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Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
Cara Colter
Back at the Christmas tree farm… Hanna Merrifield’s childhood family home was once where everyone came to buy their Christmas trees on snowy evenings. Now Hanna has returned to save the farm… Standing in her way is blast-from-the-past Sam Chisholm. Hanna’s first crush might have swapped his leathers for a well-cut suit, but he’s as irresistible as ever—and he wants to buy her farm! Sparks still fly between the rebel and the good girl, but as they work together to turn the business around, something magical happens under the mistletoe…
“So …” He took her cue and changed the subject, all business. “A real tree fetches a pretty good price in the city?”
Hanna nodded. “A king’s ransom. Mistletoe is even more dear.”
Oh, gee, did she have to bring up mistletoe? Around him, of all people?
“Oh, I know mistletoe is pricey,” he said. “I bought some once.”
“You have never bought a tree but you bought mistletoe?” Crazy to be curious, but she was. “Why?”
He looked off into the distance. “I think I had this cheesy idea that if I carried it around in my pocket I could haul it out and hold it over my head and collect lots of free Christmas kisses.”
She felt a shiver along her spine at the thought of meeting Sam Chisholm under the mistletoe.
Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
Cara Colter
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CARA COLTER lives in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is the recent recipient of an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the �Love and Laughter’ category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her or learn more about her through her website: www.cara-colter.com (http://www.cara-colter.com).
To all my incredible new friends in New Zealand: the Browns, the Burtons, the Emmersons, the Pilkingtons and the Kalinowskis. Thank you. Your genuine kindness and generosity humbles and amazes.
Contents
Cover (#u5dae9a3a-0576-5823-9f23-3f95d4421ed0)
Introduction (#u9c0b3c8a-03bf-521b-a836-5576ed4f8cc9)
Title Page (#u97c1a8fb-ddda-50b4-ab29-7cfc0f3d9556)
About the Author (#u9093fc4a-fd84-5172-b395-1833575cf87b)
Dedication (#uc82e4922-41ff-549c-b647-e49c559ff7b9)
CHAPTER ONE (#u3d07fa48-656c-59b4-9012-13168d83b0ea)
CHAPTER TWO (#u5f12f81e-9057-5f2e-8038-729c7a43af90)
CHAPTER THREE (#u81f24800-54bd-53f7-9726-a70e1f0ea1cf)
CHAPTER FOUR (#uc9ba5339-fb07-5538-8e29-1d3046fe8eb9)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ud5bf9241-1adf-53a6-9376-553c232e625f)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_2906c8fe-7c8b-58d1-b1e0-24e27a6c3aec)
“I QUIT!”
Hanna Merrifield held the phone away from her ear, and then tucked it in close again so her coworkers at the upscale accounting firm of Banks and Banks would not be disturbed by the loud, belligerent voice of her caller.
“Now, now, Mr. Dewey,” she said, her tone conciliatory, “you can’t just quit.”
“Can’t?” Mr. Dewey shouted, outraged. “Can’t?”
“It’s just that,” Hanna said soothingly, resisting the temptation to hold the phone away again, “you would be leaving me in quite a pinch.” Her eyes slid to her desktop calendar. “It’s November thirtieth. Christmas is only weeks away.”
“Hang Christmas.”
That sentiment expressed how she had felt herself a million times or so. Hanna closed her eyes against the work, piled in neat stacks on her desk, each screaming its urgent deadline. Not now, she wanted to shout at Mr. Dewey, the manager of Christmas Valley Farm.
The farm had been in her family since the late 1800s. But Hanna had become the sole, and reluctant, owner of it upon the death of her mother six months ago.
Christmas Valley Farm. The place that she never wanted to go back to.
And it really, until this phone call, had looked like she might never have to.
“Isn’t someone coming to look at it tomorrow?” she reminded Mr. Dewey. “A potential buyer?” She didn’t add finally. “If you could just hang on until the showing, give me a chance to find someone else to manage it, I would be most appreciative—”
“Have a listen to this.” A terrible noise came over the phone line: the screeching of tires and blaring of horns.
“What on earth?”
“It’s that damn pony. Evil, she is. She’s out on the road again. I’m done. I’m done with the midget horse, I’m done with people knocking on my cottage door day and night demanding trees and wreaths and sleigh rides. I’m done with all the ho-ho-ho and merriment. I hate it all, and the dwarf horse, Molly, the most.”
Really, he was summing up the way Hanna herself had often felt growing up on the Christmas tree farm. But that feeling of being exhausted and fed up and one hundred percent done with all things Christmas didn’t come at the beginning.
Her resentments—about all the work, and all the demands, and the elf costume, and her father’s new and inventive gimmicks to sell trees and wreaths—piled up by the end of the frantic weeks leading to Christmas.
“Mr. Dewey,” Hanna said tentatively, “Have you been drinking?”
“I have, but not nearly as much as I plan to be.”
And with that, the phone went dead in Hanna’s hands. She called back instantly—surely he didn’t intend to leave Molly in the middle of the highway—but Mr. Dewey did not pick up.
She sat at her desk for a moment, completely paralyzed. A horse loose on the highway. And no manager on the farm’s best—well, only—twenty-four income-earning days?
The farm’s profits had dwindled over the past decade, but still rose in Hanna’s throat when she thought of trying to meet those expenses herself.
The place had to sell. It was more imperative now than ever. She would have to meet the buyer tomorrow herself. Maybe that would be a good thing. She couldn’t imagine Mr. Dewey, in his current frame of mind, doing the best job of presenting the farm for sale.
Then what? Hanna asked herself. She could not take the weeks until Christmas off work. She forced herself to breathe.
One thing at a time.
It was a two-hour drive to the farm in upstate New York. The cantankerous Molly could well be dead by the time Hanna reached there.
Hanna had the uncharitable thought—one she was sure she shared with Mr. Dewey—that Molly’s demise could be nothing but a blessing. Maybe, if the pony was gone, he could even be convinced to come back to work.
It was a mark of her desperation that she would want him back.
But, right now, she had other worries. One thing working in a huge accounting firm had taught her?
Liability, liability, liability.
“I’m so sorry,” Hanna stammered to Mr. Banks, a few minutes later, “I have to leave. Family emergency.” This was, technically, not quite true, as she no longer had a family.
Or, she reminded herself sadly, any hope of one. Her fiancГ©, Darren, had broken off their engagement not a month after the death of her mom.
Not that she wanted to be thinking of that right now. She had the immediate problem of a pony in the middle of the road just waiting to rain lawsuits into her life.
Mr. Banks did not look the least sympathetic. He pulled his glasses down on his nose and looked disapprovingly over the tops of them at her.
Since the end of her relationship, Hanna had been putting in twelve-and fourteen-hour days. Her work had been filling all the spaces in her life, and quite satisfactorily, too.
She had become Mr. Banks’s darling, and she knew she was, at the moment, his first choice for the promotion coming up.
“How long will you be gone?” he asked sharply.
“Twenty-four hours,” Hanna said rashly.
He considered this, and then sighed as if she was a big disappointment to him. “Not a minute more,” he said sternly.
Her promotion now seemed to be in at least as much danger as Molly on the highway!
Her life, just a few months ago, had felt so comfortably solid, as though her future was chiseled in stone. Advancing nicely in her job, planning her wedding...but now everything seemed to be the way she hated it the most: totally up in the air.
