Kissing Santa. Jessica Hart
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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