“You going to offer to help me get un-hard-up?” he asked.
“No! And this isn’t funny,” she said when he laughed.
“Well, actually, it is a little.”
She wouldn’t look at him as she looked down at her feet, because her toe hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.
Again he pushed away from the plane and came close, too close. “Char thinks I’m still carrying a torch for you.”
“She has a heart of gold and you took advantage of her to get information.”
“She does have a heart of gold,” he agreed, not denying the charge. “But I have a feeling you’re the real heart bleeder here.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve seen you; working late, working your ass off and your knuckles to the bone. Literally.” He smiled when she rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen you mother Kellan and Ritchie, and listen to Ernest give you yet another reason why he can’t clean that damn closet you want him to clean. You help Charlene when she gets busy, you get Al photography work with a customer…face it. You love these guys, all of them, and you treat them like family because your own failed you so badly.”
“Leave my past out of this.” At least he hadn’t figured out that her bleeding-heart syndrome didn’t extend to her social life, and that she hadn’t had sex in-
“I would, but then Char told me how you don’t date much.” He tipped her chin. “You hard up, too, Mel?”
She pointed her wrench at him, put it to his chest to make sure he kept his distance. “Not that hard up.”
“I don’t know, you nearly went off like a rocket when I kissed you-”
“Hey, there were two of us going off like rockets, thank you very much!”
He grinned. “Me thinks the lady protest too much.”
“You are impossible!”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.” As she spun to limp away, he caught her, pulling her back around. “What do you suppose it says about me that your snarling attitude turns me on?” He put his other hand on her arm, holding her. “Stand still, darlin’, I want to look at you.”
“You are one sick man.”
“I meant your toe.” Crouching down, he lifted up the pants leg on her coveralls.
Oh, God, had she shaved in the past week? “I’m fine,” she said, trying to pull away.
He looked up, his hair falling across his forehead, his eyes now level with her belly. An undeniably erotic position. “Yeah, you are,” he said softly.
She stepped back, putting some space between them, turning away while he straightened.
“This place,” he said to her back. “It really means a lot to you.”
She closed her eyes, struggled to keep her voice even. “You shouldn’t believe everything Charlene says. She’s working with cooking sherry.”
“Are you denying you care deeply about North Beach, that you put everything of yourself into it?”
To this, she said nothing. She couldn’t, or she’d give herself away.
“Odd that you’d do so much for just a job,” he continued, and she could feel him watching her. “Why, when Sally knew this place wasn’t hers.”
“I don’t know that.” Not yet.
“Why would I lie?”
She turned back to him. “After what your father did to Sally…?
In a blink, all hints of heat and amusement vanished, leaving in their place a cold, tough, impenetrable hostility.
“I just don’t see how Sally could be the bad guy,” she murmured, willing him to try to understand. “You’re holding the deed. If Sally swindled your father, as you say, then where’s the money? The plane?”
“Where’s Sally?” he countered.
They stared at each other, at an impasse. Finally, Mel conceded, and buried her head back in the engine compartment, going back to the only sure thing in her life: work.
Chapter 11
Bo watched Mel busy herself in the plane again, and decided she had the sweetest ass he’d ever seen in a set of grungy brown coveralls.
But as he stood there watching her work on the Hawker, he was filled with so much frustration he didn’t know what to do with himself.
She didn’t believe him.
No one believed him that Sally had stolen from his father, that his father had been a good, kind man who couldn’t have conned a fly-much less a woman.
Putting his fist through a wall sounded good. So did dragging Mel down to the floor and stripping off those coveralls to find the soft, warm woman he knew hid in there somewhere. Oh, yeah, getting her to whimper and pant his name in hungry desperate need would go a long way toward dissolving his temper, that was for damn sure.
But chances were she wouldn’t go easy. She’d probably fight and claw and bite, and though that might be fun another time, he wasn’t in the mood for that kind of thing at the moment. At the moment, he wanted a soft, warm, willing woman, one who’d wrap him in her arms and offer to kiss his hurt away.
As if she’d ever do that. Because it turned out she was holding a grudge against him for his father’s sins.
Sins his father hadn’t even committed.
Damn, he was tired. Tired of the battle. He’d come here with some half-baked idea of getting his justice, of selling out from beneath Sally’s feet. But now he was thinking of something else entirely.
This woman, the most troublesome, annoying, frustrating woman he’d ever met. “Mel.”
She didn’t bother to answer. She still had her head buried in the Hawker. She was filthy, smelled like fuel and oil, and God he must have hit his head at some point this morning because she still revved his engine.
“Shit on a stick,” she muttered.
He stuck his head in next to hers, surveyed both the situation and the spot of grease on Mel’s nose-wisely not mentioning the latter-and said, “I can get the bolt off.”
She turned her head and leveled those icy eyes on him. “Yeah, but it’ll cost me.”
He wished he understood the female mind better because he had no idea what she was thinking other than wishing he was far, far away, preferably dead.
“Ratchet, please.” She jerked her head toward the toolbox.
Willing to play along, he backed out of the engine and peered into the toolbox. “Not here.”
“Try the parts closet, there’s a box of tools there on the floor.”
He turned toward the closet, opened the door.
“Sorry, there are no blondes in there,” Mel called out.
“What?”
“You don’t remember the second time I ever saw you?” she asked. “Right there in that closet, banging some blonde?”
He looked at the shelves. He didn’t often think about the past. It was filled with memories best forgotten. His mother’s cold voice and colder heart. Eddie’s plane habit, which caused frequent moves from one small airport to another…
Then, Sally, the woman Eddie had lost his head and then his heart to, despite the fact she didn’t possess one.
A heart, that is. Brains, Sally had in spades, and it hadn’t taken her long to sink her hungry claws into the love- struck Eddie, or his bank account.
Buh-bye savings account.
Buh-bye hopes and dreams.
And then, finally, buh-bye Eddie.