* * *
Sam Chisholm turned his wipers on a higher speed as the fat snowflakes plopped on his windshield and melted. The early winter storm was thickening. Snow was gathering heavily in the boughs of evergreen trees, and drifting in white mounds along the road.
This part of rural upstate New York was Christmas-card–pretty, and the storm, despite presenting some driving challenges, was only adding to the charm of the picture.
Rolling hills were frosted in thick white. Golden light spilled out of farmhouse windows, casting shadows on towering barns. Cows and horses were dark silhouettes against the snowy backdrop. Sam’s car passed over quaint bridges that crossed creeks as silver as Christmas-tree tinsel.
He knew this area of the country, but time had a way of changing things and he was beginning to wonder if he had missed the driveway.
There it was.
Christmas Valley Farm.
He’d almost passed right by it, and his shrewd businessman’s mind made note that the sign had faded, and it was not lit. He was no kind of expert on Christmas trees—or Christmas for that matter—but presumably people might want to choose their tree in the evening. He glanced at his watch. The darkness of the night suggested midnight, but it was only eight o’clock.
Sam turned in sharply enough to feel his car skid a touch. There was a For Sale sign, even less visible and more faded than the farm sign. There were also fresh tire tracks through the snow, and he could see where the other vehicle had fishtailed on the slippery ground.
He felt his own tires hesitate, trying to find purchase on the slick track. He had an appointment. He would have thought, in the interest of making a good impression—not to mention the convenience of customers doing early Christmas shopping—the drive would be plowed.
Suddenly, an apparition materialized on the drive to the right of him. A creature, gnomelike and hooded, hunched against the storm, led a fat pony toward the golden glow of a distant barn.
It was another Christmas-card–worthy picture, except that when it was caught in the sweep of his headlights, the pony started, and leapt onto the track in front of Sam’s vehicle. The gnome didn’t have the good sense to let go, and went to its knees, and was dragged along the ground.
Sam had been creeping along, but when he punched his brakes, he felt the car slide, then heard the sickening thump.
Sam slammed to full halt, and leaped from his vehicle and raced around the front. The gnome was on its knees, untouched by the vehicle, spitting out snow. A tubby, dun-colored pony with a scruffy black mane, snow caught in a shaggy coat, was nearly beneath his bumper.
It wagged its fur-and-snow-matted legs in the air, then grunted, and leapt to its feet. It gave him a look that appeared to be loaded with malice before it staggered to one side of the road and glared balefully back at them. Sam moved toward it, but the pony shuffled away, backing up one step for his every step forward.
“Don’t try and catch her—she’ll bolt,” the kneeling gnome said, in a surprisingly feminine voice.
The gnome was right. When he stopped, the pony stopped. He had more immediate things that needed his attention, anyway.
“Are you all right?” Sam dropped to his knees in the snowbank beside her. “Why on earth didn’t you let go when the damn thing bolted? It nearly dragged you right in front of the car!”
“If it hadn’t taken me an hour and half to catch her, I might have!”
Something about the tone, annoyed and clipped, and yet husky and smooth, sent a little shiver along Sam’s spine. He reached for the hood and brushed it back, aware he was holding his breath.
The hood fell away, and Sam found himself staring into the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. They were an astonishing hazel, part brown, part green, part gold.
He should have started breathing again, but he didn’t. Her hair, light brown, turned to honey as it caught the distant light from the barn. It tumbled out from under the hood. It looked to Sam as if her hair might have started the day piled up on top of her head, not a strand daring to be out of place. Now, part of it had escaped its band and part of it had not, and it hissed with static from the hood being pulled away.
Recognition stole his breath away.
Hanna Merrifield was all grown up, and she was not in the least gnome-like.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_fd9c4c7b-c17b-59bd-b609-775bbd2b8a41)
SAM REGARDED HANNA with astounded awareness. Under a ridiculously large and cumbersome plaid jacket—she had obviously thrown it on over the top of what looked to be a beautifully tailored black slack suit—she was lovely, and slender, and surprisingly curvy in all the right places given that slenderness.
She glared at the pony in frustration, running her fingers through the lush tangle of her burnished hair, scraping a mat of snow from it, but failing to restore her locks to any kind of order.
Despite the wildness of her hair, her makeup was subtle and expert: a hint of green shadow bringing out the spectacular hazel of eyes that were enormous with a combination of both fright and annoyance at the moment.
She had a touch of gloss on her mouth that made her lips look plump and kissable. Sam remembered, suddenly and in almost excruciating detail, the flavor and texture and warmth and invitation of those lips.
He realized his hand was still resting at the edge of her hood, and he snapped it down by his side. He noticed she had a brush of color on high cheekbones—from the crisp air or chasing the pony or an expert hand with a makeup brush—he couldn’t be sure.
But in a face that was otherwise winter-pale, her skin as delicate as porcelain, the color on her cheekbones made them look sculpted and accentuated the breathtaking perfection of her face. It occurred to him that once she had been cute. That cuteness had transformed into beauty.
“Hanna. Hanna Merrifield,” he said, and then ran a hand through his own hair, sending melted snow flying. “Mr. Dewey told me you didn’t live here anymore. He said you haven’t lived here for years.”
“I haven’t, I don’t,” she said, a slight tremor in her voice, more shaken than she was letting on.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Mr. Dewey quit two hours ago, though I’m hoping by morning he will have reconsidered. He let me know the pony was loose on the highway.”
Hanna would, he knew, be super annoyed to know that despite the polished perfection of her makeup and hair, and the clear indication of education in her voice, he still saw the girl who had been pressed into service as a Christmas elf to help with selling trees, visits with Santa, and pony-pulled sleigh rides on her family’s Christmas tree farm.
Maybe it was because the too-large parka over her suit reminded him of her as an elf all those years ago. The boots, comical in their largeness, obviously did not belong to her either, but added to the impression of a child playing the grown-up.
He remembered, suddenly, as clearly as if were yesterday, the day he had seen her in her green elf costume in her father’s Christmas tree lot. She had probably been all of fifteen.
It was the first time he’d ever noticed the girl who went to the same high school as he did, but was in the grade behind him, and therefore invisible.
But in that elf suit? Anything but invisible. Cute and comical, but with the length of her legs being shown off by the shortness of the green tunic, there had been just a whisper of something else...
She’d been mortified that he and his friends had seen her, and if he had been then the man he was now, he would have possibly had the grace to pretend the encounter had never happened.
But he had just been a boy himself, and after that day, he had not been able to resist teasing her when their paths crossed. He had liked seeing her looking flustered and adorable, spitting at him like a cornered barn kitten.
But then, he reminded himself, she had shown him she had some claw, and that was a lesson about Hanna Merrifield that he would do well to remember.
Her focus moved off the pony, and she was regarding him intently now, curious how he had known her, and then recognition dawned in her features.
“Sam?” she asked, and it was evident she was as stunned by this unexpected reunion as he was. “Sam Chisholm?”
“One and the same.”
Hanna Merrifield’s fingers combed through the lushness of her thick hair once more, and she sent a flustered look and a frown at the clumsy boots on her feet, and muttered, “Oh, sheesh.”
Sam raised an eyebrow at her and she flushed.
