“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.
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