Aussie Rules

Chapter 1

If you asked Melanie Anderson, nothing was sexier than flying. Not an eighty-five mile-per-hour ride in a Ferrari, not any chick flick out there, nothing, not even men. Not that she had anything against the penis-carrying gender, but flying was where it was at for Mel, and had been since the tender age of four, when she’d constructed wings out of cardboard and jumped out of a tree on a dare. Unfortunately, that first time the ground got in her way, breaking her fall.

And her ankle.

Her second try had come at age eight, when she’d leapt off her granny’s second-story deck into a pile of fallen leaves. No broken ankle this time, but she did receive a nice contusion to the back of the head.

By age twelve, a time when most girls discovered boys and their toys, Mel had discovered airplanes, and had taken a job sweeping for tips at a local airport just to be near them. Maybe because her own home never seemed happy, maybe because she didn’t have much else to look forward to, but the magic of flying was all she ever dreamed about.

She wanted to be a pilot. And not just any pilot, but a kick-ass pilot who could fly anywhere, anytime, and look cool while doing it.

Now she was twenty-six and she’d pulled it all off. She ran her own charter service: Anderson Air. That Anderson Air consisted of a single Cessna 172 and a not-exactly-air-worthy Hawker was another matter altogether. Having fueled her dreams from cardboard wings to titanium steel made her proud as hell of herself. Now, if only she could pay her bills, things would be just about perfect, but money, like man-made orgasms, remained in short supply.

“Mel! Mel, sweetie, the oven is kaput again!”

Mel sighed as she walked through the lobby of North Beach Airport, a small, privately owned, fixed-base operation. The cozy, sparsely decorated place was dotted with worn leather couches and low, beat-up coffee tables and potted palm trees-low maintenance to the extreme. A couple of the walls were glass, looking out onto the tarmac and the two large hangars, one of which housed the maintenance department and the other the overnight tie-down department. Beyond that lay a string of fourteen smaller hangars, all rentals. And beyond that, Santa Barbara and the Pacific Ocean, where Mel could routinely find her line guys and aircraft mechanic riding the waves on their surfboards instead of doing their job.

The far wall held a huge map of the world, dotted with different colored pushpins designating the places where she and everyone else had flown to on various chartered flights. Red pins dominated. Mel was red, of course, and just looking at the map made her smile with pride.

Just past the map, the wall jutted out, opening up into the Sunshine Café, an ambitious name for five round tables and a small bar/nook, behind which was a stove, oven, microwave, and refrigerator, all crammed into six hundred square feet and painted a bright sunshine yellow. On the walls hung photos, all of planes, and all gorgeously shot from the ground’s viewpoint.

Charlene Stone stood in the middle of the kitchen nook, bottle-dyed maroon hair piled on top of her head, her black lip gloss a perfect match to her black fingernails. She’d turned forty this year and wore a T-shirt that read TWENTY WAS GOOD BUT FORTY IS BETTER, and a pair of short shorts that rivaled Daisy Duke’s. As the eighties had been Char’s favorite decade to date, she had Poison blaring from a boom box on the counter while staring into the oven. “I can’t get my muffins going,” she said in her Alabama drawl.

“I thought I was your muffin, baby.”

This from Charlene’s husband, Al, the photographer who’d taken the pictures on the walls, who despite being forty himself had never outgrown his horny twenties. Medium height, built like the boxer he’d once been, he waggled a brow and grinned.

They’d been married forever, had in fact raised two kids while they’d still been kids themselves, but they had empty-nest syndrome now, and were currently revisiting their honeymoon days-meaning they talked about sex often, had sex often, and talked about it some more.

“People come here for my muffins,” Charlene said, and smacked Al’s chest.

“I love your muffins.”

“You’re just kissing up now.”

This brought out a big, hopeful grin. “No, but I’d like to.” He shifted close, put his hands on Char’s hips. “Kiss up, and then down…”

Char shot Mel a long look. “Men are dogs.”

Mel tended to agree with that assessment but she knew enough to keep her tongue. “I’ll get the oven fixed.”

“Oh, honey, that’d be great. I know you’re swamped and this is the last thing you need.”

Yep, on the list of things Mel didn’t need, the oven going on the blink fell right behind a hole in her head. “We need the oven. I’ll get it fixed ASAP.”

“Good, because if I keep disappointing the customers, we aren’t going to be able to pay our rent this month. Sally will freak.”

Ah, yes, the elusive Sally.

