not getting any younger.”
“A minute ago, you were telling me you were fine. Fit as a fiddle, I believe you said.” He winked at her, and Keira smothered a laugh behind a napkin. “And you don’t look a day over sixty-five with those cheekbones.”
Orna was eighty, but he knew she guarded that information like the key to a bank vault. “Flattery will get you nowhere, Ronan Walsh. And yes, I have some more time in me, God willing. But I don’t have forever. Now, I know a young girl—”
“So do I.” Ronan grinned. “Several, in fact.”
Orna’s end-of-her-tether huff made him swallow a chuckle. Truth was, Ronan didn’t date much these days—he’d tried it once or twice, and it always ended up in tears. Never his. So he’d shifted his focus to his career, and his life had a lot less drama because of it. Now he was adding family back into the mix, and that would keep him plenty busy.
Romantic relationships weren’t worth the hassle.
“Don’t you want to be married, Ronan?” Orna asked, shaking her head.
“Not really,” he replied honestly.
“But—”
“You never married, and neither did Mom and Dad,” he pointed out with a shrug. “Anyway, Keira has the white-picket-fence thing totally covered. And honestly, I give her an A-plus at life. Gold stars all around.”
His sister tossed him a look that said she would hate him forever if he dragged her into it. Oops. Too late now.
“That means something, coming from a professor,” Ronan added with a mock serious face. “I couldn’t possibly live up to the standard she’s set.”
“You fight dirty,” Keira muttered.
“I only want you to have the good things in life that I never got myself,” Orna said.
“I’m focused on my work, Gram.” He reached across the table and clasped her hand. “And I love what I do. How many people can say they bounce out of bed in the morning because they love their job so much?”
“Life has to be more than work,” Orna replied wisely. “Would it be so bad to settle down and make a family?”
Like the one he grew up in, where neither one of his parents ever seemed to love their children or each other? Like the family who kicked Orna out of her home for getting pregnant, or the rich man who paid her to move across the world like a fly to be shooed?
Uh, no thanks.
Keira’s making it work.
An outlier. Every research study had those, and Ronan knew they weren’t to be trusted. The trend was to be trusted. The bulk of information telling the same story, not the little red dot flying free in the white space.
And the trend told him that relationships equaled pain and suffering.
Chapter Three
Fact: an elephant’s penis is so big it can rest on it like an additional leg.
Audrey rocked back and forth on her heels outside the classroom for her first lesson of the semester. Of course the subject she’d been most excited about was Brain-Changing Positivity with none other than Professor Walsh, former professor at Cambridge University in England and graduate of Harvard. First name, Ronan. Age, thirty-four. Height and weight…dreamy.
A crush on your professor? Really? Well, isn’t that more cliché than the elbow patches on his blazer.
She bit the inside of her cheek. Luckily, her grades didn’t matter. Unlike most of the students at Harrison Beech College, Audrey wasn’t getting a degree. Hell, she wasn’t even like the majority of mature age students in her night classes, who were doing it for career advancement.
She was learning for fun with no end goal in mind.
Most people would shake their heads at that, but she’d always loved learning. Before her mother died, when Audrey’s dreams were still intact, she used to fantasize about growing up and strolling through a leafy college campus, her arms filled with heavy books containing the secrets of the universe. These days, she satisfied that need with night classes on everything from depictions of women in film, to the politics of the British monarchy, to American postmodern literature, to philosophy and social media. Anything to keep her neurons firing.
Maybe taking classes for nothing beside the joy of learning was strange. But she was okay with that.
Which was all to say, her concerns about showing up tonight had nothing to do with grades and everything to do with total and utter personal embarrassment.
Sucking in a breath, she pushed down on the handle to the classroom. It was empty because she was a good ten minutes early. On purpose. At the front