The Art of Romance (7 page)

A few people milled around a table with pump-top coffee dispensers and boxes of doughnuts. A big guy—bigger even than Bobby Patterson—moved toward him, hand outstretched.

“Hey, I’m Patrick Macdonald.”

Dylan shook the meaty hand. Though Patrick wasn’t but an inch or so taller, he must have weighed at least seventy-five to a hundred pounds more. “Dylan Bradley.”

“Welcome, Dylan. This is my fiancée, Stacy Simms.”

She was the complete opposite of Patrick—thin and short with dark hair to his bulky, tall, and blond. But she had a handshake almost as firm as his. When he returned his hand to his side, Dylan flexed it to make sure all his bones were still whole and in the right places.

Patrick ushered him over to the registration table, where Dylan filled out a visitor information slip, and then over to the food and beverage table.

“Are you new to the area, Dylan?” Patrick motioned toward the coffee and doughnuts.

Dylan raised his hand to decline. “I grew up here. In this church, actually.”

Patrick eyed him. “Really? So did I, and I don’t remember you. When did you graduate from high school?”

“Ten years ago.”

“Ah.” Patrick nodded in understanding. “You probably came up into the youth group the year I graduated. Where’d you go to school?”

“High school? Hume-Fogg.”

Patrick let out a low whistle. “Ah, so you’re one of those genius types. No wonder our paths never crossed.”

No, his brothers were the geniuses. He was the one who’d struggled with the coursework at the academic magnet school. If it hadn’t had the best art program in town, he wouldn’t have worked so hard to keep his grades up and stay in.

Patrick continued without waiting for Dylan to respond. “I’m just a football mutt from Hillsboro High. So what do you do now that brought you back to Nashville?” Patrick fixed himself a cup of coffee.

Actually, the question people should be asking was what had he
done
that brought him back to Nashville. “I’m…” What was he, really?

Well, Dr. Holtz had all but promised him at least two courses. “I’m an art professor. I’ll be teaching at James Robertson this spring.”

Patrick’s blond eyebrows shot up. “Robertson? I know someone who teaches there part-time. Name’s Zarah Mitchell.”

“I met her Friday evening at a dinner party—and her fiancé and some other friends of theirs who go here.” Dylan looked around the room to see if they’d arrived yet.

“That’s great—so they told you about this class?”

Dylan moved out of the way of a guy and gal—obviously a couple—trying to get to the coffee. “They mentioned something about the class’s Christmas party.”

An odd expression came over Patrick’s face. “About…did they actually say it was Young Professionals?”

“Not that I remember, no.”

“I see.” Patrick finished off the coffee and tossed the Styrofoam cup in the small trash can under the table, then stepped out of the way of another surge of people—couples, mostly, it seemed, coming for breakfast.

Dylan moved with him, continuing to scan the crowd for anyone he’d met Friday night. There were far more paired-off couples in the room than what he expected for a singles class—and if not mistaken, he was pretty sure all of them were wearing what looked like wedding rings.

“Zarah and Bobby are in the singles class.”

Frowning, Dylan turned to look at Patrick. “Right.”

“This is Young Professionals—our class is for twentysomething singles and marrieds.”

“It’s…but…so, what’s the singles class?” This was another reason he’d gotten frustrated with organized religion—all their confusing divisions and terminology.

“Singles is for folks over the age of about thirty who, well, aren’t married.”

So if one was unmarried and under thirty, he was considered a young professional, and if he was over thirty, he was a single? Wait—that meant Zarah and Bobby and Flannery…and Caylor Evans…might be older than he originally thought. He’d figured they were all right around his age.

When he’d walked out of Rhonda’s apartment, her threats of revealing his most closely held secret to the school trustees echoing behind him, he’d sworn he’d never get mixed up with an older woman again.

Just one more reason for him to avoid Caylor Evans.

“So do you have a boyfriend yet?”

Caylor smiled down at the little old lady—well, she was little, and she looked old, though Caylor guessed she wasn’t quite as old as Sassy. “No Mrs. Morton. Not since last Sunday.”

“Well, I’m praying—and I’ve got all the other girls in the class praying—that a nice young man will come along soon. You’ve got too pretty a face to stay a spinster your whole life.” Mrs. Morton patted Caylor’s arm and shuffled off toward the sanctuary.

Caylor continued on to the choir room, shaking her head. She loved attending the smallish church, but that was one of the drawbacks: Everyone knew about and meddled in—all in the guise of praying for each other—everyone else’s business. And ever since an online article about a church where the senior adult women’s praying for the single adults in their church had led to a 1,000 percent increase in marriages, or something to that effect, had gone viral among the senior women’s group, and since Caylor was one of the few unmarried adults who attended regularly, they seemed to have taken her on as their special project.

No one else had arrived yet. Caylor stuck her Bible in the cubby that held her choir music and carried her ensemble notebook to the piano. Grading theses and writing finals had made it nearly impossible for her to get in the practice she’d wanted on this morning’s special music.

Finding the notes on the piano whenever she wasn’t confident she was hitting them correctly while practicing it a cappella, Caylor was on her second run-through of the piece before anyone else in the eight-person ensemble arrived.