“A person just wants to make a good impression when they meet someone from their past,” she said, tossing her head a bit defensively. Then she bit her lip, regretting having said it, even though it was true. “I’m an accountant. Banks and Banks.”
Sam realized she was trying to divorce herself from the very image that had first leapt into his mind: of Hanna as an adorable Christmas elf. Still, he tried not to look too shocked. Hanna, an accountant?
“Why on earth didn’t you let go of the pony?”
“Easy for you to say,” she said, tearing her gaze away from her boots, and glaring sideways at the pony. “I’d just caught her.”
Was Hanna cradling one of her hands in the other? “Did you do something to your hand?”
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“I seem to remember pony frustrations in your past,” he said, and earned himself a sharp look that clearly said I’m an accountant now. I just told you.
“It’s the same pony,” she said, reluctantly and not at all fondly. “And now she’s on the loose again.”
His fault entirely, from Hanna’s tone of voice.
“Well, she doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. Can I have a look at your hand?”
“No. And she never appears to be going anywhere. She’s not fond of wasted motion. She’s saving all her energy for when I make another attempt to catch her.”
Against his better judgment, Sam held out his hands to her. He noticed she reached out with only one. Still, he could feel the warmth of that hand rising past the Merino wool of a very good glove. He set his legs against the slippery footing, and then pulled Hanna to her feet.
They stood regarding one another. He looked for signs that she had changed, and despite the cut of her I’m-an-accountant-now suit and the passage of nine years, he found very few. If he was to wipe away that faint dusting of makeup, Hanna Merrifield would look much the same as she had looked at fifteen. The bone structure that had promised great beauty had delivered.
Except there was something faintly bruised about her eyes, like she carried sorrow around with her, which Sam knew she did. It made him want to squeeze her uninjured hand, which he realized, uncomfortably, he was still holding.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” he said, and gave in to the impulse to offer comfort. He gave her hand a quick, hard squeeze before dropping it. “Wasn’t it six months ago now?”
Hanna nodded. She was looking down at her hand as if even through her glove she had felt the same nearly electrical jolt as him.
Sam shoved his own hands in the deep pockets of his long, leather jacket.
“I’m also sorry about nearly running you down. You and the pony just seemed to materialize out of the night. Do you think the pony is all right?”
“I’m afraid so,” she said gloomily, and he couldn’t help but smile at her tone. “She’s the reason I’m out here. The farm manager has just quit because of her dreadful antics. Though I’m hoping I can talk him out of it.”
Though he wondered about the wisdom of trying to talk the manager out of quitting when he had obviously left her in a complete pickle, Sam kept that to himself.
“Bad timing, isn’t it?” he said. “Right before Christmas? His defection explains why the driveway isn’t plowed for customers.”
“I don’t think the tree stand or gift shop has been open at night.”
The businessman in him couldn’t stop from commenting, “But that’s when it’s convenient for people who work during the day to shop.”
“It’s early in the season,” Hanna said, a bit defensively, and then sighed. “You don’t know the half of it.” Her gloom seemed to deepen.
“Why don’t you tell me?” Sam told himself it was purely his interest in the farm, and not any kind of interest in her, that made him want to know the details.
She hesitated, then shrugged. “Things have been different the last few years and the farm has been run by managers. It has been on a downward slide ever since.”
Then she seemed to realize she did not want to confide in him after all, and bit down on that plump bottom lip.
Hanna pulled herself to her full height, which was not very high, maybe five foot four or five, and said with graceful polish, “And you, Sam? What are you doing in the driveway of Christmas Valley Farm on a night when it would seem wiser to stay inside and drink cocoa? Are you shopping for your Christmas tree?”
“I’m not exactly the stay-inside-and-drink-cocoa kind of guy,” he said with a snort. “And I’m even less of a shopping-for-a-Christmas-tree kind of guy.”
And he saw something flash through her eyes. Crazy to think it might be a memory of that one kiss they had shared so many years ago.
“I understand you’ve put the farm up for sale,” he said. “I’m here as a prospective buyer.”
* * *
“You?” Hanna could hear the disbelief in her voice, and she saw the hardness settle around his features at her tone.
Still, it was shocking. Sam Chisholm buying Christmas Valley Farm? The shock of it took her mind off the throb of dull pain in her hand that had been caused by hanging on to the pony’s rope when she should have let go.
Though, now, too late, after the disbelieving words had come from her mouth, Hanna saw there were differences between this man and the one she remembered from years ago.
Sam Chisholm’s shoulders, gathering snow on them already, were immense under a tailored long coat that was not buttoned. It was the kind of coat people around here did not wear: a beautiful dark leather, turned up at the collar. He had a plaid scarf casually threaded under the collar of the coat.
Would she have recognized this man if she had passed him on the street? Of course, she had the fleeting thought that if they were going to meet unexpectedly, she would have much rather passed him on the street.
In her rush to get home to deal with the Molly emergency, Hanna had not packed proper farm wear.
So she stood before this gloriously attractive man in a too-large mackinaw of her father’s, and boots that may have been her father’s too, which she had found still standing at the back door of the farmhouse though he had been gone for years.
Her fault that her father, too young for such things, had collapsed in his tracks, hands over the heart that had exploded in his chest? The heart that she had broken.
The thought blasted through Hanna. Her life in the city was so full, so busy. Planning for the wedding, her pace had become even more frantic. She hadn’t had time for thoughts like that. And she had loved the fact that her life was too full for thoughts of the past. Maybe that was why, even now, she filled every spare second with work...
The guilt she had been running from seemed to have settled over her like a cloud as soon as she had opened the back door of the farm, stuffy from being shut up for so long.
Easier to focus on the distraction of Sam Chisholm than the guilt she knew had been waiting for this moment: her return to her childhood home after a six-year absence.
Sam looked deeply sophisticated, and gave off the unconscious air of wealth and control. He also radiated a certain power that went beyond the perfection of his physique, that perfection obvious even beneath the line of that expensive jacket.
His hair was devil’s food-dark, cut short and neat. His face was clean-shaven and exquisitely handsome: wide-set eyes, straight nose, honed jawline, strong chin with just the faintest and sexiest hint of a cleft in it. His lips were full and sensual, and there was something faintly intimidating about the set of them.
But right underneath those surface impressions of strength and confidence lurked a certain roguish charm—of a pirate or a highwayman. In fact, that remembered rogue seemed to dance in the darkness of those eyes, so brown they appeared black in the shadowed light of the snowy night.
“You don’t think I’m a suitable buyer for your farm?” he asked, those dark eyes piercing her. His voice was faintly amused, but challenging at the same time.
His voice reminded her of a large cat: a growl that could be pure sensuality, or could be danger, or some lethal combination of both. It had an almost physical quality to it, as if sandpaper had whispered across the nape of her neck.
Hanna registered, as a sad afterthought to her sizzling awareness of how damned attractive Sam was, that she had managed to insult the only prospective buyer the farm had seen since it was listed six months ago. And she’d unwittingly revealed its slow decline to him, as well.
“I’m sorry,” Hanna said hastily. “No insult was intended.”
“None was taken,” he said, but his voice remained the pure raw silk of a gunslinger just as prepared to draw as to smile.
“I can see you’ve changed,” she said, but the brightness in her voice felt forced. In truth she felt a certain unfathomable loss at the change in him. “You are certainly not the renegade boy I remember, though I must say you don’t strike me as any kind of a farmer.”
