What he wants for Christmas…

His billions can’t buy!

Widower billionaire Aidan Phillips is determined to give his daughter the traditional country Christmas she wants. But his vibrant hostess, Noelle McGregor, is showing him that money can’t buy happiness. As a snowstorm swirls outside, Aidan recognizes the pain in Noelle’s mesmerizing eyes, and finds himself opening up about his past. Might he have found the perfect present for his little girl after all: a mommy for Christmas?

CARA COLTER shares her life in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, nine horses and one small Pomeranian with a large attitude. She loves to hear from readers, and you can learn more about her and contact her through Facebook.

Also by Cara Colter

Snowflakes and Silver Linings

Rescued by the Millionaire

The Millionaire’s Homecoming

Interview with a Tycoon

Meet Me Under the Mistletoe

The Pregnancy Secret

Soldier, Hero…Husband?

Housekeeper Under the Mistletoe

The Wedding Planner’s Big Day

Swept into the Tycoon’s World

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Snowbound with the Single Dad

Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-07844-3

SNOWBOUND WITH THE SINGLE DAD

© 2018 Cara Colter

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Carol Geurts,

who shows dignity, courage and integrity

through all of life’s storms.

You are an inspiration.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

Extract

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

“THERE’S MY LITTLE Christmas star!”

Noelle felt a swell of joy as she watched her grandfather, Rufus, shut down the tractor and climb down off it. He paused to lift the old black Lab, Smiley, out of the cab. Then he turned and came through the snow toward her, Smiley shuffling behind him with his happy grin in place, despite the dog’s pained gait.

She was relieved to see that, unlike Smiley, her grandpa was agile, surprisingly strong-looking for a man of seventy-eight years. He was dressed for cold, in a thick woolen toque, mittens and a lined plaid lumber jacket.

His embrace, too, was powerful as he came and hugged her tight, lifting her right off her feet.

He put her down and regarded her. “You haven’t been losing weight, have you?”

“No,” she said quickly, although she wasn’t at all certain. She had always been a slight girl, but she hadn’t been near a weigh scale since the abrupt end of her engagement. Noelle was fairly certain you could not lose weight eating chocolate ice cream for supper. And also, sometimes, for breakfast.

Their worry was mutual. It was to be their first Christmas without Grandma McGregor. In those months after Grandma had died, there had been something in her grandpa’s voice on the phone, which Noelle had not heard before—a weariness, a disconnect, as if he was not quite there. Sometimes he had made mistakes about what day it was, and seemed confused about other small details of daily life. Other times he had reminisced so obsessively about the past that Noelle had been convinced he was declining, too, dying of a broken heart.

Then, a few weeks ago, she had noticed an improvement. To her great surprise and relief, he’d actually seemed excited about Christmas. It had always been such a magical time of year in her family, partly because it was her birthday, too. Would it be too much to expect a Christmas miracle that would begin to heal their losses this year?

But when Noelle had driven into the yard and seen her grandpa had not put up a single decoration, she had felt her heart fall. Then, when she had noticed the tractor tracks, heading off into nowhere, she’d been frightened. He didn’t have cattle anymore. Where was he going? She’d followed along the tracks with great trepidation.

“Grandpa.” She sighed, feeling that sense of coming home. She got down on her knees and gave Smiley a long hug and an ear scratching before she got up and surveyed her grandfather’s project.

He seemed to be clearing snow in a large square in the middle of what used to be a cow pasture. “What on earth are you doing?”

His arm looped over her shoulder, he turned and looked with pleasure at his handiwork.

“I’m building me a helicopter landing pad,” he said, and her sense of well-being plummeted.

“A what?” she stammered.

“You heard me. Don’t go giving me that have-you-lost-your-mind look. Come on, we’ll go to the house and have coffee. You brought everything you need for a nice Christmas at the ranch?”

She thought he might want to take the tractor back to the house, but instead he turned with her and walked the pounded-down snow of the tractor track, Smiley dogging their heels.

“Yes.” Noelle hesitated, and then asked, “I wondered why you didn’t have any decorations up yet?”

“I thought it would be good to do it together.”

Even though she had never helped with things like putting the outside lights up, she loved the idea of them working together to re-create Christmases like the ones they had always enjoyed.

