At best.
“How are you?” he asked, leaning on the white picket fence that separated them. Did he look cool or dorky when he leaned like this? Why was he even asking himself these questions?
He used to be a confident man. This was what having a crush did to a person.
“Um,” she said, glancing over her shoulder nervously. “Well, I’m in the middle of a house cleaning job right now, and the owner is at home. So this isn’t agreattime?”
“Oh. Right. Right,” he said. “Yeah, totally. I just, uh… have you been getting my texts? I didn’t hear back, so I was worried.”
Stop talking, he told himself internally.
She scrunched up her nose apologetically—and adorably, he couldn’t help but notice. He really was in over his head with her. Goodness.
“No, I got them,” she said vaguely. “I was just, uh, busy.”
“I don’t want to throw around accusations, June,” he said. “But that wasn’t entirely convincing.”
There, that had sounded more normal. Perhaps he wasn’t a total lost cause after all.
“Yeah, sorry,” she said, shooting another glance over her shoulder. He knew that he should let her get back to work, but he worried that if they didn’t figure this out now, he wouldn’t ever get an answer. And he really wanted to give this a chance unless she truly didn’t want him to try.
“Come on, June,” he prodded, letting the full force of his interest show. It wasn’t as though he was doing a good job of hiding how much he was charmed by her anyway. He didn’t need to try to salvage his pride or anything. “What’s going on?”
She hesitated, then huffed out a breath, shifting the rug under one arm so that she could gesture between the two of them.
“It’s this, Levi,” she said. “I’m literally cleaning someone else’s house right now, and you are a famous country music star. Those are not compatible lives. You know that video that Benjamin ratted me out for watching? It had amillionviews. Amillion. Onemillionpeople watched your video. And that was only one video! You arefamous. I am barely keeping it together. We literally could not have more disparate statuses.”
Levi blinked at this onslaught of information, which had all been delivered in one, breathless rush.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You have been avoiding me… because you think you aren’t good enough for me?”
“Slightly harsh way of putting it,” she said. “But essentially, yeah.”
And Levi couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry,” he gasped at June’s outraged expression. “I’m not laughing at you.”
“You could have fooled me,” she said doubtfully.
“No, seriously,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m laughing atmyself. I have been standing here, giving myself a hard time for being such a totaldorkover you, and then I found out that you’re feeling similar things?” He laughed again. “We are more alike than you want to think, June Caldwell.”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully.
“That might make me feel the teeniest, tiniest bit better,” she admitted.
He seized on this.
“This isn’t the first similarity though,” he reminded her. “The thing that made me talk to you in the first place was our shared interest in singing. And we’ve been having a good time together, haven’t we?”
“We have,” she admitted, still a touch guarded, but clearly opening up to him.
“Well, I don’t want to give that up for an insignificant reason like you thinking your job isn’t good enough. And don’t even try to say that it isn’t,” he added when she opened her mouth to do just that. “You are making a life for you and your son. However you do that, it’s admirable. I won’t hear any arguments to the contrary.”
“Okay, fine,” she said, a smile playing about her lips despite her stern tone. “But do you think I could get back to?—”
“Excuse me, young man!”
The sharp words had Levi looking up to where an elderly woman with a tight crop of gray curls was leaning out of an upstairs window. Levi could only see her from the collarbones up, but she had a strictness about her that made him think of a governess in a period piece.
