with every click of the odometer. The open range offered breathing space and miles and miles of uninterrupted contemplation beneath a cloudless Wyoming sky that put no ceiling on a person’s dreams. She made a game of following any road that appealed to her sense of adventure.

  Tiredness from lack of sleep the previous night combined with the emotional exhaustion of sorting through her feelings. Completely used up both physically and emotionally, Lauren shut off her cell phone without a sense of guilt. She certainly wasn’t married, and had yet to commit to moving in with Travis on a temporary basis. A grown woman she didn’t need anyone’s permission to take a little road trip.

  When Lauren finally pulled into a quaint bed-and-breakfast tucked into the foothills of the Tetons, she gave herself permission to sleep for days on end. She had just collected her room key when a handsome stranger registering next to her in the hotel lobby stroked her wounded ego by offering her an alternate plan for the evening.

  “If you’d let me buy you a drink in the lounge, I’d do my very best to replace that sad expression on your pretty face with a smile,” he told her.

  Where was she?

  Travis was going out of his mind with worry. A couple of hours after the sun went down and Lauren still hadn’t returned from town, he set aside his reservations about being the little boy who called wolf and contacted every single person he knew who might have any inkling of her whereabouts, effectively distributing his anxiety even among Lauren’s friends and family.

  “She left here hours ago,” her mother informed him.

  Travis regretted worrying her. Glad that she didn’t chastise him for not treating her daughter right, he asked her if she knew of any reason that Lauren might be upset.

  There was a long pause on the other end of the phone before Barbara responded. “I only know that she loves you madly—and she’s afraid that you don’t feel the same way about her.”

  That soft-spoken reprimand hit Travis with all the subtlety of a baseball bat. The memory of his silent response to Lauren’s sweet, sweet admission of love stabbed through him, and he forgot about salvaging the tenuous good impression he’d made upon her family.

  “I care very deeply about your daughter,” he said.

  “Then you might think about letting her know that—before you lose her altogether.”

  It was good advice. Travis just hoped it wasn’t too late to follow it. If he had been unsure of his feelings for Lauren before, by the time he hung up the phone, there was absolutely no doubt left in his mind that he had fallen hopelessly in love with her. Why else would he become so physically sick with worry wondering where she was?

  Travis imagined the worst. The possibilities were endlessly gruesome. He envisioned her bleeding to death by the side of road, wandering around the countryside in a state of amnesia, abducted and raped by some lunatic. The spike in his blood pressure was at a dangerous level. Exhausting the more grisly scenarios, he considered another possibility.

  Maybe she was just playing mind games with him. Maybe she was more like Jaclyn than he wanted to think. Maybe she was down at The Alibi looking for a less emotionally constipated man who didn’t swallow his tongue whenever she expressed her feelings for him.

  At a loss what to do, Travis climbed into his pickup in a self-induced panic and set out to find her. He tried the bars first. There was no sign of her there. Nor on any of the side streets in Pinedale. His friend Larry at the police station informed him that they could not put out an all-points bulletin for a single woman who had been missing for less than twenty-four hours.

  “And I hate to tell you, but you don’t have any legal rights over someone who isn’t your wife.”

  Leaning over the counter, Travis took a combative stance. Jaclyn had tried provoking him into such a fit of fury on more than one occasion and had done little more than irritate him. This was different from such manipulative ploys. Travis had to believe that Lauren wouldn’t play those kind of sick games.

  Stepping back, Larry hastened to expound his official position.

  “Listen, buddy, I’m sorry to see you in such a state, but this sounds more like a personal issue than a criminal one. I don’t know how long the two of you have been together, but since when is Lauren required to report in to you?”

  Travis backed off. Not because he wanted to. But because he had no other choice but to spend the night in jail if he didn’t. The fact that Larry made him feel like some overprotective Neanderthal without a clue how to treat a lady didn’t set well with him. Probably because he resembled the comparison more than he cared to admit.

  “Sorry to take my frustrations out on you,” Travis said. “But if I don’t hear something from Lauren soon, I promise I’ll be back in here demanding action.”

  Just a few short weeks ago Lauren would have been tempted to accept the stranger’s offer to buy her a drink and strike up a conversation with a prospective bridegroom. Today she opted for a hot bath instead. No longer satisfied to be with just any man, she had her heart set on Travis. No one else would do.

  Lauren filled the tub with hot water and eased herself in. Nothing in the world calmed her nerves like a good long soak. Placing a steaming washcloth over her face, she let the mystical properties of the bath dissolve the world beyond her skin. Much later when the water grew tepid and her skin turned the texture of prunes, she drained the liquid from the tub and felt the tension in her body melt away. By the time she stumbled to bed and said a little prayer that the path she was meant to take would be clearly laid out in front of her tomorrow, she was already half-asleep.