“That sounds fun. I’m so looking forward to the break. I’ll be here now until just after New Year’s.”

“Ah, good. Good. Everybody else will leave Boxing Day, so we’ll have a bit of time for just you and me.”

“What do you mean everybody?” she asked, surprised.

“Oh, my goodness, Ellie,” he said, calling her by his pet name for her, “wait until I show you what I’ve gone and done. Have you ever heard of Me-Sell?”

She cocked her head at him quizzically.

“You know, the place on the interstate where you put the ads up?”

“The internet? Oh, you mean I-Sell? That huge online classified ad site?”

“That’s it!”

The thought of her grandpa on I-Sell gave her pause. He still heated his house with wood. He received two channels on his old television set—if he fiddled with the rabbit ears on top of it long enough. He did not own a cell phone, not that there was signal anywhere near here. He and Grandma had never had a computer, never mind the internet.

“I go down to the library in the village and use the interstate,” he said.

“Internet,” she corrected him weakly.

“Whatever. I decided to sell some of my old machines out in the barn. Just taking up space. Ed down the road got a pretty penny for his. He did it all on I-Sell.”

“Do you need money?” she asked, appalled that somehow this had passed her by in their weekly telephone conversations. She got out here to visit him at least once a month. Why hadn’t she noticed he was pinching his pennies? Had her own double heartbreak made her that self-involved?

“Good grief, no! Got more money than I know what to do with since I sold off most of the land except for this little parcel around the home place.”

Another of the recent heartbreaking losses had been that decision to sell off most of the land that had been in the McGregor family for generations. There was no one left to work it. In her fantasies, Noelle had hoped one day she and Mitchell would buy it back.

They came over a little rise, and both of them paused. There it sat, the home place, prettier than a Christmas card. Surrounded by mounds of white snow was a large two-story house, pale yellow with deep indigo shutters, a porch wrapping around the whole lower floor, smoke chugging out the rock chimney.

If her grandmother had been alive, the house would have been decorated by now, December 21. There would have been lights along the roofline and a huge wreath on the front door, the word HOPE peeking out from under a big red bow. The huge blue spruce in the front yard would have been dripping with lights. But this year there was not a single decoration, and it made Noelle’s eyes smart, even if her grandfather had waited for her to do it.

Behind the house was a barn, once red, now mostly gray. In the near distance the foothills, snow dusted, rolled away from them, and in the far distance the peaks of the Rockies were jagged and white against a bright blue sky.

They passed the barn on the way to the house, and two large gray horses with feathered feet and dappled rumps came running out of a paddock behind it.

“Hello, Fred, hello, Ned,” she said affectionately.

Noelle went over to the fence and held out her hand. Fred blew a warm cloud of moist air onto her hand. She reached up to touch his nose, but just as she did, a tiny little horse, as black as Smiley, exploded through the snow from behind the barn, and the other two took off, snorting and blowing.

The tiny horse, having successfully chased away the competition, strained its neck to reach over the fence, and nipped at where her fingers dangled.

She snatched them away, and the pony gave an indignant shake of its scruffy black mane and charged off in the direction it had come.

“Who—or what—is that?” she asked.

“That’s Gidget,” her grandfather said. “She seems like a nasty little piece of work, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to find a pony close to Christmas.”

“A pony for Christmas?”

Noelle shot her grandfather a look. Again, she had the terrifying thought her grandfather might be slipping, that maybe he thought she was a little girl again.

“She’s a Christmas surprise.”

“Oh! You’re keeping someone’s surprise pony until Christmas?”

“Something like that. Look at you shivering. City gal.”

He took his toque off, revealing a head of very thick silver hair. He placed it on her own head and pulled it tenderly over her ears, as if she was, indeed, twelve again and not twenty-three. This time, instead of terrifying her, the casual gesture made her feel deeply loved.

He moved to her car, an economy model that had struggled a bit on the very long, snowy road that led to his place from the secondary highway. Her grandfather wrestled her suitcase out of the trunk. It was a big suitcase, filled with gifts and warm clothes, and her skates. The pond behind the house would be frozen over. The suitcase had wheels, but her grandpa chose to carry it and Noelle knew better than to insult him by offering to help.

When they walked in the back door into the back porch, the smell of coffee was strong in the house, though she immediately missed the just-out-of-the-oven aroma of her grandmother’s Christmas baking.

