by Jessica Hart
Sophie didn’t say anything. She should have been nicer about Vicky, she thought guiltily, mindlessly stroking Bess. If anyone ought to understand how the other girl was feeling right now, it was her. She knew what it was like to discover that all your dreams were not going to come true after all. But she had been bitchy, not kind. Jealous instead of sympathetic.
She was a cow. No wonder Bram was fed up. Who would want everyone thinking that he was desperate enough to consider being lumbered with her for life? It wasn’t surprising that they were all pushing him towards Vicky Manning.
Beside her, Bram glanced at her averted profile and felt awful. He had spoken without thinking. Sophie didn’t need to be told what Vicky was going through. She hadn’t deserved to be hurt either. Now all he had done was remind her of Nick.
Nice one, Bram.
He had been unprepared for the sharpness of the disappointment he had felt when Sophie had turned down the idea of marriage the previous weekend. The more Bram had thought about it, the more he’d thought it would work. They could have a good marriage. He and Sophie were such good friends—surely that would make up for the fact that they weren’t passionately in love?
Bram had been well on his way to convincing himself that he really did want to marry Sophie, and it had been harder than he’d thought when she had said no.
But he was determined not to waste any more of his life. Sophie had said no, and that was that. Until then he had only talked about moving on, but trying to convince her to marry him, realising that he could, in fact, be happy with someone other than Melissa, had been his first step to changing his life.
He wasn’t going to stop just because Sophie wasn’t over Nick. She had been his best chance of moving on, Bram knew, but she wasn’t his only chance.
So he had gone to the pub and talked to poor Vicky Manning and tried to be positive. But it hadn’t felt right. And then Sophie had rung and the mere sound of her voice had been enough to make the idea of marrying anyone else absurd.
And now here she was, her expression cross and sulky, her hair tumbling as wildly as ever around her face, her mouth set in a fiercely straight line, and he was so glad to see her that the tightness in his chest eased for the first time in a week.
They had turned off onto the narrow country road that led up to Askerby. There was very little traffic this way, but Bram pulled off the road into the entrance to a field.
Bess sat up, instantly alert, as they stopped, but Bram wasn’t going anywhere, it seemed. He sat with his arms resting on the steering wheel, staring through the windscreen to where the twin beams of his headlights cut a swathe through the darkness.
‘Sophie,’ he said after a while. ‘I’m sorry.’
She turned her head at that. ‘I’m sorry too,’ she said, her throat tight. ‘I shouldn’t have got you into this mess in the first place.’
‘Well, there’s no one I’d rather be in a mess with,’ said Bram, and the hint of a smile in his voice made him sound like the Bram she knew once more. ‘At least we’re in it together. Tell me what you want to do.’
‘What I really want is to rewind time, preferably to nine o’clock yesterday evening, before I started telling whopping lies to my sister,’ said Sophie glumly, but she was already feeling better.
‘What made you do it?’
‘Oh, I don’t know…I suppose I’d been thinking about our conversation last weekend. I was tired of trying to convince Melissa that she doesn’t need to feel guilty any more. I wanted her to think that I really was over Nick, and she was so delighted when I told her about us that I didn’t have the heart to ring her back and tell her that it wasn’t true after all.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘DOES it still seem like a good idea now?’ Bram asked.
‘Yes…yes, it does.’ Having plunged into the situation without looking—typical, her mother would say—Sophie was beginning to think that it might all work out for the best. ‘It would certainly keep Mum and Melissa happy this Christmas, anyway.’
‘Forget your mother and Melissa,’ said Bram, who thought privately that Sophie had always been too protective of her little sister, and spent far too much time keeping her happy when she should have been thinking about herself. ‘What about you?’
‘Well, yes—me too, I suppose,’ said Sophie, a little surprised. ‘It would certainly be easier to face Nick if you were there. Of course it doesn’t solve your problem,’ she went on worriedly. ‘Pretending to be engaged to me won’t help you find a wife, will it?’
