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CHRISTMAS WIFE WANTED

Jackie Ashenden

Chapter One

LIBERTY LOCKHEART GENERALLY tried to find a silver lining in every difficult situation, but it was hard finding a silver lining in slogging through dense Norwegian snow. Especially after her car had died, and it was looking like a storm was coming.

And most especially when the whole reason she was in Norway was in search of a ghost.

The information she’d managed to get hold of had led here, up a remote road, in a remote fjord, to find an even more remote castle. Or house. Or lodge, or wherever it was that the man she was searching for lived.

She’d been making good time, too, until her car had slipped off the road due to black ice and then had managed to get itself firmly stuck in a ditch. Not an ideal situation by any stretch, and deep down Libby knew that unless she found shelter soon, she might potentially freeze to death on the side of the road. It was already heading towards late afternoon, and soon it would be getting on for evening, and she didn’t want to think about still being outside then. So, she didn’t think about it. She was a very determined optimist and was certain that eventually she’d find the man she was looking for.

Kaius Frost. Legendary financial analyst. CEO of Frost Finance, a huge, multinational financial services company. Billionaire.

And once, her childhood friend.

She’d been eight and he’d been twelve, and he’d looked after her at The Worthington Home, the group home they’d been in together as orphans. Then he’d been adopted and had been taken away, and she hadn’t seen him since. Well, not counting the news stories she’d followed, watching his meteoric rise to success.

It had always made her glad for him, as she was whenever any of the children from Worthington did well in their lives. She herself had never been adopted, so she’d lived at the home since the day she’d arrived at six years old, when her last foster situation hadn’t worked out. She’d remained there ever since and even after aging out of the system, she’d stayed. She’d always wanted to make the lives of orphaned or neglected children better, and now she was the manager of the home herself, she was in charge of doing so.

It was a task she relished and enjoyed, but after funding for Worthington had been cut, things had become harder. Prices had gone up, and when people were having difficulty making ends meet, donations fell off. There just wasn’t enough money to go around and naturally the people that ended up suffering the most were the people society often forgot about. The poor, the disenfranchised, and of course, children.

It was the children who were the reason she was out here, forging through knee-deep snow, just a week before Christmas. The home needed a cash injection and soon, otherwise it would be closed down and her charges dispersed through a system that didn’t give a shit about them. Libby would die before she let that happen.

Or, at least, she’d let herself become very, very uncomfortable, and right now, she was indeed very, very uncomfortable. It was freezing and the snow jacket she’d bought from a charity shop before she left the UK was no match for the depths of a Norwegian winter. Her shoes were soaked and so was the scarf that Jenny—one of the teenagers at the home—had knitted for her. She’d pulled down the matching hat as far as it would go, but sadly that wasn’t much better, either.

The wind was picking up and it cut through her coat like a sword through silk, and now it was getting dark.

Maybe it would, actually, come to that, to dying for the sake of the children. Maybe they’d find her body in the snow the next day, frozen solid. Then again, given the remoteness of the area, perhaps they wouldn’t find her until next spring.

She should have been a lot more prepared, probably, but the weather report hadn’t said anything about the snowstorm that was just now blowing over, and she hadn’t expected her phone to die, either. She shouldn’t have used the map app so continuously—that always drained the battery far more quickly than she was expecting.

Well, none of that could be helped now. If she didn’t want to become another statistic, she was just going to have to hope she wasn’t far from Kaius’s house, and that she’d get there soon.

Her foot slipped yet again, and she went down on her knees, the snow soaking the denim of her already soaking jeans. Muttering a curse, Libby hauled herself up yet again and kept on going.

Perhaps when she finally got to his house, she’d look so pathetic he’d agree immediately to give her the money she needed for the home’s operation next year. Perhaps she wouldn’t even need to make a case. He’d take one look at her general patheticness and he’d agree to anything.

It wasn’t the most cheerful of thoughts, but that’s all she had going for her at this point. None of her other sources of funding had come through, and Kaius Frost was her last hope. One last desperate leap of faith to save the home.

It all would have been so much easier if she’d been able to get in touch with him via phone, but there had been so many layers of security to get through that it was virtually impossible. She’d tried to visit the Frost Finance office in London, but that had been just as impossible to penetrate as the phone had been.

Not that she was surprised. He was the CEO of a huge company, and she was the equivalent of a random stranger coming in and expecting to meet him immediately.

She should have been patient, she supposed. She’d told the various secretaries and receptionists that she’d spoken to that she was a childhood friend of his, yet that hadn’t worked, and after calling continuously hadn’t worked, either, she’d turned to more desperate options. Such as getting one of the teenagers at the home to use their tech skills to find out Kaius Frost’s home address. Even she hadn’t expected that to work, yet it had, and now, here she was, in Norway and aiming to knock on his door and ask him for a donation personally. It was a clear invasion of privacy, she knew that, but the kids mattered more than the hurt feelings of one billionaire, even if he had once been her friend.

Anyway, she just hoped he was at home, which he might not be. He was a very busy man by all accounts. Still, she had it on good authority that he liked to spend Christmas in Norway, so the chance of him being here was good.

Snow began to slide icily down Libby’s spine, so she decided she wasn’t going to think about that. She had to look on the bright side, keep herself hopeful, and with any luck he would be there, not only that, he’d remember her and the home, and would want to donate some minuscule portion of his vast fortune in order to keep that home running.

Pausing a moment to wipe the snow from her eyes, she squinted into the gloom ahead of her. She was currently heading up a ridge covered in pine trees, but the road she’d been following had now disappeared under a layer of fresh snow.

Great.

Her heart sank, and for a minute she debated the wisdom of continuing on. Still, she didn’t have a lot of choice, considering her car was lying in the ditch some way back down the ridge. She could go back and sit in it until it got light again, but then she might freeze to death inside it.

No, she had to keep going. Not only did her life depend on it, so did the lives of the children under her care, and anyway, surely it couldn’t be that far now. The map app had said his house was on the side of the fjord, not the top of the mountain, and before her car had slid off the road, she’d only been ten minutes away. So if she kept heading in this direction, hopefully she’d get there eventually.