The Billionaire Of Coral Bay
Nikki Logan
Return of the secret billionaire…For Mila Nakano, Coral Bay’s stunning coast is more than just paradise—it’s a safe haven. Until gorgeous new visitor Richard Grundy arrives, sending her senses into overdrive!Secret billionaire Rich has come to the Bay looking for business opportunities—not romance. This single-minded tycoon prides himself on making decisions with his head…until he’s captivated by gentle, exotic Mila! Now he has his toughest job yet: persuading Mila he has got good intentions…to make her Coral Bay's newest bride!Romantic GetawaysEscape to Paradise!
Return of the secret billionaire...
For Mila, Coral Bay’s coast is more than just paradise, it’s a safe haven... Until gorgeous visitor Richard Grundy arrives—sending her senses into overdrive!
Secret billionaire Rich has come to the Bay looking for business opportunities, not romance. This single-minded tycoon prides himself on making decisions with his head, until he’s captivated by gentle, exotic Mila! Now he has his toughest job yet...persuading Mila he has good intentions: to make her Coral Bay’s newest bride!
Romantic Getaways
Escape to Paradise!
This Valentine’s Day escape to four of the world’s most romantic destinations with these sparkling books from Mills & Boon Romance!
From the awe-inspiring desert to vibrant Barcelona, and from the stunning coral reefs of Australia to heart-stoppingly romantic Venice—get swept away by these wonderful romances!
The Sheikh’s Convenient Princess
by Liz Fielding
The Unforgettable Spanish Tycoon
by Christy McKellen
The Billionaire of Coral Bay
by Nikki Logan
Her First-Date Honeymoon
by Katrina Cudmore
The Billionaire of Coral Bay
Nikki Logan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
NIKKI LOGAN lives on the edge of a string of wetlands in Western Australia with her partner and a menagerie of animals. She writes captivating nature-based stories full of romance in descriptive natural environments. She believes the danger and richness of wild places perfectly mirrors the passion and risk of falling in love. Nikki loves to hear from readers via www.nikkilogan.com.au (http://www.nikkilogan.com.au) or through social media. Find her on Twitter, @ReadNikkiLogan (https://twitter.com/ReadNikkiLogan), and Facebook, NikkiLoganAuthor (https://facebook.com/NikkiLoganAuthor).
For Pete
Who came when I needed him most.
Contents
Cover (#uf0537cef-9ee2-5221-9e4a-b2745ea12268)
Back Cover Text (#u6a258673-c1ef-5eef-8755-5ed0ae8c6c33)
Introduction (#u9cb48ae7-78c3-5dfd-b976-366ec9596926)
Title Page (#uafc6099e-1958-5e63-8671-d82b164ecb0e)
About the Author (#uadea4b62-b7d3-5d0f-a764-a6ac0d542803)
Dedication (#u4962795a-af12-5755-8ee4-065d413b1b9e)
CHAPTER ONE (#uc79697cc-c493-5890-8998-1308adab3d41)
CHAPTER TWO (#u2eaa6a07-7491-5ca9-a6ee-707f3417e42a)
CHAPTER THREE (#u51a46549-e538-51cc-b8b9-0db4d082e019)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_ff445b34-a6ef-5a10-ae77-27cac890ecd3)
THE LUXURY CATAMARAN had first appeared two days ago, bobbing in the sea off Nancy’s Point.
Lurking.
Except Mila Nakano couldn’t, in all fairness, call it lurking since it stood out like a flashing white beacon against the otherwise empty blue expanse of ocean. Whatever its crew were doing out there, they weren’t trying to be secretive about it, which probably meant they had permission to be moored on the outer fringes of the reef. And a vessel with all the appropriate authorisation was no business of a Wildlife Officer with somewhere else to be.
Vessels came and went daily on the edge of the Marine Park off Coral Bay—mostly research boats, often charters and occasionally private yachts there to enjoy the World Heritage reefs. This one had ‘private’ written all over it. If she had the kind of money that bought luxury catamarans she’d probably spend it visiting places of wonder too.
