Kissing Santa. Jessica Hart

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.