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.
“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