Bram lifted his shoulders in a resigned gesture. ‘Finding a wife can wait a few weeks.’
‘Then you’ll help me?’
He looked at her. She had taken her seat belt off and turned in her seat to face him, her eyes shining in the darkness and her face somehow vivid through the gloom. How could he not help her? She was Sophie.
‘Of course I will,’ he said simply.
‘Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!’ Sophie was so relieved she leant across Bess and kissed Bram impulsively on the cheek. Her lips were soft and warm against his skin, and the elusive gorse scent of her hair made Bram’s senses reel for a disorientating moment.
‘You are such a star!’ she told him, and then sat back, laughing protestingly as Bess, reluctant to miss out on any demonstration of affection, began to lick their chins indiscriminately. ‘I’ll make it up to you, Bram, I promise.’
Bram wished he couldn’t still feel her lips against his cheek. Lucky Bess had been there to break things up. For one terrible moment he had felt an unexpected urge to put his arm round her and pull her lush warmth closer—and then where would he have been?
Clearing his throat, he tried to steady his still spinning senses. ‘If we’re going to convince everybody that we really are engaged, we’re going to have to do this properly,’ he said.
‘We don’t have to do anything, do we?’ said Sophie, putting her arm round Bess to calm her down. The dog subsided happily against her, panting in contentment.
Lucky Bess, Bram thought involuntarily.
And then, Where had that thought come from?
‘Surely we just need to agree if anyone asks us if we’re engaged?’
‘I seem to remember getting engaged involves a bit more than that,’ said Bram, thinking of his brief engagement to Melissa. It seemed like another life now. ‘We’ll need to go and see your parents, for a start, and make it official.’
‘I know.’ Sophie hunched her shoulders against the thought and her wide mouth turned down in exaggerated trepidation. ‘I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.’
‘Have you spoken to your mother yet?’
‘No,’ she said guiltily. ‘I wanted to talk to you first, so that we had our story straight. I made Ella answer the phone this morning, and I’ve had my mobile switched off all day. I’m sure she’ll have been trying to ring, but I haven’t dared check for messages! Has she tried to call you?’
‘I don’t know. I left the answer machine on and skulked around the shed in case I suddenly saw her car there when I came back at lunchtime…Not that I’m afraid of her, or anything!’
‘Not much!’ Sophie couldn’t help laughing at the idea of Bram creeping around his own farm to avoid her mother.
‘I just thought it would be better if we talked to her together,’ said Bram, with a fine attempt at dignity. But the corner of his mouth was twitching. ‘What do you think she’ll say?’
‘I think we can be sure there’ll be a comment about what I’m wearing,’ said Sophie, resigned to her mother’s habits, ‘but I would have thought she’d be pleased at the idea of us getting married. It means she’ll be able to look Maggie Jackson in the eye again, if nothing else. I’m more worried about her asking a lot of personal questions we won’t be able to answer. You know what she’s like. I’m sure she’ll catch us out.’
‘We’ll just keep things simple and stick w
ith the story that you told Melissa. I fell in love with you, then you realised that you were in love with me. That’s easy enough. I think the body language will be more difficult.’
‘Body language? What body language?’
‘Exactly,’ said Bram. ‘We’re comfortable together as friends, but not as lovers. I remember being engaged to Melissa. When you first announce it you’re the centre of attention, and I think people would notice if we weren’t at ease touching each other, and they might start to wonder how much in love we really were.’
‘It just means the occasional hug or kiss, though, doesn’t it?’ said Sophie airily. ‘No one is going to expect us to go in for passionate clinches over the roast turkey. I don’t mind giving you a squeeze every now and then and calling you darling! You can do that too, can’t you?’
A much too vivid image of what it would be like to hold Sophie close and kiss her presented itself to Bram, and he had to make quite an effort to push away the thought of how soft and luscious she would be. There was something wrong about the way thoughts like that kept creeping up on him unawares, he decided. It made him distinctly uncomfortable.
