Chapter 1: Sofia’s Secret Penchant

I turned final on approach to Moffett Field’s runway 14L, and I knew it was going to be the first and final time I was going to land this baby at my old stomping grounds. Obviously, I also had to make at least one departure, but this was it as far as my operations from here would go from now on.

But let’s start with first things first. I am Ian O’Connor, born and bred in California, but of distant Irish ancestry and in more recent ancestry rather British than American, despite the fact that except for Canada and Mexico I had actually never seen anything outside the borders of the US of A at that point. How come, you may ask. Well, as far as I could work out our family history, my dad’s ancestors came from Cork in Ireland but they moved to Britain something like two-hundred years ago to become rich, upper class twits and spent the next two centuries marrying other upper class twits.

In 1979 my parents moved to America, because British workers at the time spent most of their days around burning rubbish bins being on strike, which was not an environment in which an IT company could flourish. They were dependent on other businesses going well. True to their hopes the business took off like a rocket once they had arrived and established themselves on the shores of California.

As a result of that we were loaded like Fort Knox and we all spoke with an almost comically posh British accent. Yes, even I talked like some middle aged twit blathering about in the House Of Commons, despite the fact that I had never set foot on British soil in all my eighteen-and-a-bit years of existence. It was my dad’s lasting legacy. Americanisms were strictly frowned upon in our home, and thus I ended up being the weird rich kid what spoke like a Brit despite being as American as oversized burgers or Coke served in buckets.

Mind you, it was not all bad. For some reason the girls really dug my accent, and around the age of fourteen I actually started to cultivate it. Not that it helped much with getting into any knickers, but I always had willing takers if I asked for a date. The not getting into any knickers bit didn’t really bother me anyway, at least not yet, as at the age of fifteen I discovered that I was a massive aviation geek, not very surprisingly, because dad had been one too.

Like all self-respecting businessmen with more cash than he could ever realistically spend, he had a private jet, and he needed it too, because by the mid-nineties his business was no longer restricted to Santa Clara Valley. He had also offices in Washington, Bristol in the UK and in Berlin, Germany. Unlike most other businessmen though, he flew the thing himself, and having been with him on many of those trips, I had caught the bug as well.

By the time I was seventeen I had a private pilot’s license and with some change he had found down the back of the sofa dad had bought me a second-hand Piper Saratoga in excellent nick. That was why I was not yet too concerned about bedding any ladies. I was too busy flying about the countryside whenever I had enough spare time. When other folks my age were out clubbing and shagging, I was shooting approaches into Billy Bob Cyrus Municipal Airfield in South Backwater Creek or any other god forsaken small airfield in the rural countryside...

Alas, it would all come to a devastating head one day about four months before my eighteenth birthday in 1998. I was coming home from a cross country flight out of Reno, when I saw the unmistakable sight of a downed plane from about eight thousand feed height. Just moments later air traffic control took me off my approach vector into Moffet Field and diverted me to San José International.

As I would learn later that day, the downed plane had been dad’s Falcon 900 with him and mum in it. I had lost both my parents in one accident. The cause was found relatively quickly. The maintenance company had botched the C check and the plane had gone down after a rudder hard-over, with no chance for dad to catch it as he was lacking the altitude and speed, being on approach to Moffett Field already.

As if that would make a bloody difference I took delivery of thirty eight million quid in damages. That money wasn’t going to bring my parents back, and we had more than enough dough to begin with, so I gave the whole package away to various charities. I didn’t want to have any money that was almost literally soaked in my parents’ blood.

For weeks, I didn’t go flying any more. My Saratoga was still stored in San José, racking up storage fees, and I didn’t give a damn until I got the kick up the backside that I so richly deserved and needed. It came from none other than Sofia, our live-in house maid.

Her real name was Zsófia, the Hungarian version of the name, but since she had tired of explaining her name every time, or watching government clerks drool all over their shirts trying to pronounce it, she had changed her name to the anglicised version Sofia after she had fled communist Hungary and found refuge in the US in 1988.

Sofia had been an upcoming equestrian talent in Hungary and had used her participation in a youth tournament in Canada to flee and seek asylum in the US at the age of just fifteen in 1988. Although communism in her home country fell only a little more than a year later, she had never returned, but still visited her parents regularly. They were still living in Hungary, now free of the shackles of the former regime.

About 2 months after the crash, she had sat me down and told me the story of how she fell off her horse for the first time. She had landed on her back and was unable to breathe for quite some time and she also ended up being very sore and hardly able to walk for two weeks. She never wanted to get anywhere near a horse, ever again. That was until her coach made her understand that she would live with that fear for the rest of her life, unless she got back on a horse again as soon as possible.

It didn’t take long for me to understand what she was trying to tell me in that cute Hungarian accent of hers. I had to get back behind the controls of my plane and see what it felt like, if nothing else, to try and not develop an irrational fear of flying. And so I found myself back behind the yoke of the Saratoga, ready to fly it back to Moffett field out of San José, where it had been in storage since the diversion. Needless to say, Sofia had been right. My fears and misgivings subsided as soon as I was back in the cockpit and by the time I lined up on short final into Moffett Field after a short ferry flight, I knew I wanted to be back in the skies as soon and as often as possible.

That’s how I left the airfield on my eighteenth birthday, not only reconciled with my love of flying, but also full of ideas about what I would want to do with that new-found enthusiasm. This state of mind continued until I came back home and my brain stopped functioning. When I entered the large mansion that now housed only Sofia and myself, I found her in a state that is commonly known as ‘being naked’. Well, strictly speaking, she was not entirely naked, as she wore high heels, sheer white long stockings and a garter belt that was only marginally bigger than its washing label, but for all intents and purposes, she was stark naked.

Now, the normal reaction would have been to ask what in the name of all that’s holy this little show was all about, especially as she went about her work as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do so with her entire natural beauty on display. Alas, normal was not within my cerebral capacity at that point, so I just gawked, dumbfounded, and I got hard.

Although Sofia had never made it into professional riding after arriving in the US, she was still taking our two horses for a ride practically daily, and the one short period I had spent trying to learn to ride one of them had taught me it was an activity that required a helluva lot more strength and stamina than it looked like, which is why Sofia was in top shape, literally, and I had never tried it again and was therefore more on the scrawny side.

Her breasts, medium sized for what little I knew about the female body at the time, were firm and perfectly shaped, topped by small, pinkish nipples. While not massive, they looked quite a lot larger than what they looked like when she wore her riding gear. I would learn later what a sports bra was. And, quite obviously, she had been on the receiving end of a full Brazilian wax as with the exception of her long black hair, there was not a hint of fur on her anywhere south of her eyes.