Mistletoe Marriage (Harlequin Romance) Read online

  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.

  And, just like then, she had sought refuge at Haw Gill Farm. Straightening from the comfort of his warm bulk, Sophie looked at Bram and wondered if he had any idea how much he meant to her. He was such a dear friend, so level-headed, so down to earth, so reassuringly solid. The mere sight of him was enough to make her feel safer and steadier.

  ‘All I could think of was coming to see you,’ she said simply.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BRAM’S side felt cold where Sophie had been leaning against him, and part of him wished that she would come back, instead of turning up her collar against the cold and thrusting her hands into her pockets like that. The other part of him was glad that she had moved away. For some reason her nearness was making him feel strange today.

  So strange that when Bess, snuffling along the hedgerow, put up a pheasant, he actually jumped as it exploded out of its hiding place, squawking with indignation.

  It made Sophie start, too, and she looked guiltily at the bales still waiting to be unloaded in the fading light of the winter afternoon.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve held you up. You’ve got better things to do than listen to me moaning on.’

  ‘You know I always enjoy listening to you moan,’ said Bram lightly, ‘but I should finish moving those bales.’ He glanced down at Sophie. ‘It won’t take long. Why don’t you go and put the kettle on? You know what Mum used to say…’

  ‘It’ll all feel better after a nice cup of tea!’ she chanted obediently.

  Molly Thoresby had been a great believer in the power of tea. How many times had Sophie heard her say that? She smiled at the memory as she walked back to the farmhouse. She could see Molly now, lifting the lid on the old kitchen range, setting the kettle firmly on the stove, while Sophie sat at the table and poured out her problems.

  Sophie loved her own mother, of course she did, but she had loved Bram’s almost as much. Harriet Beckwith was smart and well-groomed, while Molly had been warm and comfortable and wise. Molly had never pushed or criticised or complained the way Harriet did. She’d just listened and made tea, and funnily enough things almost always had felt better afterwards. When Molly had died suddenly, a couple of months ago, Sophie had felt nearly as bereft as Bram.

  The big farmhouse kitchen looked exactly the same as it had always done, with its sturdy pine table set in the window, its cluttered dresser and the two shabby armchairs drawn up in front of a wood-burning stove, but it was empty without Molly.

  The clock on the mantelpiece ticked into the silence. Sophie filled the kettle and set it to boil on the range, just the way Molly had used to do. She had always loved this shabby, comfortable kitchen. Her mother’s was immaculate, full of modern appliances and spacious work surfaces, but it wasn’t a place you wanted to linger.

  Outside, the sky was streaked with pink over the moors, and it was getting darker by the minute. Sophie liked the short winter afternoons, and the way switching on a lamp could make the darkness beyond the windows intensify. She put on the lights in the kitchen so that Bram could see their inviting yellow glow as he came home. It must be awful for him coming back to a dark house each evening now that Molly had gone.

  She stood in the big bay window and watched the light fade over the moors. Her mind drifted to thoughts of Nick, the way it always did at quiet times like this. She thought about his heart-shaking smile, about the shiver of pleasure that went through her at the merest brush of his fingers, about the thrill of being near him.

  Being with Nick had never felt safe—not in the way being with Bram did, for instance. There had always been an element of risk in their relationship. Sophie could see that now. She had never been able to relax completely with Nick for fear that she would lose him. Even when she had been at her happiest it had felt as if she were on point of exploding with the sheer intensity of it all. It had been a dangerous feeling, but a wonderful one too. Loving Nick had made her feel electric, alive.

  Would she ever feel that way again? Sophie wondered. It didn’t seem possible. There was only one Nick, and he b
elonged to her sister now.

  The sound of the back door opening jerked Sophie out of her thoughts.

  ‘In your kennel, Bess,’ she heard Bram say. ‘Stay!’

  Poor old Bess was a softie amongst sheepdogs. Sophie was sure that she secretly yearned to be a pet, so that she could come inside and sit by the fire. Every day she sat hopefully at the door while Bram took his boots off, before being ordered off to her warm, clean kennel.

  ‘You’re a working dog,’ Bram would tell her sternly. ‘You can come in when you retire.’

  ‘That dog is hopeless,’ he said as he came into the kitchen wearing thick grey socks on his feet. His brown hair was ruffled by the wind, and his eyes looked so blue in his square, brown face that for a startled moment Sophie felt as if she were looking at a stranger.

  ‘She’s not that bad,’ said Sophie as she warmed the teapot.

  ‘She is. She’s useless. I’m never going have a starring role on One Man and His Dog with Bess.’ Bram pretended to complain. ‘Sometimes I think it would be easier to run around after the sheep myself and let Bess have the whistle!’

  Sophie laughed. ‘At least she tries. And she adores you.’

  ‘I wish she’d adore me by doing what I told her,’ sighed Bram.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not how adoring works,’ said Sophie sadly, and he glanced at her, compassion in his blue eyes.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  Sophie kept swirling the hot water around in the teapot.

  ‘Does it ever get any better, Bram?’ she asked.

  He didn’t pretend not to understand her. ‘Yes, it does,’ he said. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have got better with you,’ she pointed out. ‘How long is it since you were engaged to Melissa?’

  ‘More than ten years,’ he admitted.

  ‘And you’re still not totally over her, are you?’

  Bram didn’t answer immediately. He warmed his hands by the wood-burning stove and thought about Melissa, with her hair like spun gold and her violet eyes and that smile that made the sun come out.