The sense of him having changed in some fundamental way was underscored by the deep confidence in his voice. And by the way he was dressed, which backed up what she had just said about him not being a farmer.
She had a sense of being very aware of him, as if she was tingling all over, maybe because of the jolt she had felt when he had taken her hand.
Likely just static, she told herself firmly. Or the chill of the night penetrating her clothing.
Or maybe not. The lights from the headlamps of his car had illuminated them in an orb of pure gold. His breath was making puffs in the crisp air.
Hanna had the oddest and most delicious sense of breathing him in.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_fc8b72ec-ba1f-57e8-9dfb-d883979414b2)
SAM DID CUT a breathtaking picture, standing here in the crisp chill of a winter evening, his hands deep in his coat pockets. His coat was undone, and his look underneath it was casual, but not casual in the way that was interpreted around here, certainly not farmer-casual.
No, around here, in the rural community that surrounded the upstate New York village of Smith, casual was plaid shirts and faded jeans, work boots and ball caps.
Sam’s casual was more in keeping with Hanna’s life in the city, a look that could have taken him for drinks at an upscale club after work or to the theatre or to dinner at any of New York’s finest restaurants.
He was wearing a long-sleeved, creamy shirt, which looked to her like fine linen. With its thin blue pinstripe, the perfectly pressed shirt looked casually expensive. It was open at the strong column of his throat, and tucked into knife-creased, belted, dark slacks that definitely did not look as if they had come off the rack at a chain store.
“Renegade?” he asked, lifting a dark slash of an eyebrow at her.
Was there a nice way to say he looked very respectable now? Back then, respectability was what she—or anyone else—would have least predicted for him.
They had done a silly thing in the Smith High School Annual every year: under each photo of a graduating student, it had said Most likely to...sometimes flattering, but mostly not.
Most likely to become president, most likely to make a million, most likely to rob a bank.
She recalled Sam’s had said Most likely to sail the seven seas.
Just a silly thing, and yet, those few words had captured something of him: a restlessness, a need for adventure, a call to the unknown.
Of course her own, in her senior year, before she had left Smith forever, had said Most likely to become a nun and how ridiculously inaccurate had that proven?
Sam had been older than her by a year, the heartthrob of every single girl in Smith Senior High School, so he had graduated and gone before her own senior picture had appeared in the annual.
“You aren’t going to deny that, are you? That you were, uh, something of a renegade?” It occurred to her it might have been better to pretend she could barely remember him at all, but she simply wasn’t that good at pretending.
Sam had been a force unto himself then, and she suspected he still was. Even though he had just hit a pony with his car, he looked entirely unflustered, radiating a kind of self-certainty that was immensely attractive rather than off-putting.
“Something of a renegade” was an understatement. Sam Chisholm had been an absolute renegade, which of course, had only added to his lethal charm.
It looked to Hanna as if he was still dangerously and lethally charming, even if he claimed to have left a part of himself behind.
The thing was, she was not sure you could leave something like the person he used to be behind. The essence of it was still clinging to him, and it was like a nectar of wild enchantment that called to her and that could not be resisted.
She of all people should resist its pull, and frantically. But she could not. Hanna reluctantly gave herself over to remembering Sam.
Even back then, a senior in high school, Sam Chisholm hadn’t been in sync with the town of Smith’s sense of style.
He had favored faded jeans so worn that nothing was left but white threads over the large muscles in his thighs, and below the back pocket of his butt.
He had sported the world’s sexiest leather jacket, the leather distressed by real age and wear. He had worn that jacket through all seasons, even when it was far too cold for it. He had arrived at school in a rumble of noise, and often blue smoke, on an old motorbike.
He’d never ever worn a helmet, his too-long deep brown, silky hair always raked by the fingers of the wind, his features always made even more attractive by the fact they were kissed by sun and the elements.
“A renegade?” he asked again now. Sam raised a dark brow at her. She could not really tell if he was amused or annoyed.
“A renegade,” she said with prim firmness, a voice very well suited to Most Likely to Become a Nun, a voice that would never give away the fact she had found the wild version of him to be unreasonably sexy and that she had given in to the pull of remembering him with a nary a protest.
From the brief touch of his hand on hers just moments ago, he still had that mystical something that just made some men sexy and almost unbearably so.
He was dangerous to her, part of Hanna shouted. Danger, danger, danger. He was the kind of man who made a woman who had given up on love—after all, she had been jilted by her fiancé while she was still raw from the death of her mother—long for the very things she had sworn to harden herself against.
It made an eminently reasonable woman such as herself, who had vowed to dodge the wounding arrows of love by burying herself in her work, think unwanted thoughts of looks so heated they could scorch through to the soul, and breath coming in ragged, wanton gasps, and the silken caress of forbidden kisses...
It was because she had once tasted the nectar of his kiss, she warned herself, that she was being drawn back into the wild and dangerous enchantment of him.
Embarrassed by her weakness, Hanna remembered all too clearly how she had been caught in this particular spell once before.
“What made you arrive at that conclusion?” he asked.
“Which one?” she stammered, thinking remembered kisses must be showing in her face.
“That I was a renegade?” he reminded her.
“Oh, really!” she said annoyed. “Of course you were one. Anybody with a motorcycle in a place where tractors—and ponies for that matter—are more common, would be seen as a renegade headed straight for a life of debauchery.”
He actually laughed at that, and Hanna had to inwardly kick herself for liking his laughter.
And liking, too, the look of unguarded fondness that now crept across his handsome features. “Ah, my motorcycle, that old Harley-Davidson Panhead. Did you know I rescued it from a dump? And restored it myself? As much as I could, anyway. I seem to remember being stranded by the side of the road a lot. And none of those guys driving those tractors that you mentioned would stop and give me a hand, either.”
“The leather jacket sent out danger signals—clearly you were seen as a threat to the wholesome, country image of the town of Smith, poster child for an all-American town.”
Again that look of tenderness softened the features of Sam’s face. “I remember when I saw that jacket in a store window, saving up money to buy it that could have been better used for...”
His voice drifted away, and the look of fondness faded abruptly. In fact, he looked suddenly annoyed with himself. “I’m sure I was not the rebel you recall.”
“But you were. Sam Chisholm, you were the town of Smith’s answer to James Dean.”
“I suppose,” he said, his tone dry, “it must have appeared like that to you, the town of Smith’s answer to wholesome all-American girl.”
He would not have seen the high school annual that proclaimed her Most Likely to Become a Nun, but seeing her as the proverbial, sheltered, wholesome girl next door was just about the same thing.
But of course, he did not know the truth about her. Everyone had thought that she was so good and pure and could do no wrong. And she had let everyone down.
Of course, most just believed she had gone away after graduation, called, as so many rural young people were, by the bright lights and lure of the big city. The truth remained one of her most closely guarded secrets.
The truth that had left her father clutching at his heart on the pathway to his beloved Christmas Workshop.
“There was plenty of evidence you were wild,” Hanna told Sam, suddenly most anxious to stay focused on his past rather than her own, “It wasn’t just my perception, a girl looking at you through the eyes of complete innocence.”
Innocence that would soon enough be lost in the incident that had destroyed her family and had kept her from ever coming back here.