They shrugged out of jackets and boots, and left the suitcase there. Noelle pulled off her grandfather’s toque and smoothed her hair in the mirror. Her faintly freckled cheeks and nose were already pretty pink from being outside, but she knew herself to be an unremarkable woman. Mouse-brown hair, shoulder-length, straight as spaghetti, eyes that were neither brown nor blue but some muddy moss color in between, pixie-like features that could be made cute—not beautiful—with makeup, not that she bothered anymore.

The dog had already settled in his bed by the wood heater when she got into the kitchen. While her grandfather added wood to the heater, Noelle looked around with fondness.

The kitchen was nothing like the farmhouse kitchens that were all the rage in the home-decorating magazines right now. It had old, cracked linoleum on the floor, the paint was chipping off cabinets and the counters were cluttered with everything from engine pieces to old gloves. The windows were abundant but old, glazed over with frost inside the panes.

Aside from the fact that her grandmother would not have tolerated those engine pieces on the counter, and would have had some Christmas decorations up, Noelle felt that sigh of homecoming intensify within her.

Her grandfather and grandmother had raised her when her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was twelve. In all the world, this kitchen was the place she loved the most and felt the safest.

“Tell me about the helicopter pad,” she said, taking a seat at the old table. The coffee had been brewing on the woodstove, and her grandfather plopped a mug down in front of her. She took a sip, and her eyes nearly crossed it was so strong. She reached hastily for the sugar pot.

“Well, it really started when I was watching the news one night.” He took the seat across the table from her and regarded her with such unabashed affection that it melted her heart and the intensity of that feeling home grew.

“There was this story about this girl—not here, mind, England or Vancouver—”

Both equally foreign places to her grandfather.

“—who was going to be all alone for Christmas, so she just put an ad on something like I-Sell and all these people answered her, and she chose a family to have Christmas with.”

Her grandfather was beaming at her as if this fully explained the helicopter pad he was building in his cow pasture.

“Go on.”

“So I was on there anyway, trying to figure out how to put up a posting for my old junk in the barn, and I just had this thought that I missed Christmas the way it used to be.”

“You and me and Grandma?” she said wistfully, thinking of music and baking and decorating, and neighbors dropping by.

“Even before that. You know, TV was late coming to these parts. It was better without it. And a whole lot better without the interstate.”

No point telling him again. Noelle waited.

“Don’t even get me going on what cell phones are doing to the world.”

“I won’t,” Noelle said, though in truth she knew it wouldn’t be long before she missed all her social media platforms. Or more to the point, relentlessly and guiltily spying on someone else’s newly exciting life through their prolific postings.

“We used to have big gatherings at Christmas,” her grandfather said longingly. “When I was a boy, on Christmas Day the whole community would show up at the old hall, and there would be a Christmas concert, and dinner, and games. Those tables would be groaning under the weight of turkeys and hams and bowls of mashed spuds and pies. Oh, the pies! The women would try to outdo themselves on pies.

“People sang, and talked together. They exchanged gifts with their neighbors. Not much, you see, a homemade whistle, a flour sack, bleached white and embroidered with something nice, like Bless This House. If you knew a family that was having a rough go, you made sure all the kids had a present, and that they got a big fat ham to take home.”

Noelle’s sense of worry was gnawing at her again. As lovely a picture as he was painting, her grandfather had never been like this. Grandma had pretty much looked after Christmas, he’d done the outside decorating and hitched up the old horses for the mandatory Christmas sleigh ride, usually after much nagging! Until Grandma had died, he had never been given to reminiscing. He was pragmatic, not sentimental!

“So,” he said, “I got me an email address and I just put a little ad on there, inviting people to an old-fashioned Christmas, if they wanted one.”

“Here?” Noelle asked, stunned.

“Well, sure. Can you think of a better place?”

“Grandpa, you can’t invite strangers off the internet to your home!”

He folded his arms across his plaid shirt. His craggy face got a stubborn look on it. “Well, too late for your good advice, little miss Dear Abby, I already done it.”

“People replied?”

“All kinds of them,” he said with satisfaction.

“But how do you know if they’re good people?” Noelle asked. Was that faint hysteria in her voice?

