Buch lesen: «Mistletoe Marriage»

CHAPTER ONE

BRAM was unloading bales when Sophie found him.

It was a delicate business to lift each bale from the back of a trailer, and she watched him for a while as he stacked them carefully outside the farm shed, marvelling affectionately at how calm and methodical he was about everything.

There was something almost graceful about the way the tractor moved backwards and forwards in a slow and cumbersome ballet, and Sophie began to feel calmer. She waved to attract Bram’s attention the next time he turned his head, and he stopped at the sight of her, hunched in her jacket, the cold wind blowing her unruly curls around her face.

‘Hello!’ He jumped down from the tractor, followed by the ever-faithful Bess, who ran over to greet Sophie, wriggling and squirming with pleasure in a manner quite unbefitting a sheepdog as she bent to pat her. ‘I didn’t know you were coming up.’

‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ said Sophie, straightening.

She had decided to come home the moment her mother had told her that Melissa and Nick were on holiday. Although now she wished she hadn’t.

‘I’m just here for the weekend.’

‘Well, it’s good to see you.’ Bram enveloped her in a hug. ‘It’s been too long.’

Bram’s hugs were always incredibly comforting. By rights they ought to be bottled and handed out to the lonely and the heartbroken, Sophie always thought. When he held you enclosed in those powerful arms you felt safe and secure, and insensibly steadied. He didn’t need to say a thing. You could just cling to his strong, solid body and feel the slow, calm beat of his heart and somehow let yourself believe that everything would be all right.

‘It’s good to see you too,’ she said, hugging him back and smiling up at her oldest friend with unshadowed affection.

By unspoken agreement they moved over to the gate that looked out over the wide sweep of moor. It was just the right height for leaning on, and in the past they had had many discussions with their arms resting on it.

‘So, how are things?’ asked Bram.

Sophie’s reply was a grimace.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh…everything,’ she sighed.

Careless of the green mould, Sophie folded her arms on the top bar of the gate and gazed across the valley at the moor opposite. It looked bleak and brown on this raw November afternoon, but at least you could breathe up here. She thought of the small flat she shared in London, where the only view was of concrete backyards or the busy road where traffic growled through the night.

She took a deep breath. She could smell heather and sheep and the faint autumnal tang of woodsmoke drifting up from the village nestled into a fold at the foot of the moors, and she felt the tension inside her ease as her shoulders relaxed slightly, almost in spite of herself.

It was always the same at Haw Gill Farm. There was something about the air up here, high in the moors. She would arrive in state of turmoil, feeling desperate and churning with drama and emotion, but a few breaths and somehow things wouldn’t seem so bad.

‘Just the usual, then?’ said Bram, and the corner of Sophie’s mouth lifted at his deadpan tone.

Typical Bram. Nothing ever shocked him or startled him or enraged him. It was amazing that they had been friends for so long when they were so different. She was chaotic and turbulent; he had raised understatement to an art form. He was thoughtful and considered, while she was prone to excitement and exaggeration. Sometimes he drove her crazy with his placidity, but Sophie knew no one more steadfast or more true. Bram was her rock, her oldest friend, and he always made her feel better.

‘Don’t make me laugh,’ she complained. ‘I’m not supposed to be feeling better yet. Not until I’ve had a good moan and told you what the matter is!’

‘Everything sounds pretty comprehensive to me,’ said Bram.

‘You may mock, but nothing’s going right at the moment,’ Sophie grumbled. The wind was blowing her curls about her face, and Bram watched her trying to hold them back with one hand. Sophie’s hair, he always thought, was a bit like her personality—wildly curling and unruly. Or you might say, as her mother frequently did, that it was messy and out of control.

A lot of people only saw the unruliness—or messiness—and not the softness or the silkiness or the unusual colours. At first glance her hair was a dull brown, but if you looked closely you could see that there were other colours in there too: gold and copper and bronze where it caught the light.

The quirkiness of Sophie’s personality was reflected in her face. Vivid, rather than strictly pretty, it was dominated by a pair of bright eyes that were an unusual shade somewhere between grey and green. They made Bram think of a river, ever-changing with the light and the flow of the water. She had a wide, mobile mouth, and a set of the chin that revealed the stubbornness that had led to constant battles with her conventional mother as she was growing up.

