Kissing Santa. Jessica Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