Her grandfather patted her hand. “Oh, Noelle, most folks are good. You’ve just lost a little faith because of that fella, Michael—”

“Mitchell,” she corrected him weakly. She did not want to think of that “fella” with his newly exciting life right now!

“Does this have something to do with the helicopter pad?” she whispered, full of trepidation.

“Yup, indeed. Some kind of Mr. Typhoon is coming here.”

“Tycoon?” she asked, despite herself.

“Whatever.”

“Oh, Grandpa!”

“With his little girl, who lost her mommy.”

“Grandpa! Tell me you didn’t send anyone any money.”

“Well, I did send somebody money. Not the typhoon, someone else. They wanted to come to my Old-Fashioned Country Christmas, but my goodness, them people have had a run of bad luck. Couldn’t even put together the money for a tank of gasoline.”

Noelle felt sick. How far had this gone? How many people had duped him out of his money? Her hopes for a healing Christmas were evaporating.

Her grandpa was an absolute innocent in the high-tech world. All kinds of people out there were just waiting to prey on a lonely old man; all kinds of villains were trolling the internet to find the likes of her grandfather. She hoped he hadn’t spouted off to anyone else about having more money than he could use.

“Grandpa,” she said gently. “It’s a hoax. If the tycoon hasn’t asked you for money yet, he will. You’re probably being scammed…”

Her grandfather was scowling at her. “It ain’t like that.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they sent me this.” He produced a piece of paper from a heap of papers leaning off one of the counters. Noelle took it and stared at it. It appeared to be specs for building a rudimentary helicopter pad.

“Oh, no, Grandpa,” she said. This was how easy it was to fool an old man. The drawing could have been done by a child.

Her grandfather cocked his head.

“Hear that?” he asked triumphantly.

She stared at him. She heard absolutely nothing. She felt the most heartbreaking sadness. What a year of losses. The land. Her grandmother. Then, weeks after her grandmother had passed, her fiancé announcing he just wasn’t “ready.” To commit. To live in one place. Apparently to hold down a job in the oil industry that had employed them both. Mitchell had gone off to Thailand to “find himself.”

If his favorite social media page was any indication, he seemed to be being helped in this pursuit by a bevy of exotic-looking, bikini-clad beauties who had made Noelle newly aware of her lack of boldness—she had never worn a bikini—plus her own plainness and her paleness.

So, she had lost her family ranch, her grandmother and her fiancé. It was true she had held on to hope for a ridiculously long period of time that Mitchell would come to his senses and come back, even after his final betrayal.

But now, this felt as if it would be the final blow, if she was losing her grandfather, only in quite a different way. His mind going, poor old guy. She’d heard of this before. Moments of lucidity interspersed with, well, this.

He had pushed back from the table and was hurrying to the door.

“I can’t not be there when they land,” he said eagerly. “And I better throw some hay at that pony, so she’s on the back side of the barn. Don’t want that secret out yet.”

Even the dog looked doubtful, and not very happy to be going back outside.

“Grandpa,” she said soothingly, getting up, “come sit down. You can help me take my suitcase up. Maybe we’ll go find a tree this afternoon, put up some decorations—”

Her grandfather was ignoring her. He laced up his boots and went out the door, the reluctant dog on his heels. Moments later his side-by-side all-terrain vehicle roared to life and pulled away, leaving an almost eerie silence in its wake.

And then she heard it.

The very distinctive wop-wop-wop of a helicopter in the distance.

She dashed to the back porch, put on her grandfather’s toque, grabbed her jacket, shoved boots on her feet and raced out the door.

CHAPTER TWO

“KEEP BACK FROM IT!” her grandfather shouted over his shoulder.

Noelle arrived at the landing pad, breathless from running. The blades of the helicopter were throwing up so much snow that for a moment Noelle lost sight of her grandfather, the dog and the helicopter.

And then the engines died, and the snow settled, and it was very quiet. She peered at the helicopter. It was a burnished gold color, wrapped in a word, Wrangler.

Behind the bubble of a window, she could see a man doing something at the controls. He had a shock of dark hair falling over his brow, a strong profile and aviator-style sunglasses. From this distance she couldn’t make out his features, and yet, somehow she knew—perhaps from his chosen entry—that everything about this man would be extraordinary.

As she watched, he took off the earphones he was wearing and the sunglasses, which he folded into his front breast pocket. He got out his door with an easy leap. He acknowledged Noelle and her grandfather with a slight raise of his hand and then moved to the passenger door.

