Meet Me Under the Mistletoe

“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.