A/N: Please review – hope you like it!
Cold
Inside of Hartfield, Emma has very rarely – if ever – known cold. With blazing fires all year round due to her father's fear of cold (weather and illness both), one is far more likely to feel hot than otherwise.
Perversely, Emma loves winter. She loves the crispness of the air, the delicious shiver that goes down her spine at a brisk wind, the beauty of the deadened but white-cloaked landscape around her, the icy dissolution of a snowflake on the tip of her tongue, the tingling numbness of her pink nose when she comes in from the cold. It's this coming in that she loves most – she feels that to fully appreciate warmth, one must experience cold. It's something her father has never understood.
It's this thought which suddenly comes to Emma's mind one unbearably hot day in summer as she hears Mr. Knightley's impassioned, angry words about her behaviour towards Miss Bates and just knows that she is wrong and he's horribly, horribly right. When she sees the icy fire in his eyes and feels her blood run cold in her veins at the thought that she's lost his respect, she knows that she would give anything to bask once more in the warmth of his smile.