The Lost Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

the business is doing well … better than ever, in fact.
    She bit her lip, trying hard not to cry. Sniffing determinedly, she wiped her eyes and lifted her gaze to the tree again. Her daughter might not be around to share in the joy that decorating a Christmas tree could bring but it wouldn’t stop Ailsa from taking on the task herself. After all, it was something she excelled at. She ran a very successful business designing and making beautiful things—everything from tree decorations to hand-knitted sweaters and patchwork quilts. Plus, she and Saskia had been collecting and making decorative odds and ends the whole year for this season.
    Feeling her spirits lifting a little, she put her knitting away and instead of dozing in the armchair, as she normally did, for the first time in months she went upstairs to bed …
    His hand fumbling for the clock beside the bed, Jake groaned when his sleep-fogged brain registered the time. Realising that he must have slept the sleep of the dead, hetried to fathom why. Like Ailsa, he had become a veritable insomniac over the years following the accident. Sitting up and arranging a plump pillow against the iron-bedstead to support his back, he was just in time to hear the radiator in the room click and hum into life. Breathing out deliberately heavily, he wasn’t surprised to see the plume of steam that hit the icy air.
    Was the house usually this perishingly cold in the morning?
He couldn’t help feeling a spurt of annoyance shoot through him at the thought that Ailsa could have chosen to live in much more luxurious surroundings, with under-floor heating and every available comfort. Instead she had stubbornly opted for this too isolated cottage. Charming as it was, it wasn’t the home he wanted his daughter to grow up in …
    Rubbing his hands briskly together to warm them, he diverted this disturbing line of thought by wondering how soon he could get a flight back to Copenhagen today. Mulling over the possibilities—or
not
as the case might be—he shoved aside the patchwork quilt that covered the silk-edged woollen blankets and strode over to the window. Lifting a corner of the heavily lined floral curtain, Jake stared out at the incredible scene that confronted him with a mixture of frustration, disappointment and sheer bewildering astonishment.
    As far as the eye could see and beyond everything was deeply blanketed in brilliant diamond-white. And fierce gusts of wind were making the still falling snow swirl madly like dervishes. Unless he could sprout wings and fly there’d be no getting out of here today. In any case, all the planes at the airport would surely be grounded in such Siberian weather.
    ‘Damn!’
    He stood there in black silk pyjama bottoms, hishard-muscled chest bare, and willed himself to come up with a plan. But even as he seriously considered phoning his helicopter pilot back in Copenhagen he remembered the lack of service yesterday for both landlines and mobiles in the area. The current extreme weather conditions didn’t bode well for the service returning any time soon. The helicopter option was clearly off the agenda. As he bit back his increasing frustration, a tentative knock at the door made Jake’s heart race.
    ‘Jake, are you up and about yet? I was wondering if you’d like a cup of tea?’
    Instead of answering, he crossed to the door and pulled it wide. Her dark hair flowing down over her shoulders, slightly mussed as if she’d had a restless night, Ailsa stood in front of him like some wide-eyed ingénue in a kimonostyle red silk dressing gown. She barely looked out of her teens, let alone the mother of a nine-year-old. Disconcertingly, that old sense of fierce protectiveness that he’d always felt around her came flooding back.
    ‘Never mind me. You look like you could do with a hot drink to warm
you
up,’ he told her gruffly. ‘Why doesn’t your heating come on earlier? Have you seen the weather outside? It’s freezing in