Sally was the owner of North Beach Airport, and everyone’s boss, from fueling to maintenance to hangaring. Mel herself rented space from Sally for Anderson Air and in return for a lower fee managed the whole airport for Sally. Since Sunshine Café happened to be one of the few profitable segments of North Beach, the broken oven fell into Mel’s already-overflowing pot of responsibilities. She pulled the radio off the clip on her belt to call their fix-it guy, who sometimes fixed things, and sometimes didn’t. Mostly didn’t. “I’ll get Ernest.”

Charlene sighed.

“Yeah, yeah.” Mel brought the radio up to her mouth. “Ernest, come to the café, please.”

No answer, which was not a big surprise. No one was sure exactly how old Ernest was but he’d been at North Beach as long as Mel could remember. According to other sources, he’d been around since the dawn of time. Only thing was, he was grumpy as an old goat and was rarely anywhere he should be when Mel needed him.

Like now.

“He’s probably rescuing a spider.” To Al’s credit, he said this with a straight face.

Ernest loved spiders. He actually carried around a special species book in his back pocket so that he could characterize each and every spider he came across, and here just off the Santa Barbara coast, in the shadows of the Santa Ynez Mountains, he came across a lot. The only thing he loved more than spiders was computers. The man, strange as it seemed, was a computer god. He probably could have gotten a job anywhere for more money, but undoubtedly he couldn’t nap on the job anywhere else so he stayed at North Beach.

“Ernest,” Mel said again into the radio. “Come in, please. Ernest, come in.”

“No need to shout, missy.”

Mel nearly jumped out of her skin at the low, craggily, grumpy voice behind her. Ernest stood there, all five feet of him packed with attitude, from his steel-toed boots to his greasy trousers and long-sleeved, button-down plaid, to his bad comb-over, which was rumpled now, telling her he’d been sleeping in the storage closet again. The crease on his cheek that resembled the side of a can of oil was a dead giveaway. “The oven’s down,” she told him.

“Eh?” He cupped a hand to his bad ear. “Speak up!”

Mel would have fired his curmudgeonly ass a long time ago except she couldn’t afford anyone else. “Oven! Broken!”

“You never talk loud enough,” he grumbled. “Sally’s the only one who talks loud enough.”

Ernest hadn’t actually spoken directly to Sally in years, but arguing with the man was like betting against the house.

Never going to win.

“Can you fix the oven?” she yelled in his good ear.

“I’ll fix the damn oven soon as I fix the damn fuel pump!”

Mel’s stomach dropped. “What’s wrong with the gas pump?” Muffins they could live without. Getting fuel into their customers’ aircrafts, some of which landed here daily for the fuel alone, they could not.

“Nothing I can’t handle.” Ernest was already walking away, his pants slipping down because he had no hips to hold them on. He stopped, hitched them up, then kept moving.

The radio squawked with the announcement of an unscheduled plane arriving in twenty minutes. Mel waited for one of the linemen, Ritchie or Kellan, to respond to the news, but neither did. Once again she lifted the radio to her lips and called for her employees.

No response.

“Gotta love those brain-dead college students,” Char said.

Mel resisted the urge to smack her own forehead with the radio. “If those two are in the back hangar getting high again, I’m going to kill them.”

“We’re falling apart at the seams.” Charlene hugged Mel. “Look, honey, you’ve got your hands full. I’ll go see what I can wrangle up without the oven, ’kay?”

“I’ll get on it,” Mel promised her just as the Poison CD ended.

For one blessed moment silence reigned before a new CD clicked on. Journey. “I just wish we could give this place the makeover it needs,” Char yelled over the music.

Mel wished that, too. They were making ends meet, and they all had jobs, two really good things, but no one was getting rich, that was for sure.

Not that she wanted to be rich, but comfortable would be nice…

Al followed his wife into the kitchen, his hand sliding down her back to squeeze her ass.

“Albert Edward Stone!” Charlene said in her most Southern-genteel voice. “If you think that instead of cooking muffins, I’m going to ‘cook’ with you-”

“Come on, just a quickie-”

“That’s what you got just last night!”

“Hey, that wasn’t a quickie, that was some of my best work!”

Mel covered her ears and walked away. She didn’t need the reminder that everyone was getting quickies and she was not. So it’d been a long time for her, so what? People could live without sex.

Or so the rumor went.

“Mel? Mel, are you around here somewhere?”

At Dimi’s voice drifting through the lobby from the front receptionist desk, Mel changed direction and headed that way, wondering, what now?

