The Lost Wife

Frustrated by the unremitting sorrow that rose inside her whenever Jake or the accident were mentioned, let alone having him near, she stoically put aside any further thoughts on the matter and instead made her way up to the spare bedroom to put clean sheets on the bed for her ex-husband’s unexpected overnight stay.

On the way there she pushed open her daughter’s bedroom door and glanced in. The pretty pink walls were covered in posters, from the latest Barbie doll to instantly recognisable children’s programme characters. But amongst them were two large posters of the latest male teen movie idol, and Ailsa shook her head in wonder and near disbelief that her daughter was growing up so fast … too fast, in her book. Would it be easier if Saskia had both her parents taking care of her together instead of separately?

In the time-honoured habit of caring parents everywhere, she wondered yet again if she was a good enough mother—if she was perhaps failing her child in some fundamental unconscious way? Was she wrong in wanting a career of her own? To stand on her own feet at last and not feel as if she was depending on her ex-husband? At the thought of Jake she wondered if she hadn’t been utterly selfish in pushing him away emotionally and physically, and finally driving him into asking for a divorce. She should have talked to him more, but she hadn’t. Relations between them had deteriorated so badly that they’d barely been able to look at each other, she remembered sadly.

Hearing the front door open, then slam shut again, she quickly crossed the landing to the spare room. The pretty double bed with its old-fashioned iron bedstead was strewn with all manner of knitting and materials from her craft business, and she scooped them up and quickly heaped them on top of the neat little writing desk in the corner. She wouldn’t stop to sort them all out right now. Tomorrow she would venture out to the purpose-built heated office in the garden, where she created her designs and stored her materials, and she would store the colourful paraphernalia away properly. Right now she would concentrate on making the bed, so that Jake could bring up his overnight bag and unpack.

As she unfolded the pristine white sheets she’d retrieved from the airing cupboard Ailsa noticed that her hands were shaking. They might not be sharing a bed tonight, but it was a long time since she’d slept under the same roof as her ex-husband. Once upon a time they had been so very close—as if even an act of God couldn’t tear them asunder. She’d often fallen asleep at night after they’d made love enfolded in his arms and woken the next morning in just the same position … Her insides churned with grief and regret at what they had lost. The haunting memories that Jake’s appearance had brought to the surface again were so intense that it felt as if they might drown her.

‘It’s all right,’ she muttered to herself. ‘It’s only for one night. Tomorrow he’ll be gone again.’ But as she glanced out of the window at the cascade of white flakes still steadily falling her stomach clenched anxiously. She might well be wrong about that …

Jake had gone upstairs to take a shower and get a change of clothes. Ailsa took the opportunity to retreat to the kitchen to mull over what to cook for dinner. She’d planned on having a simple pasta dish with a home-made sauce for Saskia and herself that night, but she was concerned that it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy a healthy male specimen like Jake. He loved good food and the finer things in life, and was a surprisingly good cook himself. It was another reason why she was slightly nervous about cooking for him again. She was no domestic goddess, and during their marriage her husband had patiently tolerated her culinary attempts with great good humour—even if more often than not he had ended up suggesting they go out to eat at one of his favourite restaurants instead. Many times he’d suggested they hire a full-time chef or cook, but Ailsa had always insisted she loved to cook for her husband and daughter. At heart she was a traditionalist, and would have felt as if she’d somehow failed her family if she hadn’t prepared their meals.

Having grown up in a children’s home, it was inevitable that her greatest longing had always been to have a family of her own.

A heavy fall of snow rolled off the eaves outside the window and fell to the ground with a crash. Snapping out of her reverie, Ailsa reached for the kitchen telephone and listened intently for a dial-tone. Nothing … The lines were obviously still down. She was longing to hear Saskia’s sweet voice and find out for herself if her little girl was happy with her grandmother in Copenhagen. Knowing how warm and loving Tilda Larsen was, she didn’t doubt it, but she would have liked confirmation from Saskia herself.

