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As she was speaking, the kitchen door swung open, and Levi walked through in his leather jacket, holding his motorcycle helmet in one hand and shaking out his hair with the other. Had he been out riding in this miserable weather? How suitably melodramatic of him. He looked up and their eyes met.Oh shit, he mouthed.
Delilah Davenport followed Hannah’s eyes and gasped. “Oh my gosh, you’re Levi Matthews!”
Hannah put on her best “the customer is always right” smile.She was going to kill him.
“Chef Matthews, I read the article about you inGQlast month, and I watched the first episode ofAustralia’s Next Star Chefa couple of days ago,” Delilah gushed.
The cooking competition he’d filmed had just started airing. His mother had made everyone watch the first episode the night before Levi returned, but Hannah had begged off. Instead, she’d watched it alone under her weighted blanket and Kringle. Levi’s incandescence had lit up the dark room.
“Chef Matthews,” Hannah said through only slightly gritted teeth, “grew up here at Carrigan’s.”
“My parents are—” Levi started.
Hannah interrupted, not trusting him. “The cornerstones of our staff and beloved members of our family.”
The bride’s eyes lit up, and she grasped Hannah’s arm. “Is Chef Matthews joining the staff here at Carrigan’s? Is there a possibility he’ll be…catering weddings here?”
Hannah scrunched up her nose before gesturing between Levi and her. “This is Delilah Davenport, the daughter of Governor Davenport,” she said. “Delilah is a long-time follower of Miriam’s art who has booked Carrigan’s for her wedding.”
“I’m not sure what my plans are yet, but I will be in the state for the foreseeable future,” Levi demurred, and Hannah narrowed her eyes at him.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, walking past them and shaking the woman’s hand, “I’m going to change out of my wet clothes so I can get back to helping my mom in the kitchen!”
Delilah turned to Hannah, her eyes bright. “It would literally be an actual, no joke, dream come true if he could somehow do the food. I’m sure he’s like, intensely busy with requests for talk show appearances and meetings with his agent about next steps and he probably, like, has to fly back to Australia to film wrap-up stuff once the finale airs.” Delilah paused to take a breath. “But…I don’t know, is there any way?”
Was he being inundated with requests for TV appearances? Was he going to fly back to Australia? Why did the idea of that twist her gut into knots?
“I’ll check in with him about his schedule, but I don’t think he’s planning to be here until June, unfortunately,” Hannah said.Please, let him not still be here in June.
After the Davenport team bundled themselves off for a cake tasting—Hannah hadn’t been able to convince them to order a Rosenstein’s cake, although she suspected they would regret it—she headed into her office to find Blue sitting at her desk. Fuck.
She closed the door and banged her head back against it. “Are you just lingering in places now, waiting for me?”
“The place looks amazing. It’s so…dust free. And Carrigan’s All Year, it’s really smart,” he said, rearranging the pens on her desk. She gritted her teeth against the impulse to grab them and put them back in the right place. He wasn’t answering her questions.
“It was Miriam’s idea,” she told him. “Carrigan’s All Year, I mean. I would have kept doing things the way Cass had always done them until we went bankrupt, but Miriam saw that saving the place was a more fitting tribute to Cass than letting it fail.”
“It has your organizational fingerprints all over it,” he said. “Did I do okay? In there? I wasn’t trying to get in your way. I thought they’d be gone already.”
She wanted to think the worst, that he’d burst in on purpose, but given the late start, he probably had thought they’d be done, and he’d been uncharacteristically professional and circumspect.
“You were fine,” she said grudgingly. “Now I have to convince Delilah that she’ll be happy with someone other than the famous Chef Matthews cooking for her wedding, but that’s not your fault.”
He tapped a pen against his mouth in thought, and she snatched it away before it gave her ideas about his mouth.
“You have your troublemaking face on. Quit it. Whatever idea you have right now, the answer is no. Besides, Delilah mentioned that you probably have appearances to film. In Australia. Is that true?” She held her breath, waiting for him to answer.
“There are lots of places Icouldbe, but none of them are more important than being here with you right now,” he hedged.
Translation: he had a million places he could run to as soon as things got hard or didn’t go his way.
“Get out of my chair, Blue.”
“I love this chair,” he said with a little smirk. “I have very fond memories of us—”
Yeah, so did she, which was why she wasn’t going to let him finish that sentence.
“This is a new one. I burned that one!” she interrupted.