‘I’m a big fat failure on every front,’ Sophie was saying, unaware of his scrutiny. ‘I’m thirty-one,’ she began, counting her problems off on her fingers, ‘I’m living in a grotty rented flat in a place I don’t want to be, and I’m about to lose my job—so chances are that I won’t even be able to pay for that any more. I’ve already lost the love of my life, and my ambitions for a glittering career as a potter have gone down the pan as well, since the only gallery I’ve ever persuaded to show my work has closed.’ She sighed. ‘Oh, and now I’m being blackmailed!’

Bram raised an eyebrow. ‘Sounds bad.’

‘Sounds bad?’ Sophie echoed, regarding him with a mixture of resentment and resigned affection as he leant steady and solid on the gate beside her. In his filthy trousers, big mud-splattered boots and torn jumper, he looked exactly what he was—a hill farmer with a powerful body and a quiet, ordinary face. ‘Is that all you can say?’

‘What would you like me to say?’ he asked, looking at her with a trace of amusement in his blue eyes.

‘Well, you could gasp with horror, for a start,’ Sophie told him severely. ‘Honestly, anyone would think blackmail was an everyday occurrence on the North Yorkshire moors! You could at least try saying How dreadful or Poor you or something. Not just Sounds bad!’

‘Sorry,’ said Bram with mock humility. ‘I just had this idea that your mother might be up to her old tricks again.’

He was right, of course. Sophie blew out a long breath. ‘How did you guess?’ she asked, her voice laced with irony.

It wasn’t hard. Harriet Beckwith had emotional blackmail down to a fine art, having honed it over the years as Sophie was growing up.

‘What’s she up to now?’

‘She wants me to come home for Christmas,’ said Sophie, wriggling her shoulders against the cold, her expression glum. ‘She’s got it all planned. We’re going to have a jolly family Christmas all together.’

‘Ah.’ Bram got the problem immediately. ‘And Melissa…?’

‘Will be there,’ Sophie finished for him. She pulled some wayward strands of hair from her mouth, where they were being flattened by the wind. ‘With Nick, of course.’

She had made an effort to keep her voice light, but Bram could hear what it cost her just to say her brother-in-law’s name.

‘Can’t you say you’re going away with friends, like you did last year? Say you’re going skiing or something.’

‘I would if I could afford it, but I’m completely broke,’ said Sophie morosely. ‘I suppose I could pretend that I was going, but then I’d have to spend the whole of Christmas hiding out in my flat and not answering the phone, eking out a tin of sardines and watching jolly Christmas specials until I tried to strangle myself with a piece of tinsel.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much fun,’ said Bram.

‘No,’ she agreed with another sigh. ‘Anyway, it wouldn’t work. Mum’s got it all covered. She’s reminded me that it’s Dad’s seventieth birthday on December the twenty-third and she wants to have a family party for him.’

‘Hence the emotional blackmail?’

‘Exactly.’ Sophie put on her mother’s voice. ‘“It’s so long since we’ve all been together. We never see you any more. It would mean so much to your father.”’ The expressive greeny grey eyes darkened. ‘Mum says Dad hasn’t been well recently. He told me that he was perfectly all right, but you know what Dad’s like. He’d say that if he was being hung, drawn and quartered!

‘On the other hand, he might be fine. I wouldn’t put it past Mum to embellish the fact that he’s had a cold or something. She even hinted that the farm was getting too much for them, and that they might have to sell, which would mean that this might be our last Christmas at Glebe Farm.’

Sophie hunched her shoulders in her jacket. ‘She didn’t try that one in front of Dad! He’s always said that the only way he’s ever leaving the farm is in a box.’

That sounded more like Joe Beckwith. Bram could see Sophie’s difficulty. She had always been very close to her father.

‘Tricky,’ he commented carefully.

‘I feel awful for even hesitating,’ Sophie confessed miserably. ‘I mean, Dad’s never been the touchy-feely type, and he’s never cared about birthdays before, but I think this one will be different. I have to be there.’