“Evidence?” he said, his tone mocking. “You need a little more than a motorcycle and a leather jacket to be a rebel.”
“You were always being kicked out of school. For smoking—”
“I’d forgotten that,” he said with a half smile. “I still sneak the occasional smoke, but rarely. Only when I’m stressed.”
Why did she care? Unbidden came a memory of that one time, when she, the good girl, had done the most unexpected thing of all. She had boldly tasted his lips. She did not remember anything about smoke, just something delicious and forbidden unfurling within her.
“And fighting,” she continued, hearing that prudish note deepen in her voice, a defense against the power of that memory of their lips joining, that sense of the universe shifting and aligning, of all being right in her world, when it had been such a wrong thing to do.
And if she recalled, and she did, he had been very quick to point that out to her, too. What had he said?
Don’t start fires you can’t put out.
Hanna could actually feel her cheeks burning at the memory, but Sam’s mind, thankfully, was apparently not on stolen kisses. Far from it, evidently.
“Ah,” he said reminiscently. “I did enjoy a good fight. But only if I won.”
“I recall you always winning.”
He lifted a lazy eyebrow at her, and she knew she had probably revealed more than she wanted to about her girlish days of dreaming about him.
“And drinking,” she said swiftly, inserting the stern note back into her voice.
“You’re mistaken there. I did not drink then, nor do I drink now.” His voice had gone taut.
“So,” Hanna said, her own tone deliberately light, “just now, you nearly killed the pony and me stone-cold sober?”
He laughed, reluctantly. “Guilty.”
“And for skipping school,” she finished, triumphantly. “You were always being suspended because you skipped classes.”
The laughter left him instantly. “I did do a lot of that,” he admitted.
“Why?” Her curiosity felt like a form of weakness, but it really did seem, around him, that she had always suffered one form of weakness or another.
He considered her carefully for a moment, and she was aware his gaze was suddenly shuttered. “It’s really not important anymore,” he said.
And he was so right. It was not important anymore. Hanna was not the same person she had been back then—far from it—and neither was he.
He would probably be shocked by the direction her life had taken after he had left Smith, how the girl he had called “Goody Two-shoes” had managed to be such a tragic disappointment.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said, and stepped toward her. He looked down into her face and concern furrowed his brow. “Your hand still hurts, doesn’t it?”
Though it had been nearly nine years since she had laid eyes on Sam, looking into the quiet strength of his face, she felt a sense of familiarity, of knowing him.
“Yes,” she said, “it does.”
He took her arm, having seen all along which one she was favoring. He slid her glove off her hand, and turned it over in his own.
“That looks nasty,” he said, and Hanna glanced down to see her hand was already swollen and discolored. The pony rope must have caught in between her fingers and her thumb and scraped the skin away.
But the pain seemed numbed by the warmth of his thumb making a circle in the cold palm of her hand.
It felt as if her whole world dissolved into a forbidden sense of longing, the present melting into the past as Hanna experienced the same feverish awareness that Sam had always created in her.
The first time she had ever seen him, she had been in her first year of high school, and he’d been in his last. Naturally, he hadn’t known she was alive. And she would have been quite happy to keep it that way.
Worshipping him—his beautiful confidence, his way of moving, the unconsciously sexy light in his eyes, and in the upward twist of his mouth—from afar.
But, to her eternal regret, it had not stayed that way. He had noticed her, under the very worst of circumstances, and it had all just gone downhill from there.
When other boys struggled with acne and awkwardness, Sam had always walked like a king.
It was the Christmas he and some friends had shown up at the farm. That year, as always, her father had, in his never-ending quest to attract more people to buy real Christmas trees, shoveled off the old pond and advertised free skating and free hot chocolate.
Hanna remembered, sourly, that when they had added it all up in the end, it had, as always, barely balanced out. Still, wasn’t it that final tally of the season where her love of the order of numbers had been born?
But Sam and some of his friends, skates slung over their shoulders, had shown up at Christmas Valley.
Also that year, gritting her teeth and doing her bit for the family business, just as she had every year since she’d been twelve, Hanna had put on the green elf costume. When she was twelve she had liked contributing, being a part of the excitement of Christmas. She had loved the fact that her father had given her the cutest pony, Molly, and they were going to be a Christmas team: an elf offering rides in a minisleigh to children.
But by that year, at fifteen, Hanna had not been a compliant elf, but an awkward teenager. While her need for her father’s approval had kept her from being overtly rebellious, she had been humiliated by the elf costume, and seriously jaundiced about the whole Christmas thing.
That year it felt as if the blinders had come off her eyes. Christmas had seemed less about wonder and magic than endless work and chaos, and ultimately, when they counted up the receipts, disappointment.
Even Molly, whom she had managed to love unconditionally up until that point, just seemed like a mean-spirited little beast whom Hanna had to be constantly vigilant with as the pony had a terrible tendency to nip small children.
Still, her father overrode her protests and no amount of sulking, begging and outright crying could convince him she had outgrown her job as the Christmas elf.
And just like a Christmas elf, she was needed everywhere on the farm. When she wasn’t shoveling snow off that rink, she was in the workshop flogging wreaths and mistletoe. Or she was in the gift shop selling nauseatingly cute Christmas bric-a-brac. Or she was in the lots, shaking snow off racks and racks of trees. Or guiding people down the aisles of live trees. Or giving sleigh rides, the sleigh pulled by the always evil-natured Molly.
The elf costume had been the worst part of all of it, and all of it had been bad: endless work, smelling of pine, the stubborn Molly trying to bite children, her father’s latest crazy idea of an attraction to get people in.
Oh, yes, by the time Hanna Merrifield was fifteen, Christmas had totally lost its magic for her.
And then Sam had seen her in the elf getup. She had instantly abandoned the pony that she had just been putting on the harness to offer a horribly misbehaved child a ride.
Hanna had made a run for it as soon as she had seen Sam and his friends pile out of Tom Brenton’s pickup truck, but it was too late. They had seen her. Their hooted calls had followed her mad dash for the safety of the house.
She had heard Sam’s voice, above the others. Not hooting.
“Shut up, you guys.” Strong, firm, mature. “You’re embarrassing her.”
Which was even worse, of course, than the hooting. As Hanna had closed the farmhouse door behind her, and leaned against it, she had been aware of the horrifying fact that her secret heartthrob now saw her as an object of pity.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_ad2d89b4-199e-563b-ab98-7fbb4cd616b3)
IF IT HAD ended there, with a silly moment in time quickly forgotten by everyone involved, that would have been excellent.
But no, having been caught in her elf costume had unfortunate consequences. It made Hanna no longer invisible to Sam. When he saw her at school the next time, he grinned that slow, sexy grin of his, and said, “Hey, Elfie, how’s it going?”
Apparently, after coming to her defense with his friends, it was okay for him to embarrass her.
So, her first words to her secret heartthrob were, “Don’t call me that.”
But he’d just grinned, and the next time he’d seen her, he’d said the very same thing. “Hey, Elfie, how’s it going?”
She thought he was making fun of her. And her family’s farm. By the time school was letting out for Christmas, she was on edge: she was tired of the elf costume, tired of making wreaths, tired of sales figures that were, as always, mediocre in the face of her father’s beginning-of-the-season optimism.
Added to all that, “Hey, Elfie, how’s it going?” had grown into yet more teasing. In those days before school ended for Christmas break, Sam called her his favorite Goody Two-shoes. He asked after her homework. He teased her about doing his.
