Kissing Santa
Kissing Santa
Jessica Hart
We saw Nanny kissing Santa Claus…Amanda had a mission: to convince Blair McAllister to sell his home to her company. In order to get close to him she took the job of live-in nanny to his boisterous three children….But her plan backfired. Although Blair was as grouchy as a bear with a sore head, it just made him all the more attractive–and Amanda fell in love!As Blair prepared to play Santa to the kids on Christmas Eve, Amanda had forgotten all about her secret mission. She had hit on a new, far more rewarding plan: catching her boss under the mistletoe instead!
“It’s midnight,” Blair said softly. “Happy Christmas.” (#u1f579a46-a039-5931-adf3-3e71023302fe)About the Author (#ue17052af-dcea-5c5e-b7a7-3da558f1b4c6)Title Page (#u9a950f62-d940-58e3-a745-a18960ec33fb)CHAPTER ONE (#u08807a07-afc5-5cdb-92b4-705a59ebe716)CHAPTER TWO (#u31047c63-62a4-591b-b53b-02a44d3493eb)CHAPTER THREE (#uf89793ae-2d9b-5d71-be01-ab533871fb53)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“It’s midnight,” Blair said softly. “Happy Christmas.”
Amanda felt her throat tighten with unaccountable tears. “Happy Christmas,” she said in a husky voice. She felt as if she had never understood the real meaning of Christmas before now, looking out into the starlit snow with Blair beside her, their breath hanging in frozen clouds. The urge to lean against him was so strong that she forced herself to turn away... and stopped dead as she noticed the mistletoe hanging from the doorway, for the first time.
Following her gaze, Blair glanced up at the mistletoe dangling above his head Their eyes met in the frosty air. “Happy Christmas, Blair,” she murmured, and pressed her mouth to his in a kiss that was warm and long and achingly sweet.
Jessica Hart had a haphazard career before she began writing to finance a degree in history. Her experience ranged from waitress, theater production assistant and Outback cook to newsdesk secretary, expedition assistant and English teacher, and she has worked in countries as different as France and Indonesia, Australia and Cameroon She now lives in the north of England, where her hobbies are limited to eating and drinking and traveling when she can, preferably to places where she’ll find good food or desert or tropical rain.
Kissing Santa
Jessica Hart
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
AMANDA saw Blair McAllister as soon as she stepped down off the train. He was standing under a banner wishing everyone season’s greetings on behalf of the station staff, but he didn’t look exactly filled with Christmas spirit. Instead, he was watching the passengers piling out of the standard-class carriages, his hands thrust into corduroy trousers with barely concealed impatience and dark brows drawn together over a formidable-looking nose.
Dropping her case onto the platform, Amanda slid A Far Horizon surreptitiously out of her bag so that she could squint down at the photograph on the back of the dust-jacket. Yes, it was definitely the same man.
With a distinct sense of disappointment, she rested her sherry-coloured eyes on Blair McAllister as he searched the milling crowds with a frown. The photograph had been taken in a desert. Unaware of the camera, he had been smiling at someone out of sight, eyes narrowed against the glare and dark hair slightly ruffled by a hot wind, and he had looked rangy and relaxed and utterly competent.
On the tram, Amanda had studied the photograph with interest and a faint stirring of anticipation. She wouldn’t have called him exactly handsome, but there was defimtely something about him, she had decided. She wasn’t sure whether it was that look of lean self-containment, his reputation as an intrepid traveller and programme maker, or simply his tan, but, whatever it was, it gave him an indefinably glamorous air.
Now she slid the book back into her bag with a faint sigh. Who said the camera never lied? The man waiting for her on the platform might have the same severe features as the man in the photograph, but in the flesh he looked tired and bad-tempered and not in the least bit glamorous.
He stood quite still, letting the crowds surge past him, and as Amanda watched he turned his head and looked up the platform towards her. For a brief moment his gaze rested on her vibrant figure with a hard, impersonal scrutiny before it swept on, and the next moment he had transferred his attention back down the platform once more. Amanda was left feeling rather piqued at his lack of interest. She was also a little disconcerted by the shrewd intelligence in his face. Blair McAllister didn’t look like a man who would be easily fooled by anyone.
Which was unfortunate, in the circumstances.
Amanda hesitated. In London it had seemed so easy to take Sue’s place but now, as she faced the reality of her new employer, suddenly it didn’t seem quite such a good idea. She looked doubtfully along the platform at Blair, then squared her shoulders and bent to tip her suitcase back onto its wheels. She had just spent over eleven hours on trains and she wasn’t going to turn round and go back now!
Trundling the suitcase behind her, she made her way towards him through the last of the passengers. ‘Mr McAllister?’
He swung round at the sound of his name, the fierce brows shooting up in surprise at her appearing from the direction of the first-class carriages. ‘Yes—’
He stopped as he took in Amanda’s appearance. She had a mobile expression, and dark, glossy brown hair cleverly highlighted with gold swung around her face. Subject to belated qualms about what she was letting herself in for, she had bolstered her confidence by making up with care on the train, emphasising the unusual golden-brown eyes and outlining the curving mouth with the bold red lipstick that she always wore. She was wearing the suit that she had bought to celebrate promotion to executive status at last, together with her favourite shoes which were decorated with floppy bows and which always made her feel good.
‘You’re Susan Haywood?’ Blair went on in disbelief.
Perhaps she didn’t look much like a nanny, Amanda realised as his eyes rested for an incredulous moment on her shoes. Nannies probably didn’t travel first class either, but Norris had bought her ticket and she had never been one to turn down the chance of a bit of luxury. Still, it was too late to worry about that now. She gave Blair McAllister her best smile instead.
‘That’s me,’ she said mendaciously. ‘But I prefer to be called Amanda,’ she added, having decided that she would get confused if she had to answer to Sue all month.
‘Amanda?’ Her guileless smile didn’t seem to be having much effect on Blair. Instead of smiling back as any other man would have done, the surprise in his face deepened to suspicion. ‘Amanda?’ he said again, staring at her.
‘Yes.’ She allowed her innocent look to fade in her turn into bewilderment. ‘Didn’t the agency tell you?’
‘No, they didn’t.’ Blair’s voice was terse, with only a hint of a Scottish intonation.
Close to, he was much more formidable than he had seemed at first sight. That photograph had been definitely misleading, Amanda decided. Who would have thought that that cool, uncompromising mouth could relax into such a smile?
Not that there was any sign of a smile now. There was a flintiness about him, a reserve edged with irritability that made him appear dauntingly stern, and although the artificial light made it impossible to tell what colour his eyes were it showed enough to tell her that they held an uncomfortably acute expression. The photograph hadn’t warned her about that either, thought Amanda, obscurely resentful. She felt she would have been better prepared if she had known just how they could look through you.
‘All the agency told me was that you were an experienced nanny,’ Blair was saying, still frowning suspiciously. ‘They assured me that you were a nice, quiet girl.’ The penetrating gaze swept from her face to her shoes and then back again. ‘You don’t look very quiet to me.’ His tone implied that he didn’t think she looked very nice either. ‘You’ll forgive me if I seem a little taken aback,’ he went on in an arid voice. ‘I thought I was getting a sensible nanny called Susan and instead I get a glamorous executive type called Amanda!’
Amanda would normally have been delighted to be described as a glamorous executive, but the caustic note in Blair’s voice made it clear that it wasn’t intended as a compliment, and anyway, she was still bridling at the idea of not being considered nice.
‘I’m sorry if you don’t approve of the way I look,’ she said in a voice that was intended to sound quelling but which came out more peevish than anything. ‘But frankly, I don’t see what difference it makes what I look like or what I call myself. I would have thought that the important thing as far as you were concerned was whether I was as sensible as the agency promised.’
‘Quite,’ said Blair acidly. ‘And in my book a sensible girl wouldn’t come to the Highlands in shoes like that in the middle of winter, nor would she be travelling first class. If you’re expecting me to reimburse your travel expenses, you can think again!’
Amanda had opened her mouth to ask whether he always acted like Scrooge or whether it was just in honour of the season when it occurred to her that getting into an argument with her new employer within the first two minutes of meeting him was probably not the best way of ensuring that she got into Dundinnie. She had staked her career on doing just that, so she mustn’t blow it now.
‘I don’t usually travel first class,’ she assured him instead in a conciliatory voice. That at least had the advantage of being true! ‘I bought a standard ticket, but by an extraordinary coincidence I met my godfather in the buffet car,’ she went on, abandoning truth in favour of improvisation. ‘We hadn’t seen each other for ages, so he insisted that I go and sit with him in first class, and he paid the difference...a sort of Christmas present.’
‘Very generous godfather,’ commented Blair dourly. Amanda beamed at him, pleased with her story. ‘Oh, he is.’
‘Quite a coincidence meeting him on the same train!’
‘Wasn’t it?’ she agreed, all wide-eyed innocence. ‘He got off in Glasgow,’ she added, sensing disbelief, and anxious to make sure that he didn’t ask her to produce a godfather to substantiate her story.
‘Hmm.’ Blair favoured her with a hard stare, but to Amanda’s relief he didn’t pursue the matter, merely grunting sceptically as he picked up her case. ‘Well, since you’re here at last, Susan, Amanda or whatever you want to call yourself, we may as well go. I’ve been hanging around here quite long enough.’
Anyone would think that it was her fault that the train had been late, Amanda grumbled to herself, but she swallowed her resentment. She had got over the first hurdle, but she would have to be careful. For a nasty moment there she had wondered if Blair had been going to say that he hadn’t believed a word of her story, and there would have been nothing to stop him simply leaving her to catch the first train back to London, making an ignominious end to her glorious new career.
Eyeing the straight back ahead of her, Amanda reminded herself just what was at stake. This was her chance to break out of the secretarial rank at last. Norris Jeffries had more or less guaranteed a promotion if she got this right, and if she was going to do that she should be thinking about chatting Blair up, not arguing with him.
She hurried to catch up. ‘I’ve just been reading your book,’ she said brightly, but the look Blair cast down at her was not exactly encouraging.
‘Which one?’
Amanda’s mind went hideously blank as she tried to remember the title. ‘It was about the expedition you led to the desert...and you made a documentary when you were there,’ she added helpfully, although she had done little more than read the blurb on the cover and flick through the photographs. Travel books had never appealed to her; fiction, the more implausible the better, was much more her style.
‘That cuts the possibilities down to about four,’ said Blair drily. ‘You don’t remember the name of the desert, I suppose?’
‘No,’ Amanda had to admit. ‘But I thought it was terribly good,’ she made haste to console him. ‘Honestly, it was great’
‘I’m glad it made such an impression on you.’ There was no mistaking the acerbic note in his voice this time and Amanda bit her lip, feeling rather silly. Anyone else would have been glad of a compliment, she thought, instead of making it clear that they didn’t believe that she had read a word of his book! She had been going to pretend that she had seen some of his television programmes too, but she wouldn’t bother now!
Outside the station it was dark and cold and gusts of rain splattered against her face. Unprepared for the sharp drop in temperature, Amanda screwed up her face and wrapped her arms around herself to try and stop the shivering. It had been unseasonably mild in London, and she had packed her coat so that she wouldn’t have to carry it. Now she wished she hadn’t. Clearly, the Scottish weather hadn’t forgotten that there were only a couple of weeks to go until Christmas.
Blair was unlocking what looked like a Range Rover, parked against a wall in the darkness. The back was stacked with boxes, carrier bags and odd assorted pieces of machinery and there was only just enough room to wedge Amanda’s suitcase behind her seat. ‘It looks as if you’ve been shopping,’ she said brightly as Blair leant across to unlock her door and she scrambled gratefully into the shelter of the passenger seat. ‘Don’t tell me they’re all Christmas presents!’
‘Hardly.’ It was obvious that Blair didn’t think much of her effort at making conversation and had already written her down as completely inane. He slotted the key into the ignition and coaxed the engine into spluttering life. ‘I’ve merely been taking the opportunity to stock up since I was coming down to town. Dundinnie isn’t exactly handy for the shops.’
‘So I hear,’ said Amanda a little glumly. She loved shops, but Norris had raved about the castle’s isolated position. ‘The agency warned me,’ she explained quickly, feeling Blair glance at her, and then, to divert him, said, ‘Is the car all right? It’s making an awfully funny noise.’ Sue had told her that Blair McAllister was acclaimed as much for his travel documentaries as for his travel books and daring expeditions, and Amanda would have thought that if he was as successful as he was reputed to be then he could afford a car that sounded healthier than this one. Perhaps Norris was closer to the mark in suspecting that Blair had problems trying to mamtain a medieval Scottish castle at the same time as financing his travels.
‘She’s just warming up,’ said Blair irritably, as if divining the train of her thoughts. He clicked on the headlights and a powerful beam of light bounced off the wall in front of them and was reflected back through the windscreen, throwing the lean planes of his face into eerie relief. Amanda found herself noticing how the blocks of light and shadow emphasised his profile with its strong nose and clean jawline and lit just one corner of that stern mouth.
Switching on the windscreen wipers, Blair began to reverse the car out of its parking space, but as he rested an arm on her headrest and turned to look through the rear window he caught Amanda watching him and raised one eyebrow in sardonic enquiry. Unaccountably ruffled, Amanda looked quickly away. To her relief, the interior of the car was engulfed in darkness once more as the beam of the headlights swung out and away from the wall. For some stupid reason, she could feel a flush stealing up her cheeks.
‘How long will it take us to get to the castle?’ she asked with forced brightness, just to show Blair that she hadn’t even registered that joltingly brief meeting of their eyes.
‘It’s normally about two and a half hours,’ said Blair, putting the car into first. ‘Probably more like three tonight. There was a lot of rain when I drove down this morning, and they were forecasting gales again tonight.’
As if to underline his words, a gust of wind splattered rain against the windscreen. ‘Three hours!’ exclaimed Amanda, aghast. ‘I could be halfway back to London in that time!’
‘Very possibly, but you won’t find any nice straight motorways around here. As the crow flies, Dundinnie isn’t that far, but we have to follow the road around a couple of lochs and then get through the hills, and there may well be snow up there. It’s not an easy road at the best of times, but on a night like this it’ll be even slower than usual, so I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to be patient.’
He didn’t sound very sorry. ‘Couldn’t we stay here tonight and go tomorrow morning?’ pleaded Amanda. She had glanced at a map before she’d set out, measuring the distance against the scale with her thumb, and had calculated that it wouldn’t take much more than an hour to get there. That had seemed bad enough after ten hours on the train—and that was before they had been delayed for over an hour. Now the prospect of another three hours seemed too much to bear. ‘I’ve been travelling all day,’ she reminded Blair, hoping to appeal to his sense of chivalry, but she might as well have spared her breath.
‘You’ve only been sitting on a train,’ he pointed out without a trace of sympathy.
‘For eleven and a half hours!’ Amanda said indignantly. ‘Sitting still for that length of time is tiring—or am I only allowed to be tired if I’ve spent eleven hours hacking through some jungle?’
‘If you’d spent eleven days hacking through a jungle you’d be entitled to feel tired,’ said Blair with a sardonic, sideways glance. ‘As far as I can see, all you’ve been doing is sitting in a first-class carriage not doing anything—not even reading, judging by what you said about my book! I hardly think you’ve got anything to complam about,’ he went on. ‘It’s not even as if I’m asking you to drive. You can go to sleep if you want.’
‘I can’t sleep in a car,’ said Amanda sullaly. ‘It makes me feel sick.’
‘In that case you’ll just have to stay awake and shut up, won’t you?’
He was hateful, she decided, subsiding into simmering silence. Arrogant and inconsiderate and absolutely hateful! She had been unfair when she had mentally compared him to Scrooge: Scrooge would have been more charming and certainly better company this Christmas!
She slid a resentful look at Blair from under her lashes. It was all right for him. He hadn’t been up at the crack of dawn to see Sue and Nigel off at the airport, or had to struggle across London on the tube with a heavy suitcase, and he hadn’t had to sit on a train all day with only his crummy book for company either! Anyone with any feelings at all would have taken her to the nearest luxury hotel, poured her a stiff drink and ensured that she had a hot bath before falling into bed. Instead of which she was being dragged on a cross-country marathon and told to shut up when she dared to protest.
Folding her arms, Amanda glowered through the windscreen at the darkness. If Blair wanted her to shut up, she would shut up. She didn’t want to waste her conversation on him anyway!
Frustratingly, Blair didn’t appear to notice that she was ignoring him. Quite unperturbed by the silence, he drove through the town and out onto the Inverness road. ‘The agency tell me that you’ve had considerable experience of dealing with children,’ he said at last as they left the lights of Fort William behind them. ‘What made you become a nanny?’
‘I started to train as a teacher,’ said Amanda, still rather huffily. It was lucky that she knew Sue’s career nearly as well as her own. ‘But I really liked small children best,’ she went on, crossing her fingers in the darkness. ‘I used to be a nanny m the holidays and I liked the variety of temporary work. I got to travel more too. Once I spent three weeks in a luxury hotel in the Caribbean.’ It was the only one of Sue’s jobs that Amanda had ever found the least bit enviable, but Blair McAllister was predictably unimpressed.
