The Art of Romance (25 page)

She followed Sassy across the courtyard to the back door, carefully watching her grandmother cross the slick, wet concrete. But she needn’t have worried. Sassy, her supply box wrapped securely in her arms, marched right to the door and managed to get it open before Caylor could get it for her.

Sassy went directly to one of the large rooms behind the sanctuary—larger, in fact, than any of the classrooms at Robertson except for the theater-style lecture halls.

Caylor stopped just inside the door and stared. Before she’d made the decision to come and work here, she should have asked Sassy what kind of class this was. At the front of the room stood two rows of low wooden easels, each with a canvas on it. Three plastic banquet tables covered with newspaper divided the easels into groups of four. And padded metal folding chairs sat poised at each easel, ready for a student.

Sassy went to an easel in the front row, across one of the tables from where Perty was setting out tubes of paint and paintbrushes. Sassy started doing the same.

Caylor dropped her computer bag onto one of the chairs in the rows that faced the lectern to her right on this end of the large room.

Then she saw him. Dressed in a dark T-shirt and jeans, Dylan Bradley stood at the heavy-duty easel in front of all the others, arranging his own supplies on a newspaper-covered side table. He looked up, and their eyes met.

Her scalp tingled, and the sensation worked its way all the way down to her hot-pink toenails. In the past twenty-four hours, the spectacle of Sage throwing her arms around Dylan’s neck and kissing him on the cheek had replayed in Caylor’s head every time she’d allowed herself to think about it—like during the four-hour-long lunch meeting this afternoon.

And every time it played back, she couldn’t help noticing that he’d stiffened and looked extremely uncomfortable when it happened. She couldn’t blame him for Sage’s actions.

Dylan left his easel and, after greeting Sassy, moved toward Caylor.

She wanted to run, wanted to get away from him, from the guilt and embarrassment of having pictured him—well, his likeness anyway—years ago when she was writing books she never should have written. Yet like a June bug to a porch light, she couldn’t resist the draw she felt toward him.

“I didn’t know you were coming.” He extended his hand.

Though she knew it was a
really
bad idea, she placed her hand in his. Long, soft, strong fingers wrapped around her hand, and her breath caught in her chest. “I just brought Sassy up since Sage wasn’t available to drive her.”

Dylan released his grip, and their hands slid across each other’s in a slow, agonizing separation.

What was wrong with her?

She really needed to write all this down.

“How were auditions this afternoon?” Dylan tucked his hands into his jeans, pockets and rocked from heel to toe on his bare feet.

Bare feet? It was forty degrees outside.

He wiggled his toes. “Yeah…for some reason, I feel more creative without shoes on.”

“I was in a meeting that lasted all afternoon and didn’t make it to the audition session.” Caylor blushed, embarrassed he’d caught her looking at his feet.

What a great character quirk for Giovanni. How did the Renaissance-era Venetians feel about bare feet? She needed to write that question down and see if she could find any research resources on that.

Dylan excused himself when two other ladies walked into the room. Caylor sat and pulled out her laptop, then turned her chair at an angle, giving herself a better view of the other end of the room.

At 5:35, those two ladies were the only other students besides Sassy and Mrs. Bradley who’d come. Sassy turned and caught her eye and motioned Caylor forward.

Caylor shook her head.

Sassy put on her mean face.

Caylor sighed, closed the computer, and wove through the rows of chairs to sit at the easel to Sassy’s right.

The disappointment Dylan had been trying to hide eased when Caylor came forward and took a position at one of the student easels Perty had found in a storage closet in the children’s wing of the church.

Caylor took the handful of brushes and a palette her grandmother handed to her. She laid them out on the table to her right.

As soon as she looked up, Dylan bent to adjust the blue-and-white-striped vase holding a nosegay of daisies that sat on a small table between him and his students. He’d been uncertain about trying to teach a beginning painting class to people who’d never picked up a paintbrush before—all his experience with “beginners” was with students who’d had to show a certain level of existing proficiency to be able to get into art school. But now, with Caylor looking on in expectation, a sense of determination overwhelmed him—to make this the most engaging and fun class he could to make sure she’d come back.

He started talking about drawing and painting and the different types of supplies and materials they could use—though Perty had purchased a classroom-size kit of scholastic-grade acrylics for everyone to work with—and about his own background with painting. He showed two small canvases he’d done for his MFA gallery show, handpicked by Perty, but told the ladies looking up at him that they shouldn’t expect to have similar results.

“Acrylics dry quickly and don’t rehydrate once they are dry, so let’s go ahead and learn how to do a background wash. Pick a color you want for the background of your still life….” He walked them through the steps of thinning the paint and using one of the large brushes to cover their small, square canvases with the color—showing them how they could add depth by gradating the darkness of the color.

Most of the ladies chose muted shades for the background—white with touches of brown or yellow mixed in for ivories and creams—but when Caylor got up and went to Perty’s table to pick a color, she squeezed a glop of Brilliant Orange and a little bit of Chrome Yellow onto her palette.

