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He was wearing a brown distressed-leather pilot’s jacket lined with sheepskin. His shoulders appeared impossibly broad, and dark slacks accentuated the long lines of powerful legs. He moved with the innate grace of a man extremely confident in himself.
Noelle could see now his hair was more than dark, black and shiny as a raven’s wing. His features were strong and even, with the faintest hint of whisker shadowing on the hollows of his cheeks and on that merest hint of a cleft at his chin. He glanced toward her, and she felt the jolt of his eyes: electric blue, cool, assessing.
And ever so vaguely familiar. Noelle stared at his face, wondering where she had seen him before, and then stunned recognition dawned. Why wouldn’t he be confident in himself?
Aidan Phillips was even more of a presence in real life than he was in pictures. And there were plenty of pictures of him.
Less so now than a few years ago, when he and his wife, Sierra, had been unofficially crowned Canadian royalty, he an oil industry magnate, and she a renowned actress. Every public second of their romance and subsequent marriage had been relentlessly documented, photographed and commented on, as if their coming together was Canada’s answer to a real-life fairy tale.
Without, sadly, the happy ending.
“Do you know who that is?” she asked her grandfather in an undertone.
He lifted a shoulder.
“He’s one of the richest men in Canada.”
“I told you,” Rufus said, triumphantly. “A typhoon. Though it’s a poor man, indeed, who thinks all it takes to be rich is money. Ask her.”
“Ask who?”
“Her.”
Noelle turned back to see Aidan lifting a little girl out of the helicopter passenger seat. Of course, she knew he was a widower, and she knew there was a child, but he used his substantial influence to protect his daughter from any kind of public exposure.
The little girl was gorgeous—wild black curls springing from under a soft pink, very fuzzy hat that matched her jacket and leggings and snow boots. The cutest little pink furry muff dangled from a string out the sleeve of her jacket. She had the same electric blue eyes as her father. Noelle guessed her to be about five.
Aidan Phillips set the child down in the snow, and she looked around. Smiley ambled over, and the little girl squealed with delight and got down on both chubby knees, throwing her arms around the dog.
“Don’t let him lick your face,” a shrill voice commanded.
A third passenger was being helped out of the helicopter, an elderly woman with a pinched, forbidding expression.
“Well,” Grandpa said, too loudly. “There’s a face that would make a train take a dirt road.”
“Grandpa!”
But her grandpa had moved forward to greet his guests. After a moment he waved her up, and Noelle went forward, feeling the absolute awkwardness of the situation.
“And this is my granddaughter, Noelle, born on Christmas Day.”
Noelle cringed inwardly. Was her grandfather going to reveal her whole history?
“We just call her Ellie, though.”
Actually, no one but her grandfather called her Ellie anymore, but she felt it would be churlish to correct him.
“This is Tess and Aidan,” her grandfather said, as if he was introducing people he had known for a long time.
Despite her feeling of being caught off balance, Noelle smiled at the child, before turning her attention to the man. He extended his hand, and she ripped off her mitten and found her hand enveloped in one that was strong and warm. Ridiculously, she wished she was not in a parka nearly the same shade of pink as the little girl’s. She also wished for just the faintest dusting of makeup.
A woman would have to be dead—not merely heartbroken—to not want to make some sort of first impression on Aidan Phillips!
Still, she saw a faint wariness in those intense blue eyes as they narrowed on her face. When his hand enveloped hers it felt as if she had stood too close to lightning. She was tingling!
“A pleasure,” he said, but there was something as guarded in his voice as in his eyes, and Noelle was fairly certain he did not think it was a pleasure at all. In fact, his voice was a growl of pure suspicion that sent a shiver up and down her spine. She snatched her hand away from his, put her mitten on and stepped back from him.
“This is quite a surprise,” she stammered. “My grandfather only just told me we were having guests for Christmas.”
“Nor did he tell me about the lovely granddaughter.”
There was something about the way he said lovely that was faintly sarcastic, and Noelle felt an embarrassing blush rise up her cheeks. But then she realized Aidan was not commenting on the plainness she had become more painfully aware of since Mitchell’s departure, but something else entirely.