‘I expect I could manage that,’ he said gruffly, and leant forward to switch on the ignition to give himself something to do. ‘Let’s go and see your parents, then, and break the news that we’re engaged.’
‘We might as well get it over with,’ Sophie agreed, refastening her seat belt.
‘Then what?’ asked Bram as he put the Land Rover in gear and set off along the dark road. ‘Do you have to go back to London?’
‘Only because my things are there.’ She told him about her losing her job. ‘I’m not likely to get anything else before Christmas now, so it would be cheaper for me to come home, but I’m not sure how long Mum and I would last without killing each other. I love her, but she drives me crazy—and vice versa.
‘And then there’s the fact that Nick and Melissa are always popping in to Glebe Farm,’ she went on. ‘I can brace myself to see him at Dad’s birthday, if I’ve got you there, but seeing him on a day-to-day basis would be awful. I don’t think I could bear that.’
‘Why don’t you come and stay at Haw Gill until Christmas?’ Bram suggested. ‘It would look convincing, if nothing else, and you could help me on the farm.’
Sophie brightened instantly at the idea. ‘Oh, that would be wonderful!’ she said. ‘Then all I’d need to do would be to get through Dad’s party, and Christmas lunch, and then…’
She trailed off, realising that she didn’t know what would happen after that.
‘Yes—what then?’ said Bram evenly.
‘Well, then we’ll break off our engagement,’ said Sophie, recovering quickly. ‘We can always blame Christmas. It’s supposed to be very stressful on the relationship front.’
‘What are we going to say? That we don’t get on?’
‘Obviously no one’s going to believe that,’ she said, ignoring the edge of sarcasm in Bram’s voice. ‘Besides, we don’t want to end up pretending that we’re not friends. No, we’ll just have to say…I don’t know…that we realised that getting married would be a mistake but we want to stay friends—something like that.’
‘It’s a bit vague.’
‘I know, but I’m sure we’ll be able to think of something better nearer the time,’ she said. ‘It’s too hard to think of everything at once. Let’s get through Christmas first. Then we’ll find some way to call off our supposed engagement, you can start looking for a real fiancée, and maybe I can find a job up here. I don’t really want to go back to London, and perhaps once I’ve faced Nick it’ll seem easier to stay.
‘Anyway, I’ll worry about all that later,’ Sophie finished buoyantly. ‘Let’s face Mum and Dad first. If we can convince Mum, we can convince anyone!’
As Sophie had predicted, her mother’s reaction was a mixed one. Harriet was delighted at the thought of a wedding, aggrieved at not having been told their news the previous weekend, and appalled that Sophie had come to celebrate her engagement wearing torn jeans and a scruffy jumper.
‘Couldn’t you have put on a skirt?’ she demanded. ‘It’s not every day you celebrate getting engaged.’
‘Mum, it’s cold outside!’
‘Anyway, I love Sophie just the way she is,’ said Bram quickly, before they could get into one of their arguments. He put his arm round Sophie and pulled her against him, smiling in what he hoped was a suitably besotted manner. ‘Sophie doesn’t need to dress up for me.’
Harriet sniffed a bit. ‘I just hope she’ll try a bit harder on her wedding day! Anyway, we’re very pleased,’ she said, obviously remembering that this was Sophie’s day. She kissed Sophie graciously, and then Bram, who was beginning to wish he hadn’t realised quite how good it felt to hold Sophie against him like that.
‘Come in—your father’s in the sitting room.’
Joe Beckwith was reading by the fire, but at the sight of Sophie and Bram he took off his glasses, folded his paper and got to his feet. ‘So, Melissa was right, was she?’ he said, kissing Sophie and shaking Bram’s hand.
‘I’m glad, lass,’ he said simply. ‘You’re better off with someone like Bram than that London chap who broke your heart last year. He’s lucky I never got my hands on him. But you,’ he said, poking a stubby finger at Bram’s chest, ‘I know where to find you, so you’d better look after her!’
‘I will,’ said Bram. He had always liked Joe Beckwith’s directness.
‘It’s different this time, Dad,’ said Sophie, hoping that he’d never know quite how different.