‘I hope you’re not expecting anything like that this time,’ he said dampeningly. ‘Did the agency explain the situation to you?’
‘All they said was that you needed someone to help look after your sister’s children,’ said Amanda, trying to remember exactly what Sue had told her. ‘I gather that she hasn’t been well?’
‘She’s better now, but the illness left her very pulled down, and she really needed a complete break. She went through a very messy divorce last year and I think everything just caught up with her. The children were at school, but there was a very responsible nanny to look after them and she went out to New Zealand to see a friend and have a holiday. Unfortunately, the nanny’s mother is very ill, which is why I had to go down and bring the children up here last week. And then we heard that the friend she’s staying with has just been involved in an accident, so Belinda feels she ought to stay and help out until she’s on her feet again.’
Blair gave a brief sigh. ‘Unfortunately, it means that she’s not going to be able to get back in time for Christmas and the children are obviously disappointed. I have to admit that I wasn’t planning on looking after three children for six weeks, especially when they’re having to miss the end of term. That’s why I rang your agency. I’m trying to finish a book about my last trip at the moment and, to be frank, I don’t know very much about children at the best of times.’
That makes two of us, thought Amanda glumly. ‘So you just want someone to keep them out of your way for a bit?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ he said with a stiff look, mistaking her sympathy for accusation. ‘But I do have a deadline to meet, and it seemed the best thing for the children to have someone who would know how to look after them properly. They’re missing their mother and they haven’t had an easy time of it either over the last couple of years and it’s made them rather... difficult at times.’
Amanda’s heart sank. ‘What exactly does “difficult” mean?’
‘They just don’t seem to do any of things we used to do when we were kids. Simon’s eleven and Nicholas nearly nine, but all they ever want to do is sit in front of the television.’ Blair’s voice thinned with disapproval, but Amanda perked up. Watching television didn’t sound like being difficult to her.
‘There’s a little girl too, isn’t there?’
‘Emily,’ he confirmed. ‘She’s seven and very spoilt. I have to admit that I’ll be glad to hand them over to someone who knows how to deal with children,’ he added in an unexpected admission. ‘If you’re half as good as the agency say you are, you should be able to sort them out.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Amanda’s attempt at breezy confidence sounded hollow even to her own ears. ‘Yes, of course I will.’
‘But you hate children!’ Sue had exclaimed when Amanda had first proposed her plan.
‘Not all of them,’ Amanda had defended herself. ‘I’m sure I won’t mind these children. There are only three of them, after all, and it’s not as if they’re babies who need their nappies changing all the time.’ The two girls had been sitting in a crowded wine bar near Amanda’s office. They had managed to find a table and were methodically working their way through the bowl of peanuts that had come with the bottle of wine.
‘They still need to be looked after properly,’ Sue pointed out.
‘I don’t see that it can be that difficult,’ said Amanda buoyantly. ‘You told me yourself that there’s a housekeeper to do the cooking, so all I’d have to do is keep an eye on them and stop them falling in the loch.’
‘I can’t believe you’re serious about this!’ Sue looked helplessly across the table at her friend. ‘You’ve never had the slightest interest in Scotland and even less in children, and now you say you want to spend several weeks as a nanny in the Highlands! And Christmas too! Surely you’d rather spend it with your family?’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to go home for Christmas,’ said Amanda, ‘but the job’s more important to me at the moment. Anyway,’ she added, ‘my sister and her three children are going to be there, so the house’ll be packed, and everyone will be so busy fussing over them that they won’t have time to notice whether I’m there or not.’
‘What about Hugh?’
‘Oh, that’s all off,’ said Amanda carelessly. ‘He just couldn’t understand why I’d rather have a decent job than a mortgage and a screaming baby. He’s going out with Lucy now—I’m sure she’ll want exactly that and then they’ll both be happy,’ she added, not without a touch of regret, because Hugh really had been very good-looking. ‘No, my future lies in a brilliant career, and if that means spending Christmas in Scotland that’s what I’ll do.’
‘But the whole idea is completely mad!’ protested Sue. Amanda refilled their glasses. ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said confidently. ‘It’s a brilliant idea. It solves your problem and it solves my problem and it even solves Blair MeAllister’s problem. What’s wrong with that?’
‘You don’t think it’s a bit deceitful?’ asked Sue, not without a trace of irony.
‘It’s not going to make any difference to Blair McAllister which girl he gets,’ said Amanda, waving the bottle dismissively. ‘He just wants someone to keep an eye on his sister’s kids, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to do that as well as anyone else. I know you think I’m a domestic disaster, but I’m not completely irresponsible. And it would make a difference to me, Sue,’ she went on pleadingly. ‘It might be just another job to you, but my entire future depends on getting into Dundinnie Castle!’
Unfortunately, Sue was used to Amanda’s sense of drama. ‘Your future has depended on so many new jobs that I’ve lost count!’
‘This job’s different,’ Amanda insisted through a mouthful of peanuts. ‘I’m sick of being stuck as a secretary and told that I can only move up the ladder if I stay there for ten years. I want to be successful now.’
‘There’s no point in wanting to be successful unless you know what it is you want to be successful at,’ said Sue, ever practical, but Amanda brushed that aside.
‘Norris knows what I mean. He says he likes people who are hungry for success. That’s why he’s given me this job. ‘If I can get into Dundinnie and convince Blair McAllister to sell, he says there are no limits to how far I can go, but first I’ve got to prove to him that I’ve got the killer instinct.’
‘The killer instinct? You?’ Sue regarded her friend with exasperated affection. ‘I don’t know why you keep up this pretence of wanting to be a ruthless businesswoman when we all know what a softie you are underneath! You’d better not let Norris Jeffries find out about all those lame ducks you sort out if you want him to think that you’ve got the killer instinct!’
Amanda scowled. She had put a lot of effort into her new executive image. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t got any lame ducks.’
‘No? What about Geny?’
‘She just needs a bit of organisation—’ Amanda began defensively, but Sue didn’t let her finish.
‘And what about that time I turned up on your doorstep in floods of tears when you were on your way to Venice? If you’d had real killer instinct you’d have tossed me a packet of tissues on your way out to the airport, instead of cancelling your whole trip to make sure that Nigel and I got back together.’
‘It’s because I want you to stay together that I think you should let me take your place,’ said Amanda cunningly, seizing her opportunity. ‘What’s Nigel going to think when you won’t give up a crummy temporary job so that you can go with him on this holiday he’s won? It’s the chance of a lifetime, and he can’t turn it down, but if he thinks you don’t care enough to want to spent Christmas with him in California, well...’ She shook her head sadly. ‘It’s not as if you’ll get many opportunities for a free trip to the States either,’ she persevered when Sue looked gloomily down into her glass. ‘And just think what he might get up to without you!’
It was obvious that Sue had already thought. ‘It’s not that I wouldn’t love to go...’
‘Well, then!’ Amanda spread her hands virtuously. ‘Here am I, offering to take your place so that you don’t let down the agency, and all you can do is think up objections!’
‘It’s the thought of you taking my place that worries me,’ said Sue frankly. ‘I’ve built up a good reputation with the agency, and if they hear that I’ve let you work for Blair McAllister under false pretences I’m finished. He’s a highprofile clienl I know you’ve never read any of his books but you must have seen his programmes.’
‘All that pitting-yourself-against-the-elements stuff doesn’t really appeal to me,’ said Amanda.
‘He doesn’t just do that,’ protested Sue. ‘Sometimes it’s true, he does take people out into challenging environments—you should have seen what they were doing in Guyana!—but usually it’s just his individual view of a country.’
‘Maybe, but it never sounds to me as if he goes anywhere with any good restaurants,’ said Amanda flippantly. ‘What’s he supposed to be like?’
‘I think he’s brilliant. If Nigel hadn’t won this holiday, I’d be really looking forward to meeting him.’
Sensing weakness, Amanda sat up straighter. ‘The agency won’t ever find out,’ she said, at her most soothing. ‘It’s not as if I’m going to do anything. All I want is to look round the castle and report back to Norris on its condition. He’s set his heart on it for his new health centre, but he only saw it from the outside when he drove past it a couple of months ago. He wants to know what it’s like inside so that he can make Blair McAllister a realistic offer.’
‘But I thought you said that Norris had already approached him about selling the castle and got a very rude reply telling him to forget the whole idea?’
‘Oh. they always say that at first,’ said Amanda with all the confidence of one who had been in property development for two whole weeks. ‘It’s just a way of forcing up the price. That’s why Norris needs a report on the inside. He’s given me four weeks to get up to the castle and find out what I can about Blair McAllister’s financial situation. It’s not the sort of place you can turn up to out of the blue, and I was just beginning to think that I’d have to admit that I couldn’t do it when you told me you’d been offered a temporary job there starting next week.’ Clutching her hands together, she leant pleadingly over the table. ‘It can’t just be a coincidence, Sue. It has to be meant.’
Sue had taken a lot more persuasion, of course, but in the end, as always, Amanda had got her own way. That very morning, she had driven Sue and Nigel to the airport and waved them onto the plane. ‘What if something goes wrong?’ Sue had wailed, losing her nerve at the last minute.
‘Nothing’s going to go wrong,’ Amanda had said gaily, kissing her goodbye and pushing her firmly towards passport control. ‘I’ll be able to handle Blair McAllister. It’ll be easy—just leave him to me!’
Now she wasn’t so sure. She slid a sideways glance at Blair from under her lashes. The dim light from the dashboard instruments was just enough to outline his forceful profile and hint at the inflexible set of his mouth. Watching it, Amanda was conscious of a hollow feeling that there was nothing easy about Blair McAllister and that if there was any handling to be done he would be the one to do it.
Sue’s opinion of him had been shared by all the friends whom Amanda had asked, and she had begun to think that she was the only person who hadn’t seen his programmes or read his books. He had led some famous expeditions in aid of charity but Amanda’s hopes that he would turn out to have a flamboyant personality to match had been firmly quashed. He was tough, intelligent and overwhelmingly competent, they had all agreed. ‘But gorgeous!’ Pippa, another friend, had added, sighing enviously when she heard where Amanda was going.
Amanda had been inclined to pooh-pooh that idea when she’d first seen a picture of Blair McAllister, but the longer she had studied his photograph, the more she had had to admit that there was something intriguing about that air of assurance. Still, he wasn’t what she would call gorgeous. There was something too unyielding about him, she decided, studying him covertly. He was too cold, too brusque to be really attractive. Then her eyes rested on his mouth and she found herself wondering what it would be like if he turned his head and smiled at her the way he had been smiling in that photograph.
At the thought, an odd, disquieting feeling stirred inside her, and she jerked her gaze away to concentrate on the rhythmic swish and slap of the windscreen wipers. She was supposed to be pretending to be Sue, she reminded herself, and Sue would be moreinterested in the children than in her employer. She cleared her throat. ‘Who’s looking after the children tonight?’
She thought her voice sounded a little odd, but Blair didn’t seem to notice. ‘Maggie—my housekeeper—said that she would spend the mght since we were going to be so late back. She usually goes home after she’s prepared the evening meal. Which reminds me,’ he went on tersely, ‘you’re going to have to help out with the cooking and cleaning. Maggie sprained her wrist very badly yesterday and she won’t be able to do much for a while.’
‘You want me to cook?’
‘I cleared it with the agency this morning,’ he said, oblivious to Amanda’s appalled expression. ‘Naturally your salary will reflect the extra work, but the agency said that you wouldn’t mind. They told me that you were a good cook.’
Sue was. Sue was calm and patient and didn’t work herself into a frenzy when all her pots started to boil at once. Amanda loathed cooking and blessed daily the invention of the microwave. ‘I’m not that good,’ she said nervously, wondering for one wild moment if she could sprain her wrist too.
‘It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Good, plain food is all those children need.’
Amanda’s heart sank even further. If there was one thing she hated more than cooking, it was good, plain food. In cuisine, as in life, she liked things as fancy as possible. Lapsing back into glum silence, she contemplated the rain which was now slashing against the car while the wind whooped and swirled judderingly around them. It looked as if it was going to be a very dull Christmas.
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHY do you call yourself Amanda instead of Susan?’ asked Blair suddenly out of the darkness.
‘Amanda’s my middle name,’ said Amanda, who had anticipated that question.
‘What’s wrong with Susan? It’s not as if it’s an embarrassing name.’
Of course, she should have just said that she preferred Amanda and left it at that, but Amanda had always had a taste for the dramatic and had never been able to resist the temptation to embellish a story. Her elaborate excuses for being late had been famous at school. ‘All the girls in my family are called Susan,’ she improvised. ‘We use our middle names so that we don’t get confused.’
‘You’re all called Susan?’ She could feel the disbelief in the glance he shot her. ‘What on earth for?’
‘After my great-great-grandmother,’ said Amanda fluently, grateful as always for her ability to tell the most enormous fibs with a straight face. ‘She was a missionary.’ In the darkness it was impossible to read Blair’s expression, but she could sense his scepticism and it put her on her mettle. ‘In the South Pacific,’ she added as a bit of corroborative detail.
It was a mistake. ‘Oh?’ said Blair. ‘Where in the South Pacific?’
She had forgotten that he probably knew the South Pacific as well as she knew the Number 9 bus route. Feverishly, Amanda tried to think of the name of an island but, as so often when forced to call upon memory rather than imagination, her mind remained blank. ‘She moved around a lot,’ she saidvaguely instead, but as this sounded rather dull she was unable to resist adding a touch of drama to the story. ‘Family legend has it that she was eaten by cannibals,’ she added, lowering her voice to just the right touch of reverence. ‘One day she got into her canoe and paddled off to a new island, and she was never seen again.’
‘Really?’ Blair’s voice dripped disbelief and Amanda sighed inwardly. Perhaps it hadn’t been a very convincing story.
Oh, well, she had enjoyed it, anyway. As she had talked, the mythical Susan had become almost real to her, but it was clear that Blair lacked the fertile imagination that had been getting her into trouble since she’d been a child Life would be much simpler if she’d only learn to keep it under control, she acknowledged, but not nearly so much fun.
Outside, the storm was growing wilder, driving rain ferociously into the windscreen. Blair’s body was utterly relaxed, but his grip on the steering wheel was sure as he held the car steady against the gusting wind. Amanda wished that she could relax enough to fall asleep, but there was something unsettling about Blair’s massive, silent presence, like a barrier between her and the storm.
He had ignored her after the story about her supposed ancestor and Amanda, normally the most confidently chatty of people, had found herself unable to think of anything to say to break the silence. She was too aware of the cramped confines of the car. Outside it was very dark. The dashboard lights were reflected in her window, but otherwise there was nothing. Blair seemed very close, almost overwhelming, and she wished that she didn’t notice every time he moved his hand to the gear lever or glanced across to see if she was still awake.
Once they had turned off the Inverness road, they hardly saw another car, and to Amanda it seemed as if they were driving interminably into the darkness while the rain turned to sleet, zooming in at the windscreen like a meteor shower. In spite of herself, her head began to loll forward. She had no idea how much time had passed when the sound of the car splashing through a huge puddle along with the sound of Blair swearing under his breath jerked her into consciousness. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked blearily, struggling upright in her seat as the car began to splutter alarmingly.
‘Water in the petrol’ he said curtly. He changed down, but his attempts to rev the engine had little effect and not much further down the road the car coughed sadly to a halt.
Blair swore again and hauled on the handbrake. ‘That’s all I need,’ he muttered, and reached across Amanda without ceremony to rummage in the glove box.
Very conscious of his nearness, she shrank back in her seat so that she didn’t have to touch him more than necessary...not that he even seemed to notice that she was there! It was a relief when his fingers closed around a torch and he sat back, but the next minute he was opening his door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out for a stroll.’
Amanda stared stupidly at him as the rain slashed against the windows, wondering if she had fallen asleep after all and this was just a bizarre dream. ‘A stroll? In this?’
Blair gave a short, exasperated sigh. ‘Of course not!’ he said irritably. ‘I’m going to clean the filter, what do you think? And, what’s more, you’re coming with me.’
‘Me?’ She came to abruptly. ‘But I don’t know anything about cars!’
‘You don’t need to be a mechanic to hold a torch.’
‘But...’ Amanda glanced helplessly from the rain to her city suit. ‘I’ll get soaked!’ she wailed, but if she had hoped to rouse Blair’s chivalrous instincts she was doomed to disappointment.
‘I dare say, but the sooner we get out there, the sooner we can both get dry,’ he said. He had half closed his door, but now he made as if to open it again. ‘Now, are you coming?’
Amanda was looking nervously out at the wild night ‘Are you sure this is wise?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Blair, exasperated.
