A Funny Thing Happened...

They’d want to be pulled out, of course—and that would have been fine, only the tractor was out of action.

She listened with one ear to the revving going on round the corner, while the rest of her attention was on Daisy’s painfully inflamed udder.

‘Poor old girl,’ she murmured softly, massaging the cream into the reddened quarter. She had to hand-milk her, stripping out that quarter to relieve the tension. It was a painful business for both of them because Daisy was inclined to kick out at her saviour.

‘Gratitude isn’t your strong point, is it, Daisy my love?’ Jemima crooned, dodging another kick. ‘Steady, girl. There’s a good girl. Well done.’

She straightened, pressing a hand to the small of her back and easing out the kinks.

The revving had stopped. Any minute now some townie would come tiptoeing round the corner of the barn and apologetically ask for help—

Without warning, they were plunged into total darkness.

‘Damn. That’s all I need.’

She waited, giving her eyes a few moments to adjust to the sudden loss of light before she went over to Bluebell and took the no-longer-sucking cluster of suction cups out from underneath her and moved them to safety. Would the power come back on? Possibly. Or possibly not.

Oh, hell. She really didn’t need another power cut, especially not at milking time. She’d been talking to the electricity company about the dodgy supply for ages, but they hadn’t got round to stringing her a new line.

It was that tree, of course, that was the trouble—a dead oak, hugely tall and inextricably tangled in the wires, and every time the wind got up it snapped the line. Naturally they wouldn’t put in a new line until the tree was cut down. The owner of the tree was responsible, they said, and the problem was, she was the owner.

She’d asked a firm to come and quote her for cutting it down, and they’d gone away without the contract. She just didn’t have hundreds of pounds to spare on something so trivial.

It didn’t seem so trivial now, though, not with thirty cows to milk by hand—!

There was a noise, a crash followed by a stream of words that should have made her blush. Should have done, but didn’t. She’d just used a few of them herself.

It was the car driver, of course, floundering about in the yard and setting the dogs off in a volley of frenzied barking. She took the bucket out from under Daisy, put it by the wall and opened the barn door a crack. The wind shrieked and plastered her with tiny granules of ice, and, tugging her woolly hat down further over her ears, she plunged out into the yard—full tilt into a hard and undoubtedly masculine chest.

‘Ooof—’

‘Sorry!’

He stepped back, rubbing his chest where she’d head-butted him and muttering under his breath. She had to lift her head to see his face, and the snow lashed against her chapped and stinging cheeks, making her eyes water.

‘Can I help you?’ she yelled into the wind.

He peered at her, his face just inches from hers but barely visible in the last scrap of daylight.

‘I need to see the farmer—is that your father?’

Crisp, incisive, used to giving orders-and having them obeyed. Jemima smiled, and inwardly leant back and folded her arms. She loved this type.

‘I’m the farmer,’ she told him.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re about sixteen.’

She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or annoyed. She decided it was dark enough to let him get away with it, and anyway, she was only knee-high to a grasshopper. ‘Hardly,’ she said drily. ‘Stuck?’

‘Yes.’ The word was tight and clipped, and her mouth twitched again. He obviously hated being at a disadvantage. ‘I need a tow—I wonder if your father would be kind enough to pull me out with the tractor?’

She stifled the chuckle. ‘I’m sure he would,’ she said agreeably, ‘but he’s in Berkshire at his house at the moment, and anyway the tractor’s broken.’

‘Broken? What do you mean, broken?’

He sounded disbelieving, as if it was too much to accept that a machine might dare to be broken. She sighed. Now she was going to have to admit her stupidity. ‘Just—broken,’ she told him.

‘Permanently?’

‘Well, I can’t fix it in the next ten minutes, anyway,’ she snapped.

He sighed and stabbed his hands through his hair, dislodging the snow. ‘Look, can we get out of this vile weather?’

‘Be my guest.’ They ducked into the barn, and the soft lowing of the cows brought his head up sharply.

‘Are they tied up?’ he asked, and there was a certain anxiety in his voice. Our city friend doesn’t like cows, she thought with a smile.

‘You don’t need to worry,’ she assured him. ‘They’re more worried about you than you are about them.’

‘I doubt it.’ A cow lowed nearby, and he stepped back hastily. There was a squelching noise, and he swore again.

‘I should look where you stand,’ she advised, and brought forth a volley of muttered curses.

‘I should love to,’ he bit back, ‘but in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s as black as ink in here and I can’t even see the end of my nose.’

Nor could Jemima any more, and she realised that the last of the light had gone. A flurry of snow followed them in on the howling wind, and she shivered.

‘I’m sorry, I would help you,’ she told him, her compassionate nature overriding her sense of humour at last, ‘but the tractor really is out of commission at the moment and I don’t have a four-wheel drive. Is it worth trying to push it?’

He snorted. ‘I doubt it. It’s buried up to the windscreen in a snow drift.’

‘Oh, dear. Well, suppose we go and find some lamps and call the rescue people—I take it you do belong to a motoring organisation?’

‘Of course,’ he replied tartly. ‘Not that I ever need them.’

‘Of course not,’ she said blithely, tongue in cheek.

‘It hasn’t broken down,’ he growled, picking up on her dig.

‘No—and of course the snow drift was totally unexpected.’

Did she imagine it, or did he grind his teeth? Too used to having his own way—and his car wouldn’t dare break down, she was sure! Much too well-trained.

Unlike hers, but she couldn’t afford a recovery service, so she’d taken to making short journeys and then only if absolutely necessary. ‘We’ll go and ring them,’ she told him. ‘Follow me.’

‘I can’t see you, never mind follow you,’ he said bitterly.

Oh, dear. She reached out her hand and groped for his, coming up against a hard masculine thigh and—oops!