Her girlfriends were totally titillated by his attention to her. Hanna had hated it. She was desperate for Sam to see her not as an amusing child but as a woman.
She could still remember the feeling of his dark eyes on her, the shiver along her spine, the desire to be seen as anything but Elfie or Goody Two-shoes.
And so, in a moment of total desperation, she had decided she must show him that she was not a child. She, the least impulsive of people, had acted on pure impulse.
He had been outside the door of the school, his backside leaning against his motorcycle, his hair ruffled. Who rode a motorcycle in December? And with panache, besides? That day, school had been over, and she had been late coming out.
“Detention, my little Elfie?” he’d asked incredulously, his dark eyebrows lifting over those soft-as-suede eyes. Strangely, he had not seemed amused. In fact, his eyes had narrowed to slits, as if he would personally go take on anyone who had treated her unjustly, even if it was a teacher.
There had been no other students around, the parking lot empty of vehicles, the buses gone for the day. Maybe that was why Hanna hadn’t ignored him or ducked her head, and grasped her books tighter to her chest and scurried away. Or maybe it was the protective look in his eyes that had made it feel safe to stop.
She had said, with all the dignity she could muster, and over the hard beating of her heart, “I am not your little Elfie.” And then, in the interest of seeming very adult and perhaps even sophisticated, she had added in her haughtiest tone of voice. “I was, in fact, discussing iambic pentameter with Miss James.”
The dangerous glitter of amusement had left his face. For a moment, Hanna thought she had succeeded. Sam had been totally silent, expressionless.
But then he had bitten his bottom lip. His shoulders had started to shake.
And then he seemed unable to contain himself. He had thrown back his head and roared with laughter.
Other than the fact Sam’s laughter was about the most beautiful thing she had ever experienced—and it was an experience on so many levels—the fact that he was laughing at her had felt unbearable.
She had thrown down her school books and stalked over to him. So close. So close she could smell the leather of his jacket and the heady scent of his soap, and the faint engine and exhaust smells of the motorcycle.
He stopped laughing, but the amusement was back in his eyes, dancing, as they both waited to see what she would do.
Obviously, she should have smacked him.
But she didn’t. Obviously, she had failed, utterly, to convince him of her maturity by opening a discussion on iambic pentameter.
This close to him, she felt intoxicated. Iambic pentameter was the furthest thing from her mind, even if this was the kind of moment that had probably driven poets to create since the beginning of time.
Hanna felt a need to let him know she was not a dull little scholar who had temporarily enlivened his world, provided amusement for him by putting on an elf costume and trying to engage him with discussions of poetry.
She felt a need to let him know her days of being an amusement to him were over.
She had needed to let him know she was not the child the elf outfit had implied that she was.
And so, seeing the astonishment in his eyes, she had leaned closer. And then she had taken the lapels of that leather jacket and pulled him into her.
There had been the slightest resistance to her tug.
But she had ignored it.
And she had, in one moment of misguided boldness, done what she had done a million times in her dreams.
She had kissed Sam Chisholm.
She, who had never kissed anyone, had taken his lips with her own, and covered them. For a moment he had been stunned into stillness, but only for a moment.
Then his hand had rested, lightly, as lightly as though he were stroking a bird, on the back of her neck, and he had brought her gently and more fully into him. Any illusions that she’d had that a kiss was merely a chaste meeting of the lips were swept away.
The initial frosty chill on his lips melted into warmth, and then warmth became heat, and then heat became fire.
Sam explored her, discovered her with a leisurely thoroughness. What he didn’t know, and she didn’t know either, was until that moment she had not been fully alive. Sam had breathed his life into her.
And then, way too soon, he reeled back from her, and stared at her, and the chill crept back across her lips and into his eyes, that were narrow again, darkly angry.
“Look, mistletoe girl—”
Mistletoe girl? Hanna thought furiously. It was another dig at her family’s Christmas tree farm, and it made her feel as if she was standing in front of him in the elf costume once again.
“—don’t play with a fire you can’t put out,” he warned her, his voice stern and flat, and his brown eyes turned black. “You are heading for all kinds of trouble that you don’t have the first clue how to deal with.”
The anger at what she perceived as his rejection—as him acting like her father, instead of a potential boyfriend—chased the chill away again, for a far less satisfactory reason. Anger flared, white hot and consuming, inside her.
It was made worse by the fact he pushed off from his bike, and gathered her fallen books, held them out to her casually, as if nothing at all of importance had happened between them.
As if he, the town bad boy, was a gentleman who had spurned her kiss for her own good.
“As if I would ever start a fire with the likes of you,” she had snapped, grabbing her books from his outstretched arms and holding them like armor against her heaving chest.
She could have and should have left it there, but he had cocked his head at her, unperturbed by her anger, forcing her to go on.
“I know where you live, Sam Chisholm, and I know what your father does.”
It had been so childish, proof really that he was entirely correct, that she was not in the least ready for what his lips had just told her existed in the world.
Looking at the man now, she could still remember the look on his face back then.
It was about the furthest thing from the look he had now: of confidence and composure, a man in control of his world.
No, that afternoon, her words had hit him hard, dashed that self-assured look from his face. He had momentarily looked completely stunned. And then his face had gone cold as he had leaned once again, his rear against his motorbike, regarding her with those turned-earth eyes narrowed to dangerous slits.
Because here was what she knew about his father, since her own father hired him sometimes to work on their farm.
Sam Chisholm’s father was a drunk, who took work as a farm laborer if anyone was desperate enough to hire him.
The school’s sexiest boy lived in the most dilapidated trailer on the worst road in Smith, the one right by the railway tracks and the shut-down flour mill.
His face had gone cold as ice, and he’d looked at her hard enough and long enough for her to feel ashamed, but not to take back words that could not be taken back.
And now he was back in Smith, and she was back in Smith, and he wanted her family’s farm and presumably had the means to buy it.
Was it a moment of vindication for him?
“So, what do you want my farm for?” Hanna asked.
My farm? Where had that come from? Hanna had not thought of the farm as hers, or even as home, since she had left here—in disgrace that it seemed Sam might have been predicting that afternoon all those years ago when he had admonished her so sternly not to play with fire.
“I own Old Apple Crate. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
It was a moment that should have brought Sam great pleasure, because Hanna struggled to hide her awe. Old Apple Cratewas a model of success that was drooled over in business circles.
Relatively new on the business front, Sam’s company specialized in locally grown produce, much of it organic. The company was taking advantage of people’s desire to shop closer to home and know about what exactly they were getting, how it was grown and who grew it.
“I’ve heard of it, of course.”
She noted he looked pleased, but not smug.
Really, he had no reason to be so pleased that she had heard of his company. She was in business. Success stories like his were what businesses like hers paid attention to.
“And Christmas Valley Farm would be a good fit for you because?”
“I like this property for two reasons—one, it’s got a great location, with highway frontage. And two, to certify produce as organic, I need soil that hasn’t been altered by chemicals for a specified number of years.”
“So, you wouldn’t keep it as a Christmas tree farm?” She evaluated the tone of her voice with a bit of dismay.
“Are you disappointed by that?” he asked.
Hanna wanted to say no, and found she couldn’t. He had read her with alarming accuracy.