‘I’ve seen horror films like this,’ she said. ‘You know the kind of thing... a couple break down in an isolated place on a night just like this, and as soon as they get out of the car you want to shout at them not to be so stupid, because you know that some monster is lurking in the darkness, and it’s going to creep up on them and grab the girl—no, the man,’ she corrected herself after a moment’s thought. ‘That way the girl has to cope by herself. Then you just hear the man screaming and lots of horrible crunching sounds, and then she starts screaming, and instead of being sensible and getting back inside the car and locking the doors she runs off into the darkness, and the monster stalks her and—’
‘Amanda?’
Carried away by her own story, Amanda had been unaware of Blair’s incredulous expression. Now she stopped in surprise as his deceptively gentle voice cut across her ramble. ‘Yes?’ she said, a little disorientated by the abrupt switch from imagination to reality.
He handed her the torch. ‘Shut up,’ he said, quietly but very distinctly, and got out of the car.
‘Don’t blame me when the monster gets you,’ grumbled Amanda, but she opened her door. A gust of wind and rain swirled into the car, and she shivered. It looked awfully dark out there. She could just make out Blair’s figure silhouetted against the headlights.
‘Come on!’ he shouted, beckoning irritably.
Completely unnerved by her own story, Amanda hesitated, but Blair seemed more of an immediate threat than the monster so she climbed awkwardly out of the car and tittuped round the front of the car in her unsuitable shoes, her face screwed up against the weather. Blinking the rain out of her eyes, she huddled under the meagre protection of the bonnet, where Blair was already leaning over the engine.
‘Over here,’ he ordered. He had to shout over the scream of the wind. ‘I can’t see a thing without the torch.’
Reluctantly, Amanda edged towards him. In the wavering light, she could see Blair regarding her with intense exasperation. ‘How am I supposed to see anything with you waving the torch around from over there?’ he demanded when she stopped uncertainly, and reached out a hard hand to grab her by the waist and drag her into his side.
Amanda half fell against him with a squeak of surprise. ‘Now, hold it there,’ said Blair, putting his hand around hers and pointing the torch at the filter. ‘This is a fiddly job and I need to be able to see what I’m doing.’
He turned back to the engine without another word. Amanda tried to hold the torch steady, but her hand was already numb with cold. She felt oddly breathless. Even through the buffeting wind and rain, she was very conscious of the granite solidity of Blair’s body where she was pressed against him.
‘We must stop meeting like this!’ she bent to shout in his ear, trying to make a joke of it.
‘What?’
Blair lifted his head to stare at her, and Amanda was disconcerted to find that his face was very close. The rain had already sleeked his hair against his head and a trickle of water was making its way from his temple down one lean cheek.
‘Joke,’ she explained. ‘Just trying to lighten the atmosphere.’
He sighed against her. ‘I’m glad you’re having such a good time, of course, but do you think you could keep the jokes until we’re back inside the car?’
‘Just trying to help,’ she muttered, sulking at his sarcastic response. Just as she had thought: no sense of humour.
‘If you want to help, Amanda, I suggest you keep that torch still and stop distracting me!’ said Blair unpleasantly.
She was left staring resentfully down at the back of his head. It was very cold and the sleet was rapidly turning to snow. Her teeth were soon clattering together uncontrollably. To distract herself, she began mentally rewriting the blurb about Blair that had appeared on the dust-jacket of his book. ‘Brilliant’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘stimulating’ could go for a start, to be replaced by ‘grumpy’, ‘boring’ and ‘downright disagreeable’.
Her eyes rested crossly on what she could see of his face as she thought of a few more adjectives to describe the real Blair McAllister. Unaware of her regard, he was frowning down at the engine, his expression absorbed. The dim glow of reflected torchlight caught the sheen of wet skm and glimmered over the hard line of his cheek.
Suddenly, Amanda found that instead of thinking about how much she disliked him she was thinking about the feel of his body, about the strength of his arm pulling her against him, about the warmth of his fingers around hers as he steadied the torch. She tried to distract herself by thinking about the wonderful career that Norris had promised her, but the slick city office with its frantically bleeping phones and constant buzz of pressure seemed unutterably remote from this moment, as she huddled against a man she had met only a couple of hours ago while the wind plastered her wet skirt against her legs and the rain ran coldly down her neck and the only warmth and security in the world lay in the hard strength of Blair McAllister’s body.
With an effort, she looked away from him, but the wind blew the rain in her eyes if she faced in any other direction, and although she tried staring down at the engine instead her eyes kept skittering back to his face. He had turned his head slightly as he squinted at the filter and she could see the corner of his mouth. It gave her a strange feeling. She had forgotten that she was rehearsing all the things she disliked about him. All she could do was watch his mouth and wonder if it would feel as cool and firm as it looked.
Aghast at the direction of her thoughts, Amanda stiffened. What on earth had made her think about that? All at once, her senses were jangling with a humiliating awareness of the oblivious man beside her. He wasn’t bothered by the feel of her body pressed close against him, or distracted by the curve of her mouth. As far as Blair was concerned, she was just an irritating extension of his torch. She shifted her feet so that she could hold herself rigidly away from him but she doubted whether he even noticed, and it didn’t stop her tensing with every move he made.
Shaking with cold, Amanda stood awkwardly arched over the engine like a lamppost. She was so ridiculously, inexplicably nervous that when Blair suddenly reached across her to the other side of the engine she jerked back in an instinctive attempt not to come into contact with the body that had left her feeling so on edge. The sudden movement knocked the torch against the edge of the bonnet and out of her nerveless fingers, and before she had a chance to retrieve it it crashed down onto the tarmac where it promptly went out.
‘What the—!’ Blair straightened furiously to glare at her. ‘Where’s the torch?’
Amanda groped around on the road until she found it, but when she tried to click it on again nothing happened.
‘That’s a great help!’ He snatched it from her, cursing under his breath as he shook it savagely. ‘Damn! The bulb’s gone. I’ll have to go and get another one. You stay here,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘And try not to do any more damage if you can help it!’
Mortified, Amanda hunched wretchedly under the bonnet as Blair made his way round to the driver’s seat. She could see the sleet driving across the straight beam of the headlights but beyond that there was only the howling wind and pitchdarkness, and she thought of the monster that she had described so glibly in the safety of the car. She hadn’t thought of it at all when she had had Blair beside her, but now she felt cold and scared and very vulnerable.
The seconds stretched interminably. What was Blair doing? He could at least say something to let her know that he was still there. Anything might have happened to him; anything might have snuck up in the darkness. Amanda’s imagination, always vivid, spun out of control, and she had worked herself into such a state that when the lights snapped abruptly off, plunging her into blackness, she gasped and began to grope her way frantically round the bonnet in the direction where Blair had disappeared.
Gibbering with fear, she had just made it to the corner when she came slap up against a hard body. In spite of herself, she shrieked.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Blair’s voice demanded furiously.
Amanda clutched at him in relief. ‘Oh, thank God it’s you! What happened?’
‘What do you mean, what happened? Nothing happened!’
‘But the lights went out!’
‘I switched them off to save the battery.’ Blair had obviously never watched any films where the hero put his arms comfortingly around the heroine. He put Amanda away from him in an irritable gesture. ‘I couldn’t find another bulb, so we’ll have to wait until it’s light now.’
Amanda stood feeling rather foolish and wishing she could forget how reassuring it had been to hold onto him. ‘I thought something had happened to you,’ she tried to explain.
‘What could possibly happen to me between the engine and the steering wheel? And don’t start on that silly monster business!’ he added in an acerbic voice before she had a chance to answer.
‘Stranger things have happened,’ she muttered darkly as Blair moved past her in the dark to slam down the bonnet.
“The worst that’s going to happen to you is that you’re going to get even wetter if you stand out here any longer,’ he pointed out in a crushing voice. ‘So I suggest you stop wittering and get in the car.’
‘Can you turn on the lights again?’ she pleaded. It was so dark that she couldn’t even see Blair and she edged closer along the car towards the sound of his voice. ‘I can’t see a thing.’
‘Feel your way round the bonnet,’ Blair began, but, as if against his better judgement, he reached out into the blackness until his hand brushed against hers. Amanda clutched at it thankfully. ‘Here,’ he said gruffly, leading her round to the other side of the car and opening the passenger door. ‘You’d better get in.’
The opening of the door gave her enough light to climb in out of the storm, but Amanda was strangely reluctant to let go of his hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said humbly.
Moving confidently through the pitch-dark, Blair was banging his own door shut only moments later. He reached up to click on the overhead light and began stripping off his jacket. ‘Well, we seem to have survived the monsters against all the odds. Or are they circling the car even now, slavering in anticipation at the thought of us both trapped here?’
‘Very funny,’ said Amanda, unappreciative of his sarcasm, but she locked her door anyway. She watched him toss his sodden jacket over the boxes in the back and run a hand over his wet hair before wiping the worst of the rain from his face. In the dim light she could see a trickle still heading down towards his jaw and for one extraordinary moment even considered reaching across to stop it with her finger. Her hand tingled with the thought and she looked abruptly away. ‘What do we do now?’ she asked, clearing her throat.
‘Wait.’
No one could accuse Blair McAllister of garrulity, Amanda thought with an inward sigh. ‘Is that it?’ she said after a moment
‘Unless you can do mechanics by Braille, yes,’ he said tersely. ‘If you hadn’t dropped that torch, we could be on our way by now. What made you drop it, anyway?’ he went on, turning in his seat to look at her. ‘One minute you were standing there quietly, and the next you were jumping around life a scalded cat.’
‘I was cold,’ said Amanda, who had no intention of telling him why she had been so tense. ‘My hands were numb. It was like the North Pole out there.’ She shivered and wrapped her arms around her body. ‘It’s like the North Pole in here, come to that.’
‘It’s nothing like the North Pole,’ said Blair impatiently. Of course, he would have been there, wouldn’t he? He leant closer and touched the sodden material of her suit. ‘You’re soaking!’ His voice was suddenly sharp. ‘You’d better get that suit off.’
‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she muttered.
‘Only when I’ve known them longer than two hours,’ he said. His face was quite straight, but amusement threaded his voice and when Amanda looked at him suspiciously one corner of his mouth twitched.
For some reason, she felt a blush stealing up her cheeks. She felt ridiculously ruffled. This was Blair McAllister, she reminded herself with an edge of desperation. All he had done was smile at her—and not even a proper smile at that!—so why was she having trouble breathing properly?
‘I’ll get your suitcase out,’ he was saying with a return to his usual manner. Leaning over the seat, he manoeuvred her case so that it was lying flat on top of the boxes behind her. ‘I suggest you take off those wet things first, and then find something warm and dry to put on instead.’
‘Yes...yes, I’ll do that.’ Amanda pulled herself together with an effort. She must be even more tired than she had thought to let a smile—a suggestion of a smile—discompose her. She leant forward to struggle out of her jacket, but she was so cold that Blair had to help her, and the feel of his hands grazing against her only made her more awkward.
‘That shirt’s sodden too,’ he said when he eventually managed to peel off the jacket and spread it out in the back. ‘Go on, take that off too. There’s no point in being modest if it means you dying of pneumonia, and if you’re worried about me, I have had a very long, trying day, not improved by hanging around at the station for an hour and half or breaking down, and I can assure you that seduction is the last thing on my mind!’
‘The thought never occurred to me,’ said Amanda stiffly through chattering teeth.
Blair sat back in his seat and studied the bedraggled figure beside him. The meagre light was enough to see that the shiny brown hair was plastered to her head and as he watched she sniffed and drearily wiped a trickle of rain from her nose in an unconscious gesture of tiredness. ‘Come on, huny up before you freeze to death,’ he said almost brusquely. ‘It’s not exactly the ideal situation for a spot of lovemaking anyway, is it?’ he went on casually as Amanda began to fumble with the tiny buttons of her shirt. ‘I prefer a little more comfort myself.’
Amanda tried to imagine the dour Blair McAllister making love and found to her discomfort that she could manage it with unnerving clarity. She had known the man for something less than three hours, had seen him clearly for less than three minutes...how was it that she could picture him so vividly, reaching out, leaning over, bending down for a kiss? What made her picture him with a slow smile and slow, sure hands?
Her fingers were still numb with cold, and the distracting image of Blair was making her even clumsier as she struggled awkwardly with the buttons. They were tricky at the best of times and she muttered with a mixture of embarrassment and frustration as her hands slipped again.
‘Here, let me have a go,’ said Blair abruptly, and before Amanda quite realised what was happening he had leant over to undo the top button. He must have been as cold as she was, but his fingers were deft and impersonal, and warm where they brushed against her skin.
Amanda was intensely grateful for the dim light that disguised the wave of colour that swept up her cheeks. Her fingers might be numb with cold, but inside she could feel herself burning with an excruciating awareness of the man so impersonally unbuttoning her shirt with fingers that were just as slow and sure as she had imagined.
‘Seduction is the last thing on my mind,’ he had said, but she couldn’t stop herself wondering what it would be like if it wasn’t. What would it be like if he was thinking about making love now, what if he was thinking about her? What if he were unbuttoning her shirt like a lover and not like a nanny undressing a tiresome child? What would it be like if he slid his hands beneath the silk to caress her skin? Amanda’s heart was thudding slowly, painfully against her ribs and her throat was tight and dry. God, what was the matter with her? She must stop this; she must—
‘I must choose a more comfortable place to undress you next time,’ said Blair. ‘This would be much more fun if we were both warm and dry and weren’t squashed into the front seat of a damp car, wouldn’t it?’ The sound of his voice wrenched her back to reality, but she heard only the undercurrent of laughter in his voice and stared blankly at him.
‘Joke,’ he quoted her own explanation back at her. ‘Just trying to lighten the atmosphere.’
Amanda swallowed and smiled weakly. If only he knew how close he had been to reading her mind! ‘It’s just as well the seats are so wet, then, isn’t it?’ she said feebly as Blair undid the last button and pulled the shirt off her to reveal the dull gleam of the cream silk camisole she wore.
‘Just as well,’ he said after a moment.
There was a long pause, and then he looked up directly into Amanda’s eyes. The light wasn’t good enough to read his expression. It threw a fuzzy glow over one side of his face, blurring the forceful features but paradoxically heightening the impression of granite strength that already seemed so much a part of him. In the darkness he was a massive presence, at once reassuring and disturbing.
Amanda was held, pinned by that unreadable gaze. The rain drumming on the roof and the whooping wind seemed to be coming from a long way away. There was only the darkness and the blurry light on Blair’s cheek and Blair’s jaw and the solid line of Blair’s throat.
She never knew how long they looked at each other. It might only have been a few seconds, but suddenly he was looking away and she realised that she had been holding her breath. She let it out with a tiny gasp and, as if released from a spell, scrambled round in her seat to scrabble through her suitcase. She couldn’t distinguish any colours but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was to put on as many layers as possible to act as barriers between her and Blair McAllister’s unsettling gaze.
Her fingers closed on the cashmere jumper that her mother had given her last Christmas and she tugged it out, grateful for its soft warmth. After several false starts, she discovered a shirt and dragged it on before wriggling out of her wet skirt and tights and wriggling into some leggings and two pairs of socks to warm her frozen feet. Heaven only knew what colours she had on or whether any of it matched, but Amanda, studiously avoiding Blair’s eyes, cared only that she was covered.
‘Have you got a towel in there?’ Blair asked when she had finished.
‘I think so... somewhere.’ Kneeling on the seat, she groped through her suitcase until she found it. ‘Here.’
Blair took it and, ordering Amanda to bend her head, towelled her hair vigorously until she protested. She emerged complaining bitterly and with her hair standing up in all directions, but had to admit that she felt better. Grumbling about Blair’s rough treatment had dispersed her awkwardness too, and it was possible now to see that her earlier bizare reaction to him had merely been the result of cold and exhaustion.
‘Better?’ he asked as he rubbed the towel over his own hair.
‘Well, drier,’ she admitted cautiously. ‘All I need now is a hot meal, a stiff drink and a warm bed and I’d be really quite comfortable.’
‘I can’t do much about the hot meal or the warm bed,’ said Blair, reaching in the back for a carrier bag, which he extracted at last with a grunt of satisfaction. ‘But I can provide a drink.’ He produced a bottle from the bag as he eased himself back into his seat. ‘Do you like whisky?’
‘Haven’t you got anything else?’ said Amanda, who had been hoping that he might magically produce a bottle of red and a corkscrew. She might have known that he would be a whisky man.
‘No,’ he said, and unscrewed the top. ‘Have some of this anyway. It’ll warm you up.’
‘Oh, all right.’ He passed her the bottle and Amanda reached for it without enthusiasm. Her fingers fumbled against his and she couldn’t prevent a tiny frisson shivering down her spine. ‘Sorry,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Have you got a good grip of it before I let go?’ asked Blair. ‘I don’t want a good bottle of malt going the same way as the torch!’
The astringency in his voice helped Amanda to ignore the strumming sensation where their hands had touched. ‘I wouldn’t dream of dropping anything quite so close to your heart,’ she said with a frosty look. Taking a defiantly large swig, she promptly choked and spluttered as the whisky burned down her throat.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ said Blair as she shook her head to clear it and hastily handed back the bottle.
‘It’s certainly... warming,’ gasped Amanda hoarsely.
