“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 a farm,” said Bram. “A girl who hates cold mornings and mud is no good to me. That’s obviously where I’ve been going wrong all these years. All my girlfriends have been town girls. 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? On winter nights she could draw the thick, faded red curtains in the sitting room against the wind and 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.

Jessica Hart was born in West Africa, and has suffered from itchy feet ever since, traveling and working around the world in a wide variety of interesting but very lowly jobs, all of which have provided inspiration to draw on when it comes to the settings and plots of her stories. Now she lives a rather more settled existence in York, England, where she has been able to pursue her interest in history, although she still yearns sometimes for wider horizons. If you’d like to know more about Jessica, visit her Web site www.jessicahart.co.uk

Books by Jessica Hart

HARLEQUIN ROMANCE®

3844—HERE COMES THE BRIDE (2-in-1 with Rebecca Winters)

3861—CONTRACTED: CORPORATE WIFE

Mistletoe Marriage
Jessica Hart

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

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.

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 belonged 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.

‘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.

And actually, now that she looked at him properly, he did have rather an intriguing mouth. Funny that she had never noticed that before, thought Sophie. It must be something to do with all this talk about falling in love. She couldn’t remember ever noticing Bram’s mouth before. It was cool and quiet, as you might expect, but there was something about it that made her feel vaguely…what was the word? Not excited. Not definitely not that. No, disturbed. Did it make her feel just a tiny bit unsettled?

Just the teensiest bit sexy?

Horrified by the thought, Sophie shook the feeling aside. This was Bram. It felt all wrong to be studying him like this. She shouldn’t be thinking about his eyes, and definitely not about his mouth. Not that way, anyway.

‘If we were engaged you’d have the perfect excuse to stay here with me rather than at Glebe Farm at Christmas.’ Bram returned to the point of the discussion. ‘You’d still have to face Nick, of course, on your father’s birthday and at Christmas lunch, but it wouldn’t be for long. You’d be able to leave whenever you wanted, instead of having to wait for them to decide to go. We can always say that there’s a crisis here. We’re never short of those,’ he added, with a gleam of humour.

It would be easier to get through Christmas if Bram were there, Sophie had to admit. He had a quiet self-assurance that lent him an impressive manner. Bram was never rude, never showed off and, more importantly, he never let Sophie’s mother rile him. You could always rely on him to ease an awkward silence or defuse tension with humour—qualities which were likely to come in very handy indeed at the Beckwiths’ Christmas dinner.

His presence might make things easier for Melissa, too. Sophie was very conscious of how guilty her sister felt about the situation. Perhaps if Melissa thought that she had found happiness with Bram she would be able to relax and enjoy being married to Nick.

And Nick? How would he feel? Would he be glad to think that Sophie had found someone else and was finally over him?

No prizes for guessing how her mother would feel if she and Bram announced their engagement. Harriet would be delighted. Not only would she get the family Christmas she had planned, but she would have another wedding to plan in the New Year. It would be the best Christmas present Sophie could possibly give her.

Her father would be pleased, too, to have both his daughters at his seventieth birthday party.

Yes, it would be easier for everyone if she said that she was marrying Bram.

But could she marry him just to make her family happy?

Sophie turned the mug of tea between her hands.

Could it work? What would it be like to marry Bram? She had never thought of him as anything other than a friend before. What would he be like a husband? As a lover?

She studied him from under her lashes. His mouth was firm, cool, quiet. How would it feel against her own? What would his kiss be like? And those square, capable farmer’s hands. She had seen them gently easing a lamb into the world, running assessingly down the flank of a heifer, fixing an engine with deft fingers. She had never felt them smoothing over her skin. What would that be like?

The very thought made her uncomfortable.

‘This is crazy,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘I can’t believe we’re seriously talking about getting married just to save a bit of awkwardness at the Christmas dinner table!’

‘I was thinking more about saving awkwardness in life generally,’ said Bram lightly, sensing that the moment had gone.

‘We could never go through with it,’ Sophie said, still torn.

‘Couldn’t we?’

‘No.’ Her tentative smile faded. ‘No, we couldn’t. It’s not that I can’t see the advantages, Bram. I don’t really want to go through life on my own, watching from the sidelines and wasting my time feeling bitter. Of course I don’t. But it wouldn’t be fair. I care about you too much to marry you knowing how I still feel about Nick. You deserve better than that.’

‘Better in what way?’ he asked wryly, surprised at the strength of his disappointment.

It was funny. An hour ago the thought of marrying Sophie would never have crossed his mind, but now that it had it seemed like one of the best ideas he had ever had.

