Read Online WINTER WONDERLAND by Belinda Jones - Free Book Online

ride, but I clock it at under a minute and a half. You’re on, you’re off and they’re loading the next.
    This is not what I want my first dog-sledding experience to be.
    ‘I think we should wait and go to a real-deal establishment,’ I say. ‘Somewhere in a more natural setting.’
    It just doesn’t seem so authentic when there’s a 1970s tower block with a revolving restaurant on the horizon.
    ‘We can arrange that,’ Annique obliges me. ‘But I don’t think Jacques will agree… ’
    ‘Jacques?’
    ‘The Wolfman,’ she replies. ‘Jacques Dufour.’
    I’m strangely thrilled to know his real name. It feels like another step closer to finding him again.
    ‘I don’t think he courts publicity,’ Annique continues.
    ‘Is he … shy?’ I ask.
    ‘Private. And this year he has withdrawn.’
    ‘From the world?’ I ask, picturing him living in a remote, snow-crusted cave with his dogs.
    ‘From the race.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know. I just heard yesterday. I was surprised to see him here at all.’
    ‘Okay, so maybe that won’t work,’ I faux-concede, ‘but I don’t think I’m ready to take the ride right now, I’m still rather shaken up from the fall, you do understand?’
    ‘Of course.’ Annique consults her To-Do list. ‘I suppose the luge is out of the question?’
    ‘As in barrelling down an ice tunnel on a plastic tray for a ride so bone-rattling your teeth get rearranged along the way?’
    ‘Okay, no luge,’ she confirms. ‘No toboggan, no ski joring.’
    I’m about to ask what ski joring is when she says these three magic words: ‘ Cabane à Sucre ?’
    ‘If that translates as sugar shack, I’m in.’
    Again I wish Laurie was here. She’s always looking for new ways to sate her sweet tooth. Danielle and I have put on a stone since we started working in an office with an official Teatime. But I have to say, it’s such a nice tradition and great stress-reliever. I always used to burrow through the working day, barely coming up for air, but Laurie insists we take that break together – sort of the working girls’ equivalent of a family sharing their evening meal. Without the pressure to ‘finish your greens’. Unless she’s brought along something with pistachio frosting.
    Danielle’s actually more of a Mr Kipling Country Slice girl, and I love anything splurging fresh cream, but Laurie has us both drooling like dogs the first morning she’s back from a trip to New York bearing cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery. She actually has to bind the cardboard box in Sellotape so she doesn’t get tempted to claw it open on the flight, and there’s always a mad hacking and slashing with the office scissors to get to them. I smile. She’s probably just tidying away today’s crumbs now – I take out my phone and tap a sneaky response to her most recent ‘How’s it going?’ text.
    ‘Gilles is old news.’ I am deliberately blasé in my report. ‘Now I’m onto Jacques!’
    ‘Jacques and Gilles – you’re kidding?’ She taps straight back.
    I laugh out loud – I hadn’t thought of that. Especially appropriate since I just went up a hill then came tumbling down.
    ‘He has the eyes of a husky dog,’ I tell her.
    ‘How does the husky feel about that?’ she teases.
    I’m eager to chat more to her but Annique is ready to introduce me to the wonderful world of maple taffy.
    ‘Lose a filling for me!’ Laurie signs off.
    The process begins with me paying three dollars to a lady in a little wooden cabin and in return she hands me a wooden ice-lolly stick. That’s it. A bare stick.
    ‘I feel like I’m missing something … ’
    Annique tinkles a laugh.
    ‘Seriously, what happens now?’
    ‘Now you make your own,’ she says, pointing to a table of fresh snow where a man with a big ladle is running a thick line of liquid maple syrup …
    I still can’t predict the next step.
    ‘Attach the syrup to your stick,’ Annique instructs me. ‘Now roll.’
    ‘Roll?’
    ‘Twist