One Day in Apple Grove

by C. H. Admirand

  The timer rang and she drained the pasta. “How was your day?”

  Jack opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. “Busy, productive. Yours?” He handed her a glass of red wine. “It’s my favorite merlot. I hope you like it.”

  After she took a sip, she said, “It’s lovely.”

  Jamie chose that moment to shove his way in between them and jump up on Jack. Jack corrected the dog and then began to stroke his back, sending the puppy into doggie ecstasy. “Good boy, I know you missed us.” With a look of longing at his untouched glass of wine, he sighed. “How about if we go toss the ball a few times?”

  “Dinner’s ready,” Caitlin said. “But it can wait a little bit. It’ll still taste good cold.”

  Jack paused in the doorway, a hand braced above him as his gaze locked with hers. Heat shot through her at the desire in his eyes. But then he blinked and the look was gone, leaving her to wonder if it was wishful thinking. That almost-kiss was amping up the anticipation and driving her nuts.

  “That sounds wonderful. Thanks for going to the trouble of making dinner.”

  “Mmm.”

  He held out his hand. “Come on outside and play with us.”

  As she took his hand, her grip must have been a bit desperate; he looked down at their clasped hands and then into her eyes. “Tough day?”

  She shrugged. “Parts of it.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  He nodded. “Can you stay with Jamie for a minute? I need to find a tennis ball.”

  A few moments later, he emerged from the garage with his hand in the air. “OK, boy!” He wound up like an all-star pitcher and threw the ball. Jamie gave chase and Caitlin smiled at the two of them.

  A half a dozen tosses later, Jamie’s tongue was hanging out of the side of his mouth and he was panting. “Water break,” she called out.

  Both males looked at her as if she were crazy, but then Jack must have had second thoughts. “Let’s go.” Jamie followed him into the house.

  “I just need to wash my hands.”

  Since he seemed to be waiting for her to agree, she nodded and turned to fix their plates and then stopped. “Just a minute,” she said. “I left the bread in the car. Be right back.”

  He was setting the kitchen table when she walked back in and set the bag on the counter. “Fresh-baked Italian bread.”

  He handed her a cutting board and bread knife. The microwave dinged and he smiled. “I thought your meal deserved to be warmed up, especially since parts of your day didn’t go as well as mine.”

  Touched because he’d taken the time to think of her, she returned his smile.

  “Thanks.” She set the bread on the table and watched the way he moved about the kitchen, deftly removing one plate of pasta and inserting another and then topping off her wine. “You certainly know your way around the kitchen.”

  “I’ve had lots of practice living on my own, and my mom thought I should learn to cook at an early age.”

  “I learned through trial and error. Meg never had the time to learn to cook. She was too busy watching us, keeping up with schoolwork—”

  “And working with your dad. I remember how worried she was that she’d do or say the wrong thing and you and Gracie would end up scarred for life.” The microwave interrupted what he was going to say. Once he had removed the plate and set it on the table, he held out his hand to Caitlin.

  It was warm and firm with calluses—a working man’s hand. Her hand tingled and she shivered at his touch.

  “Cold?”

  “Um…no. I was just thinking…”

  “About?” he prompted.

  “Hands.”

  “What about them?” He seemed interested.

  She cleared her throat because she wasn’t about to tell him that his touch set off sparks inside of her—at least not yet. “I grew up appreciating the strength in a person’s hands. My dad could do anything with his: fix the basketball hoop, lower a bicycle seat, show one of us how to change a flat tire.”

  Jack tightened his grip on her hand and drew her a little closer. “Hands do so many other things too.”

  She looked up, meeting his gaze, unable to hold back the sigh of contentment that escaped. “True,” she mumbled. “We both use our hands to earn a living—you use yours to fix people. I use mine to fix things.”

  “Common ground.” He brushed his thumb across the back of her hand, a gentle caress that shouldn’t have caused her belly to flutter, but it did. They were talking about hands for goodness sake!

  “I grew up wanting to use my hands like my dad—the people in Apple Grove depended on him, just like I did.”

  Cait hadn’t been looking for one, but somehow she knew instinctively that she’d managed to find a man like her dad—strong, solid, and dependable.

  The warmth of Jack’s hand holding hers distracted her, and for a moment, she let her imagination run wild, wondering what it would feel like to have his hands slide to the small of her back and slowly pull her closer… “Um, we’d better eat while it’s still warm.” Brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes with her free hand, she added, “Pasta can get sticky after you warm it up twice.”

  He seemed reluctant to let go. With a knuckle, he tipped her chin up so that she could look into his eyes. “You’re not what I expected, Caitlin Mulcahy.”

  The deep timbre of his voice skittered up her spine, distracting her until all she wanted to do was give in to temptation and lay her head against his broad chest. But at the last moment, sanity returned.

  “Dinner’s getting cold.” She gave in to the involuntary shiver his intense looks and distracting hands caused. When she tugged on her hand again, this time he let her go.

  But instead of sitting down at the table, Jack, followed by his little black shadow, walked out of the kitchen. “Nice work, Mulcahy,” she grumbled. “A handsome man, a quiet dinner for two, and you somehow manage to scare him off talking about hands.”