Was Aidan Phillips insinuating her grandfather was matchmaking?
How dare he? If ever there was a person incapable of ulterior motives, it was Grandpa.
On the other hand—she slid her grandfather a look from under her lashes—was there a remote possibility he was meddling in her life? It seemed unlikely. Her grandfather was not a romantic. But he had been unabashed in his disapproval of her relationship with Mitchell, especially when they had moved in together.
Her relationship with Mitchell? Or just Mitchell as a person?
If her grandfather was matchmaking, he seemed rather indifferent to the first encounter of the lovebirds.
Realistically, it simply wasn’t Grandpa’s style. At all. And yet even as she thought that, she remembered bringing Mitchell to the ranch to meet her grandparents.
What’s wrong with him? she had heard Grandpa ask her grandmother. He doesn’t act like he’s the luckiest man in the world. He doesn’t seem to know how beautiful she is.
Noelle had heard her grandmother’s answer. She knew she had. But every time she tried to recall it, it flitted just beyond where her memory could find it, a wary bird that did not want to be captured.
Her grandfather didn’t even know about the final betrayal: that Mitchell had emptied out their joint bank account.
I made it, he’d said, when she had sent him a frantic message through a social media messaging service, asking where the money was.
There had been no acknowledgment that her salary, which had taken care of bills and groceries, had allowed them to save quite a substantial nest egg. Toward a wedding. And a house.
What had Grandpa said when she had shown up on his doorstep, her face swollen after a week of solid crying? It was better in the old days when your family helped you find your partner.
What was it with her grandfather and this sudden sentimental attachment to how things used to be?
Not that there was anything sentimental on his face at the moment. He was scowling at the older lady, who was wiping frantically at the little girl’s dog-kissed face with a linen handkerchief.
“And I ain’t had the pleasure?”
“Bertanana Sutton,” she said regally, pausing her wiping of the girl’s face, but not standing and offering her hand, which Rufus seemed to take as an insult.
“Bertanana?” her grandfather repeated. “That’s a mouthful.”
“We just call her Nana, though,” the little girl said, mischievously.
Grandpa guffawed loudly.
“Excuse me?” Bertanana said imperiously.
“Nana. Just like the Newfoundland dog in Peter Pan,” Grandpa said.
First of all, Noelle was shocked that her grandfather knew anything about Peter Pan, let alone the name and breed of the dog. And second, why was he being so unforgivably rude?
Not that she needed to intervene. Nana was giving her grandfather a look that would have felled a lesser man—or made a train take a dirt road!
“Mrs. Sutton to you,” she said.
He flinched and Noelle saw what the problem was. He’d felt judged at Nana’s first insinuation that the dog—and its kisses—were dirty. Noelle had a terrible feeling this would not go well.
“Luggage?” Grandpa asked stiffly.
Aidan turned away from them and began to unload the helicopter. For a man who was CEO of a very large company, and moved in the rarefied circles of the very rich and very famous, he seemed every bit as strong as her grandfather. How was that possible when her grandfather was a hardworking man of the land?
With no conversation between them, Aidan and her grandfather filled the back of the side-by-side with quite a large number of suitcases and parcels, and then in went the dog, and Nana and Tess.
“Out of room,” Grandpa said, happily, his hurt feelings put aside for now. He took the driver’s seat. “You two will have to walk.” And then he roared away with a wave of his hand, leaving her standing there in a cloud of snow with Aidan Phillips.
It was obvious there was no room on that vehicle. It made sense that Noelle and Aidan would be left to walk, being neither the youngest nor the oldest of the group.
And yet if someone was looking for evidence of an ulterior motive, it would seem almost embarrassingly obvious that her grandfather had engineered an opportunity to throw them together, alone.
Aidan shoved his hands deep in his pockets and gazed off at the snow-capped mountains, something tight and closed in his face.
She could smell the leather of his jacket in the cold air, and a faint and seductive scent, subtle as only the most expensive of colognes managed to be.
“I’m having a bit of trouble getting my head around all this,” she said, her voice strained.
“As am I,” he returned coolly.
