Читать книгу Kissing Santa - Jessica Hart - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

AMANDA’S head was aching. Opening one eye very cautiously, she found herself looking at something dark and curved only inches away from her face. She stared at it for a long time before her pounding brain registered that she was looking at the bottom of a steering wheel.

It hurt too much to think about what it was doing there. Amanda closed her eye again, but the effort of recognising a steering wheel had set her mind working, albeit slowly, and as she lay and willed herself to sink back into comfortable oblivion memories of the night before came filtering back in a series of odd, unconnected pictures: huddling under the bonnet in the sluicing rain, spluttering as the whisky burned down her throat, sitting very still as Blair undid the buttons of her shirt and being passionately glad of the darkness.

Blair... Until then, Amanda had been remembering in the peculiarly detached way of the half-asleep, but his image dissolved the last wisps of dream and brought her awake with a jolt. At the same moment, she became aware that fingers were twisting strands of her hair absently together and her eyes snapped open with the sudden realisation that she was sprawled across the front of the car with her head in Blair McAllister’s lap. His other hand was resting lightly at the curve of her hip, and his thighs were broad and firm and relaxed beneath her cheek.

‘At last!’ Blair must have felt her involuntary stiffening. ‘I thought you were going to sleep all morning.’

‘I didn’t realise...’ Horribly embarrassed, Amanda struggled upright, wincing at the stiffness of her limbs. Someone—presumably Blair—had stuffed a couple of jumpers from her suitcase around the handbrake, but it hadn’t stopped it digging into her. ‘Y-you should have woken me,’ she stammered.

‘I didn’t have the heart,’ said Blair. ‘You were sleeping like a baby.’

She blinked at him, disconcerted to find him at once a stranger and oddly familiar. For the first time she registered that it was light. The darkness of the night before had blurred the strength of his features and now, in the brightness of morning, it was as if she had never seen his face before.

It was his eyes she noticed first of all. They were an opaque blue-grey, the colour of slate, and beneath dark, sarcasticlooking eyebrows they held an unnervingly acute expression that gave focus to his face. For Amanda, it was as if the morning light had thrown everything about him into sharp relief: the angle of his jaw, the thick, dark hair, the prickle of stubble on his unshaven skin and, most of all, the way his mouth was set in a line that was already uncannily unfamiliar.

Aware that she was staring, and afflicted by sudden shyness, Amanda looked away. ‘I don’t feel as if I slept a wink,’ she said uncomfortably.

‘You slept more than a wink,’ said Blair. ‘You drank half my whisky, keeled over into my lap in the middle of a sentence and proceeded to snore for the rest of the night.’

Amanda looked appalled. ‘I didn’t, did I?’ She did vaguely remember drinking whisky out of a bottle, but she had no recollection of falling asleep at all. She looked suspiciously at Blair. ‘Anyway, I don’t snore.’

‘It sounded remarkably like snoring to me.’ His voice was sardonic, not unamused. ‘I’ve been listening to you ever since the wind dropped, so I should know. Still, I suppose I should be glad that one of us at least had a comfortable night.’

‘If someone asked me to describe my first night in Scotland, comfortable wouldn’t be the first word that sprang to mind,’ said Amanda sourly, grimacing as she stretched her stiff limbs. ‘I feel terrible.’

‘I’m not surprised, judging by the amount of my whisky you sank last night. I thought you weren’t supposed to like the stuff?’

Amanda held her aching head. ‘I don’t’ With her other hand, she twisted round the rear-view mirror and peered blearily into it. Her hair had lost its customary bounce and shine in last night’s rain and, although now dry, it stood up at impossible angles around her face, one side of which was marked with narrow red lines where her cheek had been pressed into Blair’s cords. Mascara was smudged beneath her gritty eyes and she moaned as she rubbed it away with a knuckle. ‘Ugh!’ was all she felt capable of groaning, and, unable to bear the sight of herself any longer, she turned the mirror away.

‘I must say that you don’t look quite as smart as you did when you got off the train last night.’ Blair pretended to look Amanda over critically, but she could tell that he was enjoying himself. He didn’t actually smile, but amusement lurked around his mouth and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened. Involuntarily, she followed his gaze from the scarlet cashmere jumper, which she had managed to put on back to front, to the hideously clashing leggings and on down to the assortment of odd socks which she had pulled on last night in her haste to cover herself.

