Jessica Hart - Kissing Santa

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.