‘Warming? Is that all you can say? That’s Macallan single malt you were chucking back!’
‘Is that good?’
‘The best.’
‘Oh. dear, I hope you weren’t saving it for a special occasion.’
Blair drank reflectively from the bottle. ‘A whisky like this makes any occasion special,’ he said.
‘What, even stranded in the middle of a storm with a hysterical nanny?’ Amanda asked ironically, and he turned in his seat to look at her. Her hair stuck out in every direction where he had rubbed it dry, but her eyelashes were still spiky with rain. Without the suit and the sleek hairstyle she looked a lot less than her twenty-four years, and almost unrecognisable as the smart young woman who had got off the train at Fort William. Blair’s eyes rested on her face, still somehow vivid in the dim light, and the chin which was tilted at a characteristically challenging angle.
‘Even that,’ he said slowly, faint amusement bracketing his mouth.
What was it about that damned elusive smile of his that made the blood tingle beneath her skin? Amanda turned away to rest her cheek against the window and let the cool glass drain the heat from her face. ‘I’m glad you’re finding it special,’ she muttered. ‘I can think of other ways to describe being stuck out in the middle of nowhere, trapped in a wet car by slavering monsters and only a bottle of whisky for comfort!’
‘Come on, stop complaining,’ said Blair without heat. ‘Things could be worse.’
‘How?’
‘You could be outside with your monsters, for a start. You ought to be grateful that we’ve the car for shelter. At least you’ll be able to sleep.’
‘Sleep? Sleep?’ Amanda’s voice rose to an outraged squeak as exhaustion caught up with her. ‘How can I possibly sleep when I’m tired and I’m cold and I’m hungry and I wish I’d never come near bloody Scotland in the first place?’
Blair was unmoved by her outburst. ‘Have another drink,’ was all he said, and he handed her the bottle. Amanda was ready for the fiery impact of the whisky this time and took a more cautious slug. ‘I’ve even got some biscuits,’ he added, producing a packet out of the bag by his feet. ‘So that will cross hunger off your list of miseries.’ He npped open the packet and passed it over to Amanda.
‘A ginger-nut wasn’t quite what I had in mind,’ she sighed, taking three anyway. She bit into one glumly. ‘I was thinking of something warm and tasty, preferably smothered in cheese, accompanied by a bottle of wine and followed by a nice, fattening pudding. Sticky toffee pudding,’ she decided after a moment’s thought. Munching on the biscuit, she lapsed into silence and stared disconsolately out at the rain which was still being hurled out of the darkness by a frustrated gale.
Blair regarded her with a sort of exasperated amusement for a moment and then reached up to click off the overhead light. ‘We may as well save the battery until we need it,’ he said as the darkness blotted out everything. Amanda couldn’t even see her ginger-nut.
‘You’re not a very typical nanny, are you?’ His voice came out of the blackness, deep and strong and infinitely reassuring.
‘What do you mean?’ said Amanda cautiously.
‘I always imagine nannies to be calm, practical people, used to coping when things go wrong.’
‘I’m coping!’ she ruffled up instantly.
‘Not without making a fuss,’ Blair pointed out astringently. ‘What would you be like if this was a crisis?’
‘What do you mean, if? This is a crisis!’
‘You’ve just proved my point for me,’ he said, sounding resigned. ‘You’ve got to spend a few uncomfortable hours in the car. It’s perfectly safe, you’ve got dry clothes, something to drink, something to eat and me to look after you in the unlikely event that anything did happen, but, for you, that’s a crisis! What would you do if something really bad happened to you?’
‘Right at this moment, I can’t think of anything worse than being stuck here with you,’ said Amanda sourly, and deliberately drank some more of his precious whisky.
Blair ignored that. ‘I just hope that you’re a little less...extravagant when it comes to dealing with children,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘Judging by what the agency told me, I can only assume that you undergo some sort of personality change when actually faced with a child!’
In the darkness, Amanda put up her chin defiantly. ‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we?’
‘Yes,’ said Blair. He was no more than a black blur against more blackness but Amanda could feel that uncomfortably acute gaze resting on her. She just hoped he couldn’t see in the dark, or her expression would surely give her away! ‘We’ll see.’
CHAPTER THREE
AMANDA’S head was aching. Opening one eye very cautiously, she found herself looking at something dark and curved only inches away from her face. She stared at it for a long time before her pounding brain registered that she was looking at the bottom of a steering wheel.
It hurt too much to think about what it was doing there. Amanda closed her eye again, but the effort of recognising a steering wheel had set her mind working, albeit slowly, and as she lay and willed herself to sink back into comfortable oblivion memories of the night before came filtering back in a series of odd, unconnected pictures: huddling under the bonnet in the sluicing rain, spluttering as the whisky burned down her throat, sitting very still as Blair undid the buttons of her shirt and being passionately glad of the darkness.
Blair... Until then, Amanda had been remembering in the peculiarly detached way of the half-asleep, but his image dissolved the last wisps of dream and brought her awake with a jolt. At the same moment, she became aware that fingers were twisting strands of her hair absently together and her eyes snapped open with the sudden realisation that she was sprawled across the front of the car with her head in Blair McAllister’s lap. His other hand was resting lightly at the curve of her hip, and his thighs were broad and firm and relaxed beneath her cheek.
‘At last!’ Blair must have felt her involuntary stiffening. ‘I thought you were going to sleep all morning.’
‘I didn’t realise...’ Horribly embarrassed, Amanda struggled upright, wincing at the stiffness of her limbs. Someone—presumably Blair—had stuffed a couple of jumpers from her suitcase around the handbrake, but it hadn’t stopped it digging into her. ‘Y-you should have woken me,’ she stammered.
‘I didn’t have the heart,’ said Blair. ‘You were sleeping like a baby.’
She blinked at him, disconcerted to find him at once a stranger and oddly familiar. For the first time she registered that it was light. The darkness of the night before had blurred the strength of his features and now, in the brightness of morning, it was as if she had never seen his face before.
It was his eyes she noticed first of all. They were an opaque blue-grey, the colour of slate, and beneath dark, sarcasticlooking eyebrows they held an unnervingly acute expression that gave focus to his face. For Amanda, it was as if the morning light had thrown everything about him into sharp relief: the angle of his jaw, the thick, dark hair, the prickle of stubble on his unshaven skin and, most of all, the way his mouth was set in a line that was already uncannily unfamiliar.
Aware that she was staring, and afflicted by sudden shyness, Amanda looked away. ‘I don’t feel as if I slept a wink,’ she said uncomfortably.
‘You slept more than a wink,’ said Blair. ‘You drank half my whisky, keeled over into my lap in the middle of a sentence and proceeded to snore for the rest of the night.’
Amanda looked appalled. ‘I didn’t, did I?’ She did vaguely remember drinking whisky out of a bottle, but she had no recollection of falling asleep at all. She looked suspiciously at Blair. ‘Anyway, I don’t snore.’
‘It sounded remarkably like snoring to me.’ His voice was sardonic, not unamused. ‘I’ve been listening to you ever since the wind dropped, so I should know. Still, I suppose I should be glad that one of us at least had a comfortable night.’
‘If someone asked me to describe my first night in Scotland, comfortable wouldn’t be the first word that sprang to mind,’ said Amanda sourly, grimacing as she stretched her stiff limbs. ‘I feel terrible.’
‘I’m not surprised, judging by the amount of my whisky you sank last night. I thought you weren’t supposed to like the stuff?’
Amanda held her aching head. ‘I don’t’ With her other hand, she twisted round the rear-view mirror and peered blearily into it. Her hair had lost its customary bounce and shine in last night’s rain and, although now dry, it stood up at impossible angles around her face, one side of which was marked with narrow red lines where her cheek had been pressed into Blair’s cords. Mascara was smudged beneath her gritty eyes and she moaned as she rubbed it away with a knuckle. ‘Ugh!’ was all she felt capable of groaning, and, unable to bear the sight of herself any longer, she turned the mirror away.
‘I must say that you don’t look quite as smart as you did when you got off the train last night.’ Blair pretended to look Amanda over critically, but she could tell that he was enjoying himself. He didn’t actually smile, but amusement lurked around his mouth and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened. Involuntarily, she followed his gaze from the scarlet cashmere jumper, which she had managed to put on back to front, to the hideously clashing leggings and on down to the assortment of odd socks which she had pulled on last night in her haste to cover herself.
Some executive she looked now! Mortified, Amanda hurriedly pulled off her jumper and put it back on the right way round, making sure this time that both sides of her shirt collar lay neatly over the round neck. The small detail made her feel better and she patted the collar down, only to flush as she caught Blair’s mocking slate eyes.
‘What time is it?’ she asked crossly.
He glanced at his watch and told her.
Amanda shuddered. ‘I knew I wouldn’t like it,’ she grumbled, rubbing a hand round her aching neck.
‘Your previous charges must have been very well behaved if you’re not used to getting up at this sort of time,’ said Blair, callously indifferent to her suffering. He reached down to release the bonnet and opened his door. ‘Not that I’d call this particularly early. It would count as a lie-in on an expedition.’
‘Remind me never to join one of your expeditions,’ muttered Amanda, watching him morosely as he jumped out and went round to inspect the engine. Still grumbling to herself, she opened her own door and eased herself out to stand in the road in her mismatched socks and stretch painfully. Only then did she look round her and her jaw dropped.
They had spluttered to a halt on a long, straight stretch of road that swept down the hillside to the shores of a loch which was as smooth and still as dark glass below them. The fury of last night’s storm might never have been. Not a breath of wind stirred the surface of the water, and it reflected back the massive snow-capped peaks looming around it, sharply outlined against a clear, crisp sky. Amanda, whose image of Scotland until now had been of brown hills shrouded in grey mist, could only stare at the scene spread out before her like a vast postcard. The hills were a warm golden colour, separated from the blue of the sky by their crowns of white snow, and the crystalline light made her blink.
‘Oh,’ she said.
Blair glanced up from the engine. ‘It’s quite a view to wake up to, isn’t it?’
‘Ye-es.’ She looked slowly around her once more, her breath freezing in a white cloud. She didn’t think that she had ever seen anywhere as empty as this before. The thin ribbon of road stretching out into the distance was the only sign of civilisation; other than that, there were only hills and sky and water and cold, clear air. There was something overwhelming about the austere grandeur of the scene that made Amanda feel very small. The massive, uncompromising mountains reminded her of Blair, she decided, trying to shrug off the feeling. ‘It’s all a bit bleak, isn’t it?’
He looked disapproving at her lack of enthusiasm. ‘It’s magnificent country. You’re very lucky to see it like this.’
But Amanda was in no mood to admire the scenery. After the first shock of surprise, she had lapsed back into early-morning disgruntlement. ‘I feel a lot of things right now,’ she sighed, ‘but lucky is not one of them.’
She was dying to go to the loo, but trees or bushes seemed to be in short supply up here. For miles there seemed to be nothing but tussocky grass interspersed with clumps of heather, dead, battered bracken and the odd patch of unmelted snow. Peeling off her ridiculous socks, Amanda rummaged in her case for a pair of trainers. She was tempted to change all her clothes, but it didn’t seem worth it before she had a bath, and anyway, she was damned if she was going to undress in front of Blair McAllister in broad daylight. It had been awkward enough in the dark!
There was a granite outcrop in the heather further up the hill. Deciding that it offered the best privacy she was going to get, Amanda began to clamber up the steep bank that ran along the roadside.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ asked Blair, straightening from the engine.
She pointed at the outcrop. ‘Just up there.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Why do you think?’ she said testily.
He sighed. ‘Why don’t you just go behind the car? I won’t look.’
‘Someone else might,’ she pointed out, grabbing onto a clump of heather so that she could haul herself up onto the top of the bank at last.
‘Who?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s not exactly a constant stream of traffic along this road.’
‘A car might come round the corner any minute.’
‘Amanda, the nearest corner is a good five miles away! You’d have plenty of time to gather yourself together if you’re that inhibited.’
‘I am not inhibited!’ she snapped, irritated by his attitude. ‘I simply prefer a little privacy, and if I want to hide behind a rock I will.’ Turning her back on him, she attempted to stalk off, but it was hard to stalk with dignity through knee-high tussocks of grass and heather, and she ended up ploughing inelegantly through it. It wasn’t long before she was regretting her determined stand. The outcrop which had looked so close from the road seemed to keep receding up the hill, and by the time she had struggled up to it she was exhausted.
To make matters worse, the granite turned out to be a sheer face set into the hillside, offering virtually no protection anyway, and she was still clearly visible from the road. Gasping for breath, Amanda could see Blair calmly tinkering with the engine, but even as she glowered resentfully down at him he glanced up the hill and saw her.
‘Are you planning to spend all day up there?’ he shouted, and tapped his watch significantly with his spanner.
Amanda didn’t deign to answer and wouldn’t have had the breath for it anyway. Instead she turned her back with something suspiciously like a flounce and tried to make herself as insignificant as possible against the granite—a hard job when you were wearing a scarlet jumper. She might as well have had a flashing neon sign over her head.
Getting down the hill was nearly as bad as getting up it. The heather caught at her leggings and the laces of her trainers, and when the slope flattened near the bank she trod in a bog, thereby ruining yet another pair of shoes and her temper.
‘Feeling better?’ Blair asked sarcastically as she scrambled clumsily down onto the road once more. He had been watching her progress as he leant against the car with folded arms.
‘No, I am not!’ stormed Amanda, wiping her soggy trainers savagely on some dead bracken and convinced in some obscure way that it was all Blair McAllister’s fault. ‘To be quite frank with you, I wish I’d never come to Scotland. The last few hours have been the worst of my life. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get pneumonia after last night, I’m so stiff I’ll probably never walk properly again, all I’ve had to eat is a few ginger-nuts and now I’ll have to go barefoot for the rest of the month,’ she finished childishly.
Blair tutted. ‘I’m not surprised Hugh dumped you if you were always this bad-tempered in the morning,’ he said.
‘Anyone would be bad-tempered if they’d spent the night I had! And, anyway, Hugh—’ Amanda stopped abruptly. ‘How do you know about Hugh?’ she demanded.
‘You told me about him at length last night, just before you passed out,’ said Blair with a sardonic look. ‘I heard all about how attractive he was and how he had taken up with some “drip”—your description, not mine—but really, you thought it was probably for the best because he never understood about your career and thought you should have wanted to settle down and have babies.’ Blair’s voice mimicked her so clearly that she squirmed mwardly.
‘I can’t think why I told you all that,’ she mumbled.
‘I assumed that you weren’t used to neat whisky,’ said Blair. ‘I certainly hope you don’t make a habit of confiding your life history to virtual strangers!’
Amanda stared at him, aghast at her own indiscretion. ‘Oh, dear, I must have been terribly boring,’ she said nervously. What if she had told him the truth about taking Sue’s place? He would have said something, though, wouldn’t he? she reassured herself. Blair McAllister wasn’t the kind of man who would calmly accept an impostor.
His next words seemed to confirm that however indiscreet she had been she hadn’t been that indiscreet. ‘No, I found it fascinating,’ he said, although not without some sarcasm. ‘I didn’t realise that anyone would think of nannying as a career incompatible with children. I would have thought that anyone who chose to spend their time looking after other people’s children would want to have their own eventually. Isn’t that what you want?’
Amanda thought of a recent weekend that she had spent with her sister, who had three children under five, and barely repressed a shudder. ‘No...I mean, not yet,’ she added, seeing Blair lift an eyebrow at her horrified expression.
‘Well, you’re still young,’ he said indifferently as he made his way round to his door. ‘And children are an enormous commitment.’
‘Exactly.’ Amanda climbed into her seat as well, relieved that he wasn’t going to enquire any further into her aversion to children. ‘Is that why you don’t have any? Because you travel so much?’
Blair turned the ignition key and coaxed the engine into life. ‘One of the reasons,’ he said uninformatively.
Amanda studied him from under her lashes and wondered what the other reasons were. Why wasn’t he married, anyway? Her ready imagination was quick to endow him with a doomed love affair in the past, but when her eye fell on the straight, stern line of his mouth she changed her mind. The Blair McAllisters of this world didn’t waste time on desperate romances. They chose wives who were calm and sensible and wouldn’t complain about being cold or wet or fed a constant diet of ginger-nuts, she decided glumly.
A strange feeling stirred inside Amanda and she looked away to stare unseeingly at the scenery. Blair wasn’t like the other men she had known. He certainly wasn’t like Hugh, who had been so handsome and charming and yet, deep down, so stuffy. It was true that Hugh had called the whole thing off in the end, but she really did think it had been for the best, no matter how pathetic Blair had made her drunken monologue sound. She wasn’t ready to settle down with anyone yet. She wanted to have a good time, not get bogged down in interminable discussions about commitment, which was all her friends ever seemed to do.
