Mistletoe Marriage (Harlequin Romance)

by Jessica Hart

  ‘I am over her,’ he said, although he didn’t sound that convincing even to himself. ‘I don’t hurt the way I used to. It’s true that I think about her sometimes, though. I think about what it would have been like if she hadn’t broken our engagement, but it’s hard to imagine now. Would Melissa have been a good farmer’s wife?’

  Probably not, Sophie thought. In spite of growing up on a farm, Melissa had never been a great one for getting her hands dirty. She had never needed to. She’d always seemed so helpless and fragile that there had always been someone to do the dirty jobs for her.

  Sophie had long ago accepted that she would have to get on and do things that Melissa would never have to contemplate, but she didn’t feel resentful about it. She loved her sister, and was proud of her beauty. When they were younger she had used to roll her eyes and call Melissa the sister from hell, but she hadn’t really minded.

  Until Nick.

  ‘I do still love Melissa,’ said Bram. ‘Part of me always will. But I don’t feel raw, the way you do at the moment, Sophie. I know it’s a terrible cliché, but time really does heal.’

  The pot was as warm as it was ever going to be. Sophie threw the water away, dropped in a couple of teabags and poured in boiling water from the kettle.

  ‘Is Melissa the reason you’ve never married?’ she asked, setting the pot on the table.

  Bram pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Partly,’ he conceded. ‘But it’s not as if I’m still waiting for her or anything. I’m ready to find someone else.’

  ‘I thought Rachel was good for you,’ volunteered Sophie. ‘I really liked her.’

  If anyone could have helped him get over Melissa, Sophie would have thought it would be Rachel. She was a solicitor in Helmsley, warm and funny and intelligent and stylish. And practical. Bram needed someone practical.

  ‘I liked her too,’ said Bram. ‘She was great. I thought we might be able to make a go of it, but it turned out that we wanted very different things. Rachel wasn’t cut out to be a farmer’s wife. She told me quite frankly that she didn’t think she could stick the isolation, and the moors frightened her in the dark. She wanted to move to York, where she could go out in the evenings, meet friends for a drink, watch a film…and I couldn’t stick living in the city.’

  He shrugged. ‘So we decided to call it a day.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sophie, wondering if Rachel might not have realised that a big part of Bram’s heart would always be Melissa’s. Even if she had never met Nick, she didn’t think that she would have wanted to marry someone who was still in love with another woman.

  From sheer force of habit she went over to the dresser, where Molly had always kept a battered tin commemorating the Queen’s wedding. Inside there would be a mouth-watering selection of homemade biscuits—things like flapjacks or rock cakes or coconut slices. But when Sophie pulled off the lid it was empty.

  Of course it was. Stupid, she chided herself. When would Bram have had time to do any baking?

  Nothing could have brought home more clearly that Molly was gone. Sophie bit her lip and replaced the lid carefully.

  ‘I miss your mum,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I miss her too.’ Bram got up and found a packet of biscuits in the larder. ‘We’d better put them on her special plate,’ he said, taking it down from the dresser. ‘She wouldn’t like the way standards have slipped around here!’

  Sophie had made Molly the plate for Christmas, the first year that she had discovered the pleasure of clay between her hands. She had fired it and then painted it herself with some rather wobbly sheep. Compared to her later work the plate was laughably crude, but Molly had been delighted, and had insisted on using it every time they had tea.

  Bram shook the biscuits onto the plate and put it on the table. Then he sat down again opposite Sophie and watched her pour tea into two mugs.

  ‘It was funny coming back to the house tonight,’ he said. ‘The lights were on, and I could hear the kettle whistling…it was almost as if Mum was still here. This is when I miss her most, when I come in at night to an empty house. She was always here…cooking, listening to the radio, drinking tea…It’s as if she’s just popped out to feed the chickens or get something from larder. I keep thinking that she’ll walk back in any minute.’