Bram ruminated, hands clasped lightly together as he leant on the gate. ‘Could you be here for the party on the twenty-third and then make plans to go somewhere else for Christmas? At least then you’d only have to coincide for a night.’

‘I tried that, but that’s when the blackmail really started! Mum said that she would just cancel the whole idea of a party for him if I was going to rush off like that. Was it so much to expect Dad to have a happy birthday and what might be his last Christmas with his family around him? How would I be able to enjoy Christmas knowing that I had been so selfish and hurt my parents and spoilt things for everybody?’

She sighed. ‘You can imagine it.’

Bram could. He had known Harriet Beckwith for as long as he could remember. If she had decided that they were going to have a family Christmas, poor Sophie didn’t stand a chance.

‘Would it be so bad?’ he asked gently.

‘No, no—probably not. I’m obviously making a big fuss about nothing, the way I always do.’ Sophie made a brave attempt at a smile. ‘It’s just…’

‘Seeing Nick again,’ Bram finished for her quietly as her voice cracked.

She nodded, her mouth wobbling too much to speak. Biting her lip fiercely, she scowled at the view. ‘I ought to be over it,’ she burst out after a moment. ‘That’s what everyone says. It’s time to move on. Get over it.’

‘It takes time, Sophie,’ said Bram. ‘Your fiancé left you for your sister. That’s not the kind of thing you can get over easily.’

He would never forget her face when she had first told him about Nick. Incandescent with happiness, she had been too excited to stand still.

Throwing her arms out, she had spun round, laughing, alight, radiating joy. ‘I am so, so happy!’ she had said, and Bram had looked at his childhood friend, scrubby, sturdy Sophie, with her tangled hair and her stubborn streak, and, startled, had seen her transformed.

For years he had hardly thought about her at all. She was just Sophie, just there, part of his life. He had missed her a little when she went away to college, but he’d had other things to distract him. They had caught up whenever she came home, and she’d always been exactly the same turbulent, tomboyish Sophie—his friend. She was funny, warm, chaotic—the kind of girl you could talk to, the kind of girl you laughed with, but not the kind of girl you slept with. Not the kind of girl you even thought about sleeping with.

So, it had been a strange feeling to look at her suddenly in a different light, to see her the same and yet somehow not the same at all.

Sophie had babbled on, too excited to notice the arrested expression in his eyes, or to realise that Bram—unflappable, unshockable Bram—had at last been taken unawares.

‘I never knew what walking on air meant until now,’ she had told him. ‘Oh, Bram, I can’t wait for you to meet Nick. He’s incredible! He’s clever and witty and glamorous and, oh…just gorgeous! I can’t believe he loves me too when he could have anyone he wanted.’

Closing her eyes, she’d hugged herself in remembered ecstasy. ‘I have to keep pinching myself to see if I’ll wake up and find that it’s all just a wonderful dream…and I know that I couldn’t bear it if it was. I think I’d die!’

That was his Sophie, Bram remembered thinking affectionately. No half measures for her. He should have guessed that when she fell in love it would be totally, utterly and passionately. Moderation simply wasn’t in her vocabulary.

‘Nick’s asked me to marry him already,’ Sophie had said, glowing in that new, unexpectedly disturbing way. ‘I haven’t said anything to Mum and Dad yet. I know they’d think I haven’t known him for very long, and they might think it was a bit soon, but Melissa’s going to come and stay with me in London in a couple of weeks, so I thought I could introduce him to the family gradually. I’m sure she’ll report back and tell them how fantastic he is, and then it won’t be like springing the news on them when I bring him up in a month or so.’

But that wasn’t quite how it had worked out.

He had been on his way home at the end of an unusually hot, still day in July when he had spotted a solitary figure trudging across the moor. Stopping the tractor, Bram had waited for her to reach him. He’d known it was Sophie, and he’d known from the brittle way that she held herself that something was very wrong.

Sophie hadn’t said a word as she’d come up to him. Bess had greeted her with her usual enthusiasm, and when Sophie had looked up from patting the dog the stricken expression in her eyes had made Bram’s heart contract.

