Janice Gentle Gets Sexy Read Free

smile, a connection. For a picosecond they are human together. Janice notices, feels this is somehow fortuitous, and decides. The thin man down the line is too thin, too peppery-looking. Square Jaw will do very well. Heroes — she bites again - are much more difficult than heroines. Somehow men do not seem to give out their personalities as freely as even the most static of women.
    She settles back and spreads a bit now that the seat to her left is vacant. The rush hour is thinning and it may be that she will have to start all over again tomorrow, for she has yet to find a heroine. She checks the height of the square-jawed chosen one. Good, she thinks, he is quite tall so there should not be too much of a problem matching him up. Ever since she became fixated on a very short but remarkably beautiful olive-skinned chap (just right for the Eastern Diplomat she needed at the time) she has been wary. Finding a match for him at under five foot four was not at all easy, for she was wise enough to know that all women, if only in their fantasies, like their partners to be bigger and stronger than they. Of course, it was possible that men also - if only in their fantasies - liked their female lovers to be ditto, but this did not concern her. It was women she wrote for and -happily - it was women who bought and read her books.
    Sylvia Perth had told her. 'Janice,' she said, 'almost all fiction is read by women. Chaps read other stuff, so don't you worry about them. You carry on writing just the way you do and that will be absolutely fine.'
    So, there could be no heroine towering over her olive-skinned hero - and that had been hard. This was the crux of the problem of her creative shibboleth; it could never be broken. If it were -even once - then everything else would tumble to the ground. The Eastern Diplomat had taken three dreadful journeys before she found the right match and she felt miserable at the prospect of similar difficulties now. She unwraps a Mars bar. Two more mornings of torture like this, especially if the wet, warm weather continued, would be —
    'Excuse me.'
    A well-bred, firm-toned female voice. Janice looks up.
    Tight lips, a strong, fine-boned face framed in a red-gold fringe, below which there are flower-blue eyes that say nothing. Remainder of hair held close in an uncompromising chignon. No lipstick, no rouge, refined bearing with the smell of lemons and honey about her. Graceless clothes; pleated skirt, plain white blouse, indeterminate brown coat and unadorned black pumps. Janice remarks to herself that the coat is not summerweight and yet its owner does not even glow. She also sees that the ankles are small, the wrists delicate, the curve of the neck graceful. This is not raw-boned gracelessness but imposed, surface only. Early forties perhaps, but not difficult to picture her younger. Janice blinks and half smiles, she nods, moves her bulk and the crackling plastic bag, and goes on chewing her chocolate bar. She continues to look sideways as she does so. Good, very good, she thinks.
    'Thank you so much.' Superior politeness as if the one giving thanks is in fact saying, Be grateful to me. Cold. With fire lurking somewhere within.
    Janice is intrigued.
    An idea shapes in her head.
    She chews faster, shifts her position to see better. Waits.
    The idea grows in her as the woman arranges herself in the seat and adjusts her clothes to avoid encroaching on Janice's side. Janice spills everywhere, well into her companion's space, yet the woman manages to avoid any physical contact at all. There is something engaging about that isolation. She takes one more long, slow sideways look before daring to decide. But yes - yes, yes, yes - it is right. Easy to see her as she is now and as she was once. Fading red-gold beauty. Lines of experience, lines of regret, perhaps? And a hardness somewhere. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Janice wants to write a retrospective novel for which red-gold and her artificial, self-imposed