by Cara Colter
She stopped her train of thought because he was still watching her way too closely and she did not like the uneasy feeling she had that Aidan Phillips, astute businessman, could read her mind.
“It would be very old-fashioned to think a woman’s main purpose in life is to find herself a mate,” she told him primly.
“And yet here we are at an Old-Fashioned Country Christmas.” He tilted his head at her, his eyes narrow and intent again. “Recent?”
“What?”
“The heartbreak?”
“I’m beginning to take a dislike to you.”
“It’s not my fault.”
“That I dislike you?”
“That women fling themselves!”
“You’re handsome and you’re wealthy and you’re extremely successful and perhaps somewhat intelligent, though it’s a bit early to tell.”
“I used rhotacism in a sentence!”
She ignored him. “Women fling themselves at you. You’ve become accustomed to it. They probably find the fact that you are a single dad bumbling through Christmas very endearing. Oh, boo-hoo, Mr. Phillips.”
It occurred to her that her sarcasm might be coming more from a deep well of resentment that Mitchell was, at this very moment, surrounding himself with bikinis on a beach in Thailand than at Aidan Phillips, but she would take all the protection the shield of sarcasm could give her. Aidan was exactly the kind of man a woman needed to protect herself from. And worse, he knew it.
“Bumbling through Christmas?” he sputtered. “You call Christmas at the Happiest Place on Earth and at Santa’s original place of residence bumbling?”
“Failures by your own admission,” she said, with a toss of her head, “and should you have doubt, ask your daughter.”
Aidan glared at her, though when he spoke, his voice was carefully controlled, milder than his glare. “I think I’m beginning to take a dislike to you, too.”
“Good!”
“Good,” he agreed. He continued, his voice softly sarcastic, “It’s setting up to be a very nice quiet Christmas in the country, after all.”
“Emphasis on quiet, since I won’t be speaking to you.”
“Starting anytime soon?” he asked silkily.
“Right now!”
“Good,” he said again.
She couldn’t resist. “Good,” she said with a curt nod. They strode along the path back to the house in a silence that bristled.
She watched out of the corner of her eye as he yanked his cell phone from his pocket and began scrolling furiously, walking at the same time. It took him a few seconds to realize it wasn’t going to work. He stopped.
“Is there cell service?” he asked tightly.
“We’re not speaking.”
“That’s childish.”
“You didn’t seem to think so a few minutes ago.”
“It’s just a yes or no,” he said.
“No.” She should not have felt nearly as gleeful about the look on his face as she did. Clearly the thought of not being joined to his world, where he was in control of everything and everybody—with the possible exception of his daughter—was causing him instant discomfort.
“Will there be cell service at the house?”
“No.”
“I’m expecting an important email. I have several calls I have to make.”
“Did you get cell service in the Finnish Lapland?”
“Actually, they take pride in their excellent cell service all across Finland.”
He managed to make that sound as if they had managed to be more bumpkin here than in one of the most remote places in the world.
Noelle had the sudden thought Tess’s string of Christmas disappointments might, at a level she would not yet be able to articulate—despite being five going on twenty-one—have had a lot more to do with her father’s ability to be absent while he was with her than the inadequacies of Disneyland or the Northern Lights.
“You can make the calls from his landline in the house,” she said, maybe more sharply than she intended. “And I guess you could go to the library in the village and check emails. That’s what my grandfather does. Mind you, he has to drive. You could take your helicopter. You could be there in minutes. Maybe even seconds! But it would cause a sensation. There would probably be that unwanted publicity involved.”
“You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?” He sounded hopeful. He was holding his phone out at arm’s length, squinting at it, willing service to appear.
“Do I look like the type of person who would pull your leg?”
He regarded her suspiciously, but didn’t answer.
It was because he didn’t answer that she decided not to tell him there were a few “sweet spots” on the ranch. One was in the hayloft of the barn. You could get the magic bars on your cell phone to light up to two, and sometimes even three precious bars, if you opened the loft door and held your arm out. If the stars were aligned properly and the wind wasn’t blowing. You had to lean out dangerously to take advantage of the service. It was a desperate measure to go sit out there in the cold trying to reconnect with the world.
And somehow she knew she’d be out there later tonight, looking at Mitchell’s latest posts about his new and exciting life, tormenting herself with all that she wasn’t.
She glanced at Aidan. When he felt her eyes on him, he shoved his cell phone in his pocket. His face was set in deep lines of annoyance, as if she had personally arranged the lack of cell service to inconvenience him.
They came over that rise in the road where they could see the house. She wondered if, in his eyes, it looked old and faintly dilapidated instead of homey and charming, especially with the snow, mounded up like whipped cream, around it. He did not even comment on the house at all, or on the breathtaking spectacle of sweeping landscapes and endless blue skies and majestic mountains.
Noelle thought that what she had said earlier in a pique might be coming true.
She disliked Aidan Phillips. A lot.