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Jessica Hart
We saw Nanny kissing Santa Claus…Amanda had a mission: to convince Blair McAllister to sell his home to her company. In order to get close to him she took the job of live-in nanny to his boisterous three children….But her plan backfired. Although Blair was as grouchy as a bear with a sore head, it just made him all the more attractive–and Amanda fell in love!As Blair prepared to play Santa to the kids on Christmas Eve, Amanda had forgotten all about her secret mission. She had hit on a new, far more rewarding plan: catching her boss under the mistletoe instead!
“It’s midnight,” Blair said softly. “Happy Christmas.” (#u1f579a46-a039-5931-adf3-3e71023302fe)About the Author (#ue17052af-dcea-5c5e-b7a7-3da558f1b4c6)Title Page (#u9a950f62-d940-58e3-a745-a18960ec33fb)CHAPTER ONE (#u08807a07-afc5-5cdb-92b4-705a59ebe716)CHAPTER TWO (#u31047c63-62a4-591b-b53b-02a44d3493eb)CHAPTER THREE (#uf89793ae-2d9b-5d71-be01-ab533871fb53)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“It’s midnight,” Blair said softly. “Happy Christmas.”
Amanda felt her throat tighten with unaccountable tears. “Happy Christmas,” she said in a husky voice. She felt as if she had never understood the real meaning of Christmas before now, looking out into the starlit snow with Blair beside her, their breath hanging in frozen clouds. The urge to lean against him was so strong that she forced herself to turn away... and stopped dead as she noticed the mistletoe hanging from the doorway, for the first time.
Following her gaze, Blair glanced up at the mistletoe dangling above his head Their eyes met in the frosty air. “Happy Christmas, Blair,” she murmured, and pressed her mouth to his in a kiss that was warm and long and achingly sweet.
Jessica Hart had a haphazard career before she began writing to finance a degree in history. Her experience ranged from waitress, theater production assistant and Outback cook to newsdesk secretary, expedition assistant and English teacher, and she has worked in countries as different as France and Indonesia, Australia and Cameroon She now lives in the north of England, where her hobbies are limited to eating and drinking and traveling when she can, preferably to places where she’ll find good food or desert or tropical rain.
Kissing Santa
Jessica Hart
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
AMANDA saw Blair McAllister as soon as she stepped down off the train. He was standing under a banner wishing everyone season’s greetings on behalf of the station staff, but he didn’t look exactly filled with Christmas spirit. Instead, he was watching the passengers piling out of the standard-class carriages, his hands thrust into corduroy trousers with barely concealed impatience and dark brows drawn together over a formidable-looking nose.
Dropping her case onto the platform, Amanda slid A Far Horizon surreptitiously out of her bag so that she could squint down at the photograph on the back of the dust-jacket. Yes, it was definitely the same man.
With a distinct sense of disappointment, she rested her sherry-coloured eyes on Blair McAllister as he searched the milling crowds with a frown. The photograph had been taken in a desert. Unaware of the camera, he had been smiling at someone out of sight, eyes narrowed against the glare and dark hair slightly ruffled by a hot wind, and he had looked rangy and relaxed and utterly competent.
On the tram, Amanda had studied the photograph with interest and a faint stirring of anticipation. She wouldn’t have called him exactly handsome, but there was defimtely something about him, she had decided. She wasn’t sure whether it was that look of lean self-containment, his reputation as an intrepid traveller and programme maker, or simply his tan, but, whatever it was, it gave him an indefinably glamorous air.
Now she slid the book back into her bag with a faint sigh. Who said the camera never lied? The man waiting for her on the platform might have the same severe features as the man in the photograph, but in the flesh he looked tired and bad-tempered and not in the least bit glamorous.
He stood quite still, letting the crowds surge past him, and as Amanda watched he turned his head and looked up the platform towards her. For a brief moment his gaze rested on her vibrant figure with a hard, impersonal scrutiny before it swept on, and the next moment he had transferred his attention back down the platform once more. Amanda was left feeling rather piqued at his lack of interest. She was also a little disconcerted by the shrewd intelligence in his face. Blair McAllister didn’t look like a man who would be easily fooled by anyone.
Which was unfortunate, in the circumstances.
Amanda hesitated. In London it had seemed so easy to take Sue’s place but now, as she faced the reality of her new employer, suddenly it didn’t seem quite such a good idea. She looked doubtfully along the platform at Blair, then squared her shoulders and bent to tip her suitcase back onto its wheels. She had just spent over eleven hours on trains and she wasn’t going to turn round and go back now!
Trundling the suitcase behind her, she made her way towards him through the last of the passengers. ‘Mr McAllister?’
He swung round at the sound of his name, the fierce brows shooting up in surprise at her appearing from the direction of the first-class carriages. ‘Yes—’
He stopped as he took in Amanda’s appearance. She had a mobile expression, and dark, glossy brown hair cleverly highlighted with gold swung around her face. Subject to belated qualms about what she was letting herself in for, she had bolstered her confidence by making up with care on the train, emphasising the unusual golden-brown eyes and outlining the curving mouth with the bold red lipstick that she always wore. She was wearing the suit that she had bought to celebrate promotion to executive status at last, together with her favourite shoes which were decorated with floppy bows and which always made her feel good.
‘You’re Susan Haywood?’ Blair went on in disbelief.
Perhaps she didn’t look much like a nanny, Amanda realised as his eyes rested for an incredulous moment on her shoes. Nannies probably didn’t travel first class either, but Norris had bought her ticket and she had never been one to turn down the chance of a bit of luxury. Still, it was too late to worry about that now. She gave Blair McAllister her best smile instead.
‘That’s me,’ she said mendaciously. ‘But I prefer to be called Amanda,’ she added, having decided that she would get confused if she had to answer to Sue all month.
‘Amanda?’ Her guileless smile didn’t seem to be having much effect on Blair. Instead of smiling back as any other man would have done, the surprise in his face deepened to suspicion. ‘Amanda?’ he said again, staring at her.
‘Yes.’ She allowed her innocent look to fade in her turn into bewilderment. ‘Didn’t the agency tell you?’
‘No, they didn’t.’ Blair’s voice was terse, with only a hint of a Scottish intonation.
Close to, he was much more formidable than he had seemed at first sight. That photograph had been definitely misleading, Amanda decided. Who would have thought that that cool, uncompromising mouth could relax into such a smile?
Not that there was any sign of a smile now. There was a flintiness about him, a reserve edged with irritability that made him appear dauntingly stern, and although the artificial light made it impossible to tell what colour his eyes were it showed enough to tell her that they held an uncomfortably acute expression. The photograph hadn’t warned her about that either, thought Amanda, obscurely resentful. She felt she would have been better prepared if she had known just how they could look through you.
‘All the agency told me was that you were an experienced nanny,’ Blair was saying, still frowning suspiciously. ‘They assured me that you were a nice, quiet girl.’ The penetrating gaze swept from her face to her shoes and then back again. ‘You don’t look very quiet to me.’ His tone implied that he didn’t think she looked very nice either. ‘You’ll forgive me if I seem a little taken aback,’ he went on in an arid voice. ‘I thought I was getting a sensible nanny called Susan and instead I get a glamorous executive type called Amanda!’
Amanda would normally have been delighted to be described as a glamorous executive, but the caustic note in Blair’s voice made it clear that it wasn’t intended as a compliment, and anyway, she was still bridling at the idea of not being considered nice.
‘I’m sorry if you don’t approve of the way I look,’ she said in a voice that was intended to sound quelling but which came out more peevish than anything. ‘But frankly, I don’t see what difference it makes what I look like or what I call myself. I would have thought that the important thing as far as you were concerned was whether I was as sensible as the agency promised.’
‘Quite,’ said Blair acidly. ‘And in my book a sensible girl wouldn’t come to the Highlands in shoes like that in the middle of winter, nor would she be travelling first class. If you’re expecting me to reimburse your travel expenses, you can think again!’
Amanda had opened her mouth to ask whether he always acted like Scrooge or whether it was just in honour of the season when it occurred to her that getting into an argument with her new employer within the first two minutes of meeting him was probably not the best way of ensuring that she got into Dundinnie. She had staked her career on doing just that, so she mustn’t blow it now.
‘I don’t usually travel first class,’ she assured him instead in a conciliatory voice. That at least had the advantage of being true! ‘I bought a standard ticket, but by an extraordinary coincidence I met my godfather in the buffet car,’ she went on, abandoning truth in favour of improvisation. ‘We hadn’t seen each other for ages, so he insisted that I go and sit with him in first class, and he paid the difference...a sort of Christmas present.’
‘Very generous godfather,’ commented Blair dourly. Amanda beamed at him, pleased with her story. ‘Oh, he is.’
‘Quite a coincidence meeting him on the same train!’
‘Wasn’t it?’ she agreed, all wide-eyed innocence. ‘He got off in Glasgow,’ she added, sensing disbelief, and anxious to make sure that he didn’t ask her to produce a godfather to substantiate her story.
‘Hmm.’ Blair favoured her with a hard stare, but to Amanda’s relief he didn’t pursue the matter, merely grunting sceptically as he picked up her case. ‘Well, since you’re here at last, Susan, Amanda or whatever you want to call yourself, we may as well go. I’ve been hanging around here quite long enough.’
Anyone would think that it was her fault that the train had been late, Amanda grumbled to herself, but she swallowed her resentment. She had got over the first hurdle, but she would have to be careful. For a nasty moment there she had wondered if Blair had been going to say that he hadn’t believed a word of her story, and there would have been nothing to stop him simply leaving her to catch the first train back to London, making an ignominious end to her glorious new career.
Eyeing the straight back ahead of her, Amanda reminded herself just what was at stake. This was her chance to break out of the secretarial rank at last. Norris Jeffries had more or less guaranteed a promotion if she got this right, and if she was going to do that she should be thinking about chatting Blair up, not arguing with him.
She hurried to catch up. ‘I’ve just been reading your book,’ she said brightly, but the look Blair cast down at her was not exactly encouraging.
‘Which one?’
Amanda’s mind went hideously blank as she tried to remember the title. ‘It was about the expedition you led to the desert...and you made a documentary when you were there,’ she added helpfully, although she had done little more than read the blurb on the cover and flick through the photographs. Travel books had never appealed to her; fiction, the more implausible the better, was much more her style.
‘That cuts the possibilities down to about four,’ said Blair drily. ‘You don’t remember the name of the desert, I suppose?’
‘No,’ Amanda had to admit. ‘But I thought it was terribly good,’ she made haste to console him. ‘Honestly, it was great’
‘I’m glad it made such an impression on you.’ There was no mistaking the acerbic note in his voice this time and Amanda bit her lip, feeling rather silly. Anyone else would have been glad of a compliment, she thought, instead of making it clear that they didn’t believe that she had read a word of his book! She had been going to pretend that she had seen some of his television programmes too, but she wouldn’t bother now!
Outside the station it was dark and cold and gusts of rain splattered against her face. Unprepared for the sharp drop in temperature, Amanda screwed up her face and wrapped her arms around herself to try and stop the shivering. It had been unseasonably mild in London, and she had packed her coat so that she wouldn’t have to carry it. Now she wished she hadn’t. Clearly, the Scottish weather hadn’t forgotten that there were only a couple of weeks to go until Christmas.
Blair was unlocking what looked like a Range Rover, parked against a wall in the darkness. The back was stacked with boxes, carrier bags and odd assorted pieces of machinery and there was only just enough room to wedge Amanda’s suitcase behind her seat. ‘It looks as if you’ve been shopping,’ she said brightly as Blair leant across to unlock her door and she scrambled gratefully into the shelter of the passenger seat. ‘Don’t tell me they’re all Christmas presents!’
‘Hardly.’ It was obvious that Blair didn’t think much of her effort at making conversation and had already written her down as completely inane. He slotted the key into the ignition and coaxed the engine into spluttering life. ‘I’ve merely been taking the opportunity to stock up since I was coming down to town. Dundinnie isn’t exactly handy for the shops.’
‘So I hear,’ said Amanda a little glumly. She loved shops, but Norris had raved about the castle’s isolated position. ‘The agency warned me,’ she explained quickly, feeling Blair glance at her, and then, to divert him, said, ‘Is the car all right? It’s making an awfully funny noise.’ Sue had told her that Blair McAllister was acclaimed as much for his travel documentaries as for his travel books and daring expeditions, and Amanda would have thought that if he was as successful as he was reputed to be then he could afford a car that sounded healthier than this one. Perhaps Norris was closer to the mark in suspecting that Blair had problems trying to mamtain a medieval Scottish castle at the same time as financing his travels.
‘She’s just warming up,’ said Blair irritably, as if divining the train of her thoughts. He clicked on the headlights and a powerful beam of light bounced off the wall in front of them and was reflected back through the windscreen, throwing the lean planes of his face into eerie relief. Amanda found herself noticing how the blocks of light and shadow emphasised his profile with its strong nose and clean jawline and lit just one corner of that stern mouth.
Switching on the windscreen wipers, Blair began to reverse the car out of its parking space, but as he rested an arm on her headrest and turned to look through the rear window he caught Amanda watching him and raised one eyebrow in sardonic enquiry. Unaccountably ruffled, Amanda looked quickly away. To her relief, the interior of the car was engulfed in darkness once more as the beam of the headlights swung out and away from the wall. For some stupid reason, she could feel a flush stealing up her cheeks.
‘How long will it take us to get to the castle?’ she asked with forced brightness, just to show Blair that she hadn’t even registered that joltingly brief meeting of their eyes.
‘It’s normally about two and a half hours,’ said Blair, putting the car into first. ‘Probably more like three tonight. There was a lot of rain when I drove down this morning, and they were forecasting gales again tonight.’
As if to underline his words, a gust of wind splattered rain against the windscreen. ‘Three hours!’ exclaimed Amanda, aghast. ‘I could be halfway back to London in that time!’
‘Very possibly, but you won’t find any nice straight motorways around here. As the crow flies, Dundinnie isn’t that far, but we have to follow the road around a couple of lochs and then get through the hills, and there may well be snow up there. It’s not an easy road at the best of times, but on a night like this it’ll be even slower than usual, so I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to be patient.’
He didn’t sound very sorry. ‘Couldn’t we stay here tonight and go tomorrow morning?’ pleaded Amanda. She had glanced at a map before she’d set out, measuring the distance against the scale with her thumb, and had calculated that it wouldn’t take much more than an hour to get there. That had seemed bad enough after ten hours on the train—and that was before they had been delayed for over an hour. Now the prospect of another three hours seemed too much to bear. ‘I’ve been travelling all day,’ she reminded Blair, hoping to appeal to his sense of chivalry, but she might as well have spared her breath.
‘You’ve only been sitting on a train,’ he pointed out without a trace of sympathy.
‘For eleven and a half hours!’ Amanda said indignantly. ‘Sitting still for that length of time is tiring—or am I only allowed to be tired if I’ve spent eleven hours hacking through some jungle?’
‘If you’d spent eleven days hacking through a jungle you’d be entitled to feel tired,’ said Blair with a sardonic, sideways glance. ‘As far as I can see, all you’ve been doing is sitting in a first-class carriage not doing anything—not even reading, judging by what you said about my book! I hardly think you’ve got anything to complam about,’ he went on. ‘It’s not even as if I’m asking you to drive. You can go to sleep if you want.’
‘I can’t sleep in a car,’ said Amanda sullaly. ‘It makes me feel sick.’
‘In that case you’ll just have to stay awake and shut up, won’t you?’
He was hateful, she decided, subsiding into simmering silence. Arrogant and inconsiderate and absolutely hateful! She had been unfair when she had mentally compared him to Scrooge: Scrooge would have been more charming and certainly better company this Christmas!
She slid a resentful look at Blair from under her lashes. It was all right for him. He hadn’t been up at the crack of dawn to see Sue and Nigel off at the airport, or had to struggle across London on the tube with a heavy suitcase, and he hadn’t had to sit on a train all day with only his crummy book for company either! Anyone with any feelings at all would have taken her to the nearest luxury hotel, poured her a stiff drink and ensured that she had a hot bath before falling into bed. Instead of which she was being dragged on a cross-country marathon and told to shut up when she dared to protest.
Folding her arms, Amanda glowered through the windscreen at the darkness. If Blair wanted her to shut up, she would shut up. She didn’t want to waste her conversation on him anyway!
Frustratingly, Blair didn’t appear to notice that she was ignoring him. Quite unperturbed by the silence, he drove through the town and out onto the Inverness road. ‘The agency tell me that you’ve had considerable experience of dealing with children,’ he said at last as they left the lights of Fort William behind them. ‘What made you become a nanny?’
‘I started to train as a teacher,’ said Amanda, still rather huffily. It was lucky that she knew Sue’s career nearly as well as her own. ‘But I really liked small children best,’ she went on, crossing her fingers in the darkness. ‘I used to be a nanny m the holidays and I liked the variety of temporary work. I got to travel more too. Once I spent three weeks in a luxury hotel in the Caribbean.’ It was the only one of Sue’s jobs that Amanda had ever found the least bit enviable, but Blair McAllister was predictably unimpressed.
‘I hope you’re not expecting anything like that this time,’ he said dampeningly. ‘Did the agency explain the situation to you?’
