The Art of Romance (14 page)

Caylor’s gift from Zarah sat on her nightstand at home. An 1899 copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Cranford
. Not a first edition, but still a rare printing from one of Caylor’s favorite authors. And when Caylor had protested at the extravagance of such a gift, Zarah had quieted her by telling her she’d picked it up online for next to nothing and felt bad for not spending more than she had.

The small brass clock on the desk chimed seven times. Zarah closed the office door and double-checked her appearance in the mirror on the back of it. Why, oh, why had she chosen to wear a sleeveless dress? Could her arms look any pastier and flabbier? Maybe she could just keep her coat on. But no, even though the black-and-white houndstooth trench coat was very nice, it just didn’t give off the Christmas party vibe the way the slightly shimmering, dark-aqua fabric of the multitiered cocktail dress did.

Leaving her purse locked in her desk drawer, Caylor left her office, making sure the door was locked behind her. She turned toward the stairs—and her heart leaped into her throat, pounding as hard as it could.

Walking toward her, dressed in a charcoal suit that must have cost a fortune, with a purple-and-gold-patterned silk tie and a gray wool overcoat folded over his arm, was Dylan Bradley. Once again, the memory of where she knew him from was so close she could almost reach out and grab it.

“You cut your hair.” Great first line.

He blushed a little and self-consciously touched the buzzed hair at the back of his head, then ran his hand up to tousle the artfully messy, longer pieces on top. “Yeah. I decided it was time.”

“Oh good, Caylor. I hoped we might run into you on the way over.” Bridget joined them.

Dylan turned and helped Bridget on with her coat. Caylor shrugged into hers at the same time so he didn’t feel obligated to assist her as well. He put his on—and fought with the collar that caught on his suit coat’s lapel and turned under.

Bridget tried to help but couldn’t quite reach. Wearing low heels tonight, Caylor was still almost the same height as Dylan, so she fixed it for him. Just as Isabella would have done for Giovanni.

Her fingertips tingled as if near a live electric wire, and she snatched her hands back. Observe, but never interfere. Wasn’t that the anthropologists’ credo? She thought she remembered something like that from the cultural anthropology course she’d taken as an undergrad. If she were to have a creed as a writer, that would be it—at least when it came to the real world. When it came to her characters’ lives, however—

“Shall we go?” Bridget started down the stairs.

Dylan motioned for Caylor to go ahead of him. “Ladies first.”

“Ah, looks like I’m not the only one with this idea.” Dr. Fletcher joined Dylan at the top of the stairs. “Mr. Bradley, isn’t it?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Please, call me Barbara. No need to be so formal; I’m not the chair of
your
department.” She graced him with a rare smile and took hold of his arm for support going down the stairs.

Caylor met Bridget at the bottom of the stairs, and they walked ahead to the doors together. “I thought you invited him so
I
could flirt with him, not Dr. Fletcher,” Caylor whispered.

Bridget rolled her eyes. “He’ll be lucky if he gets that arm back tonight.”

Dr. Fletcher rapped the floor with her brass-tipped cane, startling both of them. Caylor was pretty sure she didn’t actually need it to walk but carried it around for imperious gestures like that. “Come, girls, why are we dallying?”

Caylor held the door open for them then fell in step beside Dr. Fletcher—with Bridget walking beside Dylan. The wind had died down, but the air still froze their breath into icy fog.

“I saw on the news that it snowed in Philadelphia this week.” Dr. Fletcher tapped her cane on the sidewalk as if setting a cadence. “I imagine you miss that, Dylan.”

“The first snow of the season is nice. But it gets old after a few months.” He seemed perfectly content escorting the older lady across campus toward the dining hall, as if this was exactly how he’d pictured the evening going.

Caylor longed for a pen and paper. Being near Dylan, observing how he treated the aristocratic Dr. Fletcher with aplomb and deference, sparked so many ideas for her story she feared they’d start leaking out her ears, and she’d lose most of them by the time she got back to her office in a couple of hours.