‘You deserve more than second best, Bram,’ said Sophie in a gentle voice. ‘You deserve someone who believes in you and loves you completely for yourself, and I know that you’ll meet her sooner or later. She’ll be real and warm and kind, and you’ll wonder how you could ever have loved anyone else. You’ll be her rock, and she’ll be your star, and you’ll be so happy together that you’ll wake every morning with her and be grateful to me for not marrying you now.’

Getting up, she moved round the table until she could put her arms around him from behind and bend to kiss his cheek. ‘You’re my best friend,’ she whispered in his ear, and Bram closed his eyes briefly, shocked at the jolt of awareness he felt at her nearness and her warmth.

‘I know you’re just trying to find a way out for me, but you’ve got to think of yourself too. I just wish things could be different for both of us.’

Bram put his hand up to cover hers, where they were linked on his chest, and wished that his throat didn’t suddenly feel so tight and uncomfortable.

‘So do I,’ he said.

CHAPTER THREE

HARRIET BECKWITH came out of the kitchen the moment she heard Sophie let herself in at the front door. In spite of wearing an apron and actually holding a rolling pin, she managed to look the antithesis of the clichéd farmer’s wife. No buxom figure or floury hands for Sophie’s mother. Instead she was a handsome, well-groomed woman, with every hair perfectly in place and an air of brisk competence.

‘Look at the state of you, Sophie!’ She tutted as Sophie took off her jacket. ‘You’re absolutely covered in mud! And as for your hair…’ She trailed off in despair. ‘I suppose you’ve been up at Haw Gill?’

As always, she managed to make Sophie feel like a scrubby, rather exasperating schoolgirl. Sophie tried not to feel sullen and defensive in response, but it was hard sometimes to remember that she was thirty-one and not fourteen.

‘I thought I’d go and see Bram,’ she said placatingly.

‘I don’t know what on earth you two find to talk about,’ said Harriet, shaking her head.

What would her mother say if she knew they had been talking about marriage? Sophie watched Harriet pick up the jacket she had just slung carelessly over the chair and brush it down fussily.

Knowing her mother, she’d probably just sigh and say, Not with your hair like that, surely, Sophie?

‘Oh, you know—this and that,’ she answered vaguely.

Harriet was still brushing fastidiously. ‘Where have you been in this jacket? It’s covered in dog hairs and leaves!’

‘That’ll be from the Land Rover,’ said Sophie. ‘Bram drove me home.’

They had talked easily enough once they had dropped the bizarre marriage idea. Bram hadn’t tried to persuade her to change her mind, and Sophie thought that it was just as well. She had been perilously close to taking him up on his offer at one point, and, even though she was sure that she had made the right decision, she had a nasty feeling that it wouldn’t have taken much for her to give in.

It was all just the same as ever. Or almost. Sophie had been aware of a faint constraint on the drive down to Glebe Farm. ‘I’ll maybe see you at Christmas, then,’ was all Bram had said when he dropped her off. He hadn’t asked her to think about marrying him, to take her time and maybe reconsider.

So that was that.

‘I’m glad to hear that Bram didn’t let you go wandering around in the dark,’ sniffed Harriet. ‘At least he’s got some sense.’

Bram was always sensible, always practical. Which made it all the more amazing that he would come up with that idea of getting married. He had even managed to make it sound like the obvious solution.

‘It’s only half past six,’ Sophie protested, following her mother into the kitchen as she tried to shake the whole thought of that strange proposal from her mind.

The kitchen at Glebe Farm could not have been more different from the one at Haw Gill. In place of comfortable, shabby chairs and cluttered dressers there were gleaming steel surfaces, installed when Harriet’s catering business had begun to take off. That had now been expanded into a specially designed outbuilding, where Sophie’s mother controlled the five women from the village who helped there with the ruthless efficiency of a Harvard MBA graduate. Talk about the iron fist in the oven glove.

‘How is Bram getting on, anyway?’ her mother asked as she went back to rolling pastry. When Sophie tried to make pastry she got flour everywhere, but Harriet’s apron was pristine. ‘It must be difficult for him now Molly’s gone.’

Sophie clambered awkwardly onto one of the modern stools at the breakfast bar. ‘He’s managing.’

‘He needs to find himself a wife.’ Intent on her pastry, Harriet didn’t notice Sophie’s instinctive start. What was this? A conspiracy? ‘I heard that Rachel took herself off to York,’ she went on, before Sophie had a chance to reply. ‘I didn’t think she’d last long.’

‘Mum, you hardly knew her!’

‘You didn’t need to know her. You just needed to look at her.’ Harriet clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘I could have told Bram that he was wasting his time a long time ago. A city girl like that is no good to him. He needs someone who can help him make a go of that farm. There’s good land up there. He could do so much more with it.’