Biting down on her lip, she reached for the apron behind the larder door and turned on the oven. She scrubbed and rinsed a couple of generous sized potatoes, pricked the skins with a fork and popped them in the oven on a baking tray. Then she retrieved some minced beef from the fridge, a couple of onions and some garlic, and arranged a chopping board on the counter. She would add the prepared pasta sauce to the ingredients in the frying pan, along with some kidney beans and rustle up a quick chili con carne, she decided. At least it was a recipe she knew well, and therefore there was less chance of her having a disaster.

‘You look busy.’

The huskily male voice behind her almost made her jump out of her skin. Turning, Ailsa glanced into a sea of glittering iced blue, and her whole body suddenly felt dangerously weak. ‘I’m—I’m just preparing our dinner.’

‘Don’t go to any trouble on my account.’

‘It’s no trouble. We’ve both got to eat, right?’

His gaze scanning the ingredients on the marble-topped counter, Jake shrugged. ‘Need any help?’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Turning back to the job in hand, she picked up the waiting sharp knife to dice the onions. But it was hard to keep her hand perfectly steady when the image of Jake in a fitted wine-coloured sweater and tailored black trousers, his hair damply golden from his shower, kept impinging on her ability to think straight. ‘I know when we were together my cooking wasn’t great, but I’ve gotten better at it over the years and you might even be pleasantly surprised.’

The man standing behind her didn’t immediately reply. When Ailsa heard him exhale a heavy sigh, she tensed anxiously.

‘Why did you think your cooking wasn’t great?’

‘Well … you always seemed to end up suggesting we go to a restaurant whenever I made anything. Perhaps that was a clue?’

Saying nothing, Jake moved up beside her and gently removed the ivory-handled knife from her hand. Laying it down on the chopping board, he turned her round to face him. ‘I don’t remember ever suggesting we go to a restaurant when you’d already spent hours in the kitchen cooking a meal. And when I suggested we eat out it was only ever to give you a break, so that you wouldn’t stress over preparing something. You made some great food when we were together, Ailsa. You must have, because I’m still here … right?’

What special ingredient did he possess that made that crooked smile of his so heartbreaking? His eyes so penetratingly, flawlessly blue? Her breath hitched and her heart started to race …

CHAPTER TWO

IT PAINED Jake that Ailsa had harboured the belief all these years that he’d thought her cooking unpalatable. Yes, he had on occasion smiled at her earnest efforts when they hadn’t quite worked out, but he hoped he’d conveyed that he was appreciative too. He’d eat burnt offerings every day if he could turn back the clock to the time when they were together, before the shattering event that had torn them apart.

He breathed out slowly. As he examined her thoughtful amber gaze a ripple of undeniable electricity hummed between them.

‘Yes, you’re still here,’ she quietly agreed with a reticent smile.

‘Battle-scarred, but still alive and kicking,’ he added, joking.

Ailsa’s smile fled, as did the beginning-to-melt look in her eyes. ‘Don’t joke about that,’ she scolded. Her tone was softer as she looped some silky strands of hair behind her ear. ‘Does it still bother you? The scar, I mean?’

His heart thudding—as it always did whenever his scar came under scrutiny—Jake mentally strengthened his defences, hammering in iron nails to hold them fast. ‘Do you mean am I worried that it’s spoiled my good looks?’ he mocked. Spinning away from her, he jammed his hands into his pockets, but quickly turned back again before she had a chance to comment. ‘It’s been over four years since I acquired it. I’ve quite got used to it. I think it gives me a certain piratical appeal … don’t you? At least, that’s what women tell me’

‘Women?’

‘We’ve been divorced four years, Ailsa. Did you imagine I would stay celibate?’

‘Don’t!’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Be cruel. I don’t deserve that. When I asked you if your scar bothered you, I meant does it still give you pain?’

‘The only pain I get from it is when I remember what caused it … and what we lost that day.’

She fell silent. But not before Jake glimpsed the anguish in her golden eyes.

‘Well,’ she said after a while, ‘I’d better get on with the cooking or we won’t have a meal tonight at all.’ Clearly discomfited by what he’d confessed, Ailsa returned to the counter to continue dicing onions. ‘Why don’t you go and make yourself comfortable in the living room and just relax?’

