Mistletoe Marriage

‘I always thought it was too good to be true,’ Sophie had said eventually. And for Bram the worst thing was hearing her voice. She had always been so fiery, so alive, but now all the emotion seemed to have been emptied out of her, leaving her sounding flat and utterly expressionless. Utterly unlike Sophie.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked carefully.

‘I shouldn’t. I promised that I wouldn’t tell anyone,’ she said, in the same dull tone.

‘What? Even your oldest friend?’

She looked at him then, the river-coloured eyes stark with suffering. ‘I think at least you’d understand,’ she said.

‘Then tell me,’ said Bram. ‘Is it Nick?’

Sophie nodded dully. ‘He doesn’t love me any more.’

‘What happened?’

‘He saw Melissa. He took one look at her and fell out of love with me and in love with her. I saw it happen,’ she said, in that terrible, brittle voice. ‘I watched his face and I knew that was it.’

Bram didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh, Sophie…’

‘I should have expected it,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘You know what Melissa is like.’

Bram did know. Sophie’s sister was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She had an ethereal golden loveliness that was somehow out of place on the Yorkshire moors, unlike Sophie’s vibrant sturdiness.

It was hard to believe that the two were sisters. Melissa was nothing like Sophie. She was sweet and fragile and helpless, and few men were immune to her appeal. Bram certainly wasn’t. Sometimes it seemed to him that their brief engagement ten years ago was no more than a dream. How could a practical, ordinary man like him ever have hoped to hold on to such a treasure?

Bram couldn’t in all honesty blame Nick for falling for Melissa, but he hated him for hurting Sophie.

‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do? There was no point in pretending that nothing had happened. When we got back that night I gave him back his ring. I told him there was no point in all three of us being unhappy.’ Sophie smiled a little bitterly. ‘I let him go. Ella said that I should have fought to keep him, but how could I compete with Melissa?’

‘He might have forgotten her when she left,’ Bram suggested. He had noticed that about Melissa himself. When she was there, it was impossible to look at anyone else, but once she had gone it was sometimes hard to remember exactly what she was like, or what she had said, or how he had felt—other than dazzled by her sweetness and her beauty.

Sophie wasn’t like that, he realised with something like surprise. She wasn’t beautiful as Melissa was beautiful, but he kept a vivid picture of her in his mind, of her expressions and her laughter and the way she waved her hands around as she talked. He could always picture Sophie exactly.

‘He might have forgotten her,’ Sophie agreed, ‘and I might have tried harder if it hadn’t been for Melissa. I saw her face too. You know she’s used to men being in love with her, but I don’t think that she’s ever really been in love herself before.’

She stopped abruptly, remembering too late that Bram had loved Melissa for a very long time. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt Bram. ‘Sorry,’ she said, contrite.

‘It’s OK,’ said Bram. ‘I know what you mean.’ Sophie was right. Melissa was more used to being loved than to loving. It was just the way things were when you looked the way she did.

‘I think that Melissa fell in love for the first time when she saw Nick,’ Sophie was saying. ‘She looked completely bowled over. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, and although she tried not to show it, for my sake, I could see how she felt. Who could understand better than me?’ she added, with a brave attempt at a wry smile.

‘It was too late for me,’ she went on. ‘I knew that once Nick had seen her he wouldn’t be able to look at me in the same way. If I tried to pretend that nothing has happened it would just make three of us unhappy. At least this way Melissa and Nick have a chance at happiness.’

‘Does Melissa know what you’ve done for her?’ asked Bram, thinking that few sisters would have made the sacrifice Sophie had done.

Sophie nodded. ‘She felt absolutely awful. She cried when I told her that I wasn’t going to marry Nick after all. She said she couldn’t do that to me. But I told her that she didn’t do anything. It wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t help falling in love with Nick, and he couldn’t help falling in love with her. That’s just how it was.’

‘So Nick and Melissa are now together?’

‘Yes.’ Sophie looked down at her hands and fought to get the words past the terrible tightness in her throat. She wouldn’t cry any more, she wouldn’t. ‘Nick’s moved up to join Melissa here, and they’re going to set up an outdoor clothing business together. They’re getting married in September.’ There—the hardest bit was out. ‘That’s why I’m back now. Mum wants me to try on my bridesmaid’s dress.’

‘You’re going to be Melissa’s bridesmaid?’ Bram said incredulously. ‘Sophie, surely you don’t have to put yourself through that? It’s asking too much of you.’

‘It would look odd if I wasn’t her bridesmaid,’ she tried to explain. ‘My parents don’t know about me and Nick. I thought it would make them feel awkward. They wouldn’t know how to treat him if they knew what had happened, so I suggested to Melissa that we didn’t tell them.

