“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 grandfather repeated. “That’s a mouthful.”
“We just call her Nana, though,” the little girl said, mischievously.
Grandpa guffawed loudly.
“Excuse me?” Bertanana said imperiously.
“Nana. Just like the Newfoundland dog in Peter Pan,” Grandpa said.
First of all, Noelle was shocked that her grandfather knew anything about Peter Pan, let alone the name and breed of the dog. And second, why was he being so unforgivably rude?
Not that she needed to intervene. Nana was giving her grandfather a look that would have felled a lesser man—or made a train take a dirt road!
“Mrs. Sutton to you,” she said.
He flinched and Noelle saw what the problem was. He’d felt judged at Nana’s first insinuation that the dog—and its kisses—were dirty. Noelle had a terrible feeling this would not go well.
“Luggage?” Grandpa asked stiffly.
Aidan turned away from them and began to unload the helicopter. For a man who was CEO of a very large company, and moved in the rarefied circles of the very rich and very famous, he seemed every bit as strong as her grandfather. How was that possible when her grandfather was a hardworking man of the land?
With no conversation between them, Aidan and her grandfather filled the back of the side-by-side with quite a large number of suitcases and parcels, and then in went the dog, and Nana and Tess.
“Out of room,” Grandpa said, happily, his hurt feelings put aside for now. He took the driver’s seat. “You two will have to walk.” And then he roared away with a wave of his hand, leaving her standing there in a cloud of snow with Aidan Phillips.
It was obvious there was no room on that vehicle. It made sense that Noelle and Aidan would be left to walk, being neither the youngest nor the oldest of the group.
And yet if someone was looking for evidence of an ulterior motive, it would seem almost embarrassingly obvious that her grandfather had engineered an opportunity to throw them together, alone.
Aidan shoved his hands deep in his pockets and gazed off at the snow-capped mountains, something tight and closed in his face.
She could smell the leather of his jacket in the cold air, and a faint and seductive scent, subtle as only the most expensive of colognes managed to be.
“I’m having a bit of trouble getting my head around all this,” she said, her voice strained.
“As am I,” he returned coolly.
“I’m not going to pretend I don’t know who you are, though I suspect my grandfather doesn’t have a clue. I work in Clerical for a small oil company in Calgary, so I know the basics of who is who in the oil industry. I know you are the CEO of the Calgary-based Wrangler Oil.”
“And that I was married to Sierra Avanguard?” he asked quietly, his gaze disconcertingly direct on her face.
“Of course, that, too.”
“I don’t want any pictures of Tess showing up on social media,” he said. “Or anywhere else.”
It was said formidably, an order.
Really, was it unreasonable? He didn’t know her. He was just laying the ground rules. But he was also her grandfather’s guest, and it seemed a breach of her grandfather’s hospitality for Aidan to feel it was necessary to say this.
“That’s fine,” she said, matching his cool tone. “I don’t want any pictures of my grandfather surfacing, either. I’m sure his privacy is as important to him as yours is to you.”
He looked stunned. Obviously, if he had ever been put in his place before, it had been a long time ago.
He tilted his head at her, and looked a little more deeply. Reluctant amusement tickled around the line of that sinfully sensual mouth and sparked in his eyes for a second.
“Maybe he should stay off I-Sell, then,” he suggested.
“My grandfather does not have a clue what the repercussions of putting his invitation in a virtual world could be,” Noelle said. “I’m afraid I would have dissuaded him, had he confided his Old-Fashioned Country Christmas plans in me.”
“Ah.”
Noelle wondered if she should tell him there might be others coming. But were