She thought her voice sounded a little odd, but Blair didn’t seem to notice. ‘Maggie—my housekeeper—said that she would spend the mght since we were going to be so late back. She usually goes home after she’s prepared the evening meal. Which reminds me,’ he went on tersely, ‘you’re going to have to help out with the cooking and cleaning. Maggie sprained her wrist very badly yesterday and she won’t be able to do much for a while.’
‘You want me to cook?’
‘I cleared it with the agency this morning,’ he said, oblivious to Amanda’s appalled expression. ‘Naturally your salary will reflect the extra work, but the agency said that you wouldn’t mind. They told me that you were a good cook.’
Sue was. Sue was calm and patient and didn’t work herself into a frenzy when all her pots started to boil at once. Amanda loathed cooking and blessed daily the invention of the microwave. ‘I’m not that good,’ she said nervously, wondering for one wild moment if she could sprain her wrist too.
‘It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Good, plain food is all those children need.’
Amanda’s heart sank even further. If there was one thing she hated more than cooking, it was good, plain food. In cuisine, as in life, she liked things as fancy as possible. Lapsing back into glum silence, she contemplated the rain which was now slashing against the car while the wind whooped and swirled judderingly around them. It looked as if it was going to be a very dull Christmas.
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHY do you call yourself Amanda instead of Susan?’ asked Blair suddenly out of the darkness.
‘Amanda’s my middle name,’ said Amanda, who had anticipated that question.
‘What’s wrong with Susan? It’s not as if it’s an embarrassing name.’
Of course, she should have just said that she preferred Amanda and left it at that, but Amanda had always had a taste for the dramatic and had never been able to resist the temptation to embellish a story. Her elaborate excuses for being late had been famous at school. ‘All the girls in my family are called Susan,’ she improvised. ‘We use our middle names so that we don’t get confused.’
‘You’re all called Susan?’ She could feel the disbelief in the glance he shot her. ‘What on earth for?’
‘After my great-great-grandmother,’ said Amanda fluently, grateful as always for her ability to tell the most enormous fibs with a straight face. ‘She was a missionary.’ In the darkness it was impossible to read Blair’s expression, but she could sense his scepticism and it put her on her mettle. ‘In the South Pacific,’ she added as a bit of corroborative detail.
It was a mistake. ‘Oh?’ said Blair. ‘Where in the South Pacific?’
She had forgotten that he probably knew the South Pacific as well as she knew the Number 9 bus route. Feverishly, Amanda tried to think of the name of an island but, as so often when forced to call upon memory rather than imagination, her mind remained blank. ‘She moved around a lot,’ she saidvaguely instead, but as this sounded rather dull she was unable to resist adding a touch of drama to the story. ‘Family legend has it that she was eaten by cannibals,’ she added, lowering her voice to just the right touch of reverence. ‘One day she got into her canoe and paddled off to a new island, and she was never seen again.’
‘Really?’ Blair’s voice dripped disbelief and Amanda sighed inwardly. Perhaps it hadn’t been a very convincing story.
Oh, well, she had enjoyed it, anyway. As she had talked, the mythical Susan had become almost real to her, but it was clear that Blair lacked the fertile imagination that had been getting her into trouble since she’d been a child Life would be much simpler if she’d only learn to keep it under control, she acknowledged, but not nearly so much fun.
Outside, the storm was growing wilder, driving rain ferociously into the windscreen. Blair’s body was utterly relaxed, but his grip on the steering wheel was sure as he held the car steady against the gusting wind. Amanda wished that she could relax enough to fall asleep, but there was something unsettling about Blair’s massive, silent presence, like a barrier between her and the storm.
He had ignored her after the story about her supposed ancestor and Amanda, normally the most confidently chatty of people, had found herself unable to think of anything to say to break the silence. She was too aware of the cramped confines of the car. Outside it was very dark. The dashboard lights were reflected in her window, but otherwise there was nothing. Blair seemed very close, almost overwhelming, and she wished that she didn’t notice every time he moved his hand to the gear lever or glanced across to see if she was still awake.
Once they had turned off the Inverness road, they hardly saw another car, and to Amanda it seemed as if they were driving interminably into the darkness while the rain turned to sleet, zooming in at the windscreen like a meteor shower. In spite of herself, her head began to loll forward. She had no idea how much time had passed when the sound of the car splashing through a huge puddle along with the sound of Blair swearing under his breath jerked her into consciousness. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked blearily, struggling upright in her seat as the car began to splutter alarmingly.
‘Water 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