The Art of Romance (4 page)

While JRU wasn’t a huge school, it was big enough. It couldn’t be too hard to avoid her. Could it?

“Do you remember Mr. Science Guy from the family cookout back in October?” Caylor twirled a bent-open paper clip with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand.

“The tall, skinny guy with the pimply neck?” Zarah Mitchell, one of her best friends from college, asked.

“Yeah. The one who wanted to tell me all about his experiment while we were there.”

“I remember him. Don’t tell me he called you and asked you out.”

With her cell phone tucked between ear and shoulder, Caylor used her right hand to scroll through the list of unread e-mails sitting in her Inbox to determine if any of them needed to be addressed before she left for the day. “No, he didn’t call. But I met his brother Dylan a few minutes ago—his older brother, by the looks of him.”

“Really?” A hint of excitement came through Zarah’s voice. “How much older?”

“Probably not much. I’d say he’s probably in his late twenties.”

“Does he look just like the scientist?”

Caylor didn’t have to search hard to recall the memory of Dylan Bradley’s looks. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him since the run-in. “A little bit—but even cuter. Oh, and he’s taller than me, too.”

“That’s a bonus.”

Right at six feet tall—with a love of shoes with two-or three-inch heels—Caylor always noticed a man whom she had to look up to. Physically and intellectually. Today she had been wearing flats, and Dylan had been a few inches taller. His face floated before her mind’s eye again. “There’s something about this guy that’s so familiar, and I can’t put my finger on it.”

“He looks like his brother?”

“Yeah…that’s partly it. But I feel like I know him from somewhere—like we’ve met before.” She opened an e-mail to see if it was as important as the subject made it sound, but it wasn’t, so she closed it again.

“Your grandmothers are best friends. It’s likely that you met him sometime when you were both younger and just don’t remember it. So…are you going to go for it?” A teasing lilt softened Zarah’s voice.

Caylor leaned back in her chair. “Go for what?”

“This guy…Dylan. You’ve been saying you might have to start taking the initiative if you’re going to have any marriage prospects before you’re forty. You only have five years left, dear.”

The bent paper clip flew from Caylor’s fingers and landed with a slight tick somewhere across the small office. “Thanks for the reminder.” Actually, she had five years and six days left. “I don’t think so—he’s way too young for me.”

“If he’s in his late twenties, he can’t be more than five or six years younger than you. That’s nothing.”

“Says the lady engaged to a man two years older. Any change on setting a wedding date?” Though haranguing her friend about her open-ended engagement took the focus off the idea of Caylor’s asking a younger man out, she had to swallow back the bitterness of envy every time she talked to Zarah about the engagement or the as yet unscheduled wedding. Two years older than Zarah and a year older than their other best friend, Flannery McNeill, Caylor had always assumed she would get engaged and married first. None of them, Zarah included, had ever dreamed that Zarah would be the first engaged, first married. Of course, considering she’d met and fallen in love with the guy when she was seventeen years old, his coming back to town after so many years had given Zarah an advantage in the snaga-man category.

She hadn’t told Zarah yet, but Zarah and Bobby’s experience—meeting young, falling in love, being broken up by her emotionally abusive father, resenting each other for years, and then coming back together fourteen years later—had inspired a novel idea for Caylor. And now that she had returned all of her edits on the last manuscript on her current contract, she could start working on the proposal for a new series.

“No change. We’re still discussing whether I’ll sell my house or he’ll get rid of his condo. He likes the more urban-lifestyle feel of the apartment—reminds him of living in LA. He says my house feels too suburban for him. But I hate the idea of sharing walls—or that our floor is someone else’s ceiling. It creeps me out.”

Caylor picked up a pen and pulled the black vinyl-covered spiral notebook out from her messenger-style bag. She flipped open to the first blank page, about halfway through, and wrote:
Have engaged couple argue about where they’re going to live? Too urban/too suburban
.

“You’re writing down what I said, aren’t you?”

She closed the notebook and clicked the pen closed. “Just jotting down an idea while it’s fresh in my mind.

Zarah gave a long, exaggerated sigh on the other end of the phone line. “Just mention me in the acknowledgments, okay?”

“As always.”

“My tour group just arrived. Everything ready for tonight?”

Oh yes, the original reason for this phone call. “Would I miss our Christmas dinner? It’s been a tradition for—what?—ten, eleven years now? In fact, I need to get out of here and stop by Publix on the way home so that Sassy can—I mean, so I can finish up the desserts I’m bringing tonight.”

“Oh good—you’re not cooking.” Zarah’s voice echoed funny, and Caylor assumed she was in the stairwell headed down to the small history museum on the first floor of the Middle Tennessee Historic Preservation Commission’s building.

“Ha-ha. So funny. The one time I tried to make meat loaf, and y’all will never let me live it down.” She closed all of her programs and shut down the computer.

“More like a really big hockey puck. Gotta go. See you tonight around six.”

“I’ll be there.” They said good-bye, and Caylor tossed the phone into her bag, along with everything else she might need over the weekend.

The lines at the grocery store made an ordeal out of what should have been a relatively quick stop, but she finally made it home with all of the ingredients on Sassy’s list.

The sugary, cinnamony, spicy aroma of baking treats wrapped around Caylor as soon as she opened the kitchen door—though the loud music nearly forced her back out again.