Wordlessly, he’d moved to make way for her on the tractor step beside him, and for a while they’d just sat in silence while the evening sun turned the hillsides to gold. It had been very quiet. Bess had panted in the shade beneath the tractor, but otherwise all had been still.

‘I always thought it was too good to be true,’ Sophie had said eventually. And for Bram the worst thing was hearing her voice. She had always been so fiery, so alive, but now all the emotion seemed to have been emptied out of her, leaving her sounding flat and utterly expressionless. Utterly unlike Sophie.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked carefully.

‘I shouldn’t. I promised that I wouldn’t tell anyone,’ she said, in the same dull tone.

‘What? Even your oldest friend?’

She looked at him then, the river-coloured eyes stark with suffering. ‘I think at least you’d understand,’ she said.

‘Then tell me,’ said Bram. ‘Is it Nick?’

Sophie nodded dully. ‘He doesn’t love me any more.’

‘What happened?’

‘He saw Melissa. He took one look at her and fell out of love with me and in love with her. I saw it happen,’ she said, in that terrible, brittle voice. ‘I watched his face and I knew that was it.’

Bram didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh, Sophie…’

‘I should have expected it,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘You know what Melissa is like.’

Bram did know. Sophie’s sister was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She had an ethereal golden loveliness that was somehow out of place on the Yorkshire moors, unlike Sophie’s vibrant sturdiness.

It was hard to believe that the two were sisters. Melissa was nothing like Sophie. She was sweet and fragile and helpless, and few men were immune to her appeal. Bram certainly wasn’t. Sometimes it seemed to him that their brief engagement ten years ago was no more than a dream. How could a practical, ordinary man like him ever have hoped to hold on to such a treasure?

Bram couldn’t in all honesty blame Nick for falling for Melissa, but he hated him for hurting Sophie.

‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do? There was no point in pretending that nothing had happened. When we got back that night I gave him back his ring. I told him there was no point in all three of us being unhappy.’ Sophie smiled a little bitterly. ‘I let him go. Ella said that I should have fought to keep him, but how could I compete with Melissa?’

‘He might have forgotten her when she left,’ Bram suggested. He had noticed that about Melissa himself. When she was there, it was impossible to look at anyone else, but once she had gone it was sometimes hard to remember exactly what she was like, or what she had said, or how he had felt—other than dazzled by her sweetness and her beauty.

Sophie wasn’t like that, he realised with something like surprise. She wasn’t beautiful as Melissa was beautiful, but he kept a vivid picture of her in his mind, of her expressions and her laughter and the way she waved her hands around as she talked. He could always picture Sophie exactly.

‘He might have forgotten her,’ Sophie agreed, ‘and I might have tried harder if it hadn’t been for Melissa. I saw her face too. You know she’s used to men being in love with her, but I don’t think that she’s ever really been in love herself before.’

She stopped abruptly, remembering too late that Bram had loved Melissa for a very long time. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt Bram. ‘Sorry,’ she said, contrite.

‘It’s OK,’ said Bram. ‘I know what you mean.’ Sophie was right. Melissa was more used to being loved than to loving. It was just the way things were when you looked the way she did.

‘I think that Melissa fell in love for the first time when she saw Nick,’ Sophie was saying. ‘She looked completely bowled over. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, and although she tried not to show it, for my sake, I could see how she felt. Who could understand better than me?’ she added, with a brave attempt at a wry smile.

‘It was too late for me,’ she went on. ‘I knew that once Nick had seen her he wouldn’t be able to look at me in the same way. If I tried to pretend that nothing has happened it would just make three of us unhappy. At least this way Melissa and Nick have a chance at happiness.’

‘Does Melissa know what you’ve done for her?’ asked Bram, thinking that few sisters would have made the sacrifice Sophie had done.

Sophie nodded. ‘She felt absolutely awful. She cried when I told her that I wasn’t going to marry Nick after all. She said she couldn’t do that to me. But I told her that she didn’t do anything. It wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t help falling in love with Nick, and he couldn’t help falling in love with her. That’s just how it was.’

‘So Nick and Melissa are now together?’

