Mistletoe Marriage. Jessica Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