Mary Balogh - Simply Unforgettable

Her snowman, on the other hand, was solid and squat. He was broader than he was tall. He was—

“Too fat to pass through any door,” Mr. Marshall commented, diverted from his own efforts for a moment, “even if he were to turn sideways. Too fat to find a bed wide enough or sturdy enough to sleep on. Too fat to be allowed any bread or potatoes with his meals for the next year. He is disgustingly obese.”

“He is cuddly,” she said, tipping her head to one side to survey her unfinished creation, “and good-natured. He is not cadaverous like some snowmen I have seen. He does not look as if he will blow over in the first puff of wind. He is—”

“Headless,” he said, “as is mine. Let us get back to work and resume the name-calling afterward.”

Her poor snowman looked even more obese after she had fixed a nice round head on his shoulders. The head was too small. She tried to pack more snow about it, but it fell off in clumps about his shoulders, and she had to be content with picking out the two largest coals they had brought from the kitchen with them so that she could at least give him large, soulful eyes. She added a somewhat smaller coal nose and a fat carrot to act as his pipe and a few more small coals for coat buttons. With one forefinger she sculpted a wide and smiling mouth about the carrot.

“At least,” she said, stepping back, “he has a sense of humor. And at least he has a head.”

She looked down with a smirk at the massive one he had sculpted on the ground, complete with jug-handle ears and sausage curls.

“The contest is not over yet,” he said. “There was no time limit, was there? It would be somewhat premature to start jeering yet. You might feel foolish afterward.”

She saw then that he was not as ignorant of the laws of gravity as she had assumed. He spent some time on the shoulders of his snowman, scooping out a hollow to hold the head so that it would not roll off. Of course, he still had to get the head up there.

She watched smugly as he stooped to pick it up.

But she had reckoned without his superior height and the strength of those arm muscles. What would have been an impossibility for her looked like child’s play for him. He even had the strength to hold the head suspended over the torso for a few moments so that he could get it at just the right angle before lowering it into place. He selected the coals and carrot he wanted and pressed them into place—though he used his carrot for a nose. And then he reached into one of the pockets of his greatcoat and drew out a long, narrow knitted scarf in a hideous combination of pink and orange stripes and wrapped it about the neck of his snowman.

“The vicar’s wife in my grandfather’s parish presented it to me for Christmas,” he said. “General opinion in the village has it that she is color-blind. I think general opinion must have the right of it. It is kinder than saying she has no taste at all, anyway.”

He stepped back and stood beside Frances. Together they contemplated their creations.

“The scarf and the curls and the lopsided mouth save yours from looking mean and humorless,” she said generously. “Not to mention those ears. Oh, and those pockmarks are meant to be freckles . That is a nice touch, I must confess. I like him after all.”

“And I must admit to a fondness for Friar Tuck with his black coat buttons,” he said. “He looks like a jolly old soul, though I do not know what holds his pipe in his mouth if he is smiling so broadly.”

“His teeth.”

“Ah,” he said. “Good point. We forgot to appoint a judge.”

“And to have a trophy awaiting the winner,” she said.

It was only then, when he turned his head to grin at her, that she realized he had one arm draped about her shoulders in a relaxed, comradely gesture. She guessed that he had only just realized it himself. The smiles froze on their faces, and Frances’s knees felt suddenly weak.

He slipped his arm free, cleared his throat, and wandered closer to the snowmen.

“I suppose,” he said, “we might as well declare the competition a draw. Agreed? If we do not, we will get into a scrap again and you will be devising some other hair-raising scheme for putting a period to my existence. Or are you going to insist upon declaring me the winner?”

“By no means,” she said. “Mine is definitely sturdier than yours. It will withstand the forces of nature for much longer.”

“Now that is a provocative statement when I have been magnanimous enough to suggest a draw,” he said, and he stooped and turned and without warning hurled a snowball at her. It caught her in the chest and spattered up into her face.

“Oh!” she cried, outraged. “Unfair!”

And she scooped up a gloveful of snow and tossed it back at him. It hit the side of his hat, knocking it askew.

The battle was on.

It raged for several minutes until to a casual observer it might have looked as if four snowmen had been erected beside the inn. Except that two of them were moving and were helpless with laughter. And except that one of them, the taller and broader of the two, suddenly lunged for the other and bore her backward until she was lying on her back in a soft snowdrift with his weight pressing her deeper and his hands clamped to her wrists and holding them imprisoned on either side of her head.

“Enough!” he declared, still laughing. “That last one caught me in the eye.”

He blinked flakes of snow off his eyelashes.

“You admit defeat, then?” She laughed up at him.

“Admit defeat?” His eyebrows rose. “Pardon me, but who is holding whom vanquished in the snow?”

“But who just declared that he had had enough?” She waggled her eyebrows at him.

“The same one who then ended the battle with a decisive annihilation of the enemy.” He laughed back at her.

She suddenly became aware that he was actually on top of her. She could feel his weight bearing her down. She could feel his breath warm on her face. She looked into his hazel eyes, only inches away, and found them smoldering back into her own. She looked down at his mouth and was aware at the same moment that his eyes dropped to hers.

Her strange adventure moved perilously close to danger—and perhaps to something rather splendid.

His lips brushed across hers and she felt as if she were lying beneath a hot August sun rather than December snow clouds.

She had never known a man so very male—a thought that did not bear either pursuing or interpreting.

“I have just remembered the bread,” she said in a voice that sounded shockingly normal to her ears. “I will be fortunate indeed if it has not risen to fill the kitchen to the ceiling. I will be fortunate if I can get through the door to rescue it.”

His eyes smoldered into hers for perhaps a second longer, and then one corner of his mouth lifted in what might have been a smile or perhaps was simple mockery. He pushed himself to his feet, brushed himself off, and reached down a hand to help her up. She banged her gloved hands together and then shook her cloak, but there was as much snow down inside the collar of it as there was on the outside, she was sure.

“Oh, this was such fun,” she said, not looking at him.

“It was indeed,” he agreed. “But if I ever meet fortune face-to- face, I will demand to know why I had to be stranded here with a prudish schoolteacher. Go, Miss Allard. Run. If I can have no fresh bread with my soup after all, I shall be quite out of humor.”

For the merest moment Frances thought of staying in order to protest his use of the word prudish . But if she were foolish enough to do that, she might find herself having to prove that it did not apply to her.

She fled, though for very pride’s sake she did not run.