Snowbound With The Single Dad

Aidan glared at her, though when he spoke, his voice was carefully controlled, milder than his glare. “I think I’m beginning to take a dislike to you, too.”

“Good!”

“Good,” he agreed. He continued, his voice softly sarcastic, “It’s setting up to be a very nice quiet Christmas in the country, after all.”

“Emphasis on quiet, since I won’t be speaking to you.”

“Starting anytime soon?” he asked silkily.

“Right now!”

“Good,” he said again.

She couldn’t resist. “Good,” she said with a curt nod. They strode along the path back to the house in a silence that bristled.

She watched out of the corner of her eye as he yanked his cell phone from his pocket and began scrolling furiously, walking at the same time. It took him a few seconds to realize it wasn’t going to work. He stopped.

“Is there cell service?” he asked tightly.

“We’re not speaking.”

“That’s childish.”

“You didn’t seem to think so a few minutes ago.”

“It’s just a yes or no,” he said.

“No.” She should not have felt nearly as gleeful about the look on his face as she did. Clearly the thought of not being joined to his world, where he was in control of everything and everybody—with the possible exception of his daughter—was causing him instant discomfort.

“Will there be cell service at the house?”

“No.”

“I’m expecting an important email. I have several calls I have to make.”

“Did you get cell service in the Finnish Lapland?”

“Actually, they take pride in their excellent cell service all across Finland.”

He managed to make that sound as if they had managed to be more bumpkin here than in one of the most remote places in the world.

Noelle had the sudden thought Tess’s string of Christmas disappointments might, at a level she would not yet be able to articulate—despite being five going on twenty-one—have had a lot more to do with her father’s ability to be absent while he was with her than the inadequacies of Disneyland or the Northern Lights.

“You can make the calls from his landline in the house,” she said, maybe more sharply than she intended. “And I guess you could go to the library in the village and check emails. That’s what my grandfather does. Mind you, he has to drive. You could take your helicopter. You could be there in minutes. Maybe even seconds! But it would cause a sensation. There would probably be that unwanted publicity involved.”

“You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?” He sounded hopeful. He was holding his phone out at arm’s length, squinting at it, willing service to appear.

“Do I look like the type of person who would pull your leg?”

He regarded her suspiciously, but didn’t 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.

CHAPTER FOUR (#u43ab6e6a-dc9b-58bf-afd9-ff3cab34d8b4)

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-guylook 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.