‘Maybe I’ll do just that,’ he murmured, glad of the opportunity to regroup his feelings and not blurt out anything else that might hurt her. Gratefully, he exited the room.

The charming dining room had terracotta walls, exposed beams on the ceiling, and a rustic oak floor. In the centre of the sturdy table—also oak—several different-sized white and scarlet candles burned, lending a warm and inviting glow to the room now that the day had turned seasonally dark. The window blinds were not yet pulled down, and outside snowflakes continued to float past the window in a never-ending stream. In the past, when they’d been married and in love, Jake might have considered the atmosphere intimate. But something told him it wasn’t his ex-wife’s intention to create such a potentially awkward impression. She ‘d always lit candles at dinner, whatever the season. She simply loved beauty in all its forms.

She’d once told him that the children’s home she’d grown up in had been bare of beauty of any kind and her soul had longed for it. Quickly he jettisoned the poignant memory, but not before berating himself for not encouraging her to talk more about her childhood experiences when they’d been married.

Now, at her invitation, he drew out a carved wooden chair, then tried to relax as she briefly disappeared to get their food. When she returned he watched interestedly as she carefully placed the aromatic meal she’d prepared in front of him, noting how appealing she’d made it look on the plate. He hadn’t realised how hungry he was until he’d scented the chilli, and he tucked into it with relish when Ailsa told him to, ‘Go ahead and eat … don’t wait for me.’

‘What do you think?’

The slight suggestion of anxiety in her tone made his gut clench. Touching his napkin to his lips, Jake grinned in a bid to help dispel it. Sitting opposite him, her long hair turning almost copper in the light of the gently flickering candle flames, she was quite utterly bewitching. A little buzz of sensual heat vibrated through him. ‘It’s delicious. I can’t begin to tell you how welcome it is after a long day’s travelling,’ he answered huskily.

‘That’s all right, then. Would you like some juice or some water?’ She was already reaching her hand towards the two jugs positioned on the raffia place-mat between them.

Jake nodded. ‘Water is fine … thanks.’

They seemed to have an unspoken agreement not to talk during the meal. But then, just as he finished every last scrap of the chilli she had prepared, Ailsa took a deep breath and brought an end to the silence.

‘Was it snowing in Copenhagen when you left?’ she asked conversationally.

‘We’ve had a few heavy snow showers over the past couple of days, but nothing like you’ve got here.’

‘Saskia must be pleased, then. She loves the snow. She’s been praying for a white Christmas.’

Leaning back in his chair, Jake met her gaze warily. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t bring her home today.’

Ailsa didn’t reply straight away and reassure him that she was okay with it. Behind her soft amber glance he sensed deep disappointment, and perhaps some residue of anger too. He blew out a breath to release the tension that had started to gather force in the pit of his stomach.

‘I know you don’t want to hear it, but I had so many plans for Christmas. I even told my customers to get their orders in early because I was taking an extra week off before Christmas Day to spend some time with my daughter. I’m really sorry that your mother lost your father, Jake, but she’s not the only one grieving.’ She was fighting hard to contain her emotion, and her beautiful eyes misted with tears.

‘Grieving?’ he echoed, not understanding.

‘Have you forgotten what day it is today?’ Her steady gaze unflinching now, she curled her fingers into the pristine white napkin now lying crumpled by her plate. ‘It’s the anniversary of our baby’s death … the day of the accident. That’s why I needed Saskia home today. If she was here I’d be focusing all my attention on her and wouldn’t let myself dwell on it so much.’

For the second time since setting eyes on Ailsa after so long Jake felt winded. Then a plethora of raw emotion gripped him mercilessly, almost making him want to crawl out of his own skin. An intense feeling of claustrophobia descended—just as if someone had shoved him inside a dark, windowless cell and then thrown away the key …

‘I’ve never noted the date,’ he admitted, his dry throat suddenly burning. ‘Probably because I don’t need some damned anniversary to remind me of what we lost that day!’ Pushing to his feet, he crossed to the window to stare blindly out at the curtain of white still drifting relentlessly down from the heavens. Vaguely he registered the scrape of Ailsa’s chair being pushed back behind him.

