Mistletoe Marriage. Jessica Hart

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