  Sophie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Bram, I’m so sorry. I go on and on about my own problems, but losing Molly was much, much worse than anything I’ve had to deal with. How are you coping?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ said Bram easily, as she had known that he would. ‘It’s only now that I understand how much Mum did for me, though. When she was around I didn’t really have to think about cooking or shopping or washing. I guess I was spoilt.’

  ‘Are you eating properly?’ Sophie asked, knowing that Molly would have wanted her to check.

  He nodded. ‘I can’t manage anything very posh, and I’m always forgetting to go to the shops, but I won’t starve. It’s not that I can’t look after myself, but there seem to be so many household chores I never knew about before, and it all takes so much time when I get in at night.’

  ‘Welcome to the world of women,’ said Sophie dryly, taking a biscuit and pushing the plate towards him.

  ‘Sorry.’ Bram grimaced an apology. ‘That sounded as if I was looking for a replacement servant, didn’t it? It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I just wish I had known how hard Mum worked when she was alive. I wish I hadn’t taken it all for granted, and that I could have told her how much I appreciated everything that she did for me.’

  Sophie’s heart ached for him. ‘Molly loved you,’ she told him. ‘And she knew you loved her. You didn’t need to tell her anything.’

  Bram helped himself to sugar and sat stirring his tea abstractedly. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to manage when it comes to lambing,’ he confessed. ‘You need at least two of you then.’

  Lambing time would be the hardest. Sophie had grown up on a farm and she knew how carefully the farmers watched their sheep, all day and all night, desperate to ensure that as many lambs as possible survived.

  She always quite liked helping with the lambing herself. She loved the smell of hay and the bleating sheep and the way the tiniest of lambs staggered to their feet to find their mothers. But she only did it for the occasional night. She didn’t have to spend three weeks or more with barely a chance of sleep. There were plenty of other times, too, when a farmer like Bram really did need help.

  ‘It’s hard running a farm on your own,’ she said, and he sighed at little.

  ‘I see now why Mum was so keen for me to get married.’ He stirred his tea some more. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot since she died,’ he admitted after a while. ‘As long as Mum was alive I didn’t need to face up to the fact that I’d lost Melissa.’ He paused, listening to his own words, and frowned. ‘Does that make sense?’ he asked Sophie.

  ‘You mean it was easy to use Melissa as an excuse for why it never quite worked out with anyone else?’

  Bram looked rueful. ‘It doesn’t sound very good when you put it like that, does it? But I think that’s what I did, in a way. None of my other girlfriends ever made me feel the way Melissa did, and I suppose I didn’t need to try while Mum was here and everything carried on as normal.

  ‘Now she’s dead…’ He trailed off for a moment, trying to explain. ‘I get lonely sometimes,’ he admitted at last. ‘I sit here in the evenings and think about what my life is going to be like if I don’t get married, and I don’t like it. I think it’s time I put Melissa behind me for good. I’ve got to stop comparing every woman I meet to her and move on properly.’

  ‘Moving on is easier said than done,’ Sophie pointed out, thinking of Nick, and Bram smiled in rueful agreement.

  ‘Especially when you live up on the moors and spend whole days when you only get to meet sheep and talk to Bess. It’s not that easy to find a girl you want to marry at the best of times, and it seems to me that the older you get, the harder it is.
’

  Sophie thought about it. For the first time it occurred to her that there weren’t a lot of opportunities to meet people up here. There was the pub in the village, of course, but the community was small and it wasn’t often that newcomers moved into the area. Those who did tended to like the idea of country life without actually wanting to live it twenty-four hours a day. Most used their cottages as weekend retreats, or commuted into town.

  Maybe it wasn’t that easy for Bram. You would think it would be easy for a single, solvent, steady man in his early thirties to find a girlfriend, thought Sophie, remembering the complaints of her single friends in London. They were always moaning that all the decent men were already married. Bram might not be classically handsome, but he was kind and decent and utterly reliable. He would make someone a very good husband.

  ‘You should come to London,’ she said. ‘You’d be snapped up.’

