Jill Shalvis - Aussie Rules

© 2006

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.