Landchester Amish Love: Ruth (Amish Romance) (Landchester Amish Love Series Book 2) Read Free

closer to the price that the stranger wanted than the price that Jacob wanted. This rarely happened, at least as far as what Ruth had ever seen, and she was impressed.
    Jacob was annoyed, and left the room with the smile he often wore on his face slipping considerably, and Ruth found that she was now alone with the strange, attractive, skilled bargainer of a mann .
    Open and positive , Ruth thought, the words Katie had said out in the fields still central to her thoughts. Be open, be positive.
    “Did you say that your father had made that table?” She asked him, and she saw him jump, startled. So focused had he and Jacob been in their conversion that they must not have noticed her come in.
    “ Jah, ” the mann said, after he had recovered. “My father made this table. He’s very skilled.”
    He said this without a trace of pride.
    “Are you sure?” Ruth asked, the words coming out more critically than she had meant them. “It’s only that I know work like that, and it looks like it has come out of the Plank workshop.”
    The mann smiled, and Ruth found herself caught off guard by both the sweetness of the smile, and the dimples that appeared with it. “You have a gut eye,” he said. “It is from the Plank workshop. I’m Joseph Plank.”
    And just like that, the positive start Ruth had had was plunged into confusion. “That can’t be right,” she said, mostly to herself. But the mann laughed.
    “Do you think I would lie about my own name?” he asked.
    “ Nee , of course not.”
    Joseph looked at her, expectantly, awaiting an answer.
    “I’m friends with Katie,” Ruth continued. “She would have told me if she had a bruder . Or I would have met you, surely?”
    The mann shrugged.
    “I can’t say what my schweschder would or wouldn’t tell her friends. I make it my business not to assume what she would or wouldn’t do. If I try and guess, I usually guess wrong anyway. But I’ve been away for a while on my Rumspringa, so if you think you’d have met me lately, that would be why you hadn’t.”
    Ruth made a note to herself that she would have to ask Katie about this later. But for the moment she was happy enough only to accept what he said and move on.
    “And you’re back?” she asked him, curious. She hadn’t left the community entirely when she had gone on her own Rumspringa . She’d only accepted the freedom to experiment a bit more with Englischer things, and the choice to reject them had not been a difficult thing for her.
    Joseph answered shortly that yes, he was back. But he didn’t seem very pleased about it. Ruth wanted to know more, but didn’t know how to ask without it seeming as though she were prying into what was obviously a very private matter. So she left the matter alone.
    “And what are you doing here?” he asked her, and she told him.
    He seemed far more interested in the handicrafts than Ruth was herself, and in the end she didn’t even need to ask him to help her unload the crates and bring them in for Jacob to look at. He volunteered. And as he helped her, he looked at the objects inside and had kind things to say about them. Some of them were made by others in her familye , but he had nice things to say about what she had made as well.
    Ruth felt herself blushing as she noticed that something she had made summoned the smile and its dimples that had first made her so interested in what Joseph had to say.
    When they were done unloading the crates and stacking them inside on top of the table Joseph’s father made, Ruth found herself in the surprising situation of being unhappy they had completed her task. Now Joseph would have no reason to hang around the shop, his business completed and his assistance no longer required.
    Be open , Ruth thought. Be positive.
    But the mantra wasn’t enough to get up the courage to ask Joseph if she could see him again.
    Happily, she didn’t have to.
    “Do you know Leah and George Miller?” He asked her, quite out of nowhere. Ruth