The Art of Romance (31 page)

Dylan caught the left corner of his mouth between his teeth.

The banging of the front door as it closed behind someone saved him from having to respond to the siren.

“Ah good. Ricardo’s here.” Mother gave the tall, balding man an air kiss and ushered him over to Dylan’s portfolio.

Like the good boy he’d been trained to be—by Rhonda—Dylan stepped aside and allowed his mother, the publicist, and Emerson to discuss his art with the appraiser as if he weren’t in the room.

Instead, he pulled the strap of his messenger bag over his head, set it on what had once been the cashier’s station, and pulled out his tape measure and pad of graph paper to start measuring the space.

“Here, let me help you with that.”

Dylan nearly jumped out of his skin when Emerson’s soft fingertips brushed his hand. She took the end of the tape and walked down to the other end of the wall with it, heels making a strangely hollow tapping sound on the floor that echoed over the hushed voices of Mother and her publicist and appraiser, still huddled over the portfolio.

Shaking himself, he pressed the metal casing against the wall and wrote down the measurement—22’ 8’—at the top of the page. Without a word from him, Emerson moved to the next wall and the next, enabling him to get an accurate measure of the space in half the amount of time it would have taken him on his own.

But then she sidled up beside him when he set the graph pad down on the cashier stand to draw a rough sketch of the space.

“You seem to be an old pro at doing this.” She leaned back against the high counter, crossing her arms and looking over her shoulder at his handiwork.

“I–I’ve done it a few times.” His voice came out hoarse, wobbly. He cleared his throat.

“We have access to several portable panels so that we can display more artwork in the middle of the room. The owner is going to get the display case out of here on Wednesday, so we’ll have full use of the space—unless you have some three-dimensional artwork you’d like displayed under glass.”

He shook his head. She smelled like flowers—with a splash of musk. Not overpowering, nor unpleasant, but noticeable. Caylor, on the other hand, sometimes smelled like apples, sometimes like coconut, and on the night of Robertson’s faculty party, she’d smelled like warm, spicy gingerbread. He much preferred fruity and spicy aromas to an imitation of flowers.

“I understand you just moved back here from Philadelphia.” Emerson turned and leaned the side of her arm against the counter, facing him. “Are you enjoying being home?”

He kept sketching. “Yes.”

“And you’re teaching at James Robertson?”

“Yes.” He turned the pad and drew in the long, uninterrupted wall, counting the number of squares on the grid to make sure he drew it the correct length.

“What kinds of things do you like to do in your spare time—other than art, obviously?”

From the corner of his eye, he could see Emerson’s perfect, overly white smile. “I like watching hockey and basketball.”

“What about baseball? My dad has season tickets to Vanderbilt’s games. If you’d like to go sometime, I can try to finagle them from him.” She tucked her thick, wavy hair behind her ear with her fine-boned fingers.

“Not really a big baseball fan. Do you know the size of the panels you have access to?”

Emerson let out a tiny sigh. “They’re three feet wide, six feet tall. Fabric covered.”

Dylan turned and let his eyes rove over the open room, imagining how best to feed traffic through. He sketched in the freestanding panels—just two, one on each wall, offset from each other near the front of the room so that it wouldn’t be too crowded back here near the bar and auctioneer’s stand—then took the graph pad over to the art appraiser.

Over the next couple of hours, the appraiser, Mother, Emerson, and the publicist dickered back and forth about which pieces to display, how to frame them, and where they should be hung. Dylan gave little input—this was their baby; he was merely the vendor.

“What do you think, Dylan?”

At Emerson’s question, Dylan had to force himself out of the landscape of the new project and back into reality. “I’m sorry?”

“What do you think about grouping the paintings this way? You’re the artist; you should have the final approval on how the pieces are displayed.” Emerson raised pale brows and waited for him to answer.

“Um…” Perspiration tickled his upper lip. After years of Rhonda’s talking over him or completely ignoring his ideas, he’d stopped developing opinions on how to do anything other than the grunt work of setting up his own exhibitions. She’d always determined which pieces to display and where to hang them.

“This is our highest-ticket painting.” Mother flipped the portfolio open to one of Dylan’s least-favorite pieces. “It should be hung prominently in the front so people see it when they come in.”

“No.” Dylan’s heart leaped into his throat as if he’d just slipped off the edge of a cliff. He took a shaky breath and tried to keep his body—and voice—from trembling over this monumental step forward in his emotional healing. “The most desirable pieces should be placed in the back—that way people have to walk past, and look at, everything else on their way back to it. Feature it on the cover or just inside the front of the auction catalog. That’s what will drive interest.”

His mother pressed her hands to his cheeks, and he stiffened. “That’s my brilliant boy.” She ended the contact—he wondered if it felt as strange to her as it did to him—and turned to the event planner. “Ems, make sure to tell the graphic designer that.”

“Yes ma’am.” Emerson wrote the note with a stylus on her pad-style computer. “Dylan, I’ll need you to e-mail high-quality digital photos of each piece, along with all of the specifications—such as size, media, title—to the graphic designer”—she handed him a business card—”so she can get the catalog completed by the end of the week. I don’t think I need to point out what a quick turnaround we’re on here.”

He tucked the card into his shirt pocket. Emerson double-checked the list of paintings to be displayed and the estimated sales price with the appraiser, then handed the several sheets of legal pad paper to Dylan. He stuck it in the front of the portfolio and zipped it closed.

Before he could leave, though, the publicist, who’d stepped into the back room to take a phone call, returned. “Great news. Mr. and Mrs. Adams have five extra tickets to the hockey game Tuesday night and would like to offer them to your family, Grace.”

