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He looked at Hannah’s golden hair spilling over his sweater onto the floor. “You think she…you think she likes me?”
Cass snorted. “She’s in love with you, and you’re not going totouch her because you’re no good for her.”
His heart burst into flight at the idea that Hannah might be in love with him, back, and then plummeted into the ground at the rest of Cass’s words. The thing they’d been dancing around for years. He knew most of Advent thought he was worthless, that the guests at the inn saw him as the help’s son. That even Cass and Hannah’s family thought of him as an unwelcome nuisance and a lower class of people—Miriam’s dad had called his dad That Handyman for years, and anytime he walked into a room where the Rosensteins were gathered, their easy familial banter got quiet.
He’d always wanted Cass to really see him, but to her he was just an emotionally messy, feral, dangerous boy who might hurt her Hannah. It didn’t matter that she’d been at his bris, that he’d lived under her roof all his life, that she’d bandaged his knees and taught him to slide down the banisters yelling, “Shenanigans.”
He wasn’t good enough for her heir.
He wanted to tell Cass to fuck off, tell her she had no idea what she was talking about, but the thing was, she was right. He knew she was right. He didn’t have anything to offer Hannah. He’d have to beg her for a job when she owned the place if he wanted to stay with her. He hadn’t traveled to amazing places like she had, didn’t know how to be anything except the angry weirdo in a small town.
Cass was right, he couldn’t do anything.
“Go to culinary school, Levi. You have a bright future, far away from here. You’ll fall for someone else, and so will Hannah, and you’ll both be saved from breaking each other’s hearts.” Cass ended, sashaying off with a wave.
He was going to fucking prove to her that everything she thought about him was wrong, but until then, he was going to stay the hell away from kissing Hannah. Even if he had to renounce Judaism and join a monastery to do it.
Chapter 10
Hannah
They sat down at a booth in the corner, and Collin materialized beside them.He was a bear of a man with a huge red beard.
“Oh,” Collin drawled in his deep baritone, looking down at Levi and then over at Hannah with a cartoonish “Oh shit” face. “Is thistheLevi Blue Matthews?”
Levi raised an eyebrow at Hannah.
“Miri and I spent a lot of time here, talking about you, in the past few months,” Hannah explained. “Also, Collin is friends with the twins, so who knows what terrible things Esther has told him.”
“Well, my actual self can’t possibly be worse than the version you and my sister have been telling people, so at least I get to start with a low bar and work up!” Levi did the world’s grumpiest jazz hands.
“Speaking of, did you actually talk to your sister yet?” Hannah asked pointedly.
Levi grimaced. “No, but I’m totally going to. Eventually. Probably.”
It was tragically comforting, all the ways in which he hadn’t changed.
Collin cleared his throat, leaning against the back of Hannah’s chair. “Are you going to order?”
“Give me whatever the special is, Col. You know I’m open,” Hannah told him, waving a hand.
Levi pretended to faint onto the booth.“Did you just ask a human being to take your life out of your control and bring you a meal off the menu, about which you had not askeda million questions and made several substitutions?” he asked her. “Whoareyou?”
“I’m New Hannah,” she told him, smiling at having surprised him, “and I trust Collin’s food implicitly. He’s never steered me wrong. I will even eat his gazpacho, in spite of the cucumbers.”
Levi gasped and held his hand to his heart as if he’d been stabbed.
“I will have whatever your favorite is,” he told Collin, “if I live through the indignity that my own wife has never eaten a cucumber in my food, no matter how I’ve prepared it.”
Hannah glared at him for the audacity of that “wife” comment.
“My wife won’t eat my borscht.” There was a blush on Collin’s cheeks as he said the wordwife.
“Collin is a newlywed; he just married Marisol, who owns the boutique,” Hannah explained to Levi.
Collin nodded. “After many years of pining.”
“I know that dance.” Levi smiled. “Sometimes, they’re worth pining.”