Dimi Wilmington sat perched on the edge of her desk, head tilted as she studied the view out the window of sweeping coastlines bisected by the magnificent Santa Ynez Mountains and a typical low-lying morning fog. Willowy, with legs long past the legal limit, Dimi had a body and face that could launch a thousand ships, make the fat lady sing, and put grown men on their knees to worship at her altar.

She used them to her full advantage, too, rarely coming across a man she didn’t like-which probably explained the new whisker burn along her jaw.

Terrific. Everyone was getting lucky except Mel.

It was said she and Dimi were night and day, a modern-day odd couple. Mel being the anal one. The one who gathered worries and stress like moss on a tree. She also tended to gather the heartaches and responsibilities of others much like a fraught mother hen, bitching after all her little chicks, pecking at them until they did as she wanted them to.

Dimi was more a live-and-let-live type of soul. She cared, deeply, she’d just rather light incense and meditate than actually solve a problem. She was both a thorn in Mel’s side and her closest confidant.

She wore a multicolored, filmy, gauzy miniskirt and a snug, white cap-sleeved tee with a pink heart in the center that brought the eyes to immediate attention of her brand, spanking-new breasts. But the thing that never failed to amaze Mel about Dimi was that she could go all day and that bright, clean white tee would stay bright, clean white.

Mel didn’t even bother to look down at her coveralls, already filthy from just a quick maintenance check on the Cessna. “What’s the problem?”

Over the steam of her herbal tea and the faint smoke from the incense she’d lit, Dimi shot Mel a wry smile.

Right. What wasn’t a problem was a more likely question.

The two of them went back a long ways. As teens, Mel had swept and assisted in the maintenance department, and Dimi had answered phones. Each had been far more at home here than either of their decidedly not Leave It to Beaver homes.

Sally Wells, a woman with more dream than cash, had taken them under her wing-Sally, who’d lived as she wanted, wild and free with men and fun aplenty. As their first real role model, Mel and Dimi had both worshipped the ground Sally walked on; Mel appreciating Sally’s directness, the way she ran her own show and the world be damned, but for Dimi the worship had gone deeper. She’d wanted to be Sally.

Unfortunately, Sally had been unavailable to them for a long time now, and without her around, there was no one for Mel to share the stress of holding all this up with. No one except Dimi. “Tell me,” she said to Dimi now. “Believe me, the day can’t get worse.”

Dimi put her hand over Mel’s. “You look tired. You’re not drinking that tea I gave you.”

“I hate tea. And it’s just stress.”

“You only hate tea because I tell you it has healing abilities and you think that’s a crock of shit.” She sighed. “Money’s tight again.”

“You mean still. Money’s tight still.”

“That’s all right.” Dimi stood and, primping a little, played with the hem of her skirt, adjusted her top. “We have a couple of hot ones coming in today.”

“Hot ones” being Dimi-code for cute, rich customers.

“What we have is an unscheduled,” Mel said. “I’ve gotta get out there and do tie-down because God knows where Ritchie or Kellan is.”

Dimi pulled out a compact and checked her gloss, ran her tongue over her teeth. “I’ll do it.”

“Uh-huh.” Mel eyed the short, short skirt, which at every move flirted with revealing Dimi’s crotch. “You’re going to go get your hands dirty, risk that manicure, and tie down a plane? In that? ”

Dimi smiled. “Should get me a big tip, don’t you think?”

“That’s not even funny.”

“Hey, I’m going to hit on them anyway, might as well get something for it.”

“Stop it.” Mel knew Dimi was only kidding. Or half-kidding anyway. Dimi enjoyed men the way some women enjoy breathing. “I have enough to worry about.”

Dimi sighed and stroked a long, wayward strand of hair from Mel’s face. “We’ll be fine, hon. You’ll come up with something, you always do.”

Right. She’d just wave her magic wand and figure it all out. And while she was at it, she’d conjure up a happily ever after for all of them as well. “The oven’s down, the gas pump is acting up, and morale’s getting low.”

“They need a phone call from Sally.”

Their gazes met for a long beat.

“You do it this time,” Dimi whispered.

“Actually, I was hoping you could, from-” Mel broke off when Ernest appeared out of nowhere, shuffling past the desk, pulling his noisy cart stacked haphazardly with tools and the ever-present jar for liberating spiders.

Mel didn’t know how many times she’d asked him not to walk through the lobby like that, to instead go around the outside of the hangar, where customers wouldn’t have to see him, but he never listened. At least not to the stuff she wanted him to. “Ernest?”