Inside the campus’s main hub, they bypassed the large, central staircase for the elevator beyond.

Dr. Fletcher didn’t let go of Dylan’s arm, even in the safety of the elevator. “I hear from Leonard Holtz that you’ll be joining his department as an adjunct next semester.”

“Yes ma’am. I’ll be teaching two classes.”

“Did he tell you he has a professor going on sabbatical next year? He’ll have a visiting professorship open. If you’re as good as what I’ve heard, that position should be yours.”

Caylor almost warned Dylan not to listen to any staffing predictions Dr. Fletcher made. With the exception of the positions she directly controlled, her prognostications were usually wrong. But she couldn’t figure out how to tell Dylan that without insulting Dr. Fletcher.

“What have you heard about me?” Dylan’s voice sounded choked—but it could have been a by-product of the noise of the opening elevator doors.

“Oh, I have my sources.” She touched his arm with the head of her cane. “Nothing bad, mind you. All good. All very good.”

After divesting themselves of their coats at the makeshift coat-check station outside the dining hall, they entered. The dulcet sounds of the school’s madrigal choir from what sounded like this year’s Christmas concert provided a soft backdrop to the sparse crowd huddled near the middle of the cavernous space.

“Will you excuse me? I see someone I need to speak to.” Bridget bustled off.

“And I must go speak to the academic dean about a memo she sent out late this afternoon. Dylan, lovely to see you again. Thank you for the escort.”

“My pleasure, Dr. Fletcher.”

There they went, leaving Caylor standing here feeling like a sixth grader at her first school dance.

“You…um…you look really nice tonight, Caylor.” Instead of the laid-back, confident man who’d escorted Dr. Fletcher over here, Dylan now seemed to have morphed into a twitchy adolescent.

Good. At least she wasn’t alone in feeling uncomfortable. “Thanks. You look pretty nice yourself. Let me guess—just something you had hanging around in your closet?”

He ran his palms down the front of the jacket. “Yeah, actually. It’s something I bought in Philadelphia.”

She nodded. “I’ll bet you had to go to a lot of gala events and show openings where you had to dress up like this.” She took a glass of iced tea off the tray a server from the school’s catering company brought around.

He shrugged and took a glass of tea as well. “Not really. As the artist, I wasn’t expected to show up in a suit.”

A flash of light took them both by surprise. Caylor blinked and then came to focus on a small, wiry guy with a huge camera anchored by a strap around his neck. “Hey, Dr. Evans. Picture for the faculty intranet newsletter. Get together and…and hold your glasses out like you’re toasting.”

“Yes, we love having
candid
pictures in the newsletter,” Caylor whispered to Dylan as they stepped closer until their shoulders touched. The smooth texture of the suiting material over the warm, solid arm underneath sent goose bumps rushing all over Caylor’s body.

A couple of blinding flashes later, the camera went down. “Dr. Putnam, I’d like to introduce Dylan Bradley, who’s going to be joining the art department as an adjunct in the spring.” She looked at Dylan. “Dr. Putnam teaches photography for both art and journalism.”

The two men shook hands and exchanged pleasantries; then Dr. Putnam picked up the camera from its resting place on his chest. “Well, I’d better get back to taking photos now that more folks are arriving. I have to say, you two make a stunning couple.”

Atomic heat suffused Dylan’s face at the photographer’s statement.

Beside him, Caylor laughed. “Everyone’s a matchmaker.”

“What’s that?” Dylan’s hand shook when he raised his glass to take a sip, so he lowered it again. Too many times in his life, females had gotten the wrong idea about him and his intentions toward them simply because of an offhanded comment like Dr. Putnam’s.

“Oh, I…It just seems like everyone in my life right now is trying to—” Caylor turned bright red. “Never mind.”

He had a feeling he knew exactly what she’d been about to say. Before his relationship with Rhonda became common knowledge, everyone in Philadelphia had tried to set him up at every available opportunity. How long would it be before people here started doing it, too?