‘All they said was that you needed someone to help look after your sister’s children,’ said Amanda, trying to remember exactly what Sue had told her. ‘I gather that she hasn’t been well?’
‘She’s better now, but the illness left her very pulled down, and she really needed a complete break. She went through a very messy divorce last year and I think everything just caught up with her. The children were at school, but there was a very responsible nanny to look after them and she went out to New Zealand to see a friend and have a holiday. Unfortunately, the nanny’s mother is very ill, which is why I had to go down and bring the children up here last week. And then we heard that the friend she’s staying with has just been involved in an accident, so Belinda feels she ought to stay and help out until she’s on her feet again.’
Blair gave a brief sigh. ‘Unfortunately, it means that she’s not going to be able to get back in time for Christmas and the children are obviously disappointed. I have to admit that I wasn’t planning on looking after three children for six weeks, especially when they’re having to miss the end of term. That’s why I rang your agency. I’m trying to finish a book about my last trip at the moment and, to be frank, I don’t know very much about children at the best of times.’
That makes two of us, thought Amanda glumly. ‘So you just want someone to keep them out of your way for a bit?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ he said with a stiff look, mistaking her sympathy for accusation. ‘But I do have a deadline to meet, and it seemed the best thing for the children to have someone who would know how to look after them properly. They’re missing their mother and they haven’t had an easy time of it either over the last couple of years and it’s made them rather... difficult at times.’
Amanda’s heart sank. ‘What exactly does “difficult” mean?’
‘They just don’t seem to do any of things we used to do when we were kids. Simon’s eleven and Nicholas nearly nine, but all they ever want to do is sit in front of the television.’ Blair’s voice thinned with disapproval, but Amanda perked up. Watching television didn’t sound like being difficult to her.
‘There’s a little girl too, isn’t there?’
‘Emily,’ he confirmed. ‘She’s seven and very spoilt. I have to admit that I’ll be glad to hand them over to someone who knows how to deal with children,’ he added in an unexpected admission. ‘If you’re half as good as the agency say you are, you should be able to sort them out.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Amanda’s attempt at breezy confidence sounded hollow even to her own ears. ‘Yes, of course I will.’
‘But you hate children!’ Sue had exclaimed when Amanda had first proposed her plan.
‘Not all of them,’ Amanda had defended herself. ‘I’m sure I won’t mind these children. There are only three of them, after all, and it’s not as if they’re babies who need their nappies changing all the time.’ The two girls had been sitting in a crowded wine bar near Amanda’s office. They had managed to find a table and were methodically working their way through the bowl of peanuts that had come with the bottle of wine.
‘They still need to be looked after properly,’ Sue pointed out.
‘I don’t see that it can be that difficult,’ said Amanda buoyantly. ‘You told me yourself that there’s a housekeeper to do the cooking, so all I’d have to do is keep an eye on them and stop them falling in the loch.’
‘I can’t believe you’re serious about this!’ Sue looked helplessly across the table at her friend. ‘You’ve never had the slightest interest in Scotland and even less in children, and now you say you want to spend several weeks as a nanny in the Highlands! And Christmas too! Surely you’d rather spend it with your family?’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to go home for Christmas,’ said Amanda, ‘but the job’s more important to me at the moment. Anyway,’ she added, ‘my sister and her three children are going to be there, so the house’ll be packed, and everyone will be so busy fussing over them that they won’t have time to notice whether I’m there or not.’
‘What about Hugh?’
‘Oh, that’s all off,’ said Amanda carelessly. ‘He just couldn’t understand why I’d rather have a decent job than a mortgage and a screaming baby. He’s going out with Lucy now—I’m sure she’ll want exactly that and then they’ll both be happy,’ she added, not without a touch of regret, because Hugh really had been very good-looking. ‘No, my future lies in a brilliant career, and if that means spending Christmas in Scotland that’s what I’ll do.’
‘But the whole idea is completely mad!’ protested Sue. Amanda refilled their glasses. ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said confidently. ‘It’s a brilliant idea. It solves your problem and it solves my problem and it even solves Blair MeAllister’s problem. What’s wrong with that?’
‘You don’t think it’s a bit deceitful?’ asked Sue, not without a trace of irony.
‘It’s not going to make any difference to Blair McAllister which girl he gets,’ said Amanda, waving the bottle dismissively. ‘He just wants someone to keep an eye on his sister’s kids, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to do that as well as anyone else. I know you think I’m a domestic disaster, but I’m not completely irresponsible. And it would make a difference to me, Sue,’ she went on pleadingly. ‘It might be just another job to you, but my entire future depends on getting into Dundinnie Castle!’
Unfortunately, Sue was used to Amanda’s sense of drama. ‘Your future has depended on so many new jobs that I’ve lost count!’
‘This job’s different,’ Amanda insisted through a mouthful of peanuts. ‘I’m sick of being stuck as a secretary and told that I can only move up the ladder if I stay there for ten years. I want to be successful now.’
‘There’s no point in wanting to be successful unless you know what it is you want to be successful at,’ said Sue, ever practical, but Amanda brushed that aside.
‘Norris knows what I mean. He says he likes people who are hungry for success. That’s why he’s given me this job. ‘If I can get into Dundinnie and convince Blair McAllister to sell, he says there are no limits to how far I can go, but first I’ve got to prove to him that I’ve got the killer instinct.’
‘The killer instinct? You?’ Sue regarded her friend with exasperated affection. ‘I don’t know why you keep up this pretence of wanting to be a ruthless businesswoman when we all know what a softie you are underneath! You’d better not let Norris Jeffries find out about all those lame ducks you sort out if you want him to think that you’ve got the killer instinct!’
Amanda scowled. She had put a lot of effort into her new executive image. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t got any lame ducks.’
‘No? What about Geny?’
‘She just needs a bit of organisation—’ Amanda began defensively, but Sue didn’t let her finish.
‘And what about that time I turned up on your doorstep in floods of tears when you were on your way to Venice? If you’d had real killer instinct you’d have tossed me a packet of tissues on your way out to the airport, instead of cancelling your whole trip to make sure that Nigel and I got back together.’
‘It’s because I want you to stay together that I think you should let me take your place,’ said Amanda cunningly, seizing her opportunity. ‘What’s Nigel going to think when you won’t give up a crummy temporary job so that you can go with him on this holiday he’s won? It’s the chance of a lifetime, and he can’t turn it down, but if he thinks you don’t care enough to want to spent Christmas with him in California, well...’ She shook her head sadly. ‘It’s not as if you’ll get many opportunities for a free trip to the States either,’ she persevered when Sue looked gloomily down into her glass. ‘And just think what he might get up to without you!’
It was obvious that Sue had already thought. ‘It’s not that I wouldn’t love to go...’
‘Well, then!’ Amanda spread her hands virtuously. ‘Here am I, offering to take your place so that you don’t let down the agency, and all you can do is think up objections!’
‘It’s the thought of you taking my place that worries me,’ said Sue frankly. ‘I’ve built up a good reputation with the agency, and if they hear that I’ve let you work for Blair McAllister under false pretences I’m finished. He’s a highprofile clienl I know you’ve never read any of his books but you must have seen his programmes.’
‘All that pitting-yourself-against-the-elements stuff doesn’t really appeal to me,’ said Amanda.
‘He doesn’t just do that,’ protested Sue. ‘Sometimes it’s true, he does take people out into challenging environments—you should have seen what they were doing in Guyana!—but usually it’s just his individual view of a country.’
‘Maybe, but it never sounds to me as if he goes anywhere with any good restaurants,’ said Amanda flippantly. ‘What’s he supposed to be like?’
‘I think he’s brilliant. If Nigel hadn’t won this holiday, I’d be really looking forward to meeting him.’
Sensing weakness, Amanda sat up straighter. ‘The agency won’t ever find out,’ she said, at her most soothing. ‘It’s not as if I’m going to do anything. All I want is to look round the castle and report back to Norris on its condition. He’s set his heart on it for his new health centre, but he only saw it from the outside when he drove past it a couple of months ago. He wants to know what it’s like inside so that he can make Blair McAllister a realistic offer.’
‘But I thought you said that Norris had already approached him about selling the castle and got a very rude reply telling him to forget the whole idea?’
‘Oh. they always say that at first,’ said Amanda with all the confidence of one who had been in property development for two whole weeks. ‘It’s just a way of forcing up the price. That’s why Norris needs a report on the inside. He’s given me four weeks to get up to the castle and find out what I can about Blair McAllister’s financial situation. It’s not the sort of place you can turn up to out of the blue, and I was just beginning to think that I’d have to admit that I couldn’t do it when you told me you’d been offered a temporary job there starting next week.’ Clutching her hands together, she leant pleadingly over the table. ‘It can’t just be a coincidence, Sue. It has to be meant.’
Sue had taken a lot more persuasion, of course, but in the end, as always, Amanda had got her own way. That very morning, she had driven Sue and Nigel to the airport and waved them onto the plane. ‘What if something goes wrong?’ Sue had wailed, losing her nerve at the last minute.
‘Nothing’s going to go wrong,’ Amanda had said gaily, kissing her goodbye and pushing her firmly towards passport control. ‘I’ll be able to handle Blair McAllister. It’ll be easy—just leave him to me!’
Now she wasn’t so sure. She slid a sideways glance at Blair from under her lashes. The dim light from the dashboard instruments was just enough to outline his forceful profile and hint at the inflexible set of his mouth. Watching it, Amanda was conscious of a hollow feeling that there was nothing easy about Blair McAllister and that if there was any handling to be done he would be the one to do it.
Sue’s opinion of him had been shared by all the friends whom Amanda had asked, and she had begun to think that she was the only person who hadn’t seen his programmes or read his books. He had led some famous expeditions in aid of charity but Amanda’s hopes that he would turn out to have a flamboyant personality to match had been firmly quashed. He was tough, intelligent and overwhelmingly competent, they had all agreed. ‘But gorgeous!’ Pippa, another friend, had added, sighing enviously when she heard where Amanda was going.
Amanda had been inclined to pooh-pooh that idea when she’d first seen a picture of Blair McAllister, but the longer she had studied his photograph, the more she had had to admit that there was something intriguing about that air of assurance. Still, he wasn’t what she would call gorgeous. There was something too unyielding about him, she decided, studying him covertly. He was too cold, too brusque to be really attractive. Then her eyes rested on his mouth and she found herself wondering what it would be like if he turned his head and smiled at her the way he had been smiling in that photograph.
At the thought, an odd, disquieting feeling stirred inside her, and she jerked her gaze away to concentrate on the rhythmic swish and slap of the windscreen wipers. She was supposed to be pretending to be Sue, she reminded herself, and Sue would be moreinterested in the children than in her employer. She cleared her throat. ‘Who’s looking after the children tonight?’
She thought her voice sounded a little odd, but Blair didn’t seem to notice. ‘Maggie—my housekeeper—said that she would spend the mght since we were going to be so late back. She usually goes home after she’s prepared the evening meal. Which reminds me,’ he went on tersely, ‘you’re going to have to help out with the cooking and cleaning. Maggie sprained her wrist very badly yesterday and she won’t be able to do much for a while.’
‘You want me to cook?’
‘I cleared it with the agency this morning,’ he said, oblivious to Amanda’s appalled expression. ‘Naturally your salary will reflect the extra work, but the agency said that you wouldn’t mind. They told me that you were a good cook.’
Sue was. Sue was calm and patient and didn’t work herself into a frenzy when all her pots started to boil at once. Amanda loathed cooking and blessed daily the invention of the microwave. ‘I’m not that good,’ she said nervously, wondering for one wild moment if she could sprain her wrist too.
‘It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Good, plain food is all those children need.’
Amanda’s heart sank even further. If there was one thing she hated more than cooking, it was good, plain food. In cuisine, as in life, she liked things as fancy as possible. Lapsing back into glum silence, she contemplated the rain which was now slashing against the car while the wind whooped and swirled judderingly around them. It looked as if it was going to be a very dull Christmas.
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHY do you call yourself Amanda instead of Susan?’ asked Blair suddenly out of the darkness.
‘Amanda’s my middle name,’ said Amanda, who had anticipated that question.
‘What’s wrong with Susan? It’s not as if it’s an embarrassing name.’
Of course, she should have just said that she preferred Amanda and left it at that, but Amanda had always had a taste for the dramatic and had never been able to resist the temptation to embellish a story. Her elaborate excuses for being late had been famous at school. ‘All the girls in my family are called Susan,’ she improvised. ‘We use our middle names so that we don’t get confused.’
‘You’re all called Susan?’ She could feel the disbelief in the glance he shot her. ‘What on earth for?’
‘After my great-great-grandmother,’ said Amanda fluently, grateful as always for her ability to tell the most enormous fibs with a straight face. ‘She was a missionary.’ In the darkness it was impossible to read Blair’s expression, but she could sense his scepticism and it put her on her mettle. ‘In the South Pacific,’ she added as a bit of corroborative detail.
It was a mistake. ‘Oh?’ said Blair. ‘Where in the South Pacific?’
She had forgotten that he probably knew the South Pacific as well as she knew the Number 9 bus route. Feverishly, Amanda tried to think of the name of an island but, as so often when forced to call upon memory rather than imagination, her mind remained blank. ‘She moved around a lot,’ she saidvaguely instead, but as this sounded rather dull she was unable to resist adding a touch of drama to the story. ‘Family legend has it that she was eaten by cannibals,’ she added, lowering her voice to just the right touch of reverence. ‘One day she got into her canoe and paddled off to a new island, and she was never seen again.’
‘Really?’ Blair’s voice dripped disbelief and Amanda sighed inwardly. Perhaps it hadn’t been a very convincing story.
Oh, well, she had enjoyed it, anyway. As she had talked, the mythical Susan had become almost real to her, but it was clear that Blair lacked the fertile imagination that had been getting her into trouble since she’d been a child Life would be much simpler if she’d only learn to keep it under control, she acknowledged, but not nearly so much fun.
Outside, the storm was growing wilder, driving rain ferociously into the windscreen. Blair’s body was utterly relaxed, but his grip on the steering wheel was sure as he held the car steady against the gusting wind. Amanda wished that she could relax enough to fall asleep, but there was something unsettling about Blair’s massive, silent presence, like a barrier between her and the storm.
He had ignored her after the story about her supposed ancestor and Amanda, normally the most confidently chatty of people, had found herself unable to think of anything to say to break the silence. She was too aware of the cramped confines of the car. Outside it was very dark. The dashboard lights were reflected in her window, but otherwise there was nothing. Blair seemed very close, almost overwhelming, and she wished that she didn’t notice every time he moved his hand to the gear lever or glanced across to see if she was still awake.
Once they had turned off the Inverness road, they hardly saw another car, and to Amanda it seemed as if they were driving interminably into the darkness while the rain turned to sleet, zooming in at the windscreen like a meteor shower. In spite of herself, her head began to loll forward. She had no idea how much time had passed when the sound of the car splashing through a huge puddle along with the sound of Blair swearing under his breath jerked her into consciousness. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked blearily, struggling upright in her seat as the car began to splutter alarmingly.
‘Water in the petrol’ he said curtly. He changed down, but his attempts to rev the engine had little effect and not much further down the road the car coughed sadly to a halt.
Blair swore again and hauled on the handbrake. ‘That’s all I need,’ he muttered, and reached across Amanda without ceremony to rummage in the glove box.
Very conscious of his nearness, she shrank back in her seat so that she didn’t have to touch him more than necessary...not that he even seemed to notice that she was there! It was a relief when his fingers closed around a torch and he sat back, but the next minute he was opening his door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out for a stroll.’
Amanda stared stupidly at him as the rain slashed against the windows, wondering if she had fallen asleep after all and this was just a bizarre dream. ‘A stroll? In this?’
Blair gave a short, exasperated sigh. ‘Of course not!’ he said irritably. ‘I’m going to clean the filter, what do you think? And, what’s more, you’re coming with me.’
‘Me?’ She came to abruptly. ‘But I don’t know anything about cars!’
‘You don’t need to be a mechanic to hold a torch.’
‘But...’ Amanda glanced helplessly from the rain to her city suit. ‘I’ll get soaked!’ she wailed, but if she had hoped to rouse Blair’s chivalrous instincts she was doomed to disappointment.
‘I dare say, but the sooner we get out there, the sooner we can both get dry,’ he said. He had half closed his door, but now he made as if to open it again. ‘Now, are you coming?’
Amanda was looking nervously out at the wild night ‘Are you sure this is wise?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Blair, exasperated.
‘I’ve seen horror films like this,’ she said. ‘You know the kind of thing... a couple break down in an isolated place on a night just like this, and as soon as they get out of the car you want to shout at them not to be so stupid, because you know that some monster is lurking in the darkness, and it’s going to creep up on them and grab the girl—no, the man,’ she corrected herself after a moment’s thought. ‘That way the girl has to cope by herself. Then you just hear the man screaming and lots of horrible crunching sounds, and then she starts screaming, and instead of being sensible and getting back inside the car and locking the doors she runs off into the darkness, and the monster stalks her and—’
‘Amanda?’