Mila peeled her wetsuit down to its waist and let her eyes flutter shut as the coastal air against her sweat-damp skin tinkled like tiny, bouncing ball bearings. Most days, she liked to snorkel in just a bikini to revel in the symphony of water against her bare flesh. Some days, though, she just needed to get things done and a wetsuit was as good as noise-cancelling headphones to someone with synaesthesia—or ‘superpower’ as her brothers had always referred to her cross-sensed condition—because she couldn’t hear the physical sensation of swimming over the reef when it was muted by thick neoprene. Not that her condition was conveniently limited to just the single jumbled sensation; no, that would be too pedestrian for Mila Nakano. She felt colours. She tasted emotion. And she attributed random personality traits to things. It might make no sense to anyone else but it made total sense to her.
Of course it did; she’d been born that way.
But today she could do without the distraction. Her tour-for-one was due any minute and she still needed to cross the rest of the bay and clamber up to Nancy’s Point to meet him, because she’d drifted further than she meant while snorkelling the reef. A tour-for-one was the perfect number. One made it possible for her to do her job without ending up with a thumping headache—complete with harmonic foghorns. With larger groups, she couldn’t control how shouty their body spray was, what mood the colours they wore would leave her in, or how exhausting they were just to be around. They would have a fantastic time out on the reef, but the cost to her was sometimes too great. It could take her three days to rebalance after a big group.
But one... That was doable.
Her one was a Mr Richard Grundy. Up from Perth, the solitary, sprawling metropolis on Australia’s west coast, tucked away in the bottom corner of the state, two days’ drive—or a two-hour jet flight—from here. From anything, some visitors thought because they couldn’t see what was right in front of them. The vast expanses of outback scrub you had to pass through to get here.
The nothing that was always full of something.
Grundy was a businessman, probably, since ones tended to arrive in suits with grand plans for the reef and what they could make it into. Anything from clusters of glamping facilities to elite floating casinos. Luxury theme parks. They never got off the ground, of course; between the public protests, the strict land use conditions and the flat-out no that the local leaseholder gave on development access through their property, her tour-for-one usually ended up being a tour-of-one. She never saw them, their business suit or their fancy development ideas again.
Which was fine; she was happy to play her part in keeping everything around here exactly as it was.
Mila shed the rest of her wetsuit unselfconsciously, stretched to the heavens for a moment as the ball bearings tinkled around her bikini-clad skin and slipped into the khaki shorts and shirt that identified her as official staff of the World Heritage Area. The backpack sitting on the sand bulged first with the folded wetsuit and then with bundled snorkelling gear, and she pulled her dripping hair back into a ponytail. She dropped the backpack into her work-supplied four-wheel drive then jogged past it and up towards the point overlooking the long, brilliant bay.
She didn’t rush. Ones were almost always late; they underestimated the time it took to drive up from the city or down from the nearest airport, or they let some smartphone app decide how long it would take them when a bit of software could have no idea how much further a kilometre was in Western Australia’s north. Besides, she’d parked on the only road into the meeting point and so her one would have had to drive past her to get to Nancy’s Point. So far, hers was the only vehicle as far as the eye could see.
If you didn’t count the bobbing catamaran beyond the reef.
Strong legs pushed her up over the lip of the massive limestone spur named after Nancy Dawson—the matriarch of the family that had grazed livestock on these lands for generations. Coral Bay’s first family.
‘Long way to come for a strip-show,’ a deep voice rumbled as she straightened.
Mila stumbled to a halt, her stomach sinking on a defensive whiff of old shoe that was more back-of-her-throat taste than nose-scrunching smell. The man standing there was younger than his name suggested and he wasn’t in a suit, like most ones, but he wore cargo pants and a faded red T-shirt as if they were one. Something about the way he moved towards her... He still screamed ‘corporate’ even without a tie.
Richard Grundy.
She spun around, hunting for the vehicle that she’d inexplicably missed. Nothing. It only confounded her more. The muted red of his T-shirt was pumping off all kinds of favourite drunk uncle kind of associations, but she fought the instinctive softening that brought. Nothing about his sarcastic greeting deserved congeniality. Besides, this man was anything but uncle-esque. His dark blond hair was windblown but well-cut and his eyes, as he slid his impenetrable sunglasses up onto his head to reveal them, were a rich blue. Rather like the lagoon behind him, in fact.
That got him a reluctant bonus point.
‘You were early,’ she puffed.
‘I was on time,’ he said again, apparently amused at her discomfort. ‘And I was dropped off. Just in time for the show.’
