Kissing Santa. Jessica Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