Mistletoe Marriage (Harlequin Romance)

by Jessica Hart

‘Vicky?’

  ‘Vicky Manning. You remember her, don’t you?’

  Sophie held the phone away from her and stared at it very hard for a moment.

  ‘Yes, I remember her,’ she said tightly, bringing the phone back to her ear. ‘What’s she doing there?’

  She’d meant the question to come out light and amused, but had a horrible feeling that instead she had sounded hostile and—worse—jealous.

  ‘Waiting for me to make her a cup of coffee,’ said Bram.

  Coffee. Right. Sophie’s heart sank.

  She had been able—more or less—to dismiss Nick’s account of seeing him with Vicky in the pub. After all, there was no reason why he shouldn’t meet up and have a drink with her there.

  But if he had taken Vicky home, that meant something else. Asking someone in for coffee in London didn’t mean much, but Haw Gill Farm was so isolated that you didn’t just casually suggest dropping in on the way home.

  Which meant that Bram probably had more in mind than small talk over a mug of instant.

  A sick feeling churned in the pit of Sophie’s stomach. It wasn’t that she was jealous—not really—but Bram and Vicky? Vicky was all wrong for him. Surely Bram could see that?

  ‘Is it important?’ Bram asked in that same cautious tone when she didn’t say anything.

  ‘Of course it’s important or I wouldn’t be ringing you at this hour!’ snapped Sophie, ruffled more than she wanted to admit by the knowledge that Vicky was there…with Bram.

  God, what if it were serious? What if Bram and Vicky were the new couple in the district? Melissa would get wind of it in no time, and then what would Sophie be able to say? Oh, I was just joking when I told you I was marrying Bram?

  Cue more tearful guilt for Melissa and more humiliation for Sophie.

  She lowered her voice. ‘Can Vicky hear you?’

  ‘No, she’s in the sitting room.’ Instinctively, Bram dropped his voice to match hers.

  The sitting room at Haw Gill Farm was traditionally reserved for special occasions. Sophie didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad one. If Bram were really comfortable with Vicky, they would just be sitting around the kitchen table.

  On the other hand, there was something very inviting about the sitting room on a winter night, when the red curtains were drawn against the weather. Sophie could picture Vicky curled up winsomely on the hearthrug in front of the fire. There would be no lamps on, just the flickering light of the flames. She would be waiting for Bram to come back with the coffee.

  Who was that? she would say when he came in, smiling up at him with her big blue eyes and that little gap between her teeth that was supposed to be so sexy.

  And Bram would put the mugs down on the hearth and pull her down as he stretched on the rug beside her. Nobody important, he would say.

  That little scenario didn’t make Sophie feel any better at all.

  ‘Look, Bram, is it serious between you and Vicky? I mean, do you really like her?’

  Sophie was beginning to think that she had made a terrible mistake. If there was something between Bram and Vicky then she had quite possibly ruined it by telling Melissa a stupid lie.

  ‘Sophie, we are just having a cup of coffee together—or were until you interrupted us. What is it that is so important?’

  ‘Well,’ she said nervously. ‘I just thought that I should warn you that I’ve sort of told Melissa that we’re getting married.’

  Silence. Not just silence. Deafening silence. It seemed to resonate down the phone. Sophie would almost rather he had shouted.

  ‘I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have done it,’ she rushed on. ‘But Melissa rang and she was talking about you and Vicky and somehow it just…slipped out.’

  ‘Slipped out?’ Bram found his voice at last. ‘How can something like that just slip out?’

  ‘Look, it was your idea,’ Sophie pointed out defensively.

  ‘My idea?’

  ‘You were the one who suggested that we should get married.’

  ‘Oh, that idea,’ said Bram. ‘Would that be the one that you refused to consider the other day?’

  Sophie scowled. She didn’t like it when Bram was sarcastic. ‘I did consider it,’ she protested. ‘I just didn’t think that it would be a good idea.’

  ‘But now you do?’

  ‘Yes…No…’ Sophie found herself floundering. He was supposed to be sympathising and making her smile, the way he always did. He was supposed to make everything better, the way he always did. He wasn’t supposed to be making her feel a complete and utter fool, the way he was doing.

