Dylan checked his watch and downed the last gulp of coffee. He’d been ready to go for almost twenty minutes, but until he heard—
Under his feet, the automatic garage door opener whirred. He popped a piece of sugar-free peppermint gum in his mouth, shrugged into his sport coat, and loped down the stairs to the garage.
When he’d informed Perty yesterday he’d decided to go to church with them—this week, anyway—she’d suggested he ride with them and visit the singles class while he was at it. If he hadn’t heard Zarah, Bobby, and Flannery talking about the class Friday evening, he might have balked. But at least with them there, it might not be so awkward.
Gramps nodded over the roof of his Lexus—Dylan wasn’t sure if it was meant to convey a greeting or approval. Could have been both.
Whatever. If he looked up duress on Wikipedia, there would be a video of this situation.
“Here.” Perty handed Dylan a large, gray, leather-bound Bible. “I wasn’t sure if you had—if you’d unpacked yours yet or not.”
Of course. Having grown up in church, he should have remembered that only heathens and backsliders went to church without a Bible big enough to choke Godzilla. He climbed into the backseat and put the book down beside him as he buckled up.
Perty surprised him by going around to Gramps’s side of the car and climbing into the backseat as well.
“We’re picking up Sassy Evans on the way,” she explained at his questioning look.
After several long minutes of nothing but soft classical music filling the car, Perty turned to look at him. “When did Dr. Holtz think he might be able to let you know about teaching next semester?”
Dylan shrugged. “He wasn’t sure. Said he needed to do some shuffling. But he probably has two classes for me.”
Apparently able to see that was all she was going to get out of him, Perty turned forward again. “I hope it works out for you.”
Another pause.
“Your father called this morning to let us know they’re back from Chicago early and will join us for lunch after church. Pax is meeting us at the restaurant, too.”
Great. Dylan knew he should have driven himself this morning. He’d hoped to put off the inevitable confrontation with his parents longer—a lot longer—like after he had a full-time job somewhere else and was repacking to move far, far away.
“Did Spencer come back with them?”
“No—his finals are this week, but I don’t think he’s planning to come home as soon as they end. He mentioned a possible ski trip to Utah with some friends in his last e-mail to me. It will be the last chance he gets to relax. I’ve read the final two quarters of his program are merciless in their intensity.”
Dylan turned his head away from this grandmother and rolled his eyes. Paxton was getting a PhD in physics from Vanderbilt University, Spencer, an MBA from Northwestern. And the whiz kid of the family, twenty-one-year-old Tyler, had just started his PhD work in math at MIT.
One of the few things Dylan would miss about living in Philadelphia was getting together with Tyler for weekends in New Haven, Connecticut, about halfway between their homes. Tyler seemed to be the only one in the family who didn’t look down on Dylan for not pursuing a “real” major in his education.
Oh, and he’d miss the cheesesteak sandwiches from Pat’s King of Steaks in South Philly.
“You didn’t tell us anything about Zarah Mitchell’s dinner Friday night.” Perty must have gotten tired of the silence again. “How was it?”
He had to give her an A+ for her effort at car banter, so how could he not reciprocate? “It was fine. I met one of the drama professors from JRU, who wants my help designing sets for their spring play. And I met an editor from Lindsley House Publishing who might want me to do some freelance design work for them.”
“That would be lovely—the freelance work—if it would come through. You’ll want to be sure to follow up on that this week.”
Pat me on the head and give me a lollipop while you’re at it, Perty. Sure, maybe he hadn’t shown the highest level of maturity when he’d chosen to move in with Rhonda six months ago—knowing that having any kind of romantic relationship with her, as the chair of his department, was against institute policy, even though everyone knew about it and turned a blind eye at the time—but he was twenty-eight years old for crying out loud. Why couldn’t anyone in his family treat him like an adult?
Gramps turned onto a tree-lined street and then drove about half a block and pulled into a long driveway leading to a quaint white house. A white Ford Escape hybrid sat in the carport beside a much smaller vehicle covered with a gray car cover.
Sassy Evans. Caylor Evans’s grandmother.
No sooner did her name cross his mind than Caylor herself walked out onto the covered porch that connected the house to the carport.