Sassy danced around the kitchen singing along with Burl Ives on “A Holly Jolly Christmas.” Before Caylor could get her attention, the song ended and a random 1980s hair-band rock anthem started. Caylor heaved the grocery bags onto the table, reached for the portable speakers, and turned down the volume.

“You know, I think it might have been a mistake for me to get all of Papa’s vinyl transferred to digital and then give it to you on an MP3 player.”

Sassy sashayed over toward her, waving a wooden spoon, and took Caylor by the hand. She led her into the middle of the room and started dancing the jitterbug. “You always say that, and then you always end up having a good time anyway.”

Caylor gave in and danced with her grandmother for half a minute, then broke away. “There’s cold stuff that needs to be put in the fridge.”

After she put the groceries up—those that Sassy didn’t need immediately—Caylor returned to her car for her school stuff, which she took upstairs to her office. While there, she changed into jeans—a pair of 16s that were on the loose side of fitting, just so she’d be as comfortable as possible tonight—and a white turtleneck with reindeer all over it. She pulled out her pine tree-green cardigan to wear over it. The weather had been mild since the cold snap just before Thanksgiving, but the forecast called for a front to come in that afternoon and make the temperature drop near freezing by nightfall.

After a cup of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, Caylor put on an apron and did what she could to help Sassy—which pretty much meant trying to stay out of her way and hand her things as she needed them.

At five thirty, Sassy put the dome over the coconut cake, and Caylor covered the pan containing the Coca-Cola cake with foil. After setting the cake carriers in the back of her small SUV—in weather definitely colder than when she’d gotten home a few hours ago—Caylor took out the large tray of cookies Sassy had covered with plastic wrap, glad she had opted for the SUV instead of the smaller car when she’d decided to get a hybrid vehicle.

She ran upstairs and got her leather jacket to put on over her sweater. Back in the kitchen, she grabbed her keys and slung her purse strap over her shoulder. “Anything else you want to send?”

“Oh—wait, the fudge!” Sassy pulled the pan of chocolaty goodness out of the fridge, cut it into one-inch squares, and arranged it on a glass plate, which she then covered loosely with plastic wrap.

Caylor’s mouth watered. She loved Sassy’s fudge more than anything else, and her grandmother only made it a few times during the Christmas season each year. It was so tempting to conveniently “forget” this in her car and keep it all to herself. But she didn’t want to undo the good she’d done losing weight over the last few months. So she’d limit herself to one piece. Five, tops.

With the fudge safely out of reach in the back of the SUV, along with everything else, Caylor headed up to Zarah’s house. In the complete darkness that was six o’clock in the evening in mid-December in Nashville, most of the houses lining Granny White Pike had their Christmas lights turned on, putting Caylor even more in the mood for the annual dinner she, Zarah, and Flannery had started when they lived together in college. They each invited three people, making an even dozen, and the three of them prepared all the food.

Flannery’s car was already in the driveway when Caylor pulled up. She tapped the horn, and Zarah and Flannery came out to help carry everything in.

Just like Caylor, neither of her best friends could resist indulging in a piece of fudge as soon as Caylor uncovered it inside—and then laughed at the moaning that ensued.

Bobby, Zarah’s fiancé, arrived a few minutes later—having gone home to change clothes after spending the afternoon at the house helping Zarah set up. Caylor averted her eyes when they kissed in greeting. Even though it was no more than just a peck on the lips, a surge of jealousy flared, which she couldn’t control, and she didn’t want them to see it.

Zarah flew around, being obsessive-compulsive over making sure everything was arranged perfectly while Caylor and Flannery chatted about whom they’d invited. With Caylor, it was the usual suspects—one of the drama professors and two of the English professors, all single, all with no family in the area.

At ten to seven, the doorbell rang. Caylor crossed to answer it, still laughing over Bobby’s teasing of Zarah.

The laughter froze in her throat when she opened the door.

On the front porch, his curly dark hair mostly slicked back into a stubby ponytail, his face clean shaven, and looking handsomer than she remembered from just a few hours ago, stood Dylan Bradley.

G
o to a dinner party, she said. Meet some new people, she said. Start building a new life in Nashville, she said.

Had Perty known Caylor Evans would be here?

The only thing that made Dylan walk into the house was the cold air pressing behind him and the fact he was wearing no more than a leather jacket over his lightweight cashmere knit turtleneck.

“Dylan, I’m surprised to see you here.” Caylor Evans extended her right hand.

He shook it, ignoring the softness of her skin. He hadn’t imagined it earlier today—she was almost his height. “Dr. Evans.”

“Please, it’s Caylor. Come in out of the cold.” Caylor ushered him into the living room, closing the door behind him.

Now that he was here, Dylan was pretty sure this was the worst idea he’d had in a long time. But he’d been back in Nashville a week and, before today, hadn’t seen anybody but Perty and Gramps—and he’d been about to climb the walls being isolated from human contact like that.

He let Caylor usher him through the living room of the old, cottage-style house. While it wasn’t something he could see himself living in, he liked the mix of historical and contemporary in the furnishings and décor. He internalized a sigh. He could tell already this was not going to be his scene. But it had gotten him out of the house.

“Zarah, Dylan Bradley is here.” Caylor’s voice still held the same note of surprise as when she’d greeted him at the door moments before.