Читать книгу Kissing Santa - Jessica Hart - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

‘WHY do you call yourself Amanda instead of Susan?’ asked Blair suddenly out of the darkness.

‘Amanda’s my middle name,’ said Amanda, who had anticipated that question.

‘What’s wrong with Susan? It’s not as if it’s an embarrassing name.’

Of course, she should have just said that she preferred Amanda and left it at that, but Amanda had always had a taste for the dramatic and had never been able to resist the temptation to embellish a story. Her elaborate excuses for being late had been famous at school. ‘All the girls in my family are called Susan,’ she improvised. ‘We use our middle names so that we don’t get confused.’

‘You’re all called Susan?’ She could feel the disbelief in the glance he shot her. ‘What on earth for?’

‘After my great-great-grandmother,’ said Amanda fluently, grateful as always for her ability to tell the most enormous fibs with a straight face. ‘She was a missionary.’ In the darkness it was impossible to read Blair’s expression, but she could sense his scepticism and it put her on her mettle. ‘In the South Pacific,’ she added as a bit of corroborative detail.

It was a mistake. ‘Oh?’ said Blair. ‘Where in the South Pacific?’

She had forgotten that he probably knew the South Pacific as well as she knew the Number 9 bus route. Feverishly, Amanda tried to think of the name of an island but, as so often when forced to call upon memory rather than imagination, her mind remained blank. ‘She moved around a lot,’ she saidvaguely instead, but as this sounded rather dull she was unable to resist adding a touch of drama to the story. ‘Family legend has it that she was eaten by cannibals,’ she added, lowering her voice to just the right touch of reverence. ‘One day she got into her canoe and paddled off to a new island, and she was never seen again.’

‘Really?’ Blair’s voice dripped disbelief and Amanda sighed inwardly. Perhaps it hadn’t been a very convincing story.

Oh, well, she had enjoyed it, anyway. As she had talked, the mythical Susan had become almost real to her, but it was clear that Blair lacked the fertile imagination that had been getting her into trouble since she’d been a child Life would be much simpler if she’d only learn to keep it under control, she acknowledged, but not nearly so much fun.

Outside, the storm was growing wilder, driving rain ferociously into the windscreen. Blair’s body was utterly relaxed, but his grip on the steering wheel was sure as he held the car steady against the gusting wind. Amanda wished that she could relax enough to fall asleep, but there was something unsettling about Blair’s massive, silent presence, like a barrier between her and the storm.

He had ignored her after the story about her supposed ancestor and Amanda, normally the most confidently chatty of people, had found herself unable to think of anything to say to break the silence. She was too aware of the cramped confines of the car. Outside it was very dark. The dashboard lights were reflected in her window, but otherwise there was nothing. Blair seemed very close, almost overwhelming, and she wished that she didn’t notice every time he moved his hand to the gear lever or glanced across to see if she was still awake.

Once they had turned off the Inverness road, they hardly saw another car, and to Amanda it seemed as if they were driving interminably into the darkness while the rain turned to sleet, zooming in at the windscreen like a meteor shower. In spite of herself, her head began to loll forward. She had no idea how much time had passed when the sound of the car splashing through a huge puddle along with the sound of Blair swearing under his breath jerked her into consciousness. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked blearily, struggling upright in her seat as the car began to splutter alarmingly.

‘Water in the petrol’ he said curtly. He changed down, but his attempts to rev the engine had little effect and not much further down the road the car coughed sadly to a halt.

Blair swore again and hauled on the handbrake. ‘That’s all I need,’ he muttered, and reached across Amanda without ceremony to rummage in the glove box.

Very conscious of his nearness, she shrank back in her seat so that she didn’t have to touch him more than necessary...not that he even seemed to notice that she was there! It was a relief when his fingers closed around a torch and he sat back, but the next minute he was opening his door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Out for a stroll.’

Amanda stared stupidly at him as the rain slashed against the windows, wondering if she had fallen asleep after all and this was just a bizarre dream. ‘A stroll? In this?’

Blair gave a short, exasperated sigh. ‘Of course not!’ he said irritably. ‘I’m going to clean the filter, what do you think? And, what’s more, you’re coming with me.’