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.”

“I’ve made a note,” she said seriously, and he shot her a suspicious look to see if she was making light of him.

“I had…er…some of my staff make sure your grandfather was legitimate.”

It was faintly insulting, and yet she could hardly blame him.

“And then I spoke to your grandfather on the phone and it all seemed aboveboard. Nice old guy, first Christmas alone. Of course, he neglected to mention Ellie-born-on-Christmas-Day.”

“Maybe your research teams just aren’t that good,” she said drily. “They can’t find out what a little girl wants for Christmas and they totally missed me. I go by Noelle, actually, and being born on Christmas Day was not an indictable offense the last time I checked.”

“Did I say it like it was?”

“You did.”

“It’s just so darn…cute. Most people, of course, would hate having their birthday overshadowed by the ‘big’ day, but I bet you aren’t one of them.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What would make you presume anything about me?”

He lifted a broad shoulder. “Presumptions are a part of life. You made some about me—that I was not the type of man who would need to join strangers for Christmas—and I have made some about you.”

“Do tell,” she said, though in truth she was bracing herself. She was not sure she wanted him to tell at all.

“There’s a look about you. A country girl.”

A country girl? She had lived in the city now for nearly five years. She considered herself fairly sophisticated.

Not that you would know it at the moment. She was dressed in a pink parka and her jeans were stuffed into snow boots. On her hurried way out the back door, she had put her grandpa’s toque back on. Her cheeks were probably pink, and no doubt her nose was, too.

“Not a touch of makeup. Wholesome,” he went on, ignoring the fact that she was looking daggers at him. “Giving. Christmas magic and all that. Hopelessly naive. Probably made a bad choice in a man and Grandpa has stepped in to find you a suitable partner. Right at Christmas. Cue the music.”

He began to hum “White Christmas.”

She hoped it wouldn’t get stuck in her head.

“Are you always so insufferable?” she asked.

“I try…and that’s out of character. Not giving at all. Tut-tut.”

“Let me tell you my presumptions. You hate Christmas. I can tell by your obnoxious tone.” She thought of adding, No wonder you haven’t been able to succeed at giving your daughter a good one, but stopped herself. It would just be mean. And he was, unfortunately, right about the wholesome and giving part of her nature.

“I wondered about an ulterior motive in getting us here,” Aidan said. “Who just invites strangers for Christmas?”

“Well, you can just quit wondering. You will never—never—meet a man with more integrity than my grandfather. He’s invited strangers for Christmas because he feels he has something to give, not to take anything.”

“Humph,” he said with an insulting lack of conviction.

Was Aidan Phillips annoying her on purpose? Surely her face had softened in sympathy at his vulnerable dad side, as he had revealed each of his Christmas failures? Now, he was successfully erasing that. If he was now trying to make her angry—a defense against her unwanted sympathy—it was working all too well!

“My grandfather might be trying to look after me. I hope not, but he’s old and his heart is in the right place, which I’m sure you figured out when you accepted his generous invitation to spend Christmas at his home. I may be single, but really, you would both be presuming too much by thinking I would be interested in you!”

Of course, there was the momentary lapse over his hair, but he never had to know.

He stopped. It forced her to stop, too. She tilted her chin and glared at him.

“And you wouldn’t be?” he asked, incredulous.

“Oh!” She fought a desire to take off her grandfather’s toque and stuff it in her pocket so she wouldn’t look quite so folksy. “Why would you sound so surprised? Do you have women flinging themselves at you all the time?”

“Yes.” He cocked his head at her.

“I am not some country bumpkin who is going to be bowled over by your charm, Mr. Phillips,” she said tightly.

“I don’t have any charm.”

“Agreed.”

“You’ve had a heartbreak, just as I guessed.”

The utter audacity of the man. It made her want to pick up a handful of snow and throw it in his face.

“There might be other reasons a woman would not fling herself at you,” she suggested tightly. Even though that one happened to be true.

“There might be,” he said skeptically.

But, also true, perhaps a woman would recognize instantly that she was not in the same league as you, she thought to herself. Perhaps she’d recognize she had failed to hang on to a relationship with even a very ordinary guy, so what were her chances of—

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 when 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.

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