“Caylor, I see you’ve met the art department’s new acquisition.” Dr. Holtz and his wife joined them. After extolling Dylan’s qualifications to his wife, Holtz introduced them. Caylor excused herself and crossed the room to join Dr. Fletcher and the other English professor who’d come to the dinner party last week. They were quickly surrounded by several other couples. Caylor, however, could never get lost in a crowd—not standing taller than every woman and most of the men in the growing group. That, and no matter what angle Dylan viewed her from or how she positioned her body, he could clearly imagine painting her just so.

He returned his attention to Dr. Holtz’s introductions of the rest of the art faculty. The other six professors seemed truly interested in everything Dylan was willing to tell them about teaching at WattsMaxwell and the art community in Philadelphia. He had a hard time talking, though; years of Rhonda’s interrupting and taking over the conversation had turned him into more of a listener than a talker at these kinds of events.

But being with other artists, other people who understood the overwhelming urge to create, the slight madness that took over at such times, made him feel happy—truly happy—for the first time since he’d returned to Nashville. No, it had been longer than that. He couldn’t remember being truly happy since before Rhonda had started taking over his life—telling him what to say, what to think, what to paint; separating him from his family; making him into what she wanted him to be.

Why had it taken him so long, taken him becoming unrecognizable to himself, to realize he didn’t want to be the person Rhonda wanted him to be? He just wanted to be himself. Dylan Bradley. No airs. No pretense. No pseudonyms.

He glanced back toward the center of the room—and caught Caylor looking his direction. She smiled, gave a little wave, and returned to her group’s conversation.

The talk around him moved from the just-ended semester to an upcoming exhibition at the Frist of impressionist masterworks, including some big-name artists such as Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renoir. The familiar topics started relaxing him, made him start feeling like he might fit in here.

The newly shorn hairs on the back of his neck prickled with the sensation someone was watching him—an all-too-familiar tingle. He scanned the room, half expecting to see Rhonda. Instead, over near one of the food tables, his gaze caught Caylor’s again. She smiled—a bit guiltily, he thought—and turned to talk to someone on her other side.

Was she checking up on him? Worried about whether he was behaving himself? Speaking only to the right people?

He mentally shook himself out of the flashback. Caylor was not Rhonda. She wasn’t here to control or discipline him.

No, but she did know Perty. She could have been tasked with keeping an eye on him just to make sure he was doing okay.

“What brought you to Nashville, Dylan?” Dr. Putnam held his plate of hors d’oeuvres over his camera, which was protected from crumbs by a paper napkin draped over it.

“My family is here.” When he’d practiced that answer at home, it seemed like the most logical—and least question-raising—response possible. But from the look of expectation on the photography professor’s face, he realized it wasn’t quite enough. “I’ve been away with little chance to visit with them since I graduated from high school. It was time to come home.”

That seemed to be enough for Dr. Putnam, who finished off his chicken satay crostini and wiped at his goatee with another napkin. “Being near family cannot be overvalued. Good for you.” He lifted the camera and snapped a photo of Dylan.

“Attention, please.” At the announcement over the sound system, the crowd noise died down and everyone turned toward the stage at the other end of the dining hall.

“Oh, here we go.” Dr. Putnam moved off through the crowd toward the front of the room.

Dr. Holtz took his place beside Dylan. “This is the best part of the evening.”

Mrs. Holtz looked around her husband. “Do you sing, Dylan?”

“Sing?”

Dr. Holtz chuckled. “This is a liberal and fine arts school in Nashville, Tennessee. Aside from having one of the largest vocal performance and choral programs in the city—after Vanderbilt and Belmont, of course—we have a lot of talented people on this faculty.”

“Happy holidays, everyone!”

Dylan joined the crowd in murmuring “Happy holidays” back to the man in the tuxedo at the microphone, the college’s president, he supposed, not having seen anyone else in a tux. He glanced around, not looking for a tall redhead—and to his surprise, he didn’t see the person he most definitely wasn’t looking for.