‘Me?’ She came to abruptly. ‘But I don’t know anything about cars!’

‘You don’t need to be a mechanic to hold a torch.’

‘But...’ Amanda glanced helplessly from the rain to her city suit. ‘I’ll get soaked!’ she wailed, but if she had hoped to rouse Blair’s chivalrous instincts she was doomed to disappointment.

‘I dare say, but the sooner we get out there, the sooner we can both get dry,’ he said. He had half closed his door, but now he made as if to open it again. ‘Now, are you coming?’

Amanda was looking nervously out at the wild night ‘Are you sure this is wise?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Blair, exasperated.

‘I’ve seen horror films like this,’ she said. ‘You know the kind of thing... a couple break down in an isolated place on a night just like this, and as soon as they get out of the car you want to shout at them not to be so stupid, because you know that some monster is lurking in the darkness, and it’s going to creep up on them and grab the girl—no, the man,’ she corrected herself after a moment’s thought. ‘That way the girl has to cope by herself. Then you just hear the man screaming and lots of horrible crunching sounds, and then she starts screaming, and instead of being sensible and getting back inside the car and locking the doors she runs off into the darkness, and the monster stalks her and—’

‘Amanda?’

Carried away by her own story, Amanda had been unaware of Blair’s incredulous expression. Now she stopped in surprise as his deceptively gentle voice cut across her ramble. ‘Yes?’ 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 possibly happen to me between the engine and the steering wheel? And don’t start on that silly monster business!’ he added in an acerbic voice before she had a chance to answer.

‘Stranger things have happened,’ she muttered darkly as Blair moved past her in the dark to slam down the bonnet.

“The worst that’s going to happen to you is that you’re going to get even wetter if you stand out here any longer,’ he pointed out in a crushing voice. ‘So I suggest you stop wittering and get in the car.’

‘Can you turn on the lights again?’ she pleaded. It was so dark that she couldn’t even see Blair and she edged closer along the car towards the sound of his voice. ‘I can’t see a thing.’

‘Feel your way round the bonnet,’ Blair began, but, as if against his better judgement, he reached out into the blackness until his hand brushed against hers. Amanda clutched at it thankfully. ‘Here,’ he said gruffly, leading her round to the other side of the car and opening the passenger door. ‘You’d better get in.’

The opening of the door gave her enough light to climb in out of the storm, but Amanda was strangely reluctant to let go of his hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said humbly.

Moving confidently through the pitch-dark, Blair was banging his own door shut only moments later. He reached up to click on the overhead light and began stripping off his jacket. ‘Well, we seem to have survived the monsters against all the odds. Or are they circling the car even now, slavering in anticipation at the thought of us both trapped here?’

‘Very funny,’ said Amanda, unappreciative of his sarcasm, but she locked her door anyway. She watched him toss his sodden jacket over the boxes in the back and run a hand over his wet hair before wiping the worst of the rain from his face. In the dim light she could see a trickle still heading down towards his jaw and for one extraordinary moment even considered reaching across to stop it with her finger. Her hand tingled with the thought and she looked abruptly away. ‘What do we do now?’ she asked, clearing her throat.

‘Wait.’

No one could accuse Blair McAllister of garrulity, Amanda thought with an inward sigh. ‘Is that it?’ she said after a moment

‘Unless you can do mechanics by Braille, yes,’ he said tersely. ‘If you hadn’t dropped that torch, we could be on our way by now. What made you drop it, anyway?’ he went on, turning in his seat to look at her. ‘One minute you were standing there quietly, and the next you were jumping around life a scalded cat.’

‘I was cold,’ said Amanda, who had no intention of telling him why she had been so tense. ‘My hands were numb. It was like the North Pole out there.’ She shivered and wrapped her arms around her body. ‘It’s like the North Pole in here, come to that.’

‘It’s nothing like the North Pole,’ said Blair impatiently. Of course, he would have been there, wouldn’t he? He leant closer and touched the sodden material of her suit. ‘You’re soaking!’ His voice was suddenly sharp. ‘You’d better get that suit off.’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she muttered.

‘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.

‘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 but Amanda could feel that uncomfortably acute gaze resting on her. She just hoped he couldn’t see in the dark, or her expression would surely give her away! ‘We’ll see.’