  ‘We wouldn’t need to actually get married,’ she tried to explain. ‘I thought we could just pretend for a couple of weeks. Then we could tell everyone that we’ve changed our minds.’

  Bram glanced at the kitchen door, hoping that Vicky wouldn’t start wondering what had happened to him. ‘If we’re not going to get married, what’s the point of pretending that we are?’

  ‘To stop Melissa thinking I’m nuts! What do you think?’ Sophie was getting cross. She really wanted to go off and be quiet somewhere so she could work out how she had got into this situation.

  She took a breath and made herself speak more calmly. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I know I’ve dumped this on you without warning, but we’re not talking about a lifetime’s commitment here. I’m only asking you to cover me for a few weeks, and after that you can invite Vicky back as much as you want. But until then could you please play along?’ she added desperately. ‘Especially when Mum rings you.’

  ‘Your mother’s going to ring me?’ For the first time Bram sounded alarmed—as well he might. Harriet Beck-with’s powers of interrogation were legendary.

  ‘Well, she might do,’ said Sophie. ‘Melissa is bound to tell her first thing tomorrow, if she hasn’t already, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she tried to get hold of us. She’ll probably ring me first, but I don’t want to talk to her until we’ve got our story straight.’

  Bram sighed. ‘What exactly did you tell Melissa?’ he asked, making a mental vow not to answer the phone at all the following day.

  They were both still whispering, which seemed absurd. Sophie cleared her throat and made an effort to talk more normally.

  ‘I just said that we’d fallen in love and decided to get married.’

  ‘And she believed you?’

  ‘Funnily enough, she did,’ said Sophie, suddenly awkward. ‘She seemed to think that we were made for each other. I don’t know why. I gave her all that stuff you told me, about suddenly looking at someone and seeing them in a completely different light, so maybe that convinced her. Only I thought it might be stretching coincidence a bit if it happened to us both at the same time, so I said you’d realised earlier but hadn’t wanted to say anything because you thought I just wanted to be friends. I hope that’s OK?’ she finished nervously.

  ‘So Melissa now thinks I didn’t have the guts to tell you I was in love with you until you gave me the right opening?’

  ‘Melissa knows you’re not like that,’ said Sophie impatiently. ‘As far as she’s concerned you’re sensitive and patient, and you loved me too much to jeopardise our friendship, but when I was up last weekend I just looked at you and the scales fell from my eyes. I realised that it was you I had loved all along, so of course then we…you know, fell into each other’s arms…and that was that.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bram. ‘Melissa bought that?’

  ‘She seemed to.’

  Melissa had done more than buy it. She had marvelled at her own stupidity in not being able to see it for herself.

  ‘You’re perfect together,’ she had cried. ‘Oh, this is wonderful news! Bram’s such a lovely person, and so are you. It’s so obvious that you belong together! I can’t believe none of us ever saw it coming. I suppose you’ve always been such good friends that it never occurred to us to think of you as anything else,’ she’d decided in the end.

  ‘If you told her all that, it doesn�
��t sound as if there’s much chance of convincing her that we’ve decided it was all just a silly mistake in a couple of weeks,’ said Bram wryly. ‘Which means that as far as everyone here is concerned we’re now engaged.’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Sophie in a small voice. ‘But I won’t make you stick to it, I promise, Bram. I’ll behave really badly, if you want, so no one will blame you for breaking our engagement off when the time comes.’

  ‘We’d better not break it off just yet or Melissa really will get suspicious,’ he said. He glanced towards the door again. ‘Look, I’d better go, or Vicky will wonder whether I’m growing the coffee beans out here.’

  Sophie had forgotten Vicky for a minute. ‘What will you tell her?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ That sounded suspiciously as if he was hoping to keep his options open. Surely he wouldn’t tell Vicky the truth, would he? Sophie didn’t have the nerve to ask, though. Bram had put up with a lot already.

  ‘If we’re going to be in love, I need you here to back me up,’ Bram was saying. ‘I’m not pretending all by myself. How soon can you get up here?’

