eBookOriginal (Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
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…
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781460343739 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harlequin |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2014 |
| Series: | Harlequin Romance Series , #4453 |
| Sold by: | HARLEQUIN |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 276 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
"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 Han-na'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 fiancé, 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 shuff led 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.
* * *
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."