Carried away by her own story, Amanda had been unaware of Blair’s incredulous expression. Now she stopped in surprise as his deceptively gentle voice cut across her ramble. ‘Yes?’ she said, a little disorientated by the abrupt switch from imagination to reality.
He handed her the torch. ‘Shut up,’ he said, quietly but very distinctly, and got out of the car.
‘Don’t blame me when the monster gets you,’ grumbled Amanda, but she opened her door. A gust of wind and rain swirled into the car, and she shivered. It looked awfully dark out there. She could just make out Blair’s figure silhouetted against the headlights.
‘Come on!’ he shouted, beckoning irritably.
Completely unnerved by her own story, Amanda hesitated, but Blair seemed more of an immediate threat than the monster so she climbed awkwardly out of the car and tittuped round the front of the car in her unsuitable shoes, her face screwed up against the weather. Blinking the rain out of her eyes, she huddled under the meagre protection of the bonnet, where Blair was already leaning over the engine.
‘Over here,’ he ordered. He had to shout over the scream of the wind. ‘I can’t see a thing without the torch.’
Reluctantly, Amanda edged towards him. In the wavering light, she could see Blair regarding her with intense exasperation. ‘How am I supposed to see anything with you waving the torch around from over there?’ he demanded when she stopped uncertainly, and reached out a hard hand to grab her by the waist and drag her into his side.
Amanda half fell against him with a squeak of surprise. ‘Now, hold it there,’ said Blair, putting his hand around hers and pointing the torch at the filter. ‘This is a fiddly job and I need to be able to see what I’m doing.’
He turned back to the engine without another word. Amanda tried to hold the torch steady, but her hand was already numb with cold. She felt oddly breathless. Even through the buffeting wind and rain, she was very conscious of the granite solidity of Blair’s body where she was pressed against him.
‘We must stop meeting like this!’ she bent to shout in his ear, trying to make a joke of it.
‘What?’
Blair lifted his head to stare at her, and Amanda was disconcerted to find that his face was very close. The rain had already sleeked his hair against his head and a trickle of water was making its way from his temple down one lean cheek.
‘Joke,’ she explained. ‘Just trying to lighten the atmosphere.’
He sighed against her. ‘I’m glad you’re having such a good time, of course, but do you think you could keep the jokes until we’re back inside the car?’
‘Just trying to help,’ she muttered, sulking at his sarcastic response. Just as she had thought: no sense of humour.
‘If you want to help, Amanda, I suggest you keep that torch still and stop distracting me!’ said Blair unpleasantly.
She was left staring resentfully down at the back of his head. It was very cold and the sleet was rapidly turning to snow. Her teeth were soon clattering together uncontrollably. To distract herself, she began mentally rewriting the blurb about Blair that had appeared on the dust-jacket of his book. ‘Brilliant’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘stimulating’ could go for a start, to be replaced by ‘grumpy’, ‘boring’ and ‘downright disagreeable’.
Her eyes rested crossly on what she could see of his face as she thought of a few more adjectives to describe the real Blair McAllister. Unaware of her regard, he was frowning down at the engine, his expression absorbed. The dim glow of reflected torchlight caught the sheen of wet skm and glimmered over the hard line of his cheek.
Suddenly, Amanda found that instead of thinking about how much she disliked him she was thinking about the feel of his body, about the strength of his arm pulling her against him, about the warmth of his fingers around hers as he steadied the torch. She tried to distract herself by thinking about the wonderful career that Norris had promised her, but the slick city office with its frantically bleeping phones and constant buzz of pressure seemed unutterably remote from this moment, as she huddled against a man she had met only a couple of hours ago while the wind plastered her wet skirt against her legs and the rain ran coldly down her neck and the only warmth and security in the world lay in the hard strength of Blair McAllister’s body.
With an effort, she looked away from him, but the wind blew the rain in her eyes if she faced in any other direction, and although she tried staring down at the engine instead her eyes kept skittering back to his face. He had turned his head slightly as he squinted at the filter and she could see the corner of his mouth. It gave her a strange feeling. She had forgotten that she was rehearsing all the things she disliked about him. All she could do was watch his mouth and wonder if it would feel as cool and firm as it looked.
Aghast at the direction of her thoughts, Amanda stiffened. What on earth had made her think about that? All at once, her senses were jangling with a humiliating awareness of the oblivious man beside her. He wasn’t bothered by the feel of her body pressed close against him, or distracted by the curve of her mouth. As far as Blair was concerned, she was just an irritating extension of his torch. She shifted her feet so that she could hold herself rigidly away from him but she doubted whether he even noticed, and it didn’t stop her tensing with every move he made.
Shaking with cold, Amanda stood awkwardly arched over the engine like a lamppost. She was so ridiculously, inexplicably nervous that when Blair suddenly reached across her to the other side of the engine she jerked back in an instinctive attempt not to come into contact with the body that had left her feeling so on edge. The sudden movement knocked the torch against the edge of the bonnet and out of her nerveless fingers, and before she had a chance to retrieve it it crashed down onto the tarmac where it promptly went out.
‘What the—!’ Blair straightened furiously to glare at her. ‘Where’s the torch?’
Amanda groped around on the road until she found it, but when she tried to click it on again nothing happened.
‘That’s a great help!’ He snatched it from her, cursing under his breath as he shook it savagely. ‘Damn! The bulb’s gone. I’ll have to go and get another one. You stay here,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘And try not to do any more damage if you can help it!’
Mortified, Amanda hunched wretchedly under the bonnet as Blair made his way round to the driver’s seat. She could see the sleet driving across the straight beam of the headlights but beyond that there was only the howling wind and pitchdarkness, and she thought of the monster that she had described so glibly in the safety of the car. She hadn’t thought of it at all when she had had Blair beside her, but now she felt cold and scared and very vulnerable.
The seconds stretched interminably. What was Blair doing? He could at least say something to let her know that he was still there. Anything might have happened to him; anything might have snuck up in the darkness. Amanda’s imagination, always vivid, spun out of control, and she had worked herself into such a state that when the lights snapped abruptly off, plunging her into blackness, she gasped and began to grope her way frantically round the bonnet in the direction where Blair had disappeared.
Gibbering with fear, she had just made it to the corner when she came slap up against a hard body. In spite of herself, she shrieked.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Blair’s voice demanded furiously.
Amanda clutched at him in relief. ‘Oh, thank God it’s you! What happened?’
‘What do you mean, what happened? Nothing happened!’
‘But the lights went out!’
‘I switched them off to save the battery.’ Blair had obviously never watched any films where the hero put his arms comfortingly around the heroine. He put Amanda away from him in an irritable gesture. ‘I couldn’t find another bulb, so we’ll have to wait until it’s light now.’
Amanda stood feeling rather foolish and wishing she could forget how reassuring it had been to hold onto him. ‘I thought something had happened to you,’ she tried to explain.
‘What could possibly happen to me between the engine and the steering wheel? And don’t start on that silly monster business!’ he added in an acerbic voice before she had a chance to answer.
‘Stranger things have happened,’ she muttered darkly as Blair moved past her in the dark to slam down the bonnet.
“The worst that’s going to happen to you is that you’re going to get even wetter if you stand out here any longer,’ he pointed out in a crushing voice. ‘So I suggest you stop wittering and get in the car.’
‘Can you turn on the lights again?’ she pleaded. It was so dark that she couldn’t even see Blair and she edged closer along the car towards the sound of his voice. ‘I can’t see a thing.’
‘Feel your way round the bonnet,’ Blair began, but, as if against his better judgement, he reached out into the blackness until his hand brushed against hers. Amanda clutched at it thankfully. ‘Here,’ he said gruffly, leading her round to the other side of the car and opening the passenger door. ‘You’d better get in.’
The opening of the door gave her enough light to climb in out of the storm, but Amanda was strangely reluctant to let go of his hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said humbly.
Moving confidently through the pitch-dark, Blair was banging his own door shut only moments later. He reached up to click on the overhead light and began stripping off his jacket. ‘Well, we seem to have survived the monsters against all the odds. Or are they circling the car even now, slavering in anticipation at the thought of us both trapped here?’
‘Very funny,’ said Amanda, unappreciative of his sarcasm, but she locked her door anyway. She watched him toss his sodden jacket over the boxes in the back and run a hand over his wet hair before wiping the worst of the rain from his face. In the dim light she could see a trickle still heading down towards his jaw and for one extraordinary moment even considered reaching across to stop it with her finger. Her hand tingled with the thought and she looked abruptly away. ‘What do we do now?’ she asked, clearing her throat.
‘Wait.’
No one could accuse Blair McAllister of garrulity, Amanda thought with an inward sigh. ‘Is that it?’ she said after a moment
‘Unless you can do mechanics by Braille, yes,’ he said tersely. ‘If you hadn’t dropped that torch, we could be on our way by now. What made you drop it, anyway?’ he went on, turning in his seat to look at her. ‘One minute you were standing there quietly, and the next you were jumping around life a scalded cat.’
‘I was cold,’ said Amanda, who had no intention of telling him why she had been so tense. ‘My hands were numb. It was like the North Pole out there.’ She shivered and wrapped her arms around her body. ‘It’s like the North Pole in here, come to that.’
‘It’s nothing like the North Pole,’ said Blair impatiently. Of course, he would have been there, wouldn’t he? He leant closer and touched the sodden material of her suit. ‘You’re soaking!’ His voice was suddenly sharp. ‘You’d better get that suit off.’
‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she muttered.
‘Only when I’ve known them longer than two hours,’ he said. His face was quite straight, but amusement threaded his voice and when Amanda looked at him suspiciously one corner of his mouth twitched.
For some reason, she felt a blush stealing up her cheeks. She felt ridiculously ruffled. This was Blair McAllister, she reminded herself with an edge of desperation. All he had done was smile at her—and not even a proper smile at that!—so why was she having trouble breathing properly?
‘I’ll get your suitcase out,’ he was saying with a return to his usual manner. Leaning over the seat, he manoeuvred her case so that it was lying flat on top of the boxes behind her. ‘I suggest you take off those wet things first, and then find something warm and dry to put on instead.’
‘Yes...yes, I’ll do that.’ Amanda pulled herself together with an effort. She must be even more tired than she had thought to let a smile—a suggestion of a smile—discompose her. She leant forward to struggle out of her jacket, but she was so cold that Blair had to help her, and the feel of his hands grazing against her only made her more awkward.
‘That shirt’s sodden too,’ he said when he eventually managed to peel off the jacket and spread it out in the back. ‘Go on, take that off too. There’s no point in being modest if it means you dying of pneumonia, and if you’re worried about me, I have had a very long, trying day, not improved by hanging around at the station for an hour and half or breaking down, and I can assure you that seduction is the last thing on my mind!’
‘The thought never occurred to me,’ said Amanda stiffly through chattering teeth.
Blair sat back in his seat and studied the bedraggled figure beside him. The meagre light was enough to see that the shiny brown hair was plastered to her head and as he watched she sniffed and drearily wiped a trickle of rain from her nose in an unconscious gesture of tiredness. ‘Come on, huny up before you freeze to death,’ he said almost brusquely. ‘It’s not exactly the ideal situation for a spot of lovemaking anyway, is it?’ he went on casually as Amanda began to fumble with the tiny buttons of her shirt. ‘I prefer a little more comfort myself.’
Amanda tried to imagine the dour Blair McAllister making love and found to her discomfort that she could manage it with unnerving clarity. She had known the man for something less than three hours, had seen him clearly for less than three minutes...how was it that she could picture him so vividly, reaching out, leaning over, bending down for a kiss? What made her picture him with a slow smile and slow, sure hands?
Her fingers were still numb with cold, and the distracting image of Blair was making her even clumsier as she struggled awkwardly with the buttons. They were tricky at the best of times and she muttered with a mixture of embarrassment and frustration as her hands slipped again.
‘Here, let me have a go,’ said Blair abruptly, and before Amanda quite realised what was happening he had leant over to undo the top button. He must have been as cold as she was, but his fingers were deft and impersonal, and warm where they brushed against her skin.
Amanda was intensely grateful for the dim light that disguised the wave of colour that swept up her cheeks. Her fingers might be numb with cold, but inside she could feel herself burning with an excruciating awareness of the man so impersonally unbuttoning her shirt with fingers that were just as slow and sure as she had imagined.
‘Seduction is the last thing on my mind,’ he had said, but she couldn’t stop herself wondering what it would be like if it wasn’t. What would it be like if he was thinking about making love now, what if he was thinking about her? What if he were unbuttoning her shirt like a lover and not like a nanny undressing a tiresome child? What would it be like if he slid his hands beneath the silk to caress her skin? Amanda’s heart was thudding slowly, painfully against her ribs and her throat was tight and dry. God, what was the matter with her? She must stop this; she must—
‘I must choose a more comfortable place to undress you next time,’ said Blair. ‘This would be much more fun if we were both warm and dry and weren’t squashed into the front seat of a damp car, wouldn’t it?’ The sound of his voice wrenched her back to reality, but she heard only the undercurrent of laughter in his voice and stared blankly at him.
‘Joke,’ he quoted her own explanation back at her. ‘Just trying to lighten the atmosphere.’
Amanda swallowed and smiled weakly. If only he knew how close he had been to reading her mind! ‘It’s just as well the seats are so wet, then, isn’t it?’ she said feebly as Blair undid the last button and pulled the shirt off her to reveal the dull gleam of the cream silk camisole she wore.
‘Just as well,’ he said after a moment.
There was a long pause, and then he looked up directly into Amanda’s eyes. The light wasn’t good enough to read his expression. It threw a fuzzy glow over one side of his face, blurring the forceful features but paradoxically heightening the impression of granite strength that already seemed so much a part of him. In the darkness he was a massive presence, at once reassuring and disturbing.
Amanda was held, pinned by that unreadable gaze. The rain drumming on the roof and the whooping wind seemed to be coming from a long way away. There was only the darkness and the blurry light on Blair’s cheek and Blair’s jaw and the solid line of Blair’s throat.
She never knew how long they looked at each other. It might only have been a few seconds, but suddenly he was looking away and she realised that she had been holding her breath. She let it out with a tiny gasp and, as if released from a spell, scrambled round in her seat to scrabble through her suitcase. She couldn’t distinguish any colours but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was to put on as many layers as possible to act as barriers between her and Blair McAllister’s unsettling gaze.
Her fingers closed on the cashmere jumper that her mother had given her last Christmas and she tugged it out, grateful for its soft warmth. After several false starts, she discovered a shirt and dragged it on before wriggling out of her wet skirt and tights and wriggling into some leggings and two pairs of socks to warm her frozen feet. Heaven only knew what colours she had on or whether any of it matched, but Amanda, studiously avoiding Blair’s eyes, cared only that she was covered.
‘Have you got a towel in there?’ Blair asked when she had finished.
‘I think so... somewhere.’ Kneeling on the seat, she groped through her suitcase until she found it. ‘Here.’
Blair took it and, ordering Amanda to bend her head, towelled her hair vigorously until she protested. She emerged complaining bitterly and with her hair standing up in all directions, but had to admit that she felt better. Grumbling about Blair’s rough treatment had dispersed her awkwardness too, and it was possible now to see that her earlier bizare reaction to him had merely been the result of cold and exhaustion.
‘Better?’ he asked as he rubbed the towel over his own hair.
‘Well, drier,’ she admitted cautiously. ‘All I need now is a hot meal, a stiff drink and a warm bed and I’d be really quite comfortable.’
‘I can’t do much about the hot meal or the warm bed,’ said Blair, reaching in the back for a carrier bag, which he extracted at last with a grunt of satisfaction. ‘But I can provide a drink.’ He produced a bottle from the bag as he eased himself back into his seat. ‘Do you like whisky?’
‘Haven’t you got anything else?’ said Amanda, who had been hoping that he might magically produce a bottle of red and a corkscrew. She might have known that he would be a whisky man.
‘No,’ he said, and unscrewed the top. ‘Have some of this anyway. It’ll warm you up.’
‘Oh, all right.’ He passed her the bottle and Amanda reached for it without enthusiasm. Her fingers fumbled against his and she couldn’t prevent a tiny frisson shivering down her spine. ‘Sorry,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Have you got a good grip of it before I let go?’ asked Blair. ‘I don’t want a good bottle of malt going the same way as the torch!’
The astringency in his voice helped Amanda to ignore the strumming sensation where their hands had touched. ‘I wouldn’t dream of dropping anything quite so close to your heart,’ she said with a frosty look. Taking a defiantly large swig, she promptly choked and spluttered as the whisky burned down her throat.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ said Blair as she shook her head to clear it and hastily handed back the bottle.
‘It’s certainly... warming,’ gasped Amanda hoarsely.
‘Warming? Is that all you can say? That’s Macallan single malt you were chucking back!’
‘Is that good?’
‘The best.’
‘Oh. dear, I hope you weren’t saving it for a special occasion.’
Blair drank reflectively from the bottle. ‘A whisky like this makes any occasion special,’ he said.
