Callie’s heart constricted. “Low blow, Mom.”
“No. Just the truth.”
“You know what Dadwouldhave wanted?” Aria reached over the table to grab a basket of rolls. “A cat. And if you know of anyone looking to adopt a feline friend, I can introduce them to apurrfectcompanion.”
Both Callie and Eleanor obliged her with a laugh. Callie gave her sister a grateful look for changing the subject before she turned her attention to her food.
Though she was accustomed to her mother and Aria harping on her lack of a love life, she was usually able to brush off their remarks with a shrug and a laugh.
But today, for some reason—likely having to do with a tall, broad-shouldered man whose warm grip she still felt around her ankle—Callie couldn’t dismiss the idea quite so easily.
While she’d had a steady boyfriend in grad school, after starting her position at Skyline six years ago, she’d been so focused on her career track and research that she’d put any thoughts of a relationship on the back burner. She’d gone out on a few dates, but either the chemistry was off or the men just didn’t interest her enough that she wanted to pursue anything serious with them.
She wouldn’t admit this to her mother and sisters, but the truth was that for much of her life, Callie hadn’t wanted to settle. Though Greek myths often involved tragic love, when she was younger, she’d also enjoyed romance novels and their inevitable happy endings.
Combined with the model of her parents’ marriage, she’d dreamed ofa lotfrom a relationship. She’d wanted the kind of long-lasting, deep devotion her parents had shared, but also everything else—zinging excitement, intense passion, the kind of starry-eyed love that she’d only read about.
But now that she was pushing thirty-three, she was both too old and too practical to believe that kind of love even existed. Tingles of pleasure, hot shivers, butterflies?Pshaw.That silliness was reserved for storybooks. Not the life of a tenure-track Classics professor who structured her life around planners, calendars, and schedules.
Never mind that she’d experienced a chaos of pleasure, shivers, and butterflies in an elevator encounter that very afternoon. Never mind that her heart sped up at the mere thought of the man whose grin made his strikingly blue eyes crinkle at the corners.
Never mind the hollow ache inside at the knowledge that she would likely never see him again.