Aussie Rules Read online

  Both Dimi and Mel gasped and shrank back against each other.

  “A daddy longlegs, and he’s harmless,” Ernest said. “Harmless, you big babies. Plus he eats the bad guys.” He waggled a finger in Mel’s face. “He’s one of the good guys, and if I’d cleaned the closets out like you’d wanted, missy, I’d have ended up killing him.”

  “Um, maybe you could take him outside. Where there are no closets at all.”

  “I plan to.” He snatched up the jar. “Your e-mail problem?”

  Mel turned a wary gaze on him. “Yeah?”

  “Spam mail. Can’t trace it to one person.”

  It’d taken him long enough. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “That was the good news.”

  She blinked. “And the bad?”

  “This morning? I was the first in.” He slapped an envelope down on the counter. It had MEL typed across the front, and had been opened. “This was taped to the front door.”

  Mel slid out the piece of paper. It read: I warned you.

  She eyed Ernest. “Why was the envelope opened?”

  “Because I opened it.”

  She felt a muscle beneath her eye begin to twitch. “I realize that. But it’s addressed to me.”

  “Maybe it was important,” he said. “Maybe it was from you.”

  “It says Mel. Implying it’s to me.”

  His gaze cut to the damning evidence, then he hitched a bony shoulder. “I’ve got work.”

  When he’d walked away Mel stared in disbelief at Dimi.

  “Forget him, call the police,” Dimi said, and shuddered at the spider. “I wish he’d have taken that thing—”

  Ernest came back, and snatched the jar.

  Dimi let out a breath. When he left again, Mel stared down at the note. “Yeah. Probably the police is a good idea.” She handed the note to Dimi. “See anything unusual about this?”

  “It’s got our logo on it.” Dimi looked down at the paper. “I ordered this paper from Staples. These pads are everywhere inside this place—” She froze. “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah.” Mel felt vaguely ill. “It was written from inside the airport.”

  “Mel. A little freaked out here.”

  “Join the club.” Mel had always been so sure she’d known what had happened with Sally, that Eddie had come along and swindled Sally out of her money, and also the deed to North Beach. That Sally had gone after him, and had destroyed her love for her life here in the process.

  But now her disappearance signified something else, at least to Mel, and it hurt to think the things she was thinking. “Okay, I’ve got to go.”

  “Let me just cancel your flight,” Dimi said. “And then we’ll—”

  “I’m not going to cancel my flight.”

  “You’re going to fly? With him?”

  “The note didn’t come from him.” Mel strode toward the tarmac door. “As for the flight, it’s on the schedule. It’s mine, and I don’t cancel.”

  “Mel—”

  “Not canceling,” she called back, her gaze on the tall, gorgeous, enigmatic man on the tarmac waiting for her. “I need the money.”

  “I think it’s more than that.”

  Mel turned back and faced Dimi’s pale, horrified expression. “What more?”

  “Face it, Mel. You’re falling for him.”

  Mel’s heart tripped, giving her away, at least to herself. “I’ll be on the radio.”

  And she strode out the door.

  “I realize we’ve put a moratorium on trusting each other,” Mel said to Bo shortly after takeoff.

  Bo took his gaze off the horizon and eyed the woman who until now had pretended he wasn’t on the same flight with her.

  She looked away, down at the pristine wilderness of the Channel Islands beneath them, a rugged chain about twenty-five miles offshore to her left, shimmering on the horizon. “But there’s, um, something you should know,” she said.

  Her aviator sunglasses blocked her eyes from him, leaving him little clue as to what she was thinking. “What is that?”

  “About the two e-mails.”

  “You found out who they’re from?”

  “No.” She licked her lips. Checked her altitude even though they were perfect. “But it was three e-mails.”

  “Three.”

  “And I also got two letters. One in the mail, one taped to the front door of the airport this morning. It said, and I quote, ‘I warned you.’ ’’

  Bo stared at her, a barrage of emotions hitting him like a one-two punch. Renewed fury that she’d been threatened at all, frustration that she hadn’t seen fit to tell him, and a fear for her safety that felt a little too huge for his own comfort. “Did you call the police?”

  “Soon as I get back.”

  He had to breathe for a minute. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “Now.”

  He shook his head, pinched the bridge of his nose, and wondered why, when he’d been a patient man all of his life, that this woman seemed to drive him to the very edge of sanity without even trying.

  They fell silent again, Mel distracted by reports in her headset of unfriendly weather over the Bay Area, Bo by the passengers, who were asking him to find them an old biplane for Mr. Hutton’s father, who used to fly one. After that they needed him to pour them drinks and check the temperature, then to get the Mrs. a pillow for her stiff neck. Bo resisted the urge to tell them to do all this themselves, it was Mel’s business to make sure they were content. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to deal with them, but more that he wanted to shake the hell out of Mel.

  “You make a pretty flight attendant,” Mel deadpanned when he finally came back to the cockpit.

  He looked over at her and smiled. “Maybe I’m enjoying getting your butt, your very nice butt, I might add—out of a sling.”

  “You did not save my butt.”

  “Really.” He hitched a shoulder toward the back, where the upscale, elegant couple was engrossed—finally—in their respective laptops, complete with headphones. He imagined they were listening to something classical, while checking their stock portfolios. “Because I’m pretty sure I did.”

  Her jaw tightened, but that might have been the storm on the horizon, which they’d been carefully eyeing for the past half hour. It was going to be a hell of an issue for the return flight.

  Not that he’d mind an overnight stay in San Francisco. He could find fun and entertainment wherever he went. But truthfully, Mel was providing most of his entertainment at the moment. God, the way her eyes flashed at her every single thought. She eyed the horizon, and the churning gray and black clouds there, then swore beneath her breath.

  “Did you know you wear your thoughts out on your sleeve for everyone to see?” he asked conversationally.

  She glanced at him, her eyes pissy. “Really? What am I thinking now?”

  He laughed softly at the fuck-you glare. “Ah, that’s too easy.”

  Her mouth actually quirked in an almost smile before she turned away to once again eye the storm, then her instruments.

  “We’re going to be okay.”

  She nodded. “I know. But getting back—”

  “Yeah, we’re not going to get back. Not tonight.”

  “We are not staying overnight.”

  “What’s the matter, you afraid of a little sleepover?”

  At that, she tossed back her head and laughed. He already knew he enjoyed her temper. He enjoyed her thought processes, too, and he most definitely enjoyed her body. But her laugh. The woman had a laugh that reached out and grabbed him by the throat. And south of that as well—his heart.

  And also south of that…Yeah, he thought, she slayed him through and through.

  “Funny that you accuse me of being afraid of a sleepover,” she said. “When you’re the one who stood with a couch between us, because you were afraid I was going to rip your clothes off.”

  And yet still his clothes had come off. “You think I was afraid?”