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.
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,