his better judgment, Sam held out his hands to her. He noticed she reached out with only one. Still, he could feel the warmth of that hand rising past the Merino wool of a very good glove. He set his legs against the slippery footing, and then pulled Hanna to her feet.
They stood regarding one another. He looked for signs that she had changed, and despite the cut of her I’m-an-accountant-now suit and the passage of nine years, he found very few. If he was to wipe away that faint dusting of makeup, Hanna Merrifield would look much the same as she had looked at fifteen. The bone structure that had promised great beauty had delivered.
Except there was something faintly bruised about her eyes, like she carried sorrow around with her, which Sam knew she did. It made him want to squeeze her uninjured hand, which he realized, uncomfortably, he was still holding.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” he said, and gave in to the impulse to offer comfort. He gave her hand a quick, hard squeeze before dropping it. “Wasn’t it six months ago now?”
Hanna nodded. She was looking down at her hand as if even through her glove she had felt the same nearly electrical jolt as him.
Sam shoved his own hands in the deep pockets of his long, leather jacket.
“I’m also sorry about nearly running you down. You and the pony just seemed to materialize out of the night. Do you think the pony is all right?”
“I’m afraid so,” she said gloomily, and he couldn’t help but smile at her tone. “She’s the reason I’m out here. The farm manager has just quit because of her dreadful antics. Though I’m hoping I can talk him out of it.”
Though he wondered about the wisdom of trying to talk the manager out of quitting when he had obviously left her in a complete pickle, Sam kept that to himself.
“Bad timing, isn’t it?” he said. “Right before Christmas? His defection explains why the driveway isn’t plowed for customers.”
“I don’t think the tree stand or gift shop has been open at night.”
The businessman in him couldn’t stop from commenting, “But that’s when it’s convenient for people who work during the day to shop.”
“It’s early in the season,” Hanna said, a bit defensively, and then sighed. “You don’t know the half of it.” Her gloom seemed to deepen.
“Why don’t you tell me?” Sam told himself it was purely his interest in the farm, and not any kind of interest in her, that made him want to know the details.
She hesitated, then shrugged. “Things have been different the last few years and the farm has been run by managers. It has been on a downward slide ever since.”
Then she seemed to realize she did not want to confide in him after all, and bit down on that plump bottom lip.
Hanna pulled herself to her full height, which was not very high, maybe five foot four or five, and said with graceful polish, “And you, Sam? What are you doing in the driveway of Christmas Valley Farm on a night when it would seem wiser to stay inside and drink cocoa? Are you shopping for your Christmas tree?”
“I’m not exactly the stay-inside-and-drink-cocoa kind of guy,” he said with a snort. “And I’m even less of a shopping-for-a-Christmas-tree kind of guy.”
And he saw something flash through her eyes. Crazy to think it might be a memory of that one kiss they had shared so many years ago.
“I understand you’ve put the farm up for sale,” he said. “I’m here as a prospective buyer.”
* * *
“You?” Hanna could hear the disbelief in her voice, and she saw the hardness settle around his features at her tone.
Still, it was shocking. Sam Chisholm buying Christmas Valley Farm? The shock of it took her mind off the throb of dull pain in her hand that had been caused by hanging on to the pony’s rope when she should have let go.
Though, now, too late, after the disbelieving words had come from her mouth, Hanna saw there were differences between this man and the one she remembered from years ago.
Sam Chisholm’s shoulders, gathering snow on them already, were immense under a tailored long coat that was not buttoned. It was the kind of coat people around here did not wear: a beautiful dark leather, turned up at the collar. He had a plaid scarf casually threaded under the collar of the coat.
Would she have recognized this man if she had passed him on the street? Of course, she had the fleeting thought that if they were going to meet unexpectedly, she would have much rather passed him on the street.
In her rush to get home to deal with the Molly emergency, Hanna had not packed proper farm wear.
So she stood before this gloriously attractive man in a too-large mackinaw of her father’s, and boots that may have been her father’s too, which she had found still standing at the back door of the farmhouse though he had been gone for years.
Her fault that her father, too young for such things, had collapsed in his tracks, hands over the heart that had exploded in his chest? The heart that she had broken.
The thought blasted through Hanna. Her life in the city was so full, so busy. Planning for the wedding, her pace had become even more frantic. She hadn’t had time for thoughts like that. And she had loved the fact that her life was too full for thoughts of the past. Maybe that was why, even now, she filled every spare second with work...
The guilt she had been running from seemed to have settled over her like a cloud as soon as she had opened the back door of the farm, stuffy from being shut up for so long.
Easier to focus on the distraction of Sam Chisholm than the guilt she knew had been waiting for this moment: her return to her childhood home after a six-year absence.
Sam looked deeply sophisticated, and gave off the unconscious air of wealth and control. He also radiated a certain power that went beyond the perfection of his physique, that perfection obvious even beneath the line of that expensive jacket.
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