  Before she could launch into a diatribe, he returned with a gray sweatshirt with dark blue letters across the chest. It simply said navy. “Your arms felt chilly.” He handed it to her. “It’s a little battered because it’s my favorite.”

  She slipped it over her head, thinking the warmth of the worn fabric beat out the desire to be fashionable. “I hadn’t realized I was so cold.”

  “When I’m tired, I tend to feel the cooler temperatures faster than I normally would.” He raised his glass and smiled. “To good food, a lovely dinner companion—” Jamie’s bark had them both grinning. “Companions,” he corrected, looking down at the pup. When the dog stopped barking, sat, and looked up at them, Cait couldn’t help but laugh. They settled down to eat and the tension from moments before melted away. Conversation came easily when speaking about Jamie.

  “How are you going to bring yourself to give him back if he belongs to someone else?”

  Jack paused with the fork halfway to his lips. “It’s already been twenty-four hours and no one has stepped forward to claim him.”

  “I suppose if they were desperate, they’d be searching far and wide for him.” She paused and tasted the pasta, pleased that reheating it hadn’t made it rubbery.

  “This bread’s delicious. Who made it?”

  She smiled. “I have my sources.”

  “It didn’t come from Mary’s Market or from the supermarket over in Newark.”

  “No,” she said, “and no.”

  “Hmm, reminds me of a few ops during my time in the service.” He passed the butter to her. “Top secret,” he said with a grin. “I can tell you, but then…” He made a slicing movement across his neck.

  She laughed in between bites. “Got it.”

  “This is delicious.” His blue eyes darkened to that distracting shade of sapphire again, and she wonder
ed if she was brave enough to ask him what he was thinking about. “I normally don’t like peppers, but the yellow and orange ones taste different than the green ones.” He practically inhaled his pasta.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  “I was.”

  Her eyes sparkled with humor. “Growing up in the Mulcahy house, if you didn’t like what was on the table, you could either go hungry or find the peanut butter.”

  “That’s kinder than my house. We ate what mom cooked. Period.”

  “I think Pop was brought up that way too, but after mom died and he was doing the cooking, he gave us an option.”

  Jack looked as if he was listening, really interested. The men she’d dated had been good-looking like Jack, but so far no one measured up in other areas, criteria she hadn’t even realized she’d instinctively been using as a scale to rate her dates. Odd that she only just reasoned out that her biggest yardstick was her father, the first man in her life.

  “Would you like more wine?”

  “Um…no thank you. I still need to drive home. I had no idea that it was already after nine.”

  The teasing light in his eyes belied the seriousness of his tone when he asked, “Do you have a curfew?”

  “See if I let you have dessert,” she teased, clearing his place first and then her own.

  “Just leave the dishes,” he said when she started to rinse them off. “You cook. I clean.”

  “I could get used to that.”

  “Now,” he said, moving to stand beside her, “what’s this about dessert?”

  She opened the fridge and pointed to a bowl of raspberries and a cellophane-covered pie dish.

  His attention wavered from the delectable woman in his sights to the pie in his fridge. “What kind of pie?”

  She giggled and reached for the dish. “It’s Peggy’s buttermilk pie.”

  “How did you wrangle one out of her? People usually wait in line for one of those pies. I remember more than one fistfight in the parking lot over the years whenever an order got misplaced.”

  Cait smiled at him and his heart stuttered before picking up the beat again. “She’s my best friend.”

  “And?” Jack figured there’d be more to the story.

  “I’ll fix the hole in their barn roof come Saturday…for free.”

  “I don’t know that I’m worth the price of your labor.” Her scent clouded his brain. Lilacs. Cait smelled of lilacs.

  “Anyone who’d risk breaking his neck at dusk chasing a stray puppy through the woods to make sure that he’s not injured…and then opening his home to that puppy…deserves the whole pie.”

  While he’d been studying her delicate bone structure and the curve of her cheek, she’d grabbed another bowl from his fridge. “Whipped cream?” he asked.

  “The real kind,” she told him, “not the kind from a can.”

  “I will owe you for this but plan to take advantage of the offer and have one piece now, one piece before bed, then breakfast…”

  His gaze swept up from the bowl of whipped cream in her hands to her startled, green eyes as the gut-wrenching thought of what he’d like to do with that cream short-circuited his brain.

  She cleared her throat and asked, “Still hungry?”

  “Mmm.” For more than food. Did he dare tell her that? While the silent debate was raging inside of him, she sliced, scooped, and dropped pie, cream, and berries.

  “There you are.” When he didn’t move, she said, “Dig in.”

  Jamie chose that moment to bump into Jack and plaster himself to Jack’s leg. He groaned watching that first forkful of flaky confection fall off his fork and get snapped up between little black lips. “Why, you little devil!”

  “No more for you, Jameson,” Caitlin’s voice was stern. “Too much sugar will give you worms.”

  “Actually—” Jack began only to stop when Cait glared at him.

  “Meg said that’s what mom always used to say.”

  “But if Grace is allergic to dogs, why would your mom say that?”