She retracted that bonus point. This was her bay, not his. If she wanted to swim in it before her shift started, what business was it of his?
‘I could have greeted you in my wetsuit,’ she muttered, ‘but I figured my uniform would be more appropriate.’
‘You’re the guide, I assume?’ he said, approaching with an out-thrust hand.
‘I’m a guide,’ she said, still bristling, then extended hers on a deep breath. Taking someone’s hand was never straightforward; she never knew quite what she’d get out of it. ‘Mila Nakano. Parks Department.’
‘Richard Grundy,’ he replied, marching straight into her grasp with no further greeting. Or interest. ‘What’s the plan for today?’
The muscles around her belly button twittered at his warm grip on her water-cool fingers and her ears filled with the gentle brush of a harp. That was new; she usually got anything from a solo trumpet to a whole brass section when she touched people, especially strangers.
A harp thrum was incongruously pleasant.
‘Today?’ she parroted, her synapses temporarily disconnected.
‘Our tour.’ His lagoon-coloured eyes narrowed in on hers. ‘Are you my guide?’
She quickly recovered. ‘Yes, I am. But no one gave me any information on the purpose of your visit—’ except to impress upon her his VIP status ‘—so we’ll be playing it a bit by ear today. It would help me to know what you’re here for,’ she went on. ‘Or what things interest you.’
‘It all interests me,’ he said, glancing away. ‘I’d like to get a better appreciation for the...ecological value of the area.’
Uh-huh. Didn’t they all...? Then they went back to the city to work on ways to exploit it.
‘Is your interest commercial?’
The twin lagoons narrowed. ‘Why so much interest in my interest?’
His censure made her flush. ‘I’m just wondering what filter to put on the tour. Are you a journalist? A scientist? You don’t seem like a tourist. So that only leaves Corporate.’
He glanced out at the horizon again, taking some of the intensity from their conversation. ‘Let’s just say I have a keen interest in the land. And the fringing reef.’
That wasn’t much to go on. But those ramrod shoulders told her it was all she was going to get.
‘Well, then, I guess we should start at the southernmost tip of the Marine Park,’ she said, ‘and work our way north. Can you swim?’
One of his eyebrows lifted. Just the one, as if her question wasn’t worth the effort of a second. ‘Captain of the swim team.’
Of course he had been.
Ordinarily she would have pushed her sunglasses up onto her head too, to meet a client’s gaze, to start the arduous climb from stranger to acquaintance. But there was a sardonic heat coming off Richard Grundy’s otherwise cool eyes and it shimmered such a curious tone—like five sounds all at once, harmonising with each other, being five different things at once. It wiggled in under her synaesthesia and tingled there, but she wasn’t about to expose herself too fully to his music until she had a better handle on the man. And so her own sunglasses stayed put.
‘If you want to hear the reef you’ll need to get out onto it.’
‘Hear it?’ The eyebrow lift was back. ‘Is it particularly noisy?’
She smiled. She’d yet to meet anyone else who could perceive the coral’s voice but she had to assume that however normal people experienced it, it was as rich and beautiful as the way she did.
‘You’ll understand when you get there. Your vehicle or mine?’
But he didn’t laugh—he didn’t even smile—and her flimsy joke fell as flat as she inexplicably felt robbed of the opportunity to see his lips crack the straight line they’d maintained since she got up here.
‘Yours, I think,’ he said.
‘Let’s go, then.’ She fell into professional mode, making up for a lot of lost time. ‘I’ll tell you about Nancy’s Point as we walk. It’s named for Nancy Dawson...’
* * *
Rich was pretty sure he knew all there was to know about Nancy Dawson—after all, stories of his great-grandmother had been part of his upbringing. But the tales as they were told to him didn’t focus on Nancy’s great love for the land and visionary sustainability measures, as the guide’s did, they were designed to showcase her endurance and fortitude against adversity. Those were the values his father had wanted to foster in his son and heir. The land—except for the profit it might make for WestCorp—was secondary. Barely even that.
But there was no way to head off the lithe young woman’s spiel without confessing who his family was. And he wasn’t about to discuss his private business with a stranger on two minutes’ acquaintance.
‘For one hundred and fifty years the Dawsons have been the leaseholders of all the land as far as you can see to the horizon,’ she said, turning to put the ocean behind her and looking east. ‘You could drive two hours inland and still be on Wardoo Station.’