Harriet was a great believer in diversification. ‘You can’t get by on farming alone nowadays,’ she would tell anyone who would listen. ‘You’ve got to try something different.’ She herself had an excellent business brain, and Sophie had often suspected that she had been bored as a farmer’s wife until yet another agricultural crisis had prompted her to set up her own catering company.

It had been such a success that Harriet was always encouraging farmers like Bram to follow her example and branch out. She thought he should convert his steadings into holiday cottages, offer shooting weekends, or turn his lower fields into a par three golf course. She seemed frustrated that Bram was apparently content to stick with farming sheep and cattle at Haw Gill, as generations of Thoresbys had done before him.

‘I’m very fond of Bram,’ Harriet often said, tutting, ‘but he’s got no ambition. He’s not going anywhere.’

But it seemed to Sophie that Bram was already exactly where he wanted to be. He had no need to go anywhere at all.

‘It’s just as well Melissa didn’t marry Bram,’ Harriet said now. ‘He wouldn’t have been able to offer her the kind of life she’s used to. Look at Haw Gill. That farmhouse has hardly changed in fifty years!’

No, and as a result it was so much more comfortable than Glebe Farm, Sophie thought to herself.

‘Anyway, she’s much better off with Nick,’ her mother said with satisfaction. ‘His company’s doing very well, you know. He can look after her.’

Spoil her, you mean, Sophie corrected her mother, but only mentally. She wouldn’t waste her breath saying it out loud.

‘Melissa and Bram were far too young to get engaged.’ Harriet continued her train of thought. ‘Your father said so at the time, and he was right. It would never have worked. But it was a shame for Bram. I do wonder sometimes if he’s still got a soft spot for Melissa. He never seems to have got close to settling down with anyone else. It does seem a waste. He’s a nice young man.’

Bram was more than nice, thought Sophie, vaguely aggrieved but not quite sure why. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t always known that Bram was in love with Melissa.

‘Did he tell you about Vicky Manning?’ her mother was asking, laying the circle of pastry over a pie dish. She cut off the excess with a few swift, clean movements and began knocking up the edges with the back of the knife.

‘No.’ Sophie was surprised at the apparent non sequitur. Vicky had been in the year below her at school. She was a plump, pretty girl, nice enough, but a bit wishy-washy in Sophie’s opinion. ‘What about her?’

‘She was supposed to be getting married in less than a month,’ Harriet told her. ‘They’d booked that hotel over Whitby way. Her dress was made and the invitations had gone out and everything, and then her fiancé Keith lost his nerve and called the whole thing off! He’s gone off to Manchester to get a job, and Vicky’s been left to pick up all the pieces. She devastated, apparently.’

‘Oh, poor thing!’ Vicky might not be the most interesting person in the world, but no one deserved to be treated like that. Sophie knew how Vicky must feel. She might not have got as far as sending out invitations or choosing a dress herself, but that didn’t make the rejection and humiliation any easier to bear. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said sincerely.

‘It’s hard on her,’ Harriet agreed, ‘but I dare say it’s all for the best. According to Maggie, Keith was always going on about how boring it was up here, and hankering after the bright lights, but Vicky wouldn’t have wanted to move. She’s a real country girl.’

She checked the temperature on the oven, put in the pie and closed the door, wiping her hands on a teatowel. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up with Bram,’ she said.

‘Bram?’ Sophie sat up straight on her stool, outraged. ‘Vicky’s not the right girl for Bram!’

‘Well, I don’t know…’ Harriet considered the matter as she wiped down the work surface. ‘She could do with losing a bit of weight, but she’s got a sweet little face and she’s a hard worker. She’s grown up on the moors, too. I think she would make a good farmer’s wife.’

‘Maybe, but not Bram’s,’ said Sophie stubbornly.

‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ said Harriet. ‘There aren’t that many suitable girls around here. Bram will need to settle down soon, if he wants to have children. He’s certainly not getting any younger.’

And neither are you. Sophie didn’t know why her mother didn’t say it out loud.

‘Bram’s only thirty-two, Mother. He’s not exactly decrepit!’

‘He’ll need to be getting on with it,’ said Harriet firmly. ‘I don’t know why you’re all so picky nowadays. If you wait too long for someone perfect, you’ll have lost your chance. Look at you and that Rob,’ she went on in an aggrieved tone. ‘He sounded so nice, and all you can say is that it didn’t feel right.’

Sophie sighed. She didn’t want to start this argument again. ‘It didn’t feel right, Mum. You can’t marry someone just because they’re available and you’re not sure if you’ll find anyone better! And now I’ve met someone else. I told you that.’

Her mind flashed to Bram, and she thought about what he’d said. What would it be like to be able to say, Look, it’s Bram, Mum. We’re in love and we’re going to get married! What would her mother say? Would she believe it?

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