Joe had no idea that the London chap who’d broken her heart was his own son-in-law, and Sophie could only pray that he would never find out. Her father would hate knowing that the man he had welcomed into the family had hurt one of his daughters as much as he had made the other one happy, and both her parents would be desperately hurt themselves to find out that the truth had been kept from them for so long.
‘It had better be,’ said Joe, still looking at Bram from under his bushy brows.
Harriet broke the rather awkward pause that followed by bustling in with a bottle of champagne and four elegant flutes on a tray. ‘Hearing that you were engaged was just the most wonderful surprise,’ she said, handing the bottle to Joe to open. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Melissa rang me this morning and told me. I had to make her say it twice. When did all this happen?’
‘Just last weekend,’ said Sophie, remembering the story they had agreed.
‘But you were here last weekend, and you never breathed a word of it! I do think you might have told us.’ Harriet sounded quite put out. ‘We are your parents. I don’t understand why it had to be a secret.’
Sophie had known it was going to be like this. She glanced rather helplessly at Bram, who took her hand in a warm clasp. ‘It all happened so suddenly, Harriet,’ he explained.
‘Suddenly! You’ve known each other for years.’
‘I know, but this was different,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to admit that I’ve been in love with Sophie for quite some time now, but I thought being friends was enough for her. And then last weekend…well, everything changed—didn’t it, Sophie?’
He looked at Sophie, who smiled weakly back, impressed by how convincingly he lied. Who would have thought Bram, with his honest face and his direct blue gaze, would turn out to be such an accomplished fibber?
‘It wasn’t that we wanted to keep our relationship a secret from you,’ Bram went on, oozing sincerity, ‘but it was very new for us, and, since Sophie was going back to London, we thought that we would have the week to be sure of how we felt before we told anybody. We were planning to come and see you this weekend anyway,’ he added, ‘but then Melissa rang Sophie, and she just jumped the gun a bit.’
‘Anyway, we’re here now,’ said Sophie, feeling that she should take some part in all this. ‘And you’re the first to know after Melissa, I promise.’
Harriet looked somewhat mollified as Joe hande
d out the glasses of champagne.
‘Well, here’s to both of you,’ he said, lifting his own glass, and Harriet seconded the toast, smiling broadly.
‘We’re so happy for you,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ said Bram.
‘Thanks, Mum. Thanks, Dad.’ Sophie smiled at them a little awkwardly, feeling bad about deceiving them now that she could see how pleased they were for her. It was going to be awful telling them that they had broken off their engagement.
They smiled back expectantly, and the belated penny dropped—they were waiting for her to kiss Bram. Because that was the kind of thing you did when you were engaged, wasn’t it?
Ah. This must be what Bram had meant by body language. Sophie remembered her breezy assurance that she would be able to manage the odd kiss without any trouble, but now that she was actually here and actually going to have to kiss Bram like a lover, not a friend, it didn’t seem quite so straightforward.
It shouldn’t be a problem, of course, and it would only be a little kiss, but suddenly Sophie felt as awkward as a schoolgirl.
She glanced rather shyly at Bram, who obviously had no difficulty in reading her expression, judging by the amused look in his blue eyes. He wouldn’t want to kiss her particularly either, thought Sophie, but, being Bram, he didn’t make a fuss. He just smiled and casually slid a hand beneath her curls so that he could cup her head and pull her towards him to drop a light kiss on her lips.
His mouth was warm and very sure. Surprisingly sure, in fact. Sophie hadn’t thought that it would feel that…right…somehow. It felt odd to be kissing him, but at the same time it felt so comfortable, so comforting. Really, it felt very nice…more than nice…
Instinctively, she leant into the kiss. But as the pressure of his lips increased in response that feeling of comfort was dissipated by a peculiar jolt of excitement, and that didn’t feel nice at all. At least, it did, but it didn’t feel right. It felt disturbing, even dangerous, and she jerked away, her eyes wide and startled and very green all of a sudden.
