Baby Lessons

exactly put each of the applesauce recipes to the test, but there hadn’t been time to do so. The electricity in her apartment above the barn was still nonexistent. Thank you, rural utilities services. She’d been forced to sleep in Aunt Alice’s guest room in the farmhouse the past two nights, and while her aunt genuinely didn’t seem to mind, Madison hated to impose. She was also having a difficult time growing accustomed to her bedmate—Alice’s rescue dog, Toby.
Madison generally loved dogs. If not for the strict no-pets policy in her apartment building in Manhattan, she’d have adopted one herself by now. Last year Vogue hired a delivery service to bring ten adoptable puppies to the office for Take Your Dog to Work Day, and she’d very nearly tucked a sweet long-haired Chihuahua mix into her handbag and walked away with it, Elle Woods style.
Toby wasn’t exactly an ordinary dog, though. He was Chinese crested—delicate, fine boned and, other than some wisps of fur on his ankles and the tiptop of his head, completely hairless. Madison hadn’t gotten Alice to admit it yet, but she was fairly certain her aunt had adopted a hairless dog just so she could knit him sweaters. Toby’s doggy closet runneth over. Madison was legitimately envious of his wardrobe. The poor naked thing was a bona fide fashionista, which may have been why he’d formed such a strong bond with her. It was as if he’d sensed a kindred spirit in Madison. When he wasn’t at Main Street Yarn with Aunt Alice, he was curled into a ball in Madison’s lap or hogging her pillow at bedtime. Honestly, the pup was a sweetheart, but he had an odd habit of burrowing beneath the bedsheets during the night. One of these days Madison would get used to her feet coming into contact with bare dog skin in the wee hours of the morning. She just hoped it happened sooner rather than later.
But Madison had bigger problems than hairless dogs and her dead flat iron at the moment. Mr. Grant didn’t seem to mind Fired Up’s latest letter much. It was short, sweet—sort of...at least compared to the previous letters—and to the point. But it bothered Madison more than any of the others had, probably because she’d actually believed in her applesauce column. It had seemed like just the sort of solid, hands-on advice that her readers wanted.
Correction: reader. Singular.
Plus, the quotation marks Fired Up had put around the word expert had really gotten to her. It was basically a troll’s way of making those annoying air quotes that everybody hated. The fact that she wasn’t actually an expert was beside the point. Fired Up didn’t know a thing about her background. He didn’t even know her real name.
She wasn’t going to sit back and take the criticism this time. Enough was enough. Her job was at stake—not just her lame position at the Lovestruck Bee, but whatever glittering future awaited her back in Manhattan. Getting fired would put a huge dark stain on her résumé and make finding a new job in fashion journalism all the more impossible. She couldn’t risk it. She was going to have to put that troll in his place, once and for all. All she needed was a bushelful of apples, a little quality time in Aunt Alice’s kitchen and her laptop.
Lucky for her, Lovestruck was flush with apples this time of year. The town was dotted with orchards, and since late summer was peak tourist season, farmers made daily deliveries to the market. Apples of all varieties—Gala, Quinti, Ida Red, Jersey Mac—spilled over the edges of bushel baskets piled in the center of the produce section.
Madison brought her grocery cart to an angry halt and reached for a rich, red piece of fruit, still warm from the summer sun. But just as her fingertips came into contact with the apple’s shiny peel, someone plucked it out of her grasp.
Vermont still hated her, apparently, as did most of its inhabitants.
“Um, excuse me,” she said to the apple thief’s broad back.
Madison wasn’t usually quite so confrontational. Not even in New York, where she’d once witnessed two grown men get into an actual brawl in the checkout line at CVS. But she’d had it with this place. She really had.
The man turned around, and she squared her shoulders, fully prepared to demand an apology. But he was awfully tall—tall enough that she had to tip her head back to get a good look at him, and as she did so, her gaze snagged on three red letters situated just above the pocket on his dark blue T-shirt.
LFD.
They seemed vaguely familiar, but Madison couldn’t place them right away, probably because she was still in denial that she resided in L now instead of NY. A nagging sense of foreboding swept over her. Then the pectoral muscle beneath the letters flexed, and her mouth grew dry.
“Oh,” the bearer of the rock-hard physique said.
He sounded less than pleased, which managed to snap Madison back to her senses long enough to meet his familiar steely gaze. Only one man in all of Vermont could possibly have eyes that blue paired with such a deep frown.
LFD.
Lovestruck Fire Department.
Of course.
“It’s you,” they both said simultaneously.
His gaze homed in on her mass of unruly curls, and the corner of his lips twitched. Madison had the sudden urge to grab an apple from her cart and conk him over his annoyingly handsome head.
She couldn’t, obviously, because her cart was empty.
She lifted her chin. “You took my apple.”
His gaze narrowed. “Pardon?”
“You stole it right out of my hand.” Why had that sounded so much less crazy in her head?
“I assure you that wasn’t my intention.” He gestured toward the contents of his grocery cart. “Be my guest.”
A dozen or more apples rolled around in the bottom of his basket. Madison couldn’t have identified the apple in question if her life had depended on it.
Now was the time to back off and apologize.