Dylan averted his eyes, but not before the image of the statuesque redhead dressed in a vibrant purple sweater, gray skirt, and high-heeled, tall black boots was seared onto his retinas. He might have to break down and draw her just to stop having such a strong visceral reaction to her every time he saw her.
A slender, white-haired lady—who looked petite compared to Caylor’s over-six-foot stature, especially with the extra height from the heels—came out behind her and locked the door.
Dylan climbed out and opened the front passenger door for her—and realized Gramps was halfway around the car to do the same thing. Gramps smiled at him and then met Sassy just under the overhang of the carport roof.
Though he tried not to, Dylan met Caylor’s turquoise gaze. He inclined his head. With one arm wrapped around what looked like a notebook and a Bible—not nearly as large as the one Perty had given him—she raised her free hand and wiggled her fingers in greeting, making her keys jangle. Instead of heading toward Gramps’s car, Caylor went around to her SUV and climbed in. So, she wasn’t riding with them, too?
“Sassy Evans, you remember our oldest grandson, Dylan.” Gramps, who’d held Sassy by the elbow the few steps from the carport to the car, handed her over to Dylan to offer her assistance getting in.
Sassy’s blue eyes twinkled, and she smiled a huge, Polident-commercial-worthy smile at him. “Of course I do. It’s very nice to see you again.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Evans. It’s nice to see you again, too.” He waited until she was settled in the seat, fastening her seat belt, before closing the door and getting back into the warmth the car offered.
After Dylan fastened himself back in, Perty reached over and patted his knee. When he looked over at her, she winked at him—and in that expression, all of the memories of Perty encouraging him to draw and paint, the kits of pastels and oils she’d given him, the professors she found to teach him technique, came rushing back in. He needed to give her the benefit of the doubt. Allow for the fact that this situation was probably as awkward for them as it was for him.
Mrs. Evans turned halfway around so she could look over the seat at Perty. They started discussing their senior adult group’s upcoming Christmas party.
Dylan propped his elbow on the door and watched the expensive houses along Granny White Pike roll by. He wanted to know why Caylor hadn’t driven her grandmother to church this morning, but he didn’t want to show undue interest in her. No, it was bad enough his own brain wouldn’t leave him alone about her. He didn’t need to give their grandmothers any reason to suspect he’d even noticed her turquoise eyes with the slight uptilt at the outside corners, her patrician nose, her full lips, her seductively asymmetrical smile.
Gramps pulled the luxury sedan into the small parking lot behind the contemporary, redbrick church. Dylan unfolded himself from the backseat and stretched.
“Do you want me to help you find the Sunday school room?” Perty cradled her Bible in the crook of her elbow.
Dylan ducked his head back into the car to retrieve the one she’d given him. “I think I can manage, thanks.” He slid the thick Bible under his arm. “I did grow up in this church, remember?”
“I know, I just—” But whatever Perty “just” remained unsaid. “Have a good time. We’ll see you afterward.”
Dylan raised his hand in farewell and headed for the main entrance.
“Do you think he’ll…”
The woman in front of Dylan sneezed, drowning out the rest of Gramps’s question. According to the rest of the family, the only thing Dylan had ever done right was to get a full-time professorship at a college with a prestigious reputation—even though it was just an art school. Would there ever be a time when he didn’t have to worry about what everyone else in the family was saying about him behind his back?
Trying to put that lifelong insecurity out of his mind, he walked up to the hotel-check-in-style welcome center, part of the expansion building project that had nearly split the church apart his senior year of high school—which had started him on the road to disillusionment with organized religion.
“Welcome to Acklen Avenue Fellowship,” a perky, middle-aged woman greeted. “Looking for a Sunday school class?”
He couldn’t remember if they’d called it by a specific name Friday night. “Yes—the class for single adults.”
She picked up a thin white binder. “Hmm…singles? Let’s see…Oh—here we are. How old are you?”
Yeah, he definitely didn’t want to get stuck with the thirty-and forty something Left Behinds. “Twenty-eight.”
“Okay, you’re looking for the Young Professionals class. Take the stairs here up to the second floor and go to the second room on the right—number 226.”
“Thanks.” Well, they hadn’t called it by that name, but it had to be the right one. He jogged up the stairs and found the room easily—surprised by the large size of the space. In the middle were chairs set up in rows, lecture style, and on either end of the room were six circles of eight or ten chairs.
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.