style="font-size:15px;"> 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
