Page 12 of Sweet Surprises

At that exact moment, the bells over the door jingled again, and in tromped a gorgeous giant of a man who looked awfully familiar.

“Charlotte?” he demanded, in Tag Lawrence’s signature growl.

His eyes met hers, and she found herself captured by a striking Caribbean blue gaze for the second time in twenty-four hours.

It’s the man from the gas station,she thought to herself as her cheeks heated.Tag Lawrence is the man from the gas station…

He looked almost as surprised as she was.

“Y-yes,” she replied. “I’m Charlotte.”

“I want my shake, Mommy,” the little girl piped up, reminding Charlotte that she was at work.

“Now, Jocelyn,” the mother said firmly. “We have to be patient.”

“No worries, sweetheart,” Charlotte said to the little girl right away, tearing her eyes from Tag’s. “I’ve got it.”

She quickly hit the button on the blender to make the strawberry shake. But she’d been so thrown by Tag’s appearance that she forgot all about the lid she was still holding.

A fountain of strawberry ice cream erupted from the blender, covering her from head to toe and splashing all over the counter and the floor she had spent all morning polishing.

She squealed frantically holding the lid in front of her like it might actually block anything and fumbling for the button to turn the blender off.

She managed to switch it off—though by then there wasn’t really much left in the blender to worry about. And as she used her sleeve to wipe the ice cream from her face, she prayed that she hadn’t gotten any on the poor girl and her mom.

She blinked back the sticky concoction, relieved to see that the customer side of the counter was mercifully clean, even though pretty much everything on her side of it was a dripping pink mess.

The four of them stood there stunned for a moment, silently surveying the carnage.

“It’s just like Curious George,” the little girl finally whispered, breaking the spell.

Maybe it was just her exhaustion, but the little girl was right about Curious George, Charlotte had read that very story over and over again to a girl she babysat back in high school. She suddenly found herself pressing a hand to her mouth as she tried her level best not to laugh.

“Oh, dear,” her mother said. “It’s not very nice to compare a lady to a monkey, Jocelyn.”

Somehow that pushed Charlotte completely over the edge, and a rogue giggle escaped from behind her hand.

“But the lady is laughing,” Jocelyn rightly pointed out.

The mother looked up and Charlotte almost felt guilty for laughing, though she wasn’t sure why.

“She’s right,” Charlotte said, desperately trying and failing to stop giggling. “This did happen in aCurious Georgebook.”

“See, Mommy?”the girl said.

Charlotte noticed Tag frowning, which somehow made it even harder to pull herself together. Tears gathered in thecorners of her eyes now, mixing with the strawberry ice cream, which was cold but delicious on her lips.

“Why don’t you go get cleaned up,” Tag suggested. “I’ll take care of this.”

She highly doubted that the grumpy dairy farmer was actually going to clean the ice cream shop and take care of the customers. But she certainly couldn’t do it herself when she was covered in pink goop.

“Sorry about that,” she managed to mutter as she took off for the stairs, wondering for the second time in a day if she was going to be fired before the sun went down.

It wasn’t easy to get into her apartment without covering everything on the way with strawberry ice cream, but she did her best.

Half an hour later, she was showered and dressed again, and all the clothing she had been wearing before was rinsed off and hanging in her shower.

She was freezing cold, even after the warm shower, but she figured that’s what happened when you covered yourself in ice cream in Vermont. The apartment seemed to have warmed up a tiny bit during the day, which was good.

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