  ‘I’m not exactly overwhelmed with commitments down here,’ said Sophie, thinking of her non-existent job. ‘What about tomorrow?’

  ‘Let me know when your train gets in. I’ll pick you up from the station. And then,’ said Bram, with just a touch of grimness in his voice, ‘I think we’d better talk.’

  The mud-spattered Land Rover was waiting just outside the station entrance when Sophie arrived the following afternoon. It was only half past three, but the meagre light of a dull, wet November day was already rapidly fading and the street lamps were blurred and yellow in the creeping mist.

  Bram leant across Bess, who was sitting next to him on the front seat, to open the passenger door for her. ‘Hi,’ said Sophie as she climbed in, the way she had hundreds of times before. She wanted to be casual and friendly, the way she always was with Bram, but instead her voice sounded high and brittle, as if she were nervous.

  She was nervous. Sophie had never been nervous around Bram before, and it felt horrible, but the more she thought about the enormity of what she had done, the more nervous she felt. She had told a stupid lie to her sister which meant that she had interrupted his evening, put him in an awkward position with Vicky, and without asking she had committed him to a ridiculous pretence that soon everyone in the village would know about.

  She had taken him for granted, the way she always did, but this time she had gone too far. She had heard it in his voice last night, a certain reserve, just a hint of sternness and exasperation that was so unlike Bram’s usual dry humour that it had made Sophie realise how much she depended on his approval. She felt as if she had forfeited that with her rash announcement to Melissa, and she didn’t like it at all.

  ‘Good journey?’ he asked.

  ‘Not too bad. We were a bit late leaving King’s Cross, but at least we weren’t delayed by “leaves on the line”.’

  Oh, God, they were making small talk. This was awful.

  As Bram checked his mirror and pulled away, Sophie put on her seat belt and made a big thing of patting Bess, who was panting happily between them, content just to be close to her master.

  Why couldn’t her life be like Bess’s? A dog’s needs were so simple. All Bess wanted was to be fed and to be near Bram at all times. Heaven would be to be allowed into the kitchen to sit at his feet by the fire. Even a dog had to have a dream.

  Sophie wished that it could be that easy for her. Bess had Bram to look after her all the time, and she never got into a muddle or did stupid things that made Bram cross.

  Well, sometimes she did, Sophie amended to herself. She had once seen Bess get thoroughly muddled by Bram’s whistled instructions and the sheep had bolted in the wrong direction, which hadn’t gone down very well. But he was never angry for long, and Bess was so adoring and put her ears down so placatingly that he never carried out his threat to send her back and get a proper dog.

  The silence lengthened uncomfortably. ‘Thanks for coming to pick me up,’ Sophie tried, falling back on small talk once more.

  ‘We’re engaged, aren’t we? Picking girlfriends up at the station is the kind of thing fiancés do.’ Bram sounded quite terse. He joined the queue of cars waiting to turn out of the station, drumming his fingers on the wheel as they inched forward.

  Maybe she could try flattening her own ears, thought Sophie. It worked for Bess.

  ‘I’m sorry about all this, Bram,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I’ve been feeling really bad about forcing an engagement on you. I should have thought before I opened my big mouth.’

  ‘Well, it’s done now,’ he said, putting on his indicator to turn right. ‘We’re going to have to make the best of it now. Three people have congratulated me already today—and that’s not counting the postman, who wanted to know when the wedding was to be.’

  Oh, God. It was real, then. And all her fault.

  Sophie swallowed. Mindlessly fondling Bess’s silky ears, she studied Bram from under her lashes. In the darkness of the car he suddenly seemed like a stranger, his face lit only by the fuzzy orange glow of the station lights. For the first time she saw him not as Bram, not as the boy she remembered so well, but as a man. There was a solidity and a strength to him as he sat there, power in the big hands on the wheel, toughness in the set of his jaw.

  This was the man she had so casually claimed that she was going to marry. The man everybody in Askerby now thought was in love with her. They might imagine him kissing her with that stern mouth, undressing her with those sure hands, making love to her in the farmhouse up on the moor. A strange feeling that was not quite a shiver shuddered down Sophie’s spine and she jerked her gaze away from him.