‘Yes.’ Sophie looked down at her hands and fought to get the words past the terrible tightness in her throat. She wouldn’t cry any more, she wouldn’t. ‘Nick’s moved up to join Melissa here, and they’re going to set up an outdoor clothing business together. They’re getting married in September.’ There—the hardest bit was out. ‘That’s why I’m back now. Mum wants me to try on my bridesmaid’s dress.’

‘You’re going to be Melissa’s bridesmaid?’ Bram said incredulously. ‘Sophie, surely you don’t have to put yourself through that? It’s asking too much of you.’

‘It would look odd if I wasn’t her bridesmaid,’ she tried to explain. ‘My parents don’t know about me and Nick. I thought it would make them feel awkward. They wouldn’t know how to treat him if they knew what had happened, so I suggested to Melissa that we didn’t tell them.

‘As far as they’re concerned Melissa met him in London when she came to visit me. Then my fiancé dumped me at around the same time and was, coincidentally, also called Nick. At least that will explain why I’m not on very good form at the moment.’ She managed a twisted smile. ‘Mum thinks I’m jealous because Melissa’s getting married and I’m not.’

Bram’s brows drew together. ‘That’s not very fair on you.’

Sophie shrugged. ‘To be honest, I feel so dead inside I don’t care. Melissa and Nick have got a life to build up here. There’s no point in making things difficult for them, or for Mum and Dad, who’ll see them all the time. I think it’s better for everyone if only Nick and Melissa and I know what really happened. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone else.

‘I shouldn’t really have told you,’ she said rather helplessly. ‘It’s just…sometimes I feel so alone,’ she burst out. ‘I feel so wretched and miserable and lonely, and I hate myself for not being able to snap out of it. I’m spoiling Melissa’s wedding, as Mum keeps pointing out, but there’s no one for me to talk to,’ she said, her voice wobbling treacherously. ‘I can’t talk to Melissa because she’ll just feel even more guilty that I’m so upset, and no one else knows the truth.’

Bram put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him, feeling how rigidly she was holding herself as she struggled for control. ‘I know the truth now,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you told me. You can talk to me whenever you want.’

The urge to burst into tears and sob out all her pain and misery onto his broad shoulder was so strong that Sophie had to struggle for long moments before she could straighten and muster a wavery smile.

‘Thanks, Bram,’ she said. ‘I feel better already for having told you.’

His arm fell from her shoulder. ‘What can I do?’ he asked simply.

Sophie hesitated. ‘Would you…would you come to the wedding? I know it will be hard for you to watch Melissa getting married, Bram, and I feel bad about asking you, but it would mean a lot for me to know that there was someone there for me.’

So Bram had gone to the wedding. Of course he had done it for Sophie. He had stood in the village church and watched Melissa, looking more beautiful than ever, her lovely face lifted adoringly to Nick, and strangely it hadn’t hurt as much as he had thought it would.

Perhaps he had been too worried about Sophie to think too much about his own feelings. Bram didn’t know how she had held herself together through the wedding. She had smiled and chatted, and Bram had wondered if he was only one who could see the agony in her eyes, the only one who knew how much it had cost her to play her part, the only one who appreciated how brave she was.

Sophie had waved her sister off on her honeymoon with the man she herself loved, and gone back to London. She hadn’t seen them since, and only came home to the moors when she knew they were away. She made excuses to her parents, but Bram knew it was because of Nick.

Tucking her hand into his arm, Sophie brought him back to the raw November present, and as she leant companionably against his shoulder Bram was conscious of being aware of her in a way that he hadn’t noticed before. He’d never realised how soft she felt, or how well she fitted into the curve of his body.

She was just the right height, too. He’d never noticed that before either. Her tousled curls tickled his chin softly. They smelt clean and fresh, with the coconutty whiff of gorse flowers.

Of course the shampoo might have been meant to smell of coconuts themselves, Bram acknowledged, in an attempt to distract himself from the feel of Sophie’s body pressed into him, but he was more of a gorse man himself. He had never lain on a tropical beach under a leaning coconut palm and he didn’t want to. Give him a hillside and a gorse bush in bloom any day. The bright, brave yellow flowers, with their slightly exotic fragrance, and the sturdy spikiness of the gorse reminded him of Sophie.

