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.”
“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