‘As far as they’re concerned Melissa met him in London when she came to visit me. Then my fiancé dumped me at around the same time and was, coincidentally, also called Nick. At least that will explain why I’m not on very good form at the moment.’ She managed a twisted smile. ‘Mum thinks I’m jealous because Melissa’s getting married and I’m not.’

Bram’s brows drew together. ‘That’s not very fair on you.’

Sophie shrugged. ‘To be honest, I feel so dead inside I don’t care. Melissa and Nick have got a life to build up here. There’s no point in making things difficult for them, or for Mum and Dad, who’ll see them all the time. I think it’s better for everyone if only Nick and Melissa and I know what really happened. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone else.

‘I shouldn’t really have told you,’ she said rather helplessly. ‘It’s just…sometimes I feel so alone,’ she burst out. ‘I feel so wretched and miserable and lonely, and I hate myself for not being able to snap out of it. I’m spoiling Melissa’s wedding, as Mum keeps pointing out, but there’s no one for me to talk to,’ she said, her voice wobbling treacherously. ‘I can’t talk to Melissa because she’ll just feel even more guilty that I’m so upset, and no one else knows the truth.’

Bram put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him, feeling how rigidly she was holding herself as she struggled for control. ‘I know the truth now,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you told me. You can talk to me whenever you want.’

The urge to burst into tears and sob out all her pain and misery onto his broad shoulder was so strong that Sophie had to struggle for long moments before she could straighten and muster a wavery smile.

‘Thanks, Bram,’ she said. ‘I feel better already for having told you.’

His arm fell from her shoulder. ‘What can I do?’ he asked simply.

Sophie hesitated. ‘Would you…would you come to the wedding? I know it will be hard for you to watch Melissa getting married, Bram, and I feel bad about asking you, but it would mean a lot for me to know that there was someone there for me.’

So Bram had gone to the wedding. Of course he had done it for Sophie. He had stood in the village church and watched Melissa, looking more beautiful than ever, her lovely face lifted adoringly to Nick, and strangely it hadn’t hurt as much as he had thought it would.

Perhaps he had been too worried about Sophie to think too much about his own feelings. Bram didn’t know how she had held herself together through the wedding. She had smiled and chatted, and Bram had wondered if he was only one who could see the agony in her eyes, the only one who knew how much it had cost her to play her part, the only one who appreciated how brave she was.

Sophie had waved her sister off on her honeymoon with the man she herself loved, and gone back to London. She hadn’t seen them since, and only came home to the moors when she knew they were away. She made excuses to her parents, but Bram knew it was because of Nick.

Tucking her hand into his arm, Sophie brought him back to the raw November present, and as she leant companionably against his shoulder Bram was conscious of being aware of her in a way that he hadn’t noticed before. He’d never realised how soft she felt, or how well she fitted into the curve of his body.

She was just the right height, too. He’d never noticed that before either. Her tousled curls tickled his chin softly. They smelt clean and fresh, with the coconutty whiff of gorse flowers.

Of course the shampoo might have been meant to smell of coconuts themselves, Bram acknowledged, in an attempt to distract himself from the feel of Sophie’s body pressed into him, but he was more of a gorse man himself. He had never lain on a tropical beach under a leaning coconut palm and he didn’t want to. Give him a hillside and a gorse bush in bloom any day. The bright, brave yellow flowers, with their slightly exotic fragrance, and the sturdy spikiness of the gorse reminded him of Sophie.

‘It’s been over a year,’ she was saying, unaware of his uneasy distraction. ‘I thought I would be starting to forget Nick now, but I think I still love him just as much as I did when we were engaged. I’ve never felt like that about anyone before, and I can’t imagine ever loving anyone else in the same way. I just don’t see how I’ll ever get over him.’

‘Was he so perfect?’ Bram asked. He had met Nick briefly at the wedding, and he hadn’t been that impressed. Melissa’s husband had struck him as patronising and more than a little smug—but then he would probably have felt smug if he’d won Melissa, Bram had to acknowledge.

‘No, Nick’s not perfect,’ said Sophie. ‘He can be arrogant sometimes, and I think he’s a bit self-centred, but there was just something so exciting about him…I don’t know. It’s chemistry, I suppose. I can’t really explain how he made me feel. And now I can’t bear the thought of another man touching me.’

Bram wasn’t quite sure how he felt about hearing that, especially when her soft warmth was leaning against him and he was wondering, bizarrely, what it would feel like to put his arm round her and pull her closer.

‘I’ve tried to meet other men,’ Sophie continued, ‘but I just end up remembering how it was with Nick. I tell myself that it would be different if I actually came face to face with him again, but I’m afraid. What if it isn’t different? What if it’s exactly the same? Melissa would see that I still loved him, and that would just make things worse for her.’

‘Is that why you stay in London?’