Some executive she looked now! Mortified, Amanda hurriedly pulled off her jumper and put it back on the right way round, making sure this time that both sides of her shirt collar lay neatly over the round neck. The small detail made her feel better and she patted the collar down, only to flush as she caught Blair’s mocking slate eyes.

‘What time is it?’ she asked crossly.

He glanced at his watch and told her.

Amanda shuddered. ‘I knew I wouldn’t like it,’ she grumbled, rubbing a hand round her aching neck.

‘Your previous charges must have been very well behaved if you’re not used to getting up at this sort of time,’ said Blair, callously indifferent to her suffering. He reached down to release the bonnet and opened his door. ‘Not that I’d call this particularly early. It would count as a lie-in on an expedition.’

‘Remind me never to join one of your expeditions,’ muttered Amanda, watching him morosely as he jumped out and went round to inspect the engine. Still grumbling to herself, she opened her own door and eased herself out to stand in the road in her mismatched socks and stretch painfully. Only then did she look round her and her jaw dropped.

They had spluttered to a halt on a long, straight stretch of road that swept down the hillside to the shores of a loch which was as smooth and still as dark glass below them. The fury of last night’s storm might never have been. Not a breath of wind stirred the surface of the water, and it reflected back the massive snow-capped peaks looming around it, sharply outlined against a clear, crisp sky. Amanda, whose image of Scotland until now had been of brown hills shrouded in grey mist, could only stare at the scene spread out before her like a vast postcard. The hills were a warm golden colour, separated from the blue of the sky by their crowns of white snow, and the crystalline light made her blink.

‘Oh,’ she said.

Blair glanced up from the engine. ‘It’s quite a view to wake up to, isn’t it?’

‘Ye-es.’ She looked slowly around her once more, her breath freezing in a white cloud. She didn’t think that she had ever seen anywhere as empty as this before. The thin ribbon of road stretching out into the distance was the only sign of civilisation; other than that, there were only hills and sky and water and cold, clear air. There was something overwhelming about the austere grandeur of the scene that made Amanda feel very small. The massive, uncompromising mountains reminded her of Blair, she decided, trying to shrug off the feeling. ‘It’s all a bit bleak, isn’t it?’

He looked disapproving at her lack of enthusiasm. ‘It’s magnificent country. You’re very lucky to see it like this.’

But Amanda was in no mood to admire the scenery. After the first shock of surprise, she had lapsed back into early-morning disgruntlement. ‘I feel a lot of things right now,’ she sighed, ‘but lucky is not one of them.’

She was dying to go to the loo, but trees or bushes seemed to be in short supply up here. For miles there seemed to be nothing but tussocky grass interspersed with clumps of heather, dead, battered bracken and the odd patch of unmelted snow. Peeling off her ridiculous socks, Amanda rummaged in her case for a pair of trainers. She was tempted to change all her clothes, but it didn’t seem worth it before she had a bath, and anyway, she was damned if she was going to undress in front of Blair McAllister in broad daylight. It had been awkward enough in the dark!

There was a granite outcrop in the heather further up the hill. Deciding that it offered the best privacy she was going to get, Amanda began to clamber up the steep bank that ran along the roadside.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ asked Blair, straightening from the engine.

She pointed at the outcrop. ‘Just up there.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘Why do you think?’ she said testily.

He sighed. ‘Why don’t you just go behind the car? I won’t look.’

‘Someone else might,’ she pointed out, grabbing onto a clump of heather so that she could haul herself up onto the top of the bank at last.

‘Who?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s not exactly a constant stream of traffic along this road.’

‘A car might come round the corner any minute.’

‘Amanda, the nearest corner is a good five miles away! You’d have plenty of time to gather yourself together if you’re that inhibited.’

‘I am not inhibited!’ she snapped, irritated by his attitude. ‘I simply prefer a little privacy, and if I want to hide behind a rock I will.’ Turning her back on him, she attempted to stalk off, but it was hard to stalk with dignity through knee-high tussocks of grass and heather, and she ended up ploughing inelegantly through it. It wasn’t long before she was regretting her determined stand. The outcrop which had looked so close from the road seemed to keep receding up the hill, and by the time she had struggled up to it she was exhausted.

To make matters worse, the granite turned out to be a sheer face set into the hillside, offering virtually no protection anyway, and she was still clearly visible from the road. Gasping for breath, Amanda could see Blair calmly tinkering with the engine, but even as she glowered resentfully down at him he glanced up the hill and saw her.

