Kissing Santa. Jessica Hart
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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