‘Big,’ he grunted. Because anyone else would say that. Truth was, he knew exactly how big Wardoo was—to the square kilometre—and he knew how much each of those ten thousand square kilometres yielded. And how much each one cost to operate.
That was kind of his thing.
Rich cast his eyes out to the reef break. Mila apparently knew enough history to speak about his family, but not enough to recognise his surname for what it was. Great-Grandma Dawson had married Wardoo’s leading hand, Jack Grundy, but kept the family name since it was such an established and respected name in the region. The world might have known Jack and Nancy’s offspring as Dawsons, but the law knew them as Grundys.
‘Nancy’s descendants still run it today. Well, their minions do...’
That drew his gaze back. ‘Minions?’
‘The family is based in the city now. We don’t see them.’
Wow. There was a whole world of judgement in that simple sentence.
‘Running a business remotely is pretty standard procedure these days,’ he pointed out.
In his world everything was run at a distance. In a state this big it was both an operational necessity and a survival imperative. If you got attached to any business—or any of the people in it—you couldn’t do what he sometimes had to do. Restructure them. Sell them. Close them.
She surveyed all around them and murmured, ‘If this was my land I would never ever leave it.’
It was tempting to take offence at her casual judgement of his family—was this how she spoke of the Dawsons to any passing stranger?—but he’d managed too many teams and too many board meetings with voices far more objectionable than hers to let himself be that reactive. Besides, given that his ‘family’ consisted of exactly one—if you didn’t count a bunch of headstones and some distant cousins in Europe—he really had little cause for complaint.
‘You were born here?’ he asked instead.
‘And raised.’
‘How long have your family lived in the area?’
‘All my life—’
That had to be...what...? All of two decades?
‘And thirty thousand years before that.’
He adjusted his assessment of her killer tan. That bronze-brown hue wasn’t only about working outdoors. ‘You’re Bayungu?’
She shot him a look and he realised that he risked outing himself with his too familiar knowledge of Coral Bay’s first people. That could reasonably lead to questions about why he’d taken the time to educate himself about the traditional uses of this area. Same reason he was here finding out about the environmental aspects of the region.
He wanted to know exactly what he was up against. Where the speed humps were going to arise.
‘My mother’s family,’ she corrected softly.
Either she didn’t understand how genetics worked or Mila didn’t identify as indigenous despite her roots.
‘But not only Bayungu? Nakano, I think you said?’
‘My grandfather was Japanese. On Dad’s side.’
He remembered reading that in the feasibility study on this whole coast: how it was a cultural melting pot thanks to the exploding pearling trade.
‘That explains the bone structure,’ he said, tracing his gaze across her face.
She flushed and seemed to say the first thing that came to her. ‘His wife’s family was from Dublin, just to complicate things.’
Curious that she saw her diversity as a complication. In business, it was a strength. Pretty much the first thing he’d done following his father’s death was broaden WestCorp’s portfolio base so that their eggs were spread across more baskets. Thirty-eight baskets, to be specific.
‘What did Irish Grandma give you?’ Rich glanced at her dark locks. ‘Not red hair...’
‘One of my brothers got that,’ she acknowledged, stopping to consider him before sliding her sunglasses up onto her head. ‘But I got Nan’s eyes.’
Whoa...
A decade ago, he’d abseiled face-first down a cliff for sport—fast. The suck of his unprepared guts had been the same that day as the moment Mila’s thick dark lashes lifted just now to reveal what they hid. Classic Celtic green. Not notable on their own, perhaps, but bloody amazing against the richness of her unblemished brown skin. Her respective grandparents had certainly left her a magnetising genetic legacy.
He used the last of his air replying. ‘You’re a walking billboard for cultural diversity.’
She glanced away, her mocha skin darkening, and he could breathe again. But it wasn’t some coy affectation on her part. She looked genuinely distressed—though she was skilled at hiding it.
Fortunately, he was more skilled at reading people.
‘The riches of the land and sea up here have always drawn people from around the world,’ she murmured. ‘I’m the end result.’
They reached her modest four-wheel drive, emblazoned with government logos, halfway down the beach she’d first emerged from, all golden and glittery.
‘Is that why you stay?’ he asked. ‘Because of the riches?’