  Twelve

  Lauren squinted at the clock beside her bed. Her eyes widened in disbelief. It was almost past check-out time. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept till noon. Awakening with a renewed sense of energy, she decided it was a whole lot easier to be a clear-thinker when Travis wasn’t around to turn her brains to mush. Playing the part of the invisible woman for the past few years had certain advantages. While everyone had been busy ignoring her, Lauren learned how to think for herself and become her own person. A good night’s sleep brought with it the realization that it didn’t matter what anyone else thought. And that, no matter how well intended others might be, she shouldn’t let anyone else define her dreams.

  Quite simply Lauren wanted it all. To be married. To be a wife and a mother as well as a lover. She believed herself deserving of a tried and true happy ending complete with a preacher and a multitiered cake and a bouquet that she got to throw instead of catch for once.

  As humble as her dream might be, she decided that it was worth
holding out for.

  Pride put a steel rod in her spine and prevented Lauren from accepting less than the real deal. She was tired of crying her eyes out over someone who didn’t appreciate her, and she wasn’t willing to settle for just marrying anyone for the sake of a ring and the approval of polite society, either. Nor did she want to force a man into marriage against his will. If she were pregnant with Travis’s child after their last passionate encounter, she would rather die than use an innocent baby as a bargaining chip to get what she wanted from him.

  “I’m an intelligent, attractive and independent woman,” she told herself. “I don’t need a man to make me whole. Certainly not one with a reputation of abandoning women as soon as he grows tired of them.”

  Of course, that didn’t change the fact that she loved Travis.

  She was willing to stake her future on the idea of the two of them being together for a lifetime. The question was whether he loved her and was willing to take a chance on marriage. If he wasn’t smart enough to see what a terrific catch she was, he could go hang out at The Alibi for the next decade or so and wait for someone better to come along.

  Lauren understood that she could no more commandeer Travis’s love than she could continue to resent her father for dying. The only solution that left her a modicum of dignity was to embrace herself as a wonderful, sensual creature entitled to a lifetime of self-love and approval. Time would tell whether Travis would come around.

  If he didn’t love her enough to marry her, she decided that she would simply have to love herself all the more.

  Lauren rushed to make herself presentable before check-out time. Staring into the mirror, she looked deep into her own eyes and assured herself that everything was going to work out all right. Then she shut off the light and headed out to do a little shopping. There were a few things she wanted to buy before confronting Travis on his home turf. They included candles, chocolate, a bottle of wine and the most elegant negligee she could find.

  It was dark by the time Lauren got back to the ranch. An ominous sense of foreboding settled over her as she shut off her vehicle and stepped into the obscurity of a night illuminated only by the canopy of stars overhead. She suddenly felt very small.

  And all alone.

  There was not a single light on in either the big house or the cabin. It was one thing to imitate Katherine Hepburn’s sense of independence in the bright light of day but much harder to attempt it while fumbling for her keys in the darkness while thinking about confronting the man who made her feel as vulnerable as a kitten. She finally managed to open the front door and flip the light switch on. Everything was neat and orderly as she’d left it. The boogey man was nowhere to be seen.

  And neither was Travis.

  Lauren told herself that it was silly to be disappointed that he wasn’t there waiting for her. That he wasn’t the least bit worried about her. Not that she owed him any explanations about her whereabouts. She’d just hoped that absence might have made his heart grow fonder. All the way home, she fantasized about him waiting there for her, ready to present her with the ring he’d bought after having a change of heart.

  Disappointment was a bitter, though not wholly unexpected, pill to swallow.

  Unable to imagine where he could be at this time of night, Lauren assumed he simply had turned in early after a long day’s work. The man did work hard—much harder in fact than she had ever supposed before getting to know him better. Travis Banks was far less of the playboy that she’d always imagined him to be and more of a regular working guy who didn’t take his stewardship over the land lightly. More often than not, that meant long hours of toil in the elements and nights shortened by the necessary paperwork required to keep a ranch this size running smoothly.

  Lauren couldn’t help but worry that he might have been tossed from his horse and lay helpless at the bottom of some gulch, unconscious. Maybe he’d had an accident with some of the big equipment on the place. Maybe he was simply at the vet with a sick animal.

  Alternate possibilities about where Travis might be were too painful to entertain. Just the thought of him with another woman was enough to make her physically ill.

  Sanity demanded that she simply proceed with the ritual she’d devised to bolster her flagging courage, so she began setting the stage. She wasn’t going to wait around any longer for the love that Travis was either unwilling or unable to give her. Lauren felt entitled to the romance that every woman craved, and didn’t want to get it vicariously through movies, books or soap operas, either.

