Baby Lessons

There were a million more apples in Vermont—hundreds, if not thousands, in this very store. It certainly didn’t seem as if he’d intentionally plucked it from her hands.
But Madison didn’t back down. She couldn’t, because her life was a complete and total mess. And for some humiliating reason, Lieutenant Jack Cole seemed to have a front-row seat for her most embarrassing moments. Was clinging on to some tiny shred of pride really such a bad thing?
“Very well.” She picked an apple at random and transferred it from his cart to hers.
“That’s the one, huh? You sure?” His lips twitched again as if biting back a smile.
Sure, this he smiles at.
“I’m positive,” she said. Why, oh why, had she chosen this hill to die on?
He nodded. “Okay, then.”
“Okay,” she echoed.
Then they both stood there, regarding each other for a beat. Madison desperately wanted to ask him why he needed so many apples. There wasn’t a single other thing in his cart. Since he was wearing his Lovestruck Fire Department shirt, she figured this must be an official fireman grocery store run. But gosh, how much fruit did they go through down at the station? A lot, apparently, because he reached for another from the bushel basket at the same moment that Madison did, causing their hands to collide.
There it was again—that little zing of electricity she’d felt the last time he’d touched her. Madison couldn’t move all of a sudden. She was paralyzed, unable to do anything except blink up at the beautiful blue warmth of his irises. His gaze dropped to her mouth, and her heart felt like it might beat right out of her chest right there in the produce section.
But in a flash, his eyes met hers again. Icy blue, this time. Stone cold.
A fresh wave of embarrassment washed over her. Clearly, she’d been imagining things. Lieutenant Cole wasn’t attracted to her in the slightest, and that was fine. More than fine. She didn’t even like the man.
She took a giant backward step, eager to put some space between them. But in her haste to get away, she moved too fast, teetering on her red-soled stilettos—a holdover from her former, fashionable life. Before she could right herself, she stumbled into a row of bushel baskets. One basket tipped over, then another...and another, sending apples careening everywhere and flying in all directions.
She scrambled after them at first, trying to scoop them up and deposit as many as she could into her cart. But the sheer number of them was staggering. It was an apple avalanche, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
Not even a card-carrying hero like Jack Cole.
Apples bounced around Jack’s feet, falling faster than he could possibly catch them. He tried—oh, how he tried. He dove at them as they spilled onto the floor, but within seconds, Madison and Jack were both shin-deep in fruit.
She would have run away if she could, but a few hundred apples blocked the path to her getaway. Super.
Jack narrowed his gaze at her. “Pardon me for asking, but are you always this...”
Her face burned with heat as adjective after adjective spun round in her head, none of them flattering—clumsy...ridiculous...
Infatuated.
An apple must have hit her on the head and knocked a screw loose, because no way was she attracted to this man. He clearly brought out the very worst in her.
“Hostile?” he finally said.
“Hostile?” Her voice rose an octave or six, making her sound more like a cartoon character than a person, which seemed almost appropriate, given her current circumstances. Seriously though, if anyone was hostile around here, it was him. “I’ll have you know that most people find me charming.”
“Is that so?” He let out an unprecedented laugh, and a dimple flashed in his left cheek, because of course it did.
Dimple or not, the man was impossible. One minute he was glaring at her and the next, he was laughing at her. Except there’d been a sliver of a moment when he’d looked at her as if he’d wanted to kiss her. She was sure of it.
She lifted her chin. “Yes, it’s absolutely so.”
He said nothing. He just silently bent down, picked up one of the runaway apples and took a bite out of it while she stared at him in complete and utter confusion. What in the world was he doing?
The mind reeled.
Forbidden fruit, she thought, and for some strange reason, her heart started beating hard and fast again...so fast that she suddenly had trouble catching her breath.
Until a staticky voice rang out overhead, ending the magic spell once and for all.
“Clean up on aisle one!”
Three hours, four baking pans and a few batches of applesauce later, Madison sat across the kitchen table from her aunt Alice, poking her fork into another bite of warm apple crumble.
“This is delicious. I regret nothing,” she said as cinnamon and sugar melted in her mouth.
“Nothing?” Her aunt lifted an amused brow as she meticulously covered one of several homemade apple pies with a sheet of nonstick aluminum foil. “Not a single thing?”
Madison had regrets. A few of them, to be honest. She most definitely regretted having to spend most of what was left in her paltry bank account on bruised apples, but she was trying her hardest to look on the bright side—at least she had pie.
So much pie!
It almost made interacting with Jack Cole worth the trouble. Emphasis on almost.
“This—” she waved a forkful of hot apple filling in Aunt Alice’s direction “—is delicious. You’re a goddess in the kitchen. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Well, we couldn’t let all those apples go to waste now, could we?” Alice stood and added the foil-wrapped pie to the other three lined up on the butcher-block island in the center of the big farmhouse kitchen. Toby pranced at her feet, resplendent in a lacy knit sweater decorated with tiny crochet flowers.
Madison smiled. “Seriously, thank you. I’ve never made a pie before. It was fun.”
She’d almost been in tears when she’d arrived back