Julia Williams - Coming Home For Christmas - Warm, humorous and completely irresistible!

I knew this wouldn’t help.

Half an hour later

I’ve had a cup of tea. Come back, sat here staring some more. I’d give up now, but Jo will want to know that I’ve written something down.

Where do I even begin?

Jo says, at the beginning … that sounds like some kind of lame story we had to write at school. I was never much good at that. I was never much good at anything apart from tending to animals, and ploughing the land. And now I’m not much good at that.

So … the beginning.

I used to be happy once. I had a family, a lovely wife, a farm we ran together. I didn’t know it then, but life was pretty damned perfect.

Then, two years ago, I had an horrific accident which caused me brain damage. And nothing’s been the same since …

‘You’re here! Already?’ Pippa looked stricken as she walked across the snowy yard, delightfully scruffy in an old raincoat, thick woolly jumpy, jeans, wellies, her auburn curls tied up in a loose ponytail. ‘Just look at me, I haven’t even changed yet.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Dan, his heart singing. Pippa could have been wearing a brown paper bag and she’d still have been gorgeous. He resisted the urge to pick her up and swing her in his arms, just in case her parents were looking out of the farmhouse window. He’d only met them again once, since he and Pippa had got together at the Farmer’s Ball, though of course he remembered them from when he and Pippa had been at school together, a lifetime ago. Pippa’s parents had been nothing but friendly and welcoming, but he didn’t want to get in their bad books this early on in his relationship with their daughter.

‘You did say, Christmas Eve, your place, 7pm, didn’t you?’ said Dan, puzzled. ‘We are still going to the Hopesay Arms, aren’t we?’ They’d made the arrangement earlier in the week, but what with it being Christmas week, he’d been flat out helping his own parents on their farm, and presumably Pippa had been doing the same.

‘Oh!’ said Pippa, her face dropping. ‘I thought we said eight. Mum and Dad like going to the early Christmas service at church, so they can be up early for the cows on Christmas Day. I offered to take charge of milking tonight for them. One of the farm hands was supposed to be coming up to help me, but he’s just rung to say he’s down and out with flu. I’m so sorry, but I’m not going to be ready for hours.’

‘I can help,’ said Dan, who didn’t care where he spent time with Pippa, so long as they were together. Ever since their first date, he’d been pinching himself that she was interested in him. Pippa North, the girl every guy in his year at school had fancied. And now she was his. Permanently, he hoped.

‘Would you really?’ Pippa looked like she might burst into tears.

‘Of course,’ said Dan with a grin. ‘Where do you want me?’ Luckily, he hadn’t dressed up too much for their date, and he didn’t mind if he got his clothes dirty. He’d do anything for Pippa, he realised, anything at all. Every time he met her, she astonished him more. How many other girls her age in Hope Christmas would be milking the cows instead of heading for the pub on Christmas Eve?

‘You’re amazing,’ said Pippa, throwing her arms around him in an embrace which he wanted to last for ever. ‘Let me find you some overalls to wear.’

Which is how Dan found himself half an hour later, sitting in the milking shed, listening to Christmas carols on Pippa’s old cassette deck over the hum of the machines and the cows bellowing, laughing at the way the evening had turned out.

‘And there was me planning to show you a wild night in Hope Christmas,’ he said, grinning. ‘At this rate we’re going to be too knackered to do anything.’

‘That would be difficult,’ said Pippa, smiling as she expertly removed a cow from the stalls and cleaned it up before patting it on its rump and sending it out to the yard. ‘Hope Christmas is hardly a hub of night life. I am sorry I’ve kept you from the pub though.’

He loved that about her, the way she was always so positive and kind.

‘Don’t be,’ said Dan. ‘I don’t care where I am so long as I’m with you.’

She looked at him shyly, and blushed.

‘Me too,’ she said, and he was hit by a sudden revelation.

‘I love you, Pippa,’ he said. It was the first time he’d ever said that to any girl, ever.

‘Oh Dan,’ she said, her eyes shining, ‘I love you too.’

He wanted to kiss her there and then, but there was a cow between them, and work to be done. But as Dan watched her, focussed completely on the task in hand, totally at one with the animals she was dealing with, he was hit by a second revelation. Come what may, Pippa North was the girl he was going to marry.

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