He’d stopped to stand in front of the vending machine next to the wall map, scratching his head as he contemplated rows of candy bars. “Yeah?”

“Did you by any chance ever clean out that maintenance hangar, the one Danny wants to stock new parts in?”

“Not yet. Busy, you know.”

Right. He looked really busy. She and Dimi waited until he’d made his selection, shoved the candy bar into his pocket next to his spider book, and left.

“I hate the secrets,” Dimi whispered.

Yeah, and Mel just loved them. Not. She looked at the time. “I gotta go meet that flight. Then I have a flight myself, to LA.”

“You’re changing your clothes first, right?”

“Yes,” Mel said with irritation. “Of course.”

“You say that like you don’t regularly forget to change from mechanic to pilot. Daily.”

Mel rolled her eyes. “I’ll be back by two.”

Dimi nodded, looked wistfully out the window. “You’re so lucky.”

“Lucky?” Mel laughed in disbelief. “How exactly?”

“You get to get out of here.”

“But you hate to fly,” Mel reminded her. “You throw up every time.”

“I know, I didn’t mean…” Dimi searched for words. “Look, don’t you ever…just want to get in the plane and, I don’t know, fly off into the sunset?”

Mel just stared at her incredulously. “Never to return?”

“Well…yeah.”

North Beach was Mel’s home, her life, and no, she’d never ever thought about going away and never coming back, and she’d always figured Dimi felt just the same. “Okay, what’s wrong?”

Dimi lifted a stack of mail. “Just the usual. Here’s your incoming pile. Bills and more bills, if you’re wondering, though what’s the point of opening them, we still can’t pay last month’s.”

“Officially no one can even bug us until…” She glanced at the desk calendar. July ninth. “Tomorrow, the tenth.” Oh, God.

“Also we need fuel for the pump, and they won’t deliver it without their bill being paid.” Dimi leaned over and lit the three candles lining the front of her reception desk. The crystals on her wrists jangled, as did the ones dangling from her ears. The scent of vanilla began to fill the air, joining the incense she’d already lit on the credenza behind her.

“You’re going to make people hungry,” Mel said. “And the oven’s down.”

“I’m going to make people feel warm and cozy and at home,” Dimi corrected, and smoothed her skirt. “Helps our karma.”

Mel wanted to say that she didn’t believe in karma or fate, that they each made their own, but the sound of a plane coming in ended the conversation. “They’re early.” She understood early, she herself was always compulsively early, but it meant she had to run through the lobby, grabbing an extra orange vest off a hook as she went, slipping into the lineman’s gear as she moved quickly across the tarmac to greet the plane.

The Gulfstream was a beauty, and her pilot’s heart gave one vivacious kick of envy as the plane swept in for a honey of a landing, perfectly controlled by a pilot who was clearly a master of his craft.

When the engine shut off, Mel moved in, squinting against the early chill and wind, using the tie-down blocks to hold the plane steady, her mind wandering as she worked. The oven had gone out twice this month. She needed to look into the cost of a new one. The linemen clearly needed another ass chewing regarding responsibilities, specifically theirs. And then there was the little matter of fuel. She’d have to find a way to pay that bill pronto.

God, her brain hurt.

Finished with the tie-down, she straightened, patted the sleek side of the airplane just for the pleasure of touching it, and blew a stray strand of hair out of her face, wishing she had put on an extra layer of insulation beneath her coveralls because despite it being summer, the early-morning wind off the Pacific cut right through her.

From the other side of the aircraft, the door opened. A set of stairs released. A moment later, two long legs emerged, clad in dark blue trousers, clean work boots, and topped by a most excellent ass. Not averse to enjoying a good view, Mel stayed in place, watching as the rest of the man was revealed. White button-down shirt, sleeves shoved up above his elbows, tawny hair past his collar, blowing in the wind.

Yep, there were a few perks to this job, one of them catering right to Mel’s soft spot.

Pilots. This one looked more like a movie star pretending to be a pilot, but you wouldn’t hear her complaining. And just like that, from the inside out, she began to warm up nicely.

The man held a clipboard, which he was looking at as he turned, ducking beneath the nose of the plane to come toe to toe with her, a lock of tawny hair falling carelessly over his forehead, his eyes shaded behind aviator sunglasses.

And right then and there, every single lust-filled thought drained out of Mel’s head to make room for one hollow, horror-filled one.

No.

It couldn’t be. After all this time, he wouldn’t dare show his face.