“I’m not going to pretend I don’t know who you are, though I suspect my grandfather doesn’t have a clue. I work in Clerical for a small oil company in Calgary, so I know the basics of who is who in the oil industry. I know you are the CEO of the Calgary-based Wrangler Oil.”
“And that I was married to Sierra Avanguard?” he asked quietly, his gaze disconcertingly direct on her face.
“Of course, that, too.”
“I don’t want any pictures of Tess showing up on social media,” he said. “Or anywhere else.”
It was said formidably, an order.
Really, was it unreasonable? He didn’t know her. He was just laying the ground rules. But he was also her grandfather’s guest, and it seemed a breach of her grandfather’s hospitality for Aidan to feel it was necessary to say this.
“That’s fine,” she said, matching his cool tone. “I don’t want any pictures of my grandfather surfacing, either. I’m sure his privacy is as important to him as yours is to you.”
He looked stunned. Obviously, if he had ever been put in his place before, it had been a long time ago.
He tilted his head at her, and looked a little more deeply. Reluctant amusement tickled around the line of that sinfully sensual mouth and sparked in his eyes for a second.
“Maybe he should stay off I-Sell, then,” he suggested.
“My grandfather does not have a clue what the repercussions of putting his invitation in a virtual world could be,” Noelle said. “I’m afraid I would have dissuaded him, had he confided his Old-Fashioned Country Christmas plans in me.”
“Ah.”
Noelle wondered if she should tell him there might be others coming. But were there? She decided to take her grandfather aside and find out whether, apart from sending money to strangers, he had any other confirmed guests, before setting off alarm bells. Besides, wasn’t there a possibility this was between Aidan and Rufus and she should stay out of it?
Meanwhile she had to satisfy her curiosity about how Aidan Phillips had come to be standing in a field on her grandfather’s property! Handsome men did not just fall from the heavens!
“I must say,” Noelle said cautiously, “that you hardly seem like the type of man who would be searching an online ad site to make your Christmas plans.”
“Oh? What type of man do I seem like?”
“The kind who would have a zillion much more glamorous Christmas options and invitations than this one.”
“That’s true,” he said, with a sigh that could be interpreted as regretful that he had not accepted one of his many other invitations.
“So what brings you to Rufus McGregor’s ranch for Christmas?” she pressed.
Aidan blew out a long breath and ran a gloved hand through his hair, scattering dark wisps that drifted like feathers before they settled obediently back into place. Such a small thing to find so utterly and disconcertingly sexy.
Her ex-fiancé, Mitchell, had been bald as a billiard ball.
It was the novelty of all that silky touchable-looking hair, she told herself firmly. But still, she had noticed. Not just noticed. No, noticed and found it attractive. This had to be nipped in the bud, of course.
Noelle closed her eyes for a moment. She summoned a picture in her mind of a red dress. It hung in her dark closet at home, its color dulled behind a plastic wrapper. It was the most glorious—and the most expensive—item of clothing she had ever owned.
She had bought it for the engagement party that had never happened. Now, she would never wear it. Or get rid of it, either. It would be defense against such things as this—an odd twinge of longing that had attacked without warning, the first such longing since Mitchell had packed a single bag—he’d only needed shorts and T-shirts for his new life, after all—and bid her adieu with undisguised eagerness to be gone.
“Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes. Aidan was looking at her quizzically.
“Yes, of course. I’m fine. You were going to tell me—”
He looked at her, considering. Something softened marginally in his expression. It was probably very obvious her discomfort was authentic, and that if her grandpa had something up his sleeve, she had had no part in it.
“How I came to be here?” he asked, his tone rueful.
She nodded.
“Never tell a five-nearly-six-year-old she can have anything she wants for Christmas.”
CHAPTER THREE
“SHE PICKED THIS?” Noelle asked, shocked. “Your daughter, Tess, could have anything she wanted for Christmas and she picked my grandfather’s old place in the middle of nowhere?”
“Almost anything,” Aidan clarified. “No pony.”
Uh-oh. Did that explain nasty little Gidget’s arrival on the ranch? Her grandfather had said it was the secret he didn’t want let out yet.
“And no puppy,” Aidan added after a moment. “I actually was foolish enough to say, in a moment of utter weakness, that she could have anything else.”