  Cait rolled her eyes. “Because my parents grew up with dogs.”

  And that, thought Jack, is that. He’d seen that look before on Caitlin’s face and knew when to drop the subject. “Think I’ll make some coffee.” But while he was making coffee, the image of Caitlin wrapped in his arms kept interrupting his thought process, making it hard to think straight.

  “Need any help?”

  He shook his head and filled two mugs with coffee, handing one to Cait and setting the other on the table. “Dessert looks great…dinner was amazing.”

  “Simple,” she corrected him. “Sometimes, simple is best when you’ve had a long day and it’s late. Besides, I can’t eat a big meal after eight o’clock.”

  “But what about the pie?”

  She looked down at her pie, topped with berries and whipped cream, and slowly smiled. “There’s always room for pie.”

  He pulled out her chair and couldn’t resist testing her reaction by brushing his fingers along the nape of her neck. The shudder she tried to suppress confirmed what he’d been wondering. Caitlin Mulcahy could not help but react to his touch. It was a good feeling to realize he was not the only one affected. Besides, it was all her fault, talking about hands and having his mind wander to what else his hands could do besides heal.

  Struggling to redirect his thoughts, he focused on dessert. Sampling a few bites, he had to ask, “Why don’t they serve their pie like this at the diner?”

  Caitlin grinned. “It’s the way my great-great-grandma always served it. Molly Mulcahy was a canny woman, who knew the way to my great-great-grandpa’s heart was through his stomach.”

  “Not all men can be bought with food.”

  She sipped her coffee and let her gaze linger on him. A zing of electricity ricocheted off his heart and sent sparks of awareness to every single nerve ending in his body. Digging deep, he fought for control. He didn’t think she had any idea that she’d tied him up into a reef knot—one of the strongest knots a sailor could use—the more tension on it, the tighter the knot became. He wasn’t about to mention it—yet.

  “Can you?”

  For a moment he couldn’t remember what she’d just said, but then his brain took pity on him and he remembered. There was a time when he’d have given his right arm for a home-cooked meal, but he’d survived eating MREs—and he’d survived his second tour overseas. Maybe the way to his heart was through his stomach. “I’m in danger of saying yes…this pie tastes amazing with the toppings.”

  “I wish I’d have had the chance to get to know my great-great-grandmother…other than through some of the recipes handed down to my dad along with some of her sage advice.”

  “But that’s how you do get to know her.” Jack watched the way Caitlin slipped a bite of pie off the fork between full, soft lips and had to look away. Do not think about those lips.

  “There’s a picture of her and my great-great-grandfather on the mantelpiece in the living room.”

  “Family ties run strong in the Gannon family too.”

  “Do you miss your folks much?”

  He stopped to think about it. “I do and I don’t.”

  “Can’t you decide?”

  “I spent all of my life surrounded by their love and guidance, and then spent a chunk of my adult years in the navy—after I was injured, I used the college credits I’d earned during the navy and went to med school…I guess I got used to being on my own.”

  “I’ve never been away from home,” Caitlin confessed to her plate.

  He wondered why she sounded so sad. “Didn’t you go away to school?”

  Caitlin shrugged. “That was community college, and I was only away while I was attending classes.”

  “Not the same as living in a dorm.”

  She frowned into her cof
fee cup. “No. It’s not. Gracie was the only one of us who went away to school. And she’s forever griping about Apple Grove. Her list of reasons to leave gets longer by the day.”

  “So she’s planning on leaving town?”

  Sadness filled Cait to overflowing. “Yeah.” The reality of Mulcahys being run by someone other than herself and her two sisters was inconceivable, but fast becoming a reality. “She’s waiting to hear back from a recruiter in Columbus.” She hesitated before adding, “I can’t decide whether to root for her, fingers crossed that she gets the job…or pray they hire someone else.”

  Intentionally pitching his voice low, he asked, “Then wouldn’t her dreams of making a life for herself in the big city be squashed?”

  Cait didn’t answer for the longest time. When she raised her gaze to meet his, he was sorry to see the moisture gathering in her grass-green eyes. “It’s not that so much as thinking that I might lose her too. I’ve already lost Meg.”

  “Have you?” he asked, rising from his seat and rounding the table to stand beside her.

  She looked so alone in that one moment and then she closed her eyes and sighed. “It feels that way. It’s so hard, what with Pop and Mary getting serious, Meg married and going to be a mother of three by summertime. If Grace leaves, where will I be?”

  “Ah,” he said, taking her hand and tugging her to her feet. “Walk with me, Cait, and tell me what dream you set aside so that you wouldn’t leave your family with another hole in it.”

  She jerked free of his hold. “I didn’t say—”

  “You didn’t have to,” he said, slipping his arm through hers and tugging her toward the back door. “Come on, Jamie boy.”

  With the dog at their side, Jack opened the door and let the soft spring night weave its magic around the woman he’d come to care for in such a short time. He didn’t dare think about just how much he cared…not yet. There was time to mull that over later tonight after she’d gone.

  “The moon’s waxing.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “Did you ever go for a sail on a moonlit night? Just ghosting along with the evening breeze?”