Free Dear Emily by Fern Michaels Page A

shake, was unable to stop, and there was no quilt, no afghan to cover herself with. She didn’t even know where the thermostat was. She wanted to feel anger, to go upstairs and demand Ian tell her exactly what was going on in their lives.
    Well, she was going to find out and she was going to find out right now. Her trembling ceased and was replaced with ramrod stiffness as she mounted the steps to the second floor. She thrust open the door and peered into the darkness. The bed had been slept in, but was empty now. Ian must have gotten called out to one of the clinics during the night. She turned on the light, gathering one of Ian’s pillows to her chest. It smelled faintly of his after-shave, a potent concoction from a grateful patient. Tears dripped on the pillow. She brushed them away. Crying never helped. Crying gave her headaches. “Damn you, Ian.” She wanted a friend then more than she’d ever wanted anything. Someone to call up and talk to. Where was her old friend Aggie? For years they’d sent Christmas cards and then one year there was no card and she didn’t know where to send hers to so she’d scratched Aggie’s name off her list. Well, she was going to have a lot of spare time now. Maybe she could track Aggie down.
    Ian had his own bathroom. She looked around carefully. If she remembered correctly, this was the largest of five bedrooms—the master bedroom. The yellow room, hers, wasn’t quite as large. Ian had huge double closets. The yellow room had an oversize closet with a mirror on the door. And why the hell not, Ian needed more room than three women with all his shirts and suits. Her own wardrobe was meager compared to his.
    Who was going to clean this monstrous house? When was a housekeeper going to materialize? If that didn’t happen, she and she alone was going to have to do it. It would take her all day to dust and polish, to keep things the way Ian liked them. She’d need two vacuum cleaners, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. A set of cleaning supplies would have to go into the upstairs linen closet. Or would Ian expect her to lug things up and then down?
    From long habit, Emily made the bed, but she did it with anger in her eyes and murder in her heart. The linen closet in the hall was full of towels and sheets. There was no vacuum cleaner, no cleaning supplies.
    Emily opened the door to the yellow room. It was pretty enough in a frilly kind of way. She almost choked when she opened the closet door to see her clothes hanging neatly. She yanked at the dresser drawers to see her underwear, her stockings, her nightgowns neatly folded. She pawed through them. How dare Ian do this to her! Her personal things were no one else’s business. She did cry then when she saw her panties, the ones where the elastic was coming away from the material, all neatly folded on the bottom of the pile. Some stranger Ian hired had seen and touched her underwear. She felt ashamed, embarrassed that she didn’t have sexy, beribboned undies, the kind you bought from Victoria’s Secret. She didn’t have time to shop for such things, and goddamn it, she liked cotton underwear. Size eight. She shuddered as she slammed the drawers shut.
    The yellow room had its own bathroom. It wasn’t as large as Ian’s and didn’t have a bidet and only one vanity. She fingered the apple-green towels that were larger than beach towels and twice as thick. They were called bath sheets in the Sears Roebuck catalog.
    There was a hollow feeling in her stomach when Emily made her way downstairs to the kitchen. She passed the thermostat on the way and turned it up to 80.
    It was a beautiful, modern kitchen complete with dishwasher, trash compactor, and garbage disposal. There was a center island with cabinets underneath, lots and lots of gorgeous oak cabinets, all of them full of new dishes and copper-bottomed pots and pans. A string of garlic hung from one of the beams, which had a little note attached to the bottom that said,