She looked genuinely horrified at the thought as she unlocked the vehicle and swung her long sandy legs in. ‘Not in the sense you mean. My work is here. My family is here. My heart is here.’
And clearly she wore that heart on the sleeve of her Parks Department uniform.
Rich climbed in after her and gave a little inward sigh. Sailing north on the Portus had been seven kinds of awesome. All the space and quiet and air he needed wrapped up in black leather and oiled deck timber. He’d even unwound a little. But there was something about driving... Four wheels firm on asphalt. Owning the road.
Literally, in this case.
At least for the next few months. Longer, if he got his way.
‘Is that why you’re here?’ she asked him, though it looked as if she had to summon up a fair bit of courage to do it. ‘Drawn by the riches?’
If he was going to spend the day with her he wasn’t going to be able to avoid the question for long. Might as well get in front of it.
‘I’m here to find out everything I can about the area. I have...business interests up here. I’d like to go in fully informed.’
Her penetrating gaze left him and turned back to the road, leaving only thinned lips in its wake.
He’d disappointed her.
‘The others wanted to know a bit about the history of Coral Bay.’ She almost sighed. ‘Do you?’
It was hard not to smile at her not so subtle angling. He was probably supposed to say What others? and she was going to tell him how many people had tried and failed to get developments up in this region. Maybe he was even supposed to be deterred by that.
Despite Mila’s amateurish subterfuge, he played along. A few friendly overtures wouldn’t go amiss. Even if she didn’t look all that disposed to overtures of any kind—friendly or otherwise. Her job meant she kind of had to.
He settled into the well-worn fabric. ‘Sure. Take me right back.’
She couldn’t possibly maintain her coolness once she got stuck into her favourite topic. As long as Mila was talking, he had every excuse to just watch her lips move and her eyes flash with engagement. If nothing else, he could enjoy that.
She started with the ancient history of the land that they drove through, how this flat coast had been seafloor in the humid time before mammals. Then, a hundred million years later when the oceans were all locked up in a mini ice age and sea levels had retreated lower than they’d ever been, how her mother’s ancestors had walked the shores on the edge of the massive continental drop-off that was now five kilometres out to sea. Many of the fantastical creatures of the Saltwater People’s creation stories might well have been perfectly literal, hauled out of the deep sea trenches even with primitive tools.
The whole time she talked, Rich watched, entranced. Hiring Mila to be an ambassador for this place was an inspired move on someone’s part. She was passionate and vivid. Totally engaged in what was obviously her favourite topic. She sold it in a way history books couldn’t possibly.
But the closer she brought him to contemporary times, the more quirks he noticed in her storytelling. At first, he thought it was just the magical language of the tribal stories—evocative, memorable...almost poetic—but then he realised some of the references were too modern to be part of traditional tales.
‘Did you just call the inner reef “smug”?’ he interrupted.
She glanced at him, mid-sentence. Swallowing. ‘Did I?’
‘That’s what I heard.’
Her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. ‘Are you sure I didn’t say warm? That’s what I meant. Because it’s shallower inside the reef. The sand refracts sunlight and leads to—’ she paused for half a heartbeat ‘—warmer conditions that the coral really thrives in.’
Her gaze darted around for a moment before she continued and he got the distinct feeling he’d just been lied to.
Again, though, amateurish.
This woman could tell one hell of a tale but she would be a sitting duck in one of his boardrooms.
‘Ten thousand years from now,’ she was continuing, and he forced himself to attend, ‘those reef areas out there will emerge from the water and form atolls and, eventually, the certainty of earth.’
He frowned at her augmented storytelling. It didn’t diminish her words particularly but the longer it went on the more overshadowing it became until he stopped listening to what she was saying and found himself only listening to how she said it.
‘There are vast gorges at the top of the cape that tourists assume are made purely of cynical rock, but they’re not. They were once reef too, tens of millions of years ago, until they got thrust up above the land by tectonic plate action. The enduring limestone is full of marine fossils.’
Cynical rock. Certain earth. Enduring limestone. The land seemed alive for Mila Nakano—almost a person, with its own traits—but it didn’t irritate him because it wasn’t an affectation and it didn’t diminish the quality of her information at all. When she called the reef smug he got the sense that she believed it and, because she believed it, it just sounded...possible. If he got to lie about in warm water all day being nibbled free of parasites by a harem of stunning fish he’d be pretty smug too.