  ‘Not much point if the woman doing the snapping doesn’t fancy the idea of life on an isolated farm,’ said Bram. ‘A girl who’s squeamish and hates cold mornings and mud is no good to me. That’s obviously where I’ve been going wrong all these years. When I think about it, since Melissa all my girlfriends have been town girls at heart, which means that I’ve been looking in the wrong place. What I need is a country girl.’

  Sophie looked at him affectionately. Yes, a nice country girl was exactly what Bram needed. Surely there was someone out there who would be glad to make a life with Bram? She would have this lovely kitchen to cook in, and on winter nights she could draw the thick, faded red curtains in the sitting room against the wind and the rain and sit with Bram in front of the fire, listening to it spit and crackle.

  ‘I wish I could marry you,’ she said with a wistful smile.

  Bram put down his mug. His mother’s clock ticked into the sudden silence.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ he said.

  Sophie smiled a little uncertainly. He was joking, wasn’t he? ‘Why don’t I marry you?’ she echoed doubtfully, just to check.

  ‘You just said that you wished you could,’ Bram reminded her.

  ‘I know I said that, but I meant…’ Sophie was so thrown by the apparent seriousness in his face that she couldn’t now remember what she had meant. ‘I didn’t mean that we should actually get married,’ she tried to explain.

  ‘Why not?’

  Her wary look deepened. What was going on? ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ she said, puzzled. ‘We don’t love each other.’

  ‘I love you,’ said Bram, calmly drinking his tea.

  ‘And I love you,’ she hastened to reassure him. ‘But it’s not the same.’ She struggled to find the right words. ‘It’s not the way you should love someone when you get married.’

  ‘You mean you don’t love me the way you love Nick?’

  Sophie flushed slightly. ‘Yes. Or the way you love Melissa. It’s different; you know it is. We’re friends, not lovers.’

  ‘That’s why it could work,’ said Bram. ‘We’re both in the same position, so we understand how each other feels.’

  He paused, trying to work it out in his mind. It had never occurred to him even to think about marrying Sophie before, but now that it had the idea seemed obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

  ‘If neither of us can have the person we really want, we could at least have each other.’ He tried to convince her. ‘It wouldn’t be like taking a risk on a stranger. We’ve known each other all our lives. You know what I’m like, and I know you. I’m not going to run away appalled when I discover all your irritating habits the way a stranger might do.’

  Sophie paused in the middle of dunking a biscuit in her tea. ‘What irritating habits?’ she demanded.

  ‘Irritating was the wrong word,’ Bram corrected himself, perceiving that he was straying onto dangerous ground. ‘I should have said that I know your…quirks.’

  She wasn’t going to let it go that easily! ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the way you screw up your face when you’re trying to decide what you want to drink in the pub. The way you always say that you don’t want any crisps and then eat all of mine.’ He paused to think. ‘Those funny earrings you wear sometimes.’

  Her mouth full of biscuit, Sophie put her hands up to her ears in an instinctively defensive gesture. Her friend Ella was a jewellery designer, and made all her earrings for her now. ‘What’s funny about them?’

  Bram studied the feathery drops that trembled from her lobes. They were relatively restrained compared to the weird shapes and colours she usually wore. ‘You’ve got to admit they’re pretty unusual,’ he said.

  Sophie sniffed and reached for another biscuit. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Well, there’s the way you eat your way through a whole packet of biscuits and then spend the rest of the evening complaining that you feel fat,’ said Bram.

  Freezing with the biscuit halfway to her mouth, Sophie saw too late that he was teasing. ‘Don’t you want to know what your irritating habits are?’

  ‘Tell me the worst,’ he invited.

  ‘You’re infuriatingly calm. You never make a fuss. You never get carried away.’ Sophie ate the biscuit anyway, with a certain defiance. ‘I can’t imagine a situation in which you’d lose your cool.’

  Bram looked at her. ‘Can’t you?’