Soon, the other seven women were there. Dr. Bridger, who taught German at JRU, reviewed the pronunciations with them of the opening lines of the chorale, and by the time they were all saying their vowels and consonants the same way, the organist arrived.

They moved from the choir room to the sanctuary to practice with the microphones. Caylor loved the deep, second-alto harmony of the Advent-themed song with a slight baroque lilt, especially with the organist accompanying them on the electric keyboard set to a harpsichord sound.

After the first run-through, the sound guy—one of the other few unmarried adults in the church—came forward and removed the microphone near Caylor.

Embarrassment flamed her cheeks, even though she should be accustomed by now to taking grief from Gary for the way her voice carried in the small auditorium. She usually took teasing quite well, but the idea that the senior ladies had been trying for quite some time to get him to ask her out made her uncomfortable around him—especially since she knew that the fact she towered over his less-than-average height made him uncomfortable around her.

He set the mic stand in front of the women singing first alto, so that each one had an individual microphone, which meant that, even though Caylor was alone in singing her part, she was still drowning out multiple voices on other parts. He then came over, took her by the elbows, and made her take a couple of steps to her right—away from the rest of the ensemble. The other women laughed, and Caylor joined in, even though she didn’t really feel like it.

“Why don’t I just go stand up in the balcony?” she asked, making an effort at keeping her tone light.

“Hey—that could work.” Gary looked over his shoulder at the balcony that wrapped, U-shaped, around three sides of the sanctuary. “But it might look funny.”

Again, Caylor tried laughing with everyone else as Gary went back to the soundboard at the back of the room and the music started again.

She always tried to ease off. She really did. But she couldn’t help that the others in the ensemble held back and she’d been trained by her drama and singing professors in college to project her voice so well, she did it without thinking about it.

Once they’d had a few complete run-throughs and a couple of shorter sound tests, they dispersed—most to slip into their Sunday school classes for a few minutes. Caylor returned to the choir room and pulled the stack of essays out of her purse and sat down to get some grading done.

After several silent minutes, the sound of a clearing throat startled her. Her pen left a purple streak across the well-written paragraph of the comparative literature essay.

Gary stood in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt you.”

Caylor clicked her pen closed so she wouldn’t mar any more of the student’s paper. “It’s okay. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to say…I hope I didn’t offend you out there earlier. I realized that I probably could have done that differently to keep from making it look like an insult to you.” He ran his hand over his thinning dark hair.

“Probably.” No sense in pretending that his teasing hadn’t been a little over the top. “But it’s done with now. Let’s put it behind us.”

“Agreed.” He shoved his fists into his jeans’ pockets. “Mrs. Morton asked me about you this morning.”

Her cheeks started burning again. “Oh really?”

“Yeah. Asked me if I’d ever thought about asking you out.” He rocked from heel to toe to heel. “Caylor, I just want you to know that I think you’re a great girl—woman—but there’s nothing…I mean, I’m not—”

“We’re friends. That’s not going to change.” Much as she liked Gary and respected his ability to single-handedly run the church’s complex audio system, she couldn’t picture herself out on a date with him, much less developing romantic feelings for him. “Mrs. Morton and the senior ladies are in a phase right now.”

She explained to him about the article they’d all e-mailed around to each other. “I’m their special project. I wouldn’t be surprised if they show up at Robertson when school starts again in January and go from door to door meeting the faculty so they can determine who all the unmarried men there are that they can try to set me up with.”

Of course, if they happened to run across someone tall with shaggy, curly dark hair, a three-day growth of stubble, and expressive brown eyes teaching an art class, Caylor might not be so resistant to their meddlesome ways.

He’d looked quite nice in the glimpse she’d gotten of him this morning in a chunky, ivory cable-knit sweater with dark-brown pants and the buttery-soft, well-worn, brown, motorcycle-style leather jacket he’d worn to the dinner party Friday night. It had taken all her resolve that night to lay that jacket across the guest bed immediately and not stand there running her hands over the supple, smooth leather.

Gary excused himself—but Caylor hardly noticed. A new image of Dylan Bradley had just popped into her mind, not in any way she’d seen him so far, but in the doublet, breeches, tall boots, cloak, and broad-brimmed, feather-adorned cavalier hat stereotypical of the Renaissance era.

She stuffed the essays back into her purse and took out the small, decorative journal she always carried and started writing. Yes…Dylan Bradley might just be perfect as her new muse.

T
his church was definitely not for him. Aside from the memories that came flooding back at each familiar area of the church Dylan entered, each friend of his parents or grandparents he encountered, each reminder of why he’d grown to dislike the seemingly superficial way in which everyone here talked to each other and “worshipped,” he wasn’t crazy about the showy performance put on by the “worship leader” and the “praise team.” He didn’t know a single song that was sung. And the guest speaker, with his over-the-ear, across-the-cheek headset microphone and the three large screens behind him running a slide show of the major points of his inspirational chat—for Dylan couldn’t really consider it a sermon—seemed more like a motivational speaker on an infomercial hawking his latest product. (“I wrote about this very thing in my book….”)

From the crossed arms and frowns on the faces of many of the older people in the congregation, Dylan inferred he wasn’t the only one unimpressed by the service. With the ginormous choir loft up behind the traditional-style pulpit conspicuously empty, he had to wonder if everything about this morning was a little bit off.