Once they’d all covered the square canvases with the background wash—Caylor’s looking like the surface of the sun in its brightness compared to that of the others—he talked a little bit about light and shadow, perspective, and shapes and then let them ask questions.

“Where can we see the rest of your paintings?” One of the ladies—Edith, he was pretty sure—asked.

“I don’t have any exhibited anywhere yet, but I’ll be having a show soon—a show and charity auction. I’m certain my grandmother will fill you in on the details as soon as they’re finalized.” He smiled at his grandmother.

“Why do you paint barefoot?”

When he turned to look at her, Caylor grinned shamelessly at him.

Heat chased goose bumps up his spine. “Probably because when I started painting as a kid, I had to do it outside, and I liked the feel of the grass under my feet. Plus, if the paint drips, it keeps me from ruining my shoes.”

He reached over and touched Perty’s canvas. Dry. “Now that your backgrounds are dry, you can sketch the vase and flowers onto your canvas in pencil and then start painting it.”

He returned to his easel and started on his sketch. Out of the corner of his left eye, he watched Caylor as she sat for a while and contemplated her canvas, a distant look in her eyes.

A slow smile spread across her face. She jumped from her seat and rushed to the back of the room where she pulled a notepad out of her computer case and started scribbling. She filled one page of the legal pad and turned to the next—and the more she wrote, the broader her smile grew.

“She does that when she gets a story idea,” Mrs. Evans said in a low tone.

Dylan snapped his attention back to the ladies in front of him. “What? Oh yes. I can get that way too when an idea for a piece strikes.” He finished the rough outline of his vase and started on the flowers.

Satisfaction gleaming from her eyes, Caylor returned to her easel a few minutes later.

“Good story idea?” Sassy leaned over and whispered.

“I just figured out the main conflict for the hero and how to resolve the story.” Caylor sighed. “Of course, I won’t have time to work on it until this weekend, but I should be able to get the synopsis finished and then get the proposal off to my agent.”

“Good for you.” Sassy returned to her painting.

Caylor sat and stared at her canvas. And the longer she sat there, the more disconcerted she appeared.

Dylan left his easel and went down to sit across the table from her. “What’s wrong?”

Caylor twisted her mouth to the side. “I’m no artist. When I doodle, I draw lines and boxes. There’s no way I’m going to be able to draw—much less paint—anything that bears any resemblance to that flower arrangement.”

“Art doesn’t always have to be about making an exact replica of something. Art is about translating what something makes you feel on the inside. When you look at that vase, at those flowers, how do they make you feel?” He looked at her canvas. “Why did you choose such a bright color for your background?”

She shrugged. “I liked the way Brilliant Orange and Chrome Yellow looked in the tubes. They’re happy colors.”

“So do something with your painting that makes you happy. How can you take the vase and flowers in front of you and make something happy on your canvas?” He should probably be giving credit to his counselor here. He’d only had one session with him so far, and Dylan’s biggest breakthrough had come when he’d admitted the art he’d been doing the last four years hadn’t made him happy. “So what if it doesn’t come out perfect? If it makes you happy, that’s what matters.”

“What makes me happy, huh?” She looked at him, turned bright red, and looked back at the flowers. “Okay. I’ll come up with something.”

Back at his own easel, Dylan painted the blue-and-white vase and mixed flowers with mechanical ease. In his mind, however, he composed a portrait of Caylor Evans—and no matter how authentic to the Renaissance era he tried to make the gown he pictured her in, he could not, for the life of him, picture her with long hair.

A few minutes later, Caylor started drawing on the canvas, her hand movements showing that her image was loose and free-flowing.

She got up and went to the table between their grandmothers and picked up several tubes of the brightest-colored paint, which she took back to her table.

He wished he had the freedom she did to drop this project and give in to the creative impulse pushing at the back of his mind. He wanted—no
needed
—to draw her, to paint her, to explore the minute details of her face, of her anatomy.

Now he was the one turning bright red, he was certain. He’d tried not to be prudish when it had come to the figure drawing studios in undergrad and graduate school in which they’d had to do studies from live, nude models. As he’d learned as a child, God had designed the human form, and it wasn’t until sin entered the world that there was any shame attached to it. He understood the need for artists to have a good knowledge and understanding of human anatomy. Arms and legs could bend only certain ways, and needed to be in a certain proportion to the rest of the body. Learning those lessons had greatly helped him when creating the covers for the Melanie Mason novels, since he hadn’t had live models to draw from—well, except his own reflection in the mirror, and even then, he’d changed his own proportions and features slightly.

He had to stop thinking about Caylor, and the only way he could do it would be to go ahead and paint her portrait. Once he did that, he could stop thinking about her constantly. Stop dreaming about her. Stop wondering if she might ever be able to fall for someone who’d made the mistakes he’d made. Stop praying that God would give him a future he knew he didn’t deserve.

C
aylor hit the button on the wireless mouse and looked up at the screen behind her. “Your first assignment—for next Wednesday, since we don’t have classes Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day—is to read
chapter 1
in your theory of criticism book and ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor, which you can find in the class folder on the school intranet. The password to access the folder is on your syllabus.”

“Dr. Evans, do we have to turn in a Monday Paper next week?”