  There was a tiny pause, and for some reason Sophie found herself picturing Bram making love with a vividness that was startling and more than a little disturbing in its clarity. He would be slow and sure to start with, but as the excitement built—yes, he might lose his cool then…

  To her horror, Sophie realised that she was blushing. It didn’t seem right to be thinking of Bram in that way. She took another biscuit to give herself something to do.

  ‘OK, I’ll admit your habits aren’t as irritating as mine,’ she said, after a moment.

  ‘As irritating habits go, ours aren’t incompatible, though, are they?’

  There was another pause while Sophie eyed Bram, still half convinced that he was joking. ‘You’re not thinking about this idea seriously, are you?’

  Bram was turning his mug between square, capable hands, studying it thoughtfully. ‘I might be.’

  His eyes lifted to her face once more, suddenly very blue and keen. ‘Why don’t we face reality, Sophie? Neither of us has got a chance of marrying the person we love. We can live alone and miserable, or we can live together. Our marriage might not be one of grand passion, but we would have friendship, companionship, comfort. They count for something.

  ‘I need help on the farm, to put it bluntly,’ he went on. ‘Sophie, I’d love to have you as my wife. I need someone who understands the moors and isn’t afraid of being up here on her own—someone who can help me run the place. A partner as well as a wife. Someone just like you. And you…you can’t have what you really want either, but you did say you wanted to come home. You’ve always loved it here. Well, you could live here all the time with me. Haw Gill Farm would be your home as well as mine. You could set up a wheel and a kiln in one of the barns and start potting again.’

  The blue eyes rested on Sophie’s face. ‘Neither of us would have everything we wanted, but we would have some of it. Perfect happy-ever-after endings are for books and films, Sophie. We wouldn’t be the first people to compromise, to settle for good enough rather than the best.’

  ‘Compromising means giving up on your dreams,’ Sophie pointed out.

  ‘It means having something instead of nothing,’ countered Bram. ‘And it would solve your Christmas problem if nothing else,’ he added cunningly. ‘You said yourself that it would be easier to get through a family Christmas if you could produce a boyfriend. Why shouldn’t that boyfriend be me?’

  ‘Well…because they all know you,’ she said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘They know we’ve been friends all our lives. It doesn’t seem very likely that we’d suddenly decide to fall in love. Anyway,’ she remembered, ‘I’ve already told Mum that I’
m in love with someone else.’

  ‘You didn’t say who it was, though,’ he reminded her. ‘Why couldn’t it be me?’

  ‘Because I would have told her if it had been you,’ said Sophie, a little baffled by his persistence and still more than half convinced that he was joking.

  ‘Not necessarily. If we’d only just realised that we were in love ourselves, I think we’d want a little time to get used to the idea before we told everybody. We wouldn’t rush out and spread the news straight away, would we?’

  Sophie looked sceptical. ‘So we’d ask Mum and Dad and everyone else to believe that after all these years of being friends we suddenly looked at each other and fell in love?’

  Bram shrugged. ‘It happens. I think it’s possible to look at someone familiar and suddenly see them in a completely different light.’

  He remembered how startled he had been to realise how much she had changed when she was telling him about falling in love with Nick. Of course that wasn’t the same as falling in love with her, but still, it had been a shock. And look how conscious he had been of her leaning against him by the gate.

  ‘People change,’ he said. ‘Sometimes when you least expect it.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Sophie doubtfully. ‘I can’t really imagine falling in love like that.’

  What would it be like? She couldn’t imagine it. With Nick it had been love at first sight. One look and she had tumbled helplessly in love with him. How could it be the same if you had known the other person all your life?

  Imagine falling in love with Bram, for instance. How weird would that be? Her eyes rested on him speculatively. He had all the right bits, all in the right working order, but they looked exactly the same as they had always done. Eyes, nose, mouth—nothing wrong with any of them, but nothing special either. Nothing to make you stop and think Hello?

  Although, to be fair, she had always loved Bram’s eyes. They were the deep, clear blue of a summer sea, and they gleamed with understated humour.