Meet Me Under the Mistletoe

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

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

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.