‘I’d be interested to see those gorges,’ he said, more to spur her on to continue her hyper-descriptive storytelling than anything else. Besides, something like that was just another string in his bow when it came to creating a solid business case for his resort.
She glanced at him. ‘No time. We would have had to set off much earlier. The four-wheel drive access has been under three metres of curi—’
She caught herself and he couldn’t help wondering what she’d been about to say.
‘Of sea water for weeks. We’d have to go up the eastern side of the cape and come in from the north. It’s a long detour.’
His disappointment was entirely disproportionate to her refusal—sixty seconds ago he’d had zero interest in fossils or gorges—but he found himself eager to make it happen.
‘What if we had a boat?’
‘Well, that would be faster, obviously.’ She set her eyes back on the road ahead and then, at this silent expectation, returned them to him. ‘Do you have one?’
He’d never been prouder to have the Portus lingering offshore. But he wasn’t ready to reveal her just yet. ‘I might be able to get access...’
Her green gaze narrowed just slightly. ‘Then this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Right now we have other obligations.’
‘We do?’
She hit the indicator even though there were no other road-users for miles around, and turned off the asphalt onto a graded limestone track. Dozens of tyre-tracks marked its dusty white surface.
‘About time you got wet, Mr Grundy.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_68c72b76-6575-59fb-899a-0bc4b3dd4125)
BELOW THE SLIGHTLY elevated parking clearing at Five Fingers Bay, the limestone reef stretched out like the splayed digits in the beach’s name. They formed a kind of catwalk, pointing out in five directions to the outer reef beyond the lagoon. Mila led her one down to it and stood on what might have been the Fingers’ exposed rocky wrist.
‘I was expecting more Finding Nemo,’ he said, circling to look all around him and sounding as disappointed as the sag of his shoulders, ‘and less Flintstones. Where’s all the sea life?’
‘What you want is just out there, Mr Grundy.’
He followed her finger out beyond the stretch of turquoise lagoon to the place the water darkened off, marking the start of the back reef that kept most predators—and most boats—out, all the way up to those gorges that he wanted to visit.
‘Call me Richard,’ he volunteered. ‘Rich.’
Uh, no. ‘Rich’ was a bit too like friends and—given what he was up here for—even calling them acquaintances was a stretch. Besides, she wasn’t convinced by his sudden attempt at graciousness.
‘Richard...’ Mila allowed, conscious that she represented her department. She rummaged in the rucksack she’d dragged from the back seat of the SUV. ‘I have a spare mask and snorkel for you.’
He stared at them as if they were entirely foreign, but then reached out with a firm hand and took them from her. She took care not to let her fingers brush against his.
It was always awkward, taking your clothes off in front of a stranger; it was particularly uncomfortable in front of a young, handsome stranger, but Mila turned partly away, shrugged out of her work shorts and shirt and stood in her bikini, fiddling with the adjustment straps on her mask while Richard shed his designer T-shirt and cargo pants.
She kept her eyes carefully averted, not out of any prudishness but because she always approached new experiences with a moment’s care. She could never tell how something new was going to impact on her and, while she’d hung out with enough divers and surfers to give her some kind of certainty about what senses a half-naked person would trigger—apples for some random guy peeling off his wetsuit, watermelon for a woman pulling hers on—this was a new half-naked man. And a client.
She watched his benign shadow on the sand until she was sure he’d removed everything he was going to.
Only then did she turn around.
Instantly, she was back at the only carnival she’d ever visited, tucking into her first—and last—candyfloss. The light, sticky cloud dissolving into pure sugar on her tongue. The smell of it, the taste of it. That sweet, sweet rush. She craved it instantly. It was so much more intense—and so much more humiliating—than a plain old apples association. But apparently that was what her synaesthesia had decided to associate with a half-naked Richard Grundy.
The harmless innocence of that scent was totally incompatible with a man she feared was here to exploit the reef. But that was how it went; her associations rarely had any logical connection with their trigger.
Richard had come prepared with navy board shorts beneath his expensive but casual clothes. They were laced low and loose on his hips yet still managed to fit snugly all the way down his muscular thighs.
And they weren’t even wet yet.
