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!’