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 searched her memory. His wife had been a very famous and extraordinarily beautiful actress. Hadn’t she died around Christmas? Three years ago? The papers had not been able to get enough of that sad little toddler’s face. And then, to his credit, Aidan Phillips had managed to get his daughter out of the limelight and keep her out of it.
She could feel herself softening toward him the tiniest bit.
“And then you would think you could salvage Christmas with lovely gifts, wouldn’t you?” He sighed with long-suffering.
Again, she felt he was missing the point, but she went along. “Aren’t gifts for little girls easy? Hair ribbons and teddy bears and new pajamas? A jangly bracelet? A miniature oven?”
“Oh, right,” Aidan said, as if Noelle was hopelessly naive.
Of course, his little girl probably got those things as a matter of course, so what did Tess then have to look forward to?
“Doesn’t she tell you what she wants?”
“Yes, a puppy. And a pony. Every other item on her wish list is reserved for Santa. The fat happy Santa at the mall, not the skinny fellow in odd clothes with a real beard in Finland. And it’s a secret. If you tell anyone, then Santa won’t bring it to you, because the hearty laugh and twinkly eyes are just fronts for a mean-spirited old goat that would punish a little girl for telling her dad what she really wants.”
Noelle was struck by an irony here. Aidan Phillips, one of the most wealthy and successful men in Canada, if not the world, was in hopelessly over his head when it came to being a daddy at Christmas.
What had her grandfather just said? That a man who thought money was the only way to be rich was very poor indeed?
Still, it seemed like it should all be fairly easy. Was he the kind of man who could