“Christmas tree sales,” he said mullingly, as if to appease her. “Personally, I’m not a Christmas kind of person, but maybe professionally it could make sense.”
Don’t pursue it, Hanna begged herself. It was way too personal. But he was the one who had mentioned it.
“What does that mean, not a Christmas kind of person?” She had remembered he had also said something tonight about not even shopping for a tree. And not being a sipping cocoa kind of guy, either. So, despite his denial, he still was a bit of a renegade, out of step with the very kind of wholesome family image this business catered to.
Sam hesitated. When he spoke his voice was gruff, stripped of emotion.
“I always just felt, in that season of good cheer and merriment, I was on the outside looking in. We never even had a tree when I was a kid.”
He looked as if he regretted having said that, instantly.
She regretted his saying it, too, because it was hard enough keeping up your defenses around such a good-looking, confident man.
But then to picture him as a small child, feeling left out on Christmas, wrenched at Hanna’s soft heart. “Oh, Sam, we always had some we gave away. Fully decorated. We had a contest every year. You could have had a tree.”
He gave her an annoyed look that rejected her sympathy at the same time as letting her know the impossibility of what she was suggesting.
She felt driven to show him he might not be alone in his sentiments about Christmas.
And so Hanna offered something, too. “I’m not sure it was much better being on the inside looking out. I haven’t bothered with a tree since I left here, either.”
“Really?”
“I grew up believing artificial trees were the devil’s own work, and somehow I couldn’t bring myself to pay what they wanted for a real one in the city. Never mind working out the logistics of getting it home and thinking what to do with it in my tiny apartment once I got there.”
It was, of course, way more complicated than that.
“Oh, well, I’m sure they always had a giant one up when you arrived home.”
Easier to let him think they had remained the family he thought they were, and not to share the truth about that with him, and yet the words came out of her.
“My dad died the year after I finished high school. My mom remarried and moved away, which is why it was left to managers to run. This farm hasn’t been home for me for quite some time. And Christmas...well, Christmas.” Her voice drifted away.
He was looking at her way too closely. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” she said tartly.
“So,” he took her cue and changed the subject, suddenly all business, “a real tree fetches a pretty good price in the city?”
Hanna nodded. “A king’s ransom. Mistletoe is even more dear.”
Oh, gee, did she have to bring up mistletoe around him, of all people? she berated herself, silently cringing. Mistletoe girl seemed to suddenly be there between them.
“Oh, I know mistletoe is pricey,” he said. “I bought some once.”
Not remembering mistletoe girl at all then, but something else, from the faraway look on his face.
“You have never bought a tree but you bought mistletoe?” Crazy to be curious, but she was. “Why?”
He still looked off into the distance. “I think I had this cheesy idea that if I carried it around in my pocket, I could haul it out and hold it over my head, and collect lots of free Christmas kisses.”
“Did it work?” She felt a shiver along her spine at the thought of meeting Sam under the mistletoe.
“Lost my nerve,” he said, but she had a feeling she was not hearing all of this story, and she wasn’t sure why.
“You know, mistletoe was popular around the turn of the last century because the only time people could kiss in public was underneath it. That would hardly seem to be the case today.” Least of all for a guy like him.
But he was not going to have his personal kissing history probed. His interest in mistletoe, now at least, was all about business.
“Do you grow that here?” he finally asked. “I remember you selling it, all those years ago.”
“No, we imported it,” she said stiffly, “from a grower in Texas.”
“Hmm. Mistletoe. Trees.”
“Wreaths,” she filled in helpfully, trying to stay focused on what was between them now, which was strictly business.
“I already have the stores, and keeping local product at the forefront can be a problem during the winter months. I wonder. I’ll check on the viability of a line of Christmas products. It could be a good fit for our company.”
Hanna was taken completely by surprise by what she felt when he said that, because it seemed to her any research on his part would only serve to seal the fate of the farm.
She already knew what he would find out. Christmas products of the natural, home-grown variety were not particularly viable. Or at least they hadn’t been on her family’s farm, certainly not in comparison to a success story like Old Apple Crate.
For as long as she could remember, her family’s business had limped along from year to year, barely making ends meet.
And so why, at the thought of it not being a Christmas tree farm anymore, would she feel these emotions? Loss. Sadness. It seemed impossible. She should feel nothing but relief. And yet...that’s not what she felt.
Not at all.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_1aa06ff5-918e-5f1e-b333-efc3fb1b6ce6)
HANNA WAS TRYING not to let all the feelings that were washing through her show on her face.
“That would be ironic,” Sam said. “Me, getting into the Christmas tree business.”
“And me getting out of it,” she added softly. Out of the business, her last remaining link to her family. Good grief! She had the awful feeling she might start crying.
He was looking at her too closely and she turned away from him, acting as if she had just noticed she had a horse on the loose.
“You’re here a day early,” she said, her tone neutral. “You should come back tomorrow. I’ll be ready for you, then.”
She’d been in the house only briefly, to grab a jacket and boots, and she had barely glanced at the barn when she had run in to get a halter and lead rope. But even peripherally, it had been hard to miss that things looked a touch shabby. If she had until tomorrow at noon, when he was supposed to arrive, she could do a few cosmetic spruce-ups.
And talk to Mr. Dewey, and then be on her way.
“My appointment was for tonight,” he said.
She certainly wasn’t going to argue with his word against Mr. Dewey’s.
“I have to catch the horse,” Hanna said, fumbling through her pockets for the limp carrots she had found in the barn. “You know tonight just isn’t going to be a good night to discuss business, Sam. If you could come back tomorrow, around noon?”
She left it hanging, realizing she wasn’t sure when she wanted him to come back, which, given how eager she had felt to sell the farm, was just plain dumb.
But there was something about being back here, even with Molly misbehaving, that seemed to be pulling on a place in her that she hadn’t thought she had anymore.
A place that wanted.
That wanted all the things she had lost a long time ago. Tradition. Family. The warmth of the kitchen at night. Cookies fresh out of the oven. A gathering around a board game. Laughter.
Maybe she even wanted the kind of Christmas her family had once had: yes, they had worked hard.
But they had worked together.
And Christmas had been the day the madness stopped, and they enjoyed the same things they had tried to give everyone else: a beautiful tree, a fire in the living room hearth, laughing around a turkey dinner, a sense of closeness and family that she had never recaptured since she had left the farm.
But hadn’t she thought she and Darren would recapture all that was best about being a family? That they would have that sense of family and all that came with it, safety and security?
From what he had said, Sam hadn’t even had that.
Every single year, Hanna remembered, she had always gotten what she asked for. Even if sales had not gone well, there it was under the tree. The impossible: new skates, the down-filled parka, or a silk blouse. And her dad smiling one of his rare smiles, with such shy, proud pleasure.
Oh, Dad, I am so sorry.
Those things, she reminded herself, when push had come to shove, were the very things that had hurt her the most. Love had hurt the worst of all.
And Sam had just reminded her of that, anew. That love, that holding out hope and then having it utterly dashed, was what hurt worst of all.
She suddenly needed Sam—with his double threat, her awareness of him and the fact he could take the farm and her remaining sense of family from her for good—to be gone.
“Come back tomorrow,” she said again to Sam, her tone now clipped and much sharper than she wanted it to be, “if that’s convenient.”