Noelle suspected he had been momentarily so caught up in the guilt of refusing Tess a pony or a puppy that he had caved easily on her request to come here. But why had she wanted to come here?
“And she picked this?” Noelle asked again.
“I’m as flabbergasted as you are.” He regarded her thoughtfully. “What do you think a little girl who could have anything would choose?”
Her opinion really seemed to matter to him. He was looking at her with discomfiting intensity. She hoped he wouldn’t run his hand through his hair again.
“Disneyland?” she hazarded, after a moment’s thought.
He looked disappointed in the answer, and she was annoyed with herself for feeling that she had not wanted to let him down.
“Yes, Disneyland. According to my research staff, the number one wish of children around the world is to visit a Disney resort.”
She had not only disappointed, she hadn’t even been original. Still, if for a moment she didn’t make it all about her, what did it say about him that he had set his research staff on the task of discovering what would make his daughter’s dreams come true?
“So, you took her?”
“Yes. Tess declared, at the top of her lungs, lying on the walkway in the middle of the park, It is not Christmas without snow,” he informed Noelle solemnly. “Even though I explained to her the very first Christmas would not have had any snow, we were, at that point, beyond rational explanations.
“I’m lucky I wasn’t arrested. Fortunately, four-year-old meltdowns are not the unusual in ‘the Happiest Place on Earth.’”
She had to bite back a desire to laugh at the picture forming in her mind of this self-contained man being held hostage by a four-year-old having a tantrum.
He went on, “The holiday transformation of It’s a Small World failed to impress my daughter, despite the addition of fifty thousand Christmas lights, which is also the number of times I think we went through that particular attraction. For weeks after, I had ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Deck the Halls’ jangling away inside my head.”
“Oh, dear,” Noelle murmured. “Would you like me to take those off the caroling list?”
“There’s to be caroling?” Aidan asked, horrified.
“All part of an old-fashioned Christmas,” she said, deadpan. Of course, she had not planned a single thing for an old-fashioned Christmas. Was it wrong to take such delight in his discomfort? “I think it’s a requirement, as well as snow. You can see we have plenty of that.”
“The Christmas before Disneyland we had snow,” he confessed. “My team found a place in the Finnish Lapland. We stayed in a glass igloo and witnessed the Northern Lights. We rode in a cart pulled by reindeer. We visited Santa’s house.”
“That sounds absolutely magical.” Noelle actually was not sure anything her grandfather could offer would compete with such a Christmas.
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, dear, I can tell by your tone—”
He nodded. “Another Christmas fail. She was three at the time. Santa was not as depicted in her favorite storybook. I think creepy is the word she used in reference to him. Cweepy. Rhotacism is perfectly normal until age eight.”
“Rhotacism?” Noelle asked weakly.
“Trading out the R sound for W.”
Which meant he had checked. Or his research staff had. It was all a bit sad, and somehow made him more dangerous than his wisps of dark hair falling gently back into place after he had raked his hand through them.
Before she could reconjure the red dress, he continued. “And the reindeer were a major letdown. Non-fliers. None with a red nose.”
“I guess some elements of Christmas might be best left to the imagination,” Noelle said. It seemed to her that Aidan, in his feverish efforts to manufacture the Christmas experience, might have missed the meaning of that first Christmas entirely.
She saw, again, just a hint of vulnerability in him—the single dad trying desperately to make his daughter happy. Especially at Christmas. Desperate enough to join strangers…
Noelle searched her memory. His wife had been a very famous and extraordinarily beautiful actress. Hadn’t she died around Christmas? Three years ago? The papers had not been able to get enough of that sad little toddler’s face. And then, to his credit, Aidan Phillips had managed to get his daughter out of the limelight and keep her out of it.
She could feel herself softening toward him the tiniest bit.
“And then you would think you could salvage Christmas with lovely gifts, wouldn’t you?” He sighed with long-suffering.
Again, she felt he was missing the point, but she went along. “Aren’t gifts for little girls easy? Hair ribbons and teddy bears and new pajamas? A jangly bracelet? A miniature oven?”
