Kissing Santa

‘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.