She turned toward Molly, proffering the carrots.
Sam did not take the hint. He came and took one of the carrots from the bunch in her hand, uninvited.
“I can manage,” she said too snappishly, and took a step toward Molly, who snorted and leapt away.
“Maybe I better just stay until you have her under control. I don’t want you to hurt that hand any worse than it already is.”
And again, that forbidden place of wanting breathed itself awake within her. Wanting someone to lean on, someone to share with, someone to laugh with, someone to love...
But when she looked at the fiasco of her now-ended relationship with Darren, it seemed to Hanna all that wanting had led her to a poor relationship choice; all that wanting had left her vulnerable, weak instead of strong, way too ready to read things into situations that were not really there.
So she said uninvitingly, firmly, “I can manage on my own.”
And she felt both exceedingly irritated and exceedingly vulnerable when Sam said, his voice a seductive croon, “Come on, sweetie. Give it up.”
For a moment her heart stood still.
Then she threw back her shoulders and tossed her head. Sweetie, indeed! It was as bad as being called Elfie! She was not starting her new relationship with Sam Chisholm in the very same way as her old one.
No, wait. Relationship was way too strong. They might reach a business agreement. In the distant future.
But not if he was going to be like that. What did he mean, give it up? Give up what? Her precious hold on control?
Hanna sucked in a deep breath, and turned to face him. She meant to tell him in no uncertain terms not to call her sweetie, and to tell him she didn’t intend to give up anything.
Maybe not even her family farm.
She was contemplating with alarm the troubling thought that she might be reluctant to part with the farm, when she realized Sam was totally ignoring her, and sidling toward Molly.
“Sweetie,” he said again, his voice that same croon, though now there was absolutely no mistaking he was talking to the horse, “Give it up.”
* * *
Sam held his breath as the pony took one tentative step toward him, and then another.
He glanced over his shoulder at Hanna. “Ah,” he said, wagging an eyebrow at her, “that old irresistible charm.”
That desire to tease her had come back to him as naturally as if nearly a decade had not passed.
And her reaction was about the same as it always had been. Hanna folded her arms over her chest. She was unaware she was favoring her hurt hand, and letting him know in no uncertain terms that his irresistible charm was wasted on her.
It suddenly occurred to Sam she might have thought he was calling her sweetie.
She wouldn’t like that any more than she had liked being called Elfie. The very thought filled him with an almost irresistible urge to continue teasing her.
But then sanity regained its foothold and Sam knew the last thing he needed in his life was the complication of teasing a girl like Hanna Merrifield. She was the kind of girl who would see teasing as interest and interest as the potential for things to go deeper and further.
And he knew what deeper and further with her would mean.
She was the kind of woman who would deny she needed traditional things. But she would need them nonetheless. Hanna Merrifield would need an old-fashioned courtship, followed by a wedding with her floating down the aisle in a white gown. And then there would be babies and a house with a picket fence.
She would need a man who knew how to give her those things, as if by second nature. A man who had grown up with those concepts of family as ingrained into him as his own name.
Hanna’s man, when she settled on one, would probably come from a farm not unlike this one, one that had been in the same family for generations, and had produced stable, trustworthy, hard-working men of the earth who liked sipping cocoa and bringing home the family tree for Christmas.
Even while the thought of those things created a physical sensation in him—a throbbing ache at the back of his throat— Sam was not like that man. In fact, he already knew he was the man least likely to give her the cozy traditional life—cocoa and the Christmas trees she had so obviously missed even while she denied herself the pleasure of having one—and he knew that because he had already failed, spectacularly, in the traditional department.
“I’m divorced,” he told Hanna bluntly. There was no sense her thinking the teasing—or worse, the electricity that had jumped between them when their hands had touched—could ever mean anything.
He did not miss Hanna’s slight flinch at the word divorce, confirming what he already knew.
“That would interest me, why?” she said coolly.
“I just know my charm to be completely superficial and unworthy of a girl like you. Don’t worry about me trying to exercise it on you, though I don’t mind trying it out on the pony.”
Despite how she wanted to hold the fact that she was a career accountant out in front of her like a shield, he knew she was solidly traditional. Her dreams were written all over her.
“What do you mean, a girl like me?” she asked, her voice stiff, as if he’d insulted her instead of giving her a gift.
“You want things a guy like me could never give you, Hanna.”
“I don’t want you to give me anything! You don’t know me well enough to make presumptions about what I want,” she said huffily. “You never did, and you don’t now.”
He went on as if she had not protested. “You’re a forever kind of girl. When you get married, you will never ever get divorced, will you?”
“I’m never getting married, so it’s a stupid question.”
“You? Never getting married?” It was too easy to picture her amongst the Christmas trees, with a doting husband, two or three chubby babies in a sled and a golden retriever gamboling through the snow. “That’s ludicrous.”
“It isn’t,” she said, tilting her chin up, her eyes flashing dangerously. “Just because I never made it to the altar doesn’t mean that you are the only one with a failed relationship under your belt. I was engaged for two years.”
Despite her attempt to say it lightly, as if it didn’t matter one little bit to her, a world of pain swam in her eyes.
“That louse,” he growled.
“Wh-wh-what do you mean?” she stammered.
“He dumped you.”
Her mouth fell open, and then snapped shut. “How do you know?”
“Because if you said yes to a proposal, that would be as good as taking a vow to you. You would hang in there long after you’d figured out it was a mistake.”
“I never thought it was a mistake,” her tone was tight and did not invite any more comments.
“Louse,” he said again.
“No,” she said firmly. “He did me a favor. I love being single.”
He said nothing, and she apparently felt driven to continue.
“Not that I would want you to interpret that as an invitation to exercise your charms on me.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“I have been able to absolutely devote myself to my career.”
“Terrific,” he muttered. Sam knew he should let it go right there, but he couldn’t. Hanna Merrifield in love with her job? As an accountant? Ludicrous! He had to let her know he did know things about her...and they were things she would do well to know about herself.
“It is,” Hanna said stubbornly. “Terrific.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re acting as if you know me!”
“You’re a certain type. You’re the type of girl who stays inside and drinks cocoa on a snowy night,” he said softly. “You long for the very things you have denied yourself, like a Christmas tree.”
She was glaring at him with naked annoyance, which was a good thing, an antidote for the way he knew they both had felt when their hands touched.
There had always been something between them. Always.
Once, she had been too young.
Though, even then, had he not recognized that she needed something a person like him could never give her?
His failed marriage was ample evidence that he had been right then, and he was right now.
He was not a man accustomed to failure, and that one still had the power to sting. Though he would take it, instead, as a reminder not to tangle too deeply with the lovely Miss Merrifield.
He knew it would be a good note to leave on—with animosity shimmering off her like a heat wave off the desert.
The problem was that he felt honor bound to help her catch the horse. What was he going to do? Leave her here to deal with it when her hand was probably more injured than she was admitting?
Sam looked away from her impaling gaze to see the pony watching him. Who knew a horse could manage an expression of such deep suspicion and dislike?
It was almost identical to her owner’s.
And then, with startling swiftness, Molly leapt forward, snapped off the carrot with her slanted yellow teeth—nearly taking his fingers with it—and leapt away again. She stood just out of reach munching on the carrot, leaving him holding the green top part, all the while watching him out of the corner of her eye.
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