And that was so much safer than the alternative! She marched on ahead of him, without bothering to see if he followed.
CHAPTER FOUR
AIDAN PHILLIPS WATCHED his hostess move firmly into the lead, her pert nose in the air and her shoulders set with tension.
He’d managed, and very well, too, to annoy her.
That could only be a good thing! He had no idea if the grandfather had ulterior motives in the matchmaking department. And despite Noelle’s vehement denial, women did find him irresistible, exactly for one of the reasons she’d stated.
It was the single-dad thing that set women to cooing and setting out to rescue him. It had been most unwise on his part to share his Christmas catastrophes with someone he didn’t even know. But there had been something in the wide set of her eyes, in the green depths of them, that had momentarily weakened him, made him want to unburden. But he’d known as soon as he had, by the sudden softness in her face and the that-poor-guy look that he’d come to so heartily resent, that weakness had been—as weakness inevitably was—a terrible mistake.
She’d even articulated his parenting journey. Bumbling.
To the best of his abilities, Aidan was bumbling through the challenges of being a single parent to a small girl who had lost her mother. It stunned him that his performance would be average at best, or even below average, he suspected, if there was a test available to rate these things.
The truth was, Aidan Phillips was used to being very, very good at things. He had the Midas touch when it came to money, and he had a business acumen that came to him as naturally as breathing. He was considered one of Canada’s top business leaders, one to watch. His success was the envy of his colleagues and business competitors. At some instinctive level, he knew what to do. He knew when to expand and when to contract, whom to hire, where to experiment. He knew whe
n to be bold. And when to fold.
He’d been called an overachiever most of his life and he considered it the highest form of a compliment.
But then, there was the secret.
He sucked at the R-word, as in Relationships. His marriage, which he had gone into with incredible confidence and high hopes, had been evidence of that. He’d been like an explorer dumped in a foreign land without a map. And instead of finding his way, he had become more and more lost...
His failure in this department made him insecure about his parenting, about his ability to relate to the more sensitive gender of the species, even a pint-size model like Tess.
He could not seem to get the equation right. His business mind needed an equation, but Tess resisted being a solvable puzzle. He loved his daughter beyond reason. From the first moment he’d held her tiny squirming body in his hands, he had been smitten...and yet there was a pervasive feeling of failing, somehow.
If he was looking for a success—and he was—it was Nana. She had come from an agency that specialized in these things, and to him she was like Mary Poppins, albeit without the whimsy.
She loved his daughter—and him—in her own stern way, and she knew things about children, in the very same way he knew them about business. She knew how to pull uncooperative hair into tight ponytails without creating hysteria. She knew the right bedtime stories, and read them without missing lines as he sometimes did, hoping to get off easy and early to make that important phone call. She knew about playdates with other little creatures who cried too easily, pouted, wanted to play princess and paint their fingernails and generally terrified the hell out of Aidan.
He was guiltily aware Nana’s steadying presence allowed him to do what he was best at—work—with less guilt.
And so, Aidan was well aware he was bumbling through, doing his best and falling short, winning the unwanted pity and devotion of almost every woman who saw him with his daughter.
It’s like they all somehow knew his secret failing, including this one marching ahead of him with her nose in the air.
The truth was, he’d had his reservations about the Old-Fashioned Country Christmas. And so had Nana. For once, he had overruled her, wanting something so desperately and not knowing how to get there.
Wanting his daughter to experience something he’d never had, not even when he had shared the Christmas season with his wife. He wanted her to have that joyous Christmas that was depicted in every carol and every story and every TV show and every movie.
Crazy to still believe in such things.
But the unexpected McGregor granddaughter did. Somehow, he knew Noelle believed. In goodness. And probably miracles. The magic of Christmas and all that rot. He hated it, and was drawn to it at the very same time.
Oh, boy. She was the kind of see-through-to-your-soul person that a guy like him—who had given up on his soul a long, long time ago—really needed to watch himself around.
* * *
If there was a palpable tension between Aidan and herself, Noelle noted things were not going much better in the house.
She dispensed with the toque immediately—she could not help feeling it contributed to the country bumpkin look—but her hair was flyaway and hissing with static underneath it. Aidan looked entertained by her efforts to pat it down, so she stopped, stomped the snow off her feet and left him in the porch.
Nana and her grandfather were having a standoff in the kitchen.
“Surely you don’t think these filthy things belong on the counter?”
“Don’t touch those. There are not filthy, they’re greasy. There’s a difference. They’re engine parts. They’re in order!”
“They don’t belong in the kitchen!”
“It’s my kitchen!”
“But I won’t eat food that’s been prepared on that.” She waved a hand at the mess.
“It looks as if you could stand to miss a few meals.”
“Oh! I never!”
“That’s obvious, you dried-up old—”
“Grandpa.”
In the back of her mind Noelle was thinking, food. Had her grandfather laid in enough food for guests? Had he planned for three meals a day for at least five people, plus snacks that would interest a five-year-old? And what about the rooms? Had he freshened them up? Laundered sheets and put out good towels? Most of the rooms in this large house had not been used in years.