“Oh, right,” Aidan said, as if Noelle was hopelessly naive.
Of course, his little girl probably got those things as a matter of course, so what did Tess then have to look forward to?
“Doesn’t she tell you what she wants?”
“Yes, a puppy. And a pony. Every other item on her wish list is reserved for Santa. The fat happy Santa at the mall, not the skinny fellow in odd clothes with a real beard in Finland. And it’s a secret. If you tell anyone, then Santa won’t bring it to you, because the hearty laugh and twinkly eyes are just fronts for a mean-spirited old goat that would punish a little girl for telling her dad what she really wants.”
Noelle was struck by an irony here. Aidan Phillips, one of the most wealthy and successful men in Canada, if not the world, was in hopelessly over his head when it came to being a daddy at Christmas.
What had her grandfather just said? That a man who thought money was the only way to be rich was very poor indeed?
Still, it seemed like it should all be fairly easy. Was he the kind of man who could complicate a dot?
“How about that line of dolls that is such a big hit? Millie something?”
“Jilly,” he corrected her. “Jilly Jamjar. And her friends. Corrinne Cookiejar. Pauline Picklejar. They all come with the ‘jar’ they live in.”
“Are you making this up?”
“Really? Do I look like the kind of man who could make up a line of dolls who live in jar houses?”
“No,” she had to admit, “you do not.”
“I wish I was making it up. She already has the first three in the series. But then along came Jerry. Jerry Juicejar.”
It was quite funny listening to this extremely sophisticated man discuss the Jar dolls, fluent in their ridiculous names, but she had the feeling it would be a mistake to laugh.
“The Jarheads—my name for the toy manufacturers, not their own—in all their wisdom, made a limited edition of dear Jerry. There’s a few thousand of him. Period. For millions of children screaming his name in adulation. I swear the Jarheads are in cahoots with the mean-spirited Santa.
“Which brings us to I-Sell. One momentary lapse on my part. Okay, go ahead, see if you can find a Jerry Juicejar on there.”
“You let your five-year-old daughter go on the internet?”
Noelle was treated to a flinty look of pure warning. Do not judge me.
“She’s not five going on six, she’s five going on twenty-one.”
Which Noelle found terribly sad. Really, Tess was little more than a baby, only a year ago being quite capable of throwing a tantrum in the middle of a theme park. Still, she refrained from saying anything. She was beginning to suspect that the do-not-judge-me look she saw in his eyes had something to do with the fact that he had already judged himself with horrendous harshness.
“Plus, she wasn’t by herself. Nana was supervising. I’ve got two acquisitions assistants looking for him full time, and they have not found anyone willing to part with a Jerry. There are some things,” Aidan said with a miffed sigh, “that money can’t buy.”
“There are all kinds of things money can’t buy,” Noelle said firmly.
He looked dubious about that, even after his failed attempts to purchase Christmas happiness for his daughter with lavish holiday plans, research teams and acquisitions assistants.
“Is it possible Tess would like to just stay home for Christmas?” she suggested softly, as gently as she could. “She just wants what any child wants. To be with you. To be with her family.”
“I’m it for family,” he said tightly. “Me and Nana. Another fail in the Christmas department, I’m sure. And we don’t stay home for Christmas.”
A fire, Noelle seemed to remember. In their apartment? Christmas morning? A nation pulled from their Christmas joy to mourn with that very famous family.
“Anyway, she was looking for Jerry Juicejar, and what did she find while her supervisor nodded off on the sofa? An Old-Fashioned Country Christmas.”
“You’re quite lucky that’s all she found,” Noelle said.
Again, she got the flinty look, but underneath it she saw just a flicker of the magnitude of his sense of drowning in the sea of parenting requirements.
“You couldn’t dissuade her?” She deliberately made her tone neutral, vigilantly nonjudgmental.
Not that he seemed to appreciate her effort! He shot her a look. “You’ll soon see how easy it is to dissuade Tess. And I did, very foolishly, promise her she could have anything. A promise is a promise. She’ll be the first to let you know that, too. She has a book by that title that she carries in her hip pocket for reference and reminder purposes. So be very careful what you tell her.”