  First, she placed a single long-stemmed rose in the center of the table and surrounded it with tall flickering tapers. Then she unpacked a fondue pot, broke a thick bar of imported dark chocolate into it and turned it to simmer. Wanting to believe that whatever was happening in her life was only a reflection of the limits she put on her own mind, Lauren decided it was time for her to trust the intelligence within.

  It was time to woo herself and to indulge in the seduction of all of her senses.

  Next she selected a CD of dreamy love songs and set a bottle of champagne into a silver bucket that she filled with ice. Then she rinsed and culled a pint of fresh strawberries the size of golf balls. These she placed in a pretty antique dish reserved for special occasions. Before taking a beautifully wrapped package into her bedroom, she took a moment to stir the chocolate in the fondue pot.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, she delighted in the crinkly sound of tissue paper as she lifted an outrageously expensive negligee out of the box. The floor-length gown was a whisper of gray satin trimmed in pink lace. Lauren paused to touch the cool, slick fabric to her cheek before slipping out of her regular clothes and transforming herself into a movie star. It was as if the negligee had been custom-made to mold to the curves of her body. Twirling around in front of a full-length mirror, she’d never felt more beautiful.

  And regretted only that Travis wasn’t there to see her in it.

  She returned to the other room to take her place of honor at a candlelit table set for one. Taking a silver skewer in one hand, she stabbed a strawberry and swirled it into the rich, dark, melted chocolate. The aroma alone was enough to make her mouth water in anticipation. It took a certain amount of self-control to admire the artistry of her creation before sinking her teeth into it.

  Ah…heaven!

  Lauren washed down the aphrodisiac with champagne from a delicate crystal flute. The bubbles tickled her throat. Her second glass made her feel a little bit fuzzy. Lifting it in the air, she offered a toast as a way of kicking off the symbolic private ceremony designed to mark the beginning of her life as an enlightened creature capable of making herself happy—or at least being content in solitude of her own company.

  “Here’s to you, baby,” Lauren said to herself.

  After devouring as many chocolate-covered strawberries as her stomach could hold, she gave herself over to bedtime. She didn’t bother blowing the candles out. She drew back her sheets and sprinkled them with the essence of violets. Sheathed in satin, she slid between those perfumed sheets, fluffed her pillow and promptly burst into tears.

  Lauren wondered just how long she’d been undiagnosed as a schizophrenic.

  Love was an ill-mannered beast capable of turning a once strong-willed woman into someone incapable of making up her mind about anything: whether to sleep with Travis or not, whether to live with him or without him, whether to cry or to laugh at the ridiculousness of her dilemma. Lauren couldn’t understand why it was so difficult for him to say he loved her. Why she was good enough to sleep with but not to marry? Why, in spite of her best efforts to hold herself to a higher standard, she could not simply walk away with her head held high and her dignity intact?

  The answer to those questions seemed to lie in the fact that the bed was too big without Travis in it and that she hadn’t managed a single bite of food all night without thinking about him.

  Without missing him desperately.

  All her elaborate ritual had acc
omplished was to prove once and for all that love was more powerful than pride. What good was pretending when she couldn’t even manage to fool herself? As a modern, enlightened woman, Lauren might not need a man to make her feel complete, but she needed Travis in order to feel anything at all.

  In the dark of the night, in the middle her lonely bed, Lauren had an epiphany. Love didn’t make demands based on what others might think or do out of a sense of obligation to the outdated dreams spawned in a young girl’s heart and attached to the sentimentality of a previous era. It was wrong of her not to accept Travis as he was and where he was right now. Calling herself stupid and headstrong, she realized that Suzanne and her mother were both right.

  Rather than bemoaning the fact that Travis wasn’t ready for the kind of commitment she wanted, Lauren knew she should grab onto what he was offering with both hands and hang on for life. It was time for her to put aside unicorns and pixie dust and childish fairy tales. Time to grow up and act like a woman, not a little girl perpetually trying to please an absent father who would not have loved her any less without the unrealistic expectations she placed upon herself in his name.

  Lauren hoped it wasn’t too late and that Travis hadn’t changed his mind. First thing in the morning she intended to march right over to his house and see if she couldn’t set things right between them. Maybe if she arrived with her suitcase in hand, he wouldn’t have the heart to turn her away.

  When Travis pulled into the driveway well after midnight and saw Lauren’s car parked in front of the cabin, he couldn’t remember ever being so relieved.

  Or upset.

  Lauren had better have one hell of an explanation for taking off without letting him or anyone else know where she was going or what she was doing. Responsible, mature women simply didn’t disappear without a word to anyone. Just thinking about her foolish behavior got him so riled up that he had half a mind to knock on her door right now, and give her a good tongue-lashing. Right after he gave her a good tongue-lashing…