“That’s lovely. So that would be me, Davis, Pax, Dylan, and…” Mother put her arm around Emerson’s tiny waist. “Ems, would you like to go to the hockey game with us? You’ve done so much, and I’d love you to come and meet the rest of the family.”

Emerson beamed a high-wattage smile. “I’d love to, Mrs. Bradley.”

A moment of excitement over the prospect of attending a live hockey game crashed down when Dylan processed the information that the game was on Tuesday night. “You’ll need to find another guest, Mother. I have a standing commitment on Tuesday evenings.”

All pretense and true traces of pleasure vanished from his mother’s face. “What could you possibly have to do that’s more important than face time with one of my most important financial supporters?”

Dylan took his mother by the elbow. “Excuse us for a moment, please.”

He escorted her to the storage room in the back, feeling her grow stiffer and angrier by the second. “Mother, I’m teaching a class on Tuesday nights.”

She yanked her elbow out of his grasp. “You told me your adjunct classes are on Mondays and Wednesdays during the daytime.”

The frown on his mother’s face transported him back to being seven years old again, standing in front of her, waiting to receive his punishment for the mural he’d drawn on the basement wall. In permanent ink. “The ones I’m teaching at the school are. But I’m also teaching a painting class at Acklen Avenue for the senior adult group.”

“Cancel it.” Mother headed toward the door, as if all were settled.

Dylan’s breath caught in his throat. No wonder he’d allowed Rhonda to walk all over him the last few years. His mother had trained him for it quite well. He tried to catch a deep breath in the thinning air. “No.”

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “What did you say?”

“No. I won’t cancel the class. I’ve made a commitment, and I intend to follow through on it.” No matter how much he’d really rather go to the hockey game.

Mother stalked back over to him. “You
will
cancel, and you
will
attend the game.”

Assertive. Be assertive
. “Mother, it’s a hockey game. And while I understand that you don’t think my commitment to teaching Perty and her friends how to paint is important, it is—because it’s important to them, and it’s important to me. I’m an artist. I’m a teacher. And I know you’ve never been happy with those choices. But this is who I am. I know I’m not the son you’ve always wished I would be, but I’m the son God gave you; and I hope you can find it in your heart some day to accept me and love me the way I am. Because I love you.”

He squeezed her shoulders; then, taking a tiny bit of pleasure in her stunned silence, he left her in the storage room and returned to the front to retrieve his portfolio.

Rather than risk another run-in with Mother, he exited the front of the store and walked around the block to his car. But it wasn’t until he got home, pulling the small SUV up under the old hickory tree beside the carriage house, that he allowed himself to process what had just happened.

He’d confronted his mother. He’d resisted her commands the way he’d imagined doing with Rhonda so many times. He’d been assertive, and he’d finally shared his heart with his mother, finally stood up for himself and the life he’d chosen—the life God had called him to.

Inside the workroom, he set the portfolio down on the table at the end and then went and stood in front of his easel, letting his gaze—and his imagination—roam over the pencil lines, letting the image take shape in his head.

Several minutes later, he picked up the pencil and started sketching—no hesitation, no doubt. The image of the man looking upon the central figure of the woman, who just happened to look like Caylor Evans, needed to be there.

Because if he wanted Mother to take him seriously as an artist and accept him for who he was, he needed to be true to his calling and be the artist God was calling him to be. Not one who worried about what others might think, but one who stayed true to the vision God gave him.

Even if that meant revealing his secret past by putting his own face on canvas again.

C
aylor’s heart sped as the choir’s call to worship came to a rousing end. Though she’d sung special music dozens, if not hundreds, of times over her lifetime in this church, the nervous flutterings in the pit of her stomach never failed to start just before she rose to sing.

During the pastor’s welcoming remarks to members and guests, Caylor slipped out of the back row of the choir loft, exited, and entered the sanctuary through a side door near the stage. She bowed with everyone else for the prayer—though the first line of the song ran through her head over and over—stepped up onto the platform, placed the sheet with the words of the song on the podium, stepped to the side of it, and nodded to the pianist.

And then she looked up.

Dylan Bradley stood just inside the back doors on the left side of the sanctuary, glancing around as if to find a place to sit.

An immense buzzing filled her ears, and all coherent thought fled her mind. She could do no more than stare as he made his way around to the far side and quickly seated himself at the end of a pew—a spot that usually stayed empty due to its partially blocked view of the front of the church. But she could still see him clearly past the pillar that stood between them.

A loud chord on the piano caught her attention. Certain her face glowed incandescent with embarrassment, Caylor looked down at the piece of paper on the podium, finding there words that seemed at once familiar and strange.

The pianist seamlessly repeated the introduction, and Caylor pulled herself together and opened her mouth to start singing. After the first verse, the meaning of the words pulled her back into a spirit of worship, and she almost forgot the tall, handsome man sitting toward the back of the room.

To a murmur of soft amens from the congregation, Caylor forced herself to walk—not run—down the steps to the door. Once in the hallway, she leaned against the wall, hand pressed to her chest over her pounding heart.

She hadn’t seen Dylan in weeks—at least not at less than a distance across campus. But avoiding him had backfired; she’d thought about him more, letting him derail her thoughts frequently since they’d last spoken. And trying to channel those thoughts into writing Isabella and Giovanni’s story only made matters worse. Every time she wrote a scene, she could clearly picture Dylan as Giovanni—just as clearly as she had pictured him as the hero of every previous book she’d written.

Hoping her longer-than-usual absence wouldn’t be noted, she sneaked back into her place in the choir loft during the offertory hymn.