His only concession to the surprise was a raised brow as he lifted his sunglasses, his sea green gaze taking its sweet time, touching over her own battered work boots, the dirty coveralls, the fiery, uncontrollable red hair she’d piled on top of her head without thought to her appearance. “Look at you,” he murmured. “All grown up. G’day, Mel.”

Yeah, he’d grown up, too. He was bigger, broader, and taller than the last time she’d seen him, but she couldn’t mistake the smile-of pure, devilish, wicked trouble.

Australian accent, check.

Heart-stopping green eyes and long lashes to match the long, thick tumble of light brown hair falling in said eyes…check and check.

Curved mouth that could invoke huge waves of passion or fury…CHECK. “Bo Black,” she whispered, getting cold all over again.

Cocking his head, he let out a slow smile. “In the flesh, darlin’. Miss me?”

Miss him? Yeah, she’d missed him. Like one might miss a close call with a hand grenade. “Get off my property.”

As if he had all the time in the damn world, he leaned back against his plane, slapping the clipboard lightly against his thigh. “No can do, mate.”

“Oh, yes you can.” Staggering at a strong gust of wind, she planted her feet more firmly as she pointed to his plane. “You just get your Aussie ass back inside that heap of junk and fly it the hell out of here.”

“Heap of junk?” Instead of being insulted, he laughed good over that, the sound scraping at her belly because it’d been a long time since she’d heard it.

Of course, she hadn’t seen him in ten years, and the last time she had, he’d been eighteen to her sixteen, all long and lanky, not yet grown into his body.

He was grown into it now, damn him, and how. Reaching back, he lovingly stroked the steel of the plane, making the entirely inappropriate thought take root in her brain: did he stroke a woman like that?

Clearly she needed caffeine.

And a smack upside the head.

“You know exactly what kind of plane this is,” he noted easily. “And how valuable.”

“Fine,” she granted. “Your toy is bigger than mine, you win. Now you can go.”

Tossing his head back, he laughed again, and she made no mistake-he was laughing at her.

Nothing new.

The first time she’d ever laid eyes on him, he’d been swaggering through the lobby, having arrived in town with his father, Eddie Black, an antique plane restorer and dealer. Tall and teenage rangy, Bo had smiled at Mel and said, “Hello, mate,” and she’d fallen-both figuratively and literally-as hard as her tender sixteen-year-old heart could, tripping over her own two feet, landing in a potted palm, amusing everyone in the lobby but her.

The second time she’d seen him had been when she’d opened a stock closet to grab something for maintenance, and had found him in there, leaning back against a shelving unit, a pretty blonde customer wrapped around him like a pretzel, straddling his hips. Bo had had his hand beneath her short skirt, doing things Mel had only been able to imagine.

In fact, she’d done just that for many, many uncomfortably sweaty nights afterward.

He’d been so cool, so typically laid-back. When she’d only stood there at the storage door, frozen in shock, Bo had lazily lifted his head, eyes heavy and sexy-lidded as he’d smiled that killer smile. “No worries. Just lock the door for me, darlin’?”

No worries. Right. She’d just lock the door. Only everything inside her head wanted to stay, wanted to beg, “Can I be next?”

That had so shocked her, the unexpected longing, that she’d lost it.

Completely.

Lost.

It.

Which was her only explanation for why she’d blindly reached out, grabbed the first thing her fingers closed over-an air filter off a shelf-and…and beaned him on the head with it.

Not her proudest moment, but she blamed her red hair and the temperament that went with it. Dimi had always been warning her that someday the temper would catch up to the fire in her hair and that she was going to piss off the wrong person.

Only Bo hadn’t gotten pissed, he’d laughed.

Laughed.

Which in turn had made her feel stupid. God, she resented that.

The last time she’d seen him had been several months later, on the day his thieving, conning father had vanished.

The day her life had changed forever.

“Get out,” she said now.

That sexy little smile still in place, Bo slowly pulled out a folded piece of paper from the breast pocket of his white shirt.

She tried to read it but he held the document just out of reach, forcing her to lean in. As close as she was now, she could see his eyes weren’t a solid sea green, but flecked with gold specks. This close she could draw in the scent of him-one hundred percent male. This close she could read the paper:

Quit Deed.

A quit deed to North Beach. Her stomach dropped. “How did you-”

“I recently found a box of my father’s things, with a safe deposit box key.” His eyes were no longer smiling. “This was in there.”

“My God.”

He nodded curtly. “Yeah, that’s right, Mel. North Beach, and everything in it, is mine. Guess that means you, too.”