Aussie Rules. Jill Shalvis
The Novels of Jill Shalvis
Get a Clue
Out of This World
Smart and Sexy
Strong and Sexy
Superb and Sexy
Instant Attraction
Instant Gratification
Instant Temptation
Anthologies Featuring Jill
Bad Boys Southern Style
He's The One
Merry and Bright
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
Aussie Rules
JILL SHALVIS
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Teaser Chapter
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 W. 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2006 by Jill Shalvis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-61773-787-9 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-61773-787-9 (ebook)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2531-8
ISBN-10: 1-4967-2531-X
First Brava Trade Paperback Printing: June 2006
First Kensington Trade Paperback Printing: June 2019
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Printed in the United States of America
Dear Reader,
Hey there, I wanted to thank you SO MUCH for buying a Shalvis classic romance! These books might predate the digital age, but they’re still super fun and sexy! We hope you enjoy this peek at my earlier work!
When I first came up with the idea for Aussie Rules (over a decade ago now—where did the time go??), I was working at a small, private airport where I got to watch cute pilots come and go all day long. ☺ I just kept wondering … why not set a romance in a place like this! Oh, the fun I had plotting this story and coming up with all the quirky characters. Hope you enjoy!
Best wishes and happy reading!
Jill Shalvis
www.jillshalvis.com
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 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