‘Are you planning to spend all day up there?’ he shouted, and tapped his watch significantly with his spanner.

Amanda didn’t deign to answer and wouldn’t have had the breath for it anyway. Instead she turned her back with something suspiciously like a flounce and tried to make herself as insignificant as possible against the granite—a hard job when you were wearing a scarlet jumper. She might as well have had a flashing neon sign over her head.

Getting down the hill was nearly as bad as getting up it. The heather caught at her leggings and the laces of her trainers, and when the slope flattened near the bank she trod in a bog, thereby ruining yet another pair of shoes and her temper.

‘Feeling better?’ Blair asked sarcastically as she scrambled clumsily down onto the road once more. He had been watching her progress as he leant against the car with folded arms.

‘No, I am not!’ stormed Amanda, wiping her soggy trainers savagely on some dead bracken and convinced in some obscure way that it was all Blair McAllister’s fault. ‘To be quite frank with you, I wish I’d never come to Scotland. The last few hours have been the worst of my life. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get pneumonia after last night, I’m so stiff I’ll probably never walk properly again, all I’ve had to eat is a few ginger-nuts and now I’ll have to go barefoot for the rest of the month,’ she finished childishly.

Blair tutted. ‘I’m not surprised Hugh dumped you if you were always this bad-tempered in the morning,’ he said.

‘Anyone would be bad-tempered if they’d spent the night I had! And, anyway, Hugh—’ Amanda stopped abruptly. ‘How do you know about Hugh?’ she demanded.

‘You told me about him at length last night, just before you passed out,’ said Blair with a sardonic look. ‘I heard all about how attractive he was and how he had taken up with some “drip”—your description, not mine—but really, you thought it was probably for the best because he never understood about your career and thought you should have wanted to settle down and have babies.’ Blair’s voice mimicked her so clearly that she squirmed mwardly.

‘I can’t think why I told you all that,’ she mumbled.

‘I assumed that you weren’t used to neat whisky,’ said Blair. ‘I certainly hope you don’t make a habit of confiding your life history to virtual strangers!’

Amanda stared at him, aghast at her own indiscretion. ‘Oh, dear, I must have been terribly boring,’ she said nervously. What if she had told him the truth about taking Sue’s place? He would have said something, though, wouldn’t he? she reassured herself. Blair McAllister wasn’t the kind of man who would calmly accept an impostor.

His next words seemed to confirm that however indiscreet she had been she hadn’t been that indiscreet. ‘No, I found it fascinating,’ he said, although not without some sarcasm. ‘I didn’t realise that anyone would think of nannying as a career incompatible with children. I would have thought that anyone who chose to spend their time looking after other people’s children would want to have their own eventually. Isn’t that what you want?’

Amanda thought of a recent weekend that she had spent with her sister, who had three children under five, and barely repressed a shudder. ‘No...I mean, not yet,’ she added, seeing Blair lift an eyebrow at her horrified expression.

‘Well, you’re still young,’ he said indifferently as he made his way round to his door. ‘And children are an enormous commitment.’

‘Exactly.’ Amanda climbed into her seat as well, relieved that he wasn’t going to enquire any further into her aversion to children. ‘Is that why you don’t have any? Because you travel so much?’

Blair turned the ignition key and coaxed the engine into life. ‘One of the reasons,’ he said uninformatively.

Amanda studied him from under her lashes and wondered what the other reasons were. Why wasn’t he married, anyway? Her ready imagination was quick to endow him with a doomed love affair in the past, but when her eye fell on the straight, stern line of his mouth she changed her mind. The Blair McAllisters of this world didn’t waste time on desperate romances. They chose wives who were calm and sensible and wouldn’t complain about being cold or wet or fed a constant diet of ginger-nuts, she decided glumly.

A strange feeling stirred inside Amanda and she looked away to stare unseeingly at the scenery. Blair wasn’t like the other men she had known. He certainly wasn’t like Hugh, who had been so handsome and charming and yet, deep down, so stuffy. It was true that Hugh had called the whole thing off in the end, but she really did think it had been for the best, no matter how pathetic Blair had made her drunken monologue sound. She wasn’t ready to settle down with anyone yet. She wanted to have a good time, not get bogged down in interminable discussions about commitment, which was all her friends ever seemed to do.