‘We haven’t talked about what happened in years … not since the divorce,’ she said quietly.

‘And you think now’s the right time?’ He spun round again, feeling like a pressure cooker about to blow. Ailsa was standing in front of him with her arms folded, her expression resolute. Yet he easily noted the giveaway tremor in her lower lip that revealed she was nervous too.

‘I’m not saying I want to dwell on what happened just because it’s the anniversary of Thomas’s death, but I—’

‘Don’t call him that … Our son wasn’t even born when he died!’

At the reminder that they’d given their baby a name, Jake felt his knees almost buckle. If he didn’t think of him as having a name then he couldn’t have been real, right? He couldn’t have had an identity other than that of an unborn foetus in the womb. It was the only way he’d been able to cope with the tragedy all these years.

The delicate oval face before him, with its perfectly neat dark brows, looked faintly horrified. ‘But we did give him a name, Jake … a name and a gravestone, remember? Before the snow got really bad yesterday I took a bouquet of lilac asters and white anemones to the graveyard where he’s buried. I do it every year at this time.’

The graveyard that housed the tiny remains of his son was situated in the grounds of a picturesque Norman church tucked away behind a narrow street not far from the Westminster offices of Larsen and Son. But Jake hadn’t visited it since the day of the funeral. That had been a bitter winter’s day, when icy winds had cleaved into his wounded face like hot knives, and it was a day that he wished he could blot from his memory for ever.

Pressing his fingers into his temples, he drove them irritably back into his hair. ‘And that helps, does it?’

‘Yes, it does, as a matter of fact. I know I was only seven months pregnant when he died, but he deserves to be remembered, don’t you think? Why do you seem so angry that I’ve brought the subject up? Did you really expect to stay here the night and not have me talk about it?’

Feeling utterly drained all of a sudden, as well as a million miles away from any remedy that could soothe the pain and distress he was experiencing at the memory of the longed-for son they’d lost so cruelly, Jake moved across to the dining room door that stood ajar.

‘I’m sorry … but I really don’t think there’s any point in discussing it. What can it possibly achieve? You have to let it go, Ailsa. The past is finished—over. We’re divorced, remember? We’ve made new lives for ourselves. Who would have thought the shy young girl I married would end up running her own business? That’s quite an achievement after all that’s happened. Not everything ended in disaster between us. We’ve still got our beautiful daughter to be thankful for. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

‘Yes, we have Saskia—and I count my blessings every day that we have. And, yes, I run my own business and I’m proud of it. But do you really believe that if we don’t discuss it the shadow of that dreadful time we endured will magically go away? If it was so easy to just let it go don’t you think I would have done it by now? I thought that the divorce would help bring some closure after our baby’s death—help us both put it behind us and eventually heal. But somehow it doesn’t feel like it has. How can it when I’ve lost half of my family and can’t even hope for more children in the future? The accident robbed me of the chance. Perhaps because we’re not together any more it helps you to pretend that it never happened at all, Jake? “Out of sight, out of mind”, as they say?’

Ailsa was so near the truth that Jake stared at her. He hadn’t really wanted a divorce at all, but he had finally instigated it when the agony and the blame he’d imagined he saw in his wife’s eyes every day began to seriously disturb him. He just hadn’t been able to deal with it.

‘How can I pretend it never happened, hmm? I only have to look in the mirror every time I go to the bathroom and see this damned scar on my face to know that it did! Anyway …’

He swallowed down a gulp of air and his thundering heartbeat gradually slowed. It gave him a chance to think what to do next … to try to blot out the torturous memory of Ailsa being so badly injured in the accident that she’d slipped into unconsciousness long before the surgeons had performed a ceasarean to try and save the baby. The head surgeon had told Jake afterwards that her womb had been irreparably damaged and their infant hadn’t survived. It was unlikely she’d ever be able to bear a child again.

‘I’ve brought some work with me that I need to take a look at before I turn in. My father’s death has meant that I’ve become CEO, and inevitably there’s a raft of problems to sort out. Thanks for dinner and the bed for the night. The food was great. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Even though his excuse was perfectly legitimate, there was no escaping the fact that it made him feel like a despicable coward.

