by Cara Colter
“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.
With
out, 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.”