‘What, even stranded in the middle of a storm with a hysterical nanny?’ Amanda asked ironically, and he turned in his seat to look at her. Her hair stuck out in every direction where he had rubbed it dry, but her eyelashes were still spiky with rain. Without the suit and the sleek hairstyle she looked a lot less than her twenty-four years, and almost unrecognisable as the smart young woman who had got off the train at Fort William. Blair’s eyes rested on her face, still somehow vivid in the dim light, and the chin which was tilted at a characteristically challenging angle.
‘Even that,’ he said slowly, faint amusement bracketing his mouth.
What was it about that damned elusive smile of his that made the blood tingle beneath her skin? Amanda turned away to rest her cheek against the window and let the cool glass drain the heat from her face. ‘I’m glad you’re finding it special,’ she muttered. ‘I can think of other ways to describe being stuck out in the middle of nowhere, trapped in a wet car by slavering monsters and only a bottle of whisky for comfort!’
‘Come on, stop complaining,’ said Blair without heat. ‘Things could be worse.’
‘How?’
‘You could be outside with your monsters, for a start. You ought to be grateful that we’ve the car for shelter. At least you’ll be able to sleep.’
‘Sleep? Sleep?’ Amanda’s voice rose to an outraged squeak as exhaustion caught up with her. ‘How can I possibly sleep when I’m tired and I’m cold and I’m hungry and I wish I’d never come near bloody Scotland in the first place?’
Blair was unmoved by her outburst. ‘Have another drink,’ was all he said, and he handed her the bottle. Amanda was ready for the fiery impact of the whisky this time and took a more cautious slug. ‘I’ve even got some biscuits,’ he added, producing a packet out of the bag by his feet. ‘So that will cross hunger off your list of miseries.’ He npped open the packet and passed it over to Amanda.
‘A ginger-nut wasn’t quite what I had in mind,’ she sighed, taking three anyway. She bit into one glumly. ‘I was thinking of something warm and tasty, preferably smothered in cheese, accompanied by a bottle of wine and followed by a nice, fattening pudding. Sticky toffee pudding,’ she decided after a moment’s thought. Munching on the biscuit, she lapsed into silence and stared disconsolately out at the rain which was still being hurled out of the darkness by a frustrated gale.
Blair regarded her with a sort of exasperated amusement for a moment and then reached up to click off the overhead light. ‘We may as well save the battery until we need it,’ he said as the darkness blotted out everything. Amanda couldn’t even see her ginger-nut.
‘You’re not a very typical nanny, are you?’ His voice came out of the blackness, deep and strong and infinitely reassuring.
‘What do you mean?’ said Amanda cautiously.
‘I always imagine nannies to be calm, practical people, used to coping when things go wrong.’
‘I’m coping!’ she ruffled up instantly.
‘Not without making a fuss,’ Blair pointed out astringently. ‘What would you be like if this was a crisis?’
‘What do you mean, if? This is a crisis!’
‘You’ve just proved my point for me,’ he said, sounding resigned. ‘You’ve got to spend a few uncomfortable hours in the car. It’s perfectly safe, you’ve got dry clothes, something to drink, something to eat and me to look after you in the unlikely event that anything did happen, but, for you, that’s a crisis! What would you do if something really bad happened to you?’
‘Right at this moment, I can’t think of anything worse than being stuck here with you,’ said Amanda sourly, and deliberately drank some more of his precious whisky.
Blair ignored that. ‘I just hope that you’re a little less...extravagant when it comes to dealing with children,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘Judging by what the agency told me, I can only assume that you undergo some sort of personality change when actually faced with a child!’
In the darkness, Amanda put up her chin defiantly. ‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we?’
‘Yes,’ said Blair. He was no more than a black blur against more blackness but Amanda could feel that uncomfortably acute gaze resting on her. She just hoped he couldn’t see in the dark, or her expression would surely give her away! ‘We’ll see.’
CHAPTER THREE
AMANDA’S head was aching. Opening one eye very cautiously, she found herself looking at something dark and curved only inches away from her face. She stared at it for a long time before her pounding brain registered that she was looking at the bottom of a steering wheel.
It hurt too much to think about what it was doing there. Amanda closed her eye again, but the effort of recognising a steering wheel had set her mind working, albeit slowly, and as she lay and willed herself to sink back into comfortable oblivion memories of the night before came filtering back in a series of odd, unconnected pictures: huddling under the bonnet in the sluicing rain, spluttering as the whisky burned down her throat, sitting very still as Blair undid the buttons of her shirt and being passionately glad of the darkness.
Blair... Until then, Amanda had been remembering in the peculiarly detached way of the half-asleep, but his image dissolved the last wisps of dream and brought her awake with a jolt. At the same moment, she became aware that fingers were twisting strands of her hair absently together and her eyes snapped open with the sudden realisation that she was sprawled across the front of the car with her head in Blair McAllister’s lap. His other hand was resting lightly at the curve of her hip, and his thighs were broad and firm and relaxed beneath her cheek.
‘At last!’ Blair must have felt her involuntary stiffening. ‘I thought you were going to sleep all morning.’
‘I didn’t realise...’ Horribly embarrassed, Amanda struggled upright, wincing at the stiffness of her limbs. Someone—presumably Blair—had stuffed a couple of jumpers from her suitcase around the handbrake, but it hadn’t stopped it digging into her. ‘Y-you should have woken me,’ she stammered.
‘I didn’t have the heart,’ said Blair. ‘You were sleeping like a baby.’
She blinked at him, disconcerted to find him at once a stranger and oddly familiar. For the first time she registered that it was light. The darkness of the night before had blurred the strength of his features and now, in the brightness of morning, it was as if she had never seen his face before.
It was his eyes she noticed first of all. They were an opaque blue-grey, the colour of slate, and beneath dark, sarcasticlooking eyebrows they held an unnervingly acute expression that gave focus to his face. For Amanda, it was as if the morning light had thrown everything about him into sharp relief: the angle of his jaw, the thick, dark hair, the prickle of stubble on his unshaven skin and, most of all, the way his mouth was set in a line that was already uncannily unfamiliar.
Aware that she was staring, and afflicted by sudden shyness, Amanda looked away. ‘I don’t feel as if I slept a wink,’ she said uncomfortably.
‘You slept more than a wink,’ said Blair. ‘You drank half my whisky, keeled over into my lap in the middle of a sentence and proceeded to snore for the rest of the night.’
Amanda looked appalled. ‘I didn’t, did I?’ She did vaguely remember drinking whisky out of a bottle, but she had no recollection of falling asleep at all. She looked suspiciously at Blair. ‘Anyway, I don’t snore.’
‘It sounded remarkably like snoring to me.’ His voice was sardonic, not unamused. ‘I’ve been listening to you ever since the wind dropped, so I should know. Still, I suppose I should be glad that one of us at least had a comfortable night.’
‘If someone asked me to describe my first night in Scotland, comfortable wouldn’t be the first word that sprang to mind,’ said Amanda sourly, grimacing as she stretched her stiff limbs. ‘I feel terrible.’
‘I’m not surprised, judging by the amount of my whisky you sank last night. I thought you weren’t supposed to like the stuff?’
Amanda held her aching head. ‘I don’t’ With her other hand, she twisted round the rear-view mirror and peered blearily into it. Her hair had lost its customary bounce and shine in last night’s rain and, although now dry, it stood up at impossible angles around her face, one side of which was marked with narrow red lines where her cheek had been pressed into Blair’s cords. Mascara was smudged beneath her gritty eyes and she moaned as she rubbed it away with a knuckle. ‘Ugh!’ was all she felt capable of groaning, and, unable to bear the sight of herself any longer, she turned the mirror away.
‘I must say that you don’t look quite as smart as you did when you got off the train last night.’ Blair pretended to look Amanda over critically, but she could tell that he was enjoying himself. He didn’t actually smile, but amusement lurked around his mouth and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened. Involuntarily, she followed his gaze from the scarlet cashmere jumper, which she had managed to put on back to front, to the hideously clashing leggings and on down to the assortment of odd socks which she had pulled on last night in her haste to cover herself.
Some executive she looked now! Mortified, Amanda hurriedly pulled off her jumper and put it back on the right way round, making sure this time that both sides of her shirt collar lay neatly over the round neck. The small detail made her feel better and she patted the collar down, only to flush as she caught Blair’s mocking slate eyes.
‘What time is it?’ she asked crossly.
He glanced at his watch and told her.
Amanda shuddered. ‘I knew I wouldn’t like it,’ she grumbled, rubbing a hand round her aching neck.
‘Your previous charges must have been very well behaved if you’re not used to getting up at this sort of time,’ said Blair, callously indifferent to her suffering. He reached down to release the bonnet and opened his door. ‘Not that I’d call this particularly early. It would count as a lie-in on an expedition.’
‘Remind me never to join one of your expeditions,’ muttered Amanda, watching him morosely as he jumped out and went round to inspect the engine. Still grumbling to herself, she opened her own door and eased herself out to stand in the road in her mismatched socks and stretch painfully. Only then did she look round her and her jaw dropped.
They had spluttered to a halt on a long, straight stretch of road that swept down the hillside to the shores of a loch which was as smooth and still as dark glass below them. The fury of last night’s storm might never have been. Not a breath of wind stirred the surface of the water, and it reflected back the massive snow-capped peaks looming around it, sharply outlined against a clear, crisp sky. Amanda, whose image of Scotland until now had been of brown hills shrouded in grey mist, could only stare at the scene spread out before her like a vast postcard. The hills were a warm golden colour, separated from the blue of the sky by their crowns of white snow, and the crystalline light made her blink.
‘Oh,’ she said.
Blair glanced up from the engine. ‘It’s quite a view to wake up to, isn’t it?’
‘Ye-es.’ She looked slowly around her once more, her breath freezing in a white cloud. She didn’t think that she had ever seen anywhere as empty as this before. The thin ribbon of road stretching out into the distance was the only sign of civilisation; other than that, there were only hills and sky and water and cold, clear air. There was something overwhelming about the austere grandeur of the scene that made Amanda feel very small. The massive, uncompromising mountains reminded her of Blair, she decided, trying to shrug off the feeling. ‘It’s all a bit bleak, isn’t it?’
He looked disapproving at her lack of enthusiasm. ‘It’s magnificent country. You’re very lucky to see it like this.’
But Amanda was in no mood to admire the scenery. After the first shock of surprise, she had lapsed back into early-morning disgruntlement. ‘I feel a lot of things right now,’ she sighed, ‘but lucky is not one of them.’
She was dying to go to the loo, but trees or bushes seemed to be in short supply up here. For miles there seemed to be nothing but tussocky grass interspersed with clumps of heather, dead, battered bracken and the odd patch of unmelted snow. Peeling off her ridiculous socks, Amanda rummaged in her case for a pair of trainers. She was tempted to change all her clothes, but it didn’t seem worth it before she had a bath, and anyway, she was damned if she was going to undress in front of Blair McAllister in broad daylight. It had been awkward enough in the dark!
There was a granite outcrop in the heather further up the hill. Deciding that it offered the best privacy she was going to get, Amanda began to clamber up the steep bank that ran along the roadside.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ asked Blair, straightening from the engine.
She pointed at the outcrop. ‘Just up there.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Why do you think?’ she said testily.
He sighed. ‘Why don’t you just go behind the car? I won’t look.’
‘Someone else might,’ she pointed out, grabbing onto a clump of heather so that she could haul herself up onto the top of the bank at last.
‘Who?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s not exactly a constant stream of traffic along this road.’
‘A car might come round the corner any minute.’
‘Amanda, the nearest corner is a good five miles away! You’d have plenty of time to gather yourself together if you’re that inhibited.’
‘I am not inhibited!’ she snapped, irritated by his attitude. ‘I simply prefer a little privacy, and if I want to hide behind a rock I will.’ Turning her back on him, she attempted to stalk off, but it was hard to stalk with dignity through knee-high tussocks of grass and heather, and she ended up ploughing inelegantly through it. It wasn’t long before she was regretting her determined stand. The outcrop which had looked so close from the road seemed to keep receding up the hill, and by the time she had struggled up to it she was exhausted.
To make matters worse, the granite turned out to be a sheer face set into the hillside, offering virtually no protection anyway, and she was still clearly visible from the road. Gasping for breath, Amanda could see Blair calmly tinkering with the engine, but even as she glowered resentfully down at him he glanced up the hill and saw her.
‘Are you planning to spend all day up there?’ he shouted, and tapped his watch significantly with his spanner.
Amanda didn’t deign to answer and wouldn’t have had the breath for it anyway. Instead she turned her back with something suspiciously like a flounce and tried to make herself as insignificant as possible against the granite—a hard job when you were wearing a scarlet jumper. She might as well have had a flashing neon sign over her head.
Getting down the hill was nearly as bad as getting up it. The heather caught at her leggings and the laces of her trainers, and when the slope flattened near the bank she trod in a bog, thereby ruining yet another pair of shoes and her temper.
‘Feeling better?’ Blair asked sarcastically as she scrambled clumsily down onto the road once more. He had been watching her progress as he leant against the car with folded arms.
‘No, I am not!’ stormed Amanda, wiping her soggy trainers savagely on some dead bracken and convinced in some obscure way that it was all Blair McAllister’s fault. ‘To be quite frank with you, I wish I’d never come to Scotland. The last few hours have been the worst of my life. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get pneumonia after last night, I’m so stiff I’ll probably never walk properly again, all I’ve had to eat is a few ginger-nuts and now I’ll have to go barefoot for the rest of the month,’ she finished childishly.
Blair tutted. ‘I’m not surprised Hugh dumped you if you were always this bad-tempered in the morning,’ he said.
‘Anyone would be bad-tempered if they’d spent the night I had! And, anyway, Hugh—’ Amanda stopped abruptly. ‘How do you know about Hugh?’ she demanded.
‘You told me about him at length last night, just before you passed out,’ said Blair with a sardonic look. ‘I heard all about how attractive he was and how he had taken up with some “drip”—your description, not mine—but really, you thought it was probably for the best because he never understood about your career and thought you should have wanted to settle down and have babies.’ Blair’s voice mimicked her so clearly that she squirmed mwardly.
‘I can’t think why I told you all that,’ she mumbled.
‘I assumed that you weren’t used to neat whisky,’ said Blair. ‘I certainly hope you don’t make a habit of confiding your life history to virtual strangers!’
Amanda stared at him, aghast at her own indiscretion. ‘Oh, dear, I must have been terribly boring,’ she said nervously. What if she had told him the truth about taking Sue’s place? He would have said something, though, wouldn’t he? she reassured herself. Blair McAllister wasn’t the kind of man who would calmly accept an impostor.
His next words seemed to confirm that however indiscreet she had been she hadn’t been that indiscreet. ‘No, I found it fascinating,’ he said, although not without some sarcasm. ‘I didn’t realise that anyone would think of nannying as a career incompatible with children. I would have thought that anyone who chose to spend their time looking after other people’s children would want to have their own eventually. Isn’t that what you want?’
Amanda thought of a recent weekend that she had spent with her sister, who had three children under five, and barely repressed a shudder. ‘No...I mean, not yet,’ she added, seeing Blair lift an eyebrow at her horrified expression.
‘Well, you’re still young,’ he said indifferently as he made his way round to his door. ‘And children are an enormous commitment.’
‘Exactly.’ Amanda climbed into her seat as well, relieved that he wasn’t going to enquire any further into her aversion to children. ‘Is that why you don’t have any? Because you travel so much?’
Blair turned the ignition key and coaxed the engine into life. ‘One of the reasons,’ he said uninformatively.
Amanda studied him from under her lashes and wondered what the other reasons were. Why wasn’t he married, anyway? Her ready imagination was quick to endow him with a doomed love affair in the past, but when her eye fell on the straight, stern line of his mouth she changed her mind. The Blair McAllisters of this world didn’t waste time on desperate romances. They chose wives who were calm and sensible and wouldn’t complain about being cold or wet or fed a constant diet of ginger-nuts, she decided glumly.
A strange feeling stirred inside Amanda and she looked away to stare unseeingly at the scenery. Blair wasn’t like the other men she had known. He certainly wasn’t like Hugh, who had been so handsome and charming and yet, deep down, so stuffy. It was true that Hugh had called the whole thing off in the end, but she really did think it had been for the best, no matter how pathetic Blair had made her drunken monologue sound. She wasn’t ready to settle down with anyone yet. She wanted to have a good time, not get bogged down in interminable discussions about commitment, which was all her friends ever seemed to do.
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Jessica Hart
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: We saw Nanny kissing Santa Claus…Amanda had a mission: to convince Blair McAllister to sell his home to her company. In order to get close to him she took the job of live-in nanny to his boisterous three children….But her plan backfired. Although Blair was as grouchy as a bear with a sore head, it just made him all the more attractive–and Amanda fell in love!As Blair prepared to play Santa to the kids on Christmas Eve, Amanda had forgotten all about her secret mission. She had hit on a new, far more rewarding plan: catching her boss under the mistletoe instead!