Mistletoe Marriage. Jessica Hart

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.’