The logistics of it, not to mention the squabbling, were beginning to give Noelle an awful headache, which worsened when Aidan came into the kitchen.
Underneath his jacket, he had on an expensive shirt, pure white and possibly silk, not the kind of shirt you generally saw on the ranch. He exuded a presence of good grooming and good taste and subtle wealth that made the room seem too small and somewhat shabby.
This whole idea was so ill conceived, Noelle decided desperately. Couldn’t she just announce the Old-Fashioned Country Christmas was a terrible mistake and send them all home? At the moment it seemed everyone, including her grandfather, the instigator, would be more than pleased by such a turn of events!
“She told Tess the stove was dangerous,” her grandpa reported furiously. “You know how many kids we’ve had through this house without a single burn victim?”
Yes, everyone would be more than pleased if an old-fashioned Christmas was canceled, except for Tess. Noelle’s eyes were drawn to her stillness.
The little girl, in her candy-floss-pink outfit, with her gorgeous curls and pixie features, was standing off to the side, frozen as a statue, her hand resting on Smiley’s head, her wide eyes going back and forth between her Nana and Noelle’s grandfather.
“That’s quite enough,” Noelle said quietly, making a small gesture toward Tess.
All the adults in the room looked at the little girl.
Noelle remembered the orphaned child she had been, and she reminded her grandfather of that with a glance and a loudly cleared throat.
“Sorry,” he mumbled in the direction of Nana. “I’ve become set in my ways.”
Nana could have leaped at the opportunity to agree, but in a reasonable tone she said, “I’d be happy to clean up the counters.”
“I’ll help,” Noelle said quickly.
Her grandfather nodded. “But don’t touch my engine parts. They’re lined up in order. I’ll put them away myself. You want to help me put up the outdoor Christmas lights this afternoon?” he asked Aidan, shooting a resentful look at Nana, as if she was displacing him from a house he now couldn’t wait to get out of.
“Delighted,” Aidan said, his tone cool and not delighted in the least.
Tess broke from her stillness. The tiny worried knot in her brow evaporated. She clapped her hands together. “We’re just like a family,” she declared.
“Isn’t that the truth?” Aidan said pleasantly. Noelle shot him a look. She was almost certain his experiences with family—and with Christmas—had not been good ones. Maybe even before a horrible fire had changed everything?
Could she overcome her initial defensive reaction to him—to his hostility and his dislike of Christmas and his horrible cynicism—and change that?
Really, wasn’t that what Christmas was all about? To think about others? Weren’t the most meaningful gifts the ones you bestowed upon the strangers that came to your door? Wasn’t that in keeping with the spirit of the first Christmas, when the wise men had followed the star to a manger?
Hadn’t she been the recipient of amazing gifts from strangers and from family, when, at twelve, she had found herself facing her first Christmas as an orphan?
That was what she had to remember. It wasn’t about her. It was about giving back what had been so freely given. All of them here were going to have to unite in a common goal.
To give motherless Tess—and maybe her daddy, too—a Christmas that would ease some of their painful memori
es. A Christmas that would be filled with a kind of magic that he had searched for and found all his money could not buy. A Christmas that would be overflowing with the true spirit of the day and the season.
Hopefully, it would make her grandfather’s first Christmas without his partner of some fifty-odd years somewhat more bearable, too.
Since these were such happy thoughts, altruistic even, why did Noelle feel as if she was preparing to go into battle?
“Have you ever cut down your own Christmas tree before?” she asked Tess.
The little girl’s eyes went very round. She clapped her hands together. A smile lit her face.
“No,” she breathed. “We didn’t have our own Christmas tree last year. Or the ugly Santa year.”
Noelle noticed she had outgrown her rhotacism. Or a therapist had been hired.
Of course they wouldn’t have had a tree of their own. Not in a glass igloo and not in the best hotel room money could buy.
Tess frowned with fierce concentration. “Did we before that, Daddy?”
“Of course, we did.”
Noelle glanced at Aidan. His face was pained. Obviously, they had had their own Christmas tree once, a memory he was trying to outrun, whether he knew it or not.
“We’ll go out and find a Christmas tree,” Noelle promised her. “We won’t stop looking until we find one that is absolutely right.”
“A really big one?” Tess asked.
“Maybe. Or maybe it will be a really small one. We’ll know when we see it. It’s as if it will whisper to us, I’m the one.”
“Really?” Tess asked.
“Really.”
“Really?” Aidan said drily.
“I told you it was going to be perfect, Daddy,” Tess whispered.
“It sounds dangerous,” Nana said.
Grandpa rolled his eyes.
But it was Aidan’s face that captivated Noelle. He was, it seemed, trying to contain his cynicism as he looked at his little girl, his handsome face softened with hopefulness.
Despite all his skepticism and suspicion, he just wanted his little girl to be happy.