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“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 (#u43ab6e6a-dc9b-58bf-afd9-ff3cab34d8b4)
“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.
