No Rep (Madd CrossFit #1) - Lani Lynn Vale Page 0,13

to be jumpy.

Which, in Fran’s case, was true.

She was definitely a jumpy person, as per what obviously happened this morning with her freeze up at the front door when she heard me tell them to go run.

“Do you need help?” I asked curiously, jerking my chin in the direction of the dog food.

She smiled. “I would love some help, actually. I have to pick up this bag and two more. As well as some cat food.”

I nodded. “For your dog?”

I helped her get the first bag into place before she answered.

“No, someone else’s. Remember, I told you that I run errands? I do the things people don’t have time for, or they aren’t willing, to do. This is an errand for a mechanic shop in town. I do this every other week. Pick it all up from his place of choice, run it over to him, and he pays me for it,” she explained.

I got the next two bags for her as well and then jerked my head toward the cat food. “Which bag?”

The baby in the cart chose that moment to throw the phone he was chewing on, and I lurched forward and caught it before it could hit the ground.

I grimaced at the slobber that coated my fingers.

“Oh, shit,” Fran cursed. “I knew I shouldn’t have given that to you, Vladimir!”

My brows rose at that name.

“Vladimir?” I asked. “For real?”

Fran rolled her eyes. “The day that Mavis went into labor, she was watching Hotel Transylvania. There’s a Mavis on there, and she thought it was really cool. So she named her son Vladimir. I call him Imp. Or Vladimir when he’s in trouble.”

“Imp?” I asked curiously.

“Imp. As in Vladimir the Impaler. Imp for short.” She grinned wickedly.

“That’s bad.” I shook my head. “Cat food?”

She pointed at the cat food, which also happened to be the biggest bag Target made.

After getting it in the cart, I said, “What else do you do?”

She knew what I meant as she whirled the cart around so that the baby was facing us and she was pushing it down the aisle.

I fell into step with her as she explained.

“I do a lot of everything. That prescription you can’t ever manage to pick up? I’ll do that. Someone back into your car, and you need to take it to the shop? I’ll do that, wait around for it, or just take it and leave it and find my own way home. I did that last week, actually. Waited there for two hours before the guys said they’d need more time, then I had to walk home because my sister was at work.” She paused. “Thank God it was during the daytime. I don’t think I could make it during the dark.”

Before I could ask her why she was so afraid of the dark, the kid in the cart decided that he needed to start digging into Fran’s purse that was sitting beside him. He came out with a fistful of tampons.

“Imp, no!” she cried, grabbing them from him.

But, funny enough, the kid had a grip of steel and held on for all he was worth. By the time she finally wrestled them out of his hand, one was out of its wrapper, one was bent almost completely in half, and the other was on the ground hitting me on one foot.

I bent down and retrieved it, all the while chuckling softly.

“Your nephew is cute,” I told her.

She grinned at me. “He really is. Like, on a scale of one to ten, he’s a ten. For sure.”

I agreed. Kid was adorable.

Normally I didn’t find kids cute. Honestly, they were all pretty ugly to me until they were about two or three, when they finally developed a decent amount of hair. But Vlad was actually adorably cute, and he had a headful of blond curls. So that might’ve been the reason why.

“I guess the curls and the navy-blue eyes run in the family,” I surmised as she finally made it past all the animal products and into the food section.

“Oh, yeah,” she confirmed. “I think every single baby in our family, from the beginning of time, had blond hair and navy-blue eyes. Even those that marry in can’t break the gene seal. My dad had brown hair and brown eyes. Still, we won.”

I wanted to ask her more about her family, but I could tell by looking at her closed-off expression at the mention of her father that she chose not to willingly stay on that