Kissing Santa

‘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.’