‘If you need an extra blanket, you’ll find a pile of them in the oak chest at the end of the bed.’

Ailsa’s tone made her sound as if she was determined to rise above her disappointment at his reluctance to yet again deal with the past. He silently admired this new strength she’d acquired, and was moved to hear the compassion in her voice … compassion that he probably didn’t deserve.

‘Sleep well,’ she added with a little half-smile. ‘Don’t sit up too late working, will you? You’ve had a long day’s travelling and you must be tired.’

Obviously not expecting an answer to her remarks, she gracefully moved back to the table, then methodically started to clear away the detritus of their meal. Knowing already that his unexpected appearance had disturbed and upset her, Jake fleetingly reflected again that he should never have come here. Then he would have avoided this agonising scene. His throat locked tight with the guilt and regret that made him feel, and he swept from the room. In the prettily furnished bedroom he’d been allocated, he glanced despairingly over at the neat stack of paperwork he’d left on the hand-stitched patchwork quilt that covered the bed and angrily thumped his chest with a heartfelt groan …

Knitting at the fireside, as was her usual habit before retiring to bed—she was always working on something beautiful and handmade for a customer—Ailsa took comfort from the rhythmic click of her needles along with the crackle of fresh ash logs she’d added to the wood-burner. After that altercation with Jake earlier she was feeling distinctly raw inside—as though her very organs had been scraped with a blade. Already she’d resigned herself to another sleepless night. Sometimes she didn’t vacate the high-backed Victorian armchair until the early hours of the morning. What was the point when all she did most nights if she went to bed early was toss and turn? Sleep was still the most elusive of visitors. It wasn’t usually until around five a.m. that she’d fall into an exhausted slumber, then a couple of hours later she’d wake up again feeling drugged.

She often wondered how on earth she survived on such a relentlessly punishing lack of sleep and was able to take care of Saskia and work too. The human capacity to endure never ceased to amaze her.

But she was even more unsettled tonight by the fact that Jake was occupying the spare room upstairs. Seeing him again had been wonderful and dreadful all at the same time. But the sight of him had always made her react strongly. The deeply grooved scar on one side of his chiselled visage made him no less charismatic or handsome, she reflected. She was grief-stricken at the idea he believed that it did. And. yes … she privately admitted it did make him look rather piratical—although she hadn’t wanted to hear that other women thought so too. It nearly killed her that he seemed to have forgotten the passionate love they’d shared and moved on. There was no such ‘normal’ pattern of existence for her. How could she even look at another man with the prospect of a relationship at the back of her mind after someone like Jake Larsen?

She’d been a trainee receptionist in the Larsen offices when they’d first met. Only nineteen, yet brimming with determination to better herself after her difficult start in life, she’d been so grateful for the chance of such a ‘glamorous’ job when she’d barely had any qualifications under her belt. But she’d been studying hard at her local adult education facility to remedy that. When Jake had walked through the revolving glass doors one day, wearing a single-breasted black cashmere coat over his suit, his lightly tanned skin and blond hair making him look like some kind of mythical hero from one of those magical folk tales that had at their roots the trials and travails of life and the story of how the handsome hero and beautiful heroine overcame them together, Ailsa almost forgot to breathe.

As he’d walked up to her and her colleague, her much more confident fellow employee had whispered under her breath, ‘It’s the boss’s son … Jake Larsen. He’s come over from Copenhagen.’ But even before her colleague had told Ailsa his identity her heart had already turned over inside her chest at the arresting sight of all that sculpted Viking beauty and the spine-tingling charisma that Jake exuded. She’d never been so fascinated by a man before. And especially not a man who was clearly light years out of her league, who wore the mantle of authority and power as though it was a natural component of his DNA. Yet he’d warmly introduced himself to her, the most junior and in-experienced of his staff, as though she were no less important than one of the firm’s directors, she recalled. When he had followed up his welcome to her with a near-incandescent smile—a smile that had wiped every thought clean from her head—she’d found herself well and truly under his spell …