‘It’s been over a year,’ she was saying, unaware of his uneasy distraction. ‘I thought I would be starting to forget Nick now, but I think I still love him just as much as I did when we were engaged. I’ve never felt like that about anyone before, and I can’t imagine ever loving anyone else in the same way. I just don’t see how I’ll ever get over him.’

‘Was he so perfect?’ Bram asked. He had met Nick briefly at the wedding, and he hadn’t been that impressed. Melissa’s husband had struck him as patronising and more than a little smug—but then he would probably have felt smug if he’d won Melissa, Bram had to acknowledge.

‘No, Nick’s not perfect,’ said Sophie. ‘He can be arrogant sometimes, and I think he’s a bit self-centred, but there was just something so exciting about him…I don’t know. It’s chemistry, I suppose. I can’t really explain how he made me feel. And now I can’t bear the thought of another man touching me.’

Bram wasn’t quite sure how he felt about hearing that, especially when her soft warmth was leaning against him and he was wondering, bizarrely, what it would feel like to put his arm round her and pull her closer.

‘I’ve tried to meet other men,’ Sophie continued, ‘but I just end up remembering how it was with Nick. I tell myself that it would be different if I actually came face to face with him again, but I’m afraid. What if it isn’t different? What if it’s exactly the same? Melissa would see that I still loved him, and that would just make things worse for her.’

‘Is that why you stay in London?’

She nodded. ‘I don’t like it there, and I’m desperately homesick, but if I came home I’d have to see Nick all the time, and I don’t know how I’d bear that. Melissa feels terrible about it all. She rings me sometimes and begs me to come up and see them, but I can’t face it, and then I feel awful for upsetting her.

‘It might be different if I had a boyfriend, someone to make Melissa—and Nick, I suppose—think that I was over it and had moved on, but I can’t produce a man out of nowhere! My mother thinks it’s all my fault. She’s dying to get me married.’

‘Why?’ asked Bram, baffled.

‘Oh, because she loved Melissa’s wedding and can’t wait to organise another one. She was very put out when Susan Jackson got married last summer. You know what rivals she is with Maggie Jackson! Mum was really cross that Maggie had managed to marry off no less than three daughters, and all with what Mum calls “proper weddings”, in a church, with long white dresses and a marquee in the garden!’

Sophie shook her head ruefully. ‘I get the definite feeling that I’m letting the side down. Mum’s got this idea that if I’d only make the effort to lose some weight and smarten myself up a bit I’d be able to snaffle up a husband in no time! She’s always asking me if I’ve met anyone nice.’

‘What do you say?’

‘I suppose I play along with it a bit, just for a quiet life,’ said Sophie a little uncomfortably. ‘If I’m seeing someone I let Mum think that it’s more serious than it is. I went out with a guy called Rob for a while, and she got very excited about him. He’s a teacher, and she thought he sounded very suitable, but I had to tell her today that I’m not seeing him any more. That didn’t go down very well.’

She pushed the hair out of her eyes and managed a smile. ‘Mum thinks I’m “just not trying”!’

Bram could practically hear Harriet Beckwith saying it.

‘The thing is, Rob’s a nice guy, but…’

‘But he’s not Nick?’

‘No,’ she acknowledged with a sigh. ‘No, he isn’t. The trouble is that nobody is ever going to be Nick, but I can’t tell Mum that. She got all upset because she was hoping I’d bring Rob home for Christmas, and of course now she wants to know why it’s all over.’

‘What did you tell her?’

Sophie grimaced, remembering. ‘Well, I didn’t know what to say, so I said I’d fallen in love with someone else but it was all very new and I didn’t really want to talk about it yet. It was the best I could think of on the spur of the moment,’ she added defensively, as if Bram had poured scorn on her idea.

‘But of course now Mum’s in full interrogation mode. She keeps accusing me of being secretive and difficult. Why can’t I be sweet and nice like Melissa, who keeps in touch and goes to see them all the time? We ended up having a full-scale row, and I stormed out. It was just like being a teenager again.’ She sighed.