The Lost Wife. Maggie Cox

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, he tried 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, his hard-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 here.’

      ‘The boiler is on a timer. And, yes, I have seen the weather. I don’t think the snow has let up all night. But it’s not surprising you’re cold, standing there with barely a stitch on!’

      Jake couldn’t prevent the grin that hijacked his lips. ‘You know I don’t sleep with much on. Or had you forgotten that?’

      ‘You didn’t say whether you wanted a cup of tea or not,’ she persisted doggedly, clutching the sides of the silk dressing gown more closely together and concealing her face by letting her hair fall across it.

      But not before Jake saw that she was blushing. He experienced a very male sense of satisfaction at that. It was good to know that he could still get a reaction from her, despite all the muddied water flowing under the bridge between them …

      ‘I definitely wouldn’t say no to a hot drink of some kind. But let me take a shower first and dress before I join you downstairs.’

      ‘Okay.’ The slim shoulders lifted, then fell again before she turned away. As Jake closed the door on Ailsa’s retreating back, she swung round again. ‘Shall I cook breakfast for you as well?’

      He hesitated. Purely because he’d just noticed the smudged violet shadows beneath her eyes that clarified his belief that she probably hadn’t slept. ‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble,’ he said huskily.

      A fleeting smile curved the pretty lips he’d so loved kissing—still dreamed of kissing from time to time, whenever he tortured himself with thinking back to what they’d had.

      ‘It’s no trouble.’ She continued on her way down the landing and the gentle womanly sway of her hips made Jake’s heart ache.