  Not a very helpful way to be thinking. She had caused Bram enough trouble, without confusing the situation even further by starting to think of him…like that. If they were going to get through this she needed to keep a cool head.

  ‘I hope I didn’t spoil your evening completely last night,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s just say that it didn’t turn out quite the way that I expected,’ said Bram, as a car flashed its headlights and let him pull out into the other lane. There was an undercurrent of irony in his voice that made Sophie look at him sharply.

  That was the wrong reply. And definitely the wrong tone of voice. It was no big deal, would have been an acceptable answer. Or, even better, To be honest, I was glad of the interruption. I realised I’d made a mistake as soon as we left the pub. Nothing that implied he had hoped the evening would end very differently, anyway.

  Bess sighed and settled down, resting her head in Sophie’s lap. ‘How long have you and Vicky been seeing each other?’ Sophie stroked her soft ears. ‘You didn’t say anything about it last weekend.’

  ‘That’s because there wasn’t anything to say. We had a drink in the pub, went back for coffee, and then you rang. So we drank the coffee and I took her home. I don’t call that “seeing each other”.’

  That was a better answer. Sophie cheered up a bit.

  ‘I wouldn’t have said that Vicky was your type, anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well…I don’t know,’ she said, a little thrown by the abruptness of his question. ‘I guess she’s not like your other girlfriends. Rachel, for instance.’

  Vicky was nothing like Melissa either, but Sophie didn’t think it would be tactful to mention that.

  ‘Girls like Rachel aren’t interested in spending their lives in the middle of the Yorkshire moors,’ said Bram, without taking his eyes from the road. ‘Maybe it’s time I changed my type. At least Vicky is at home on a farm. She’s a nice person, too. She’s had a bad time, being dumped by her fiancé. She knows what it’s like to have to let go of things. She’s quiet and sensible and pretty…I could do a lot worse.’

  Sophie stared at him, appalled. He couldn’t be serious, could he? ‘Well, I’m sorry if I in
terrupted the beginning of a beautiful friendship,’ she said snippily, forgetting her resolve to stay cool and in control. ‘You should have told me to forget it when I rang!’

  ‘How could I?’ said Bram. ‘News of our engagement is already all over Askerby. It’s a good thing you rang when you did, otherwise Vicky might have thought that I’d been messing her around.’

  In other words, if she hadn’t rung the two of them would have been doing more than seeing each other! Sophie’s throat was tight with confusion and misery and guilt—and relief that she had called when she had. It would have been too late otherwise.

  ‘As it is, the gossips are going to have a field-day,’ Bram went on. ‘Last night they all saw Vicky and I leave the pub together, and this morning they hear I’m engaged to you. I just hope none of it upsets Vicky. She’s had enough to deal with recently.’

  ‘How was I to know that you’d be inviting stray women back for coffee?’ demanded Sophie, hurt and angry, but unable to justify feeling either. ‘It was only last weekend that you were suggesting that I marry you. You can’t blame me for not realising that you would go straight out and try to find someone else!’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Bram. The traffic lights changed to red and he stopped, jerking on the handbrake with a little extra vehemence.

  ‘Oh? Then how was it?’

  He stared ahead, resting his hands on the top of the steering wheel. ‘I suppose it was just that after you turned down my idea of getting married I realised that it really was time to face up to things,’ he said slowly. ‘If I really wanted to find a wife and have a family I would have to forget about Melissa and move on. So I decided to go out to the pub. Not a very dramatic change of life, but I don’t usually go during the week.

  ‘It just happened that Vicky was there. She was obviously lonely, and we got talking. And she was there the next time I went down, too. I’m not pretending I fell madly in love, but I thought, Why waste any more time? If I was going to find a new relationship I had to start somewhere, and we had to get beyond just chatting in the pub.

  ‘So I asked if she wanted to come and have coffee at Haw Gill, but she couldn’t talk about anything except Keith. She’s pretty raw about the way he cancelled the wedding. I felt sorry for her,’ said Bram as the lights changed and he released the brake once more. ‘She doesn’t deserve to be hurt like that.’