Mila filled her lungs slowly and mastered her gaze. He might not be able to read her dazed thoughts but he might well be able to read her face and so she turned back to her rummaging. Had her snorkelling mask always been this fiddly to adjust?
‘I only have one set of fins, sorry,’ she said in a rush. ‘Five Fingers is good for drift snorkelling, though, so you can let the water do the work.’
She set off up the beach a way so that they could let the current carry them back near to their piled up things by the end of the swim. Her slog through sun-soaked sand was accompanied by the high-pitched single note that came with a warmth so everyday that she barely noticed it anymore. When they reached the old reef, she turned seaward and walked into the water without a backward glance—she didn’t need the sugary distraction and she felt certain Richard would follow her in without invitation. They were snorkelling on his dollar, after all.
‘So coral’s not a plant?’ Richard asked once they were waist-deep in the electric-blue water of the lagoon.
She paused and risked another look at him. Prepared this time. ‘It’s an animal. Thousands of tiny animals, actually, living together in the form of elk horns, branches, plates, cabbages—’
He interrupted her shopping list ramble with the understated impatience of someone whose time really was money. Only the cool water prevented her from blushing. Did she always babble this much with clients? Or did it only feel like babbling in Richard Grundy’s presence?
‘So how does a little squishy thing end up becoming rock-hard reef?’ he asked.
Good. Yes. Focusing on the science kept the candyfloss at bay. Although as soon as he’d said ‘rock-hard’ she’d become disturbingly fixated on the remembered angles of his chest and had to severely discipline her unruly gaze not to follow suit.
‘The calcium carbonate in their skeletons. In life, it provides resilience against the sea currents, and in death—’
She braced on her left leg as she slipped her right into her mono-fin. Then she straightened and tucked her left foot in with it and balanced there on the soft white seafloor. The gentle waves rocked her a little in her rooted spot, just like one of the corals she was describing.
‘In death they pile up to form limestone reef,’ he guessed.
‘Millions upon millions of them forming reef first, then limestone that weathers into sand, and finally scrubland grows on top of it. We owe a lot to coral, really.’
Mila took a breath and turned to face him, steadfastly ignoring the smell of carnival. ‘Ready to meet the reef?’
He glanced out towards the reef break and swallowed hard. It was the first time she’d seen him anything other than supremely confident, verging on arrogant.
‘How far out are we going?’
‘Not very. That’s the beauty of Coral Bay; the inside reef is right there, the moment you step offshore. The lagoon is narrow but long. We’ll be travelling parallel to the beach, mostly.’
His body lost some of its rigidity and he took a moment to fit his mask and snorkel before stepping off the sandy ridge after her.
* * *
It took no time to get out where the seafloor dropped away enough that they could glide in the cool water two metres above the reef. The moment Mila submerged, the synaesthetic symphony began. It was a mix of the high notes caused by the water rushing over her bare skin and the vast array of sounds and sensations caused by looking down at the natural metropolis below in all its diversity. Far from the flat, gently sloping, sandy sea bottom that people imagined, coral reef towered in places, dropped away in others, just like any urban centre. There were valleys and ridges and little caves from where brightly coloured fish surveyed their personal square metre of territory. Long orange antenna poked out from under a shelf and acted as the early warning system of a perky, pincers-at-the-ready crayfish. Anemones danced smooth and slow on the current, their base firmly tethered to the reef, stinging anything that came close but giving the little fish happily living inside it a free pass in return for its nibbly housekeeping.
Swimming over the top of it all, peering down through the glassy water, it felt like cruising above an alien metropolis in some kind of silent-running airship—just the sound of her own breathing inside the snorkel, and her myriad synaesthetic associations in her mind’s ear. The occasional colourful little fellow came up to have a closer look at them but mostly the fish just went about their business, adhering to the strict social rules of reef communities, focusing on their eternal search for food, shelter or a mate.
Life was pretty straightforward under the surface.
And it was insanely abundant.
She glanced at Richard, who didn’t seem to know where to look first. His mask darted from left to right, taking in the coral city ahead of them, looking below them at some particular point. He’d tucked his hands into balls by his hips and she wondered if that was to stop him reaching out and touching the strictly forbidden living fossil.
She took a breath and flipped gently in the water, barely flexing her mono-fin to effect the move, swimming backwards ahead of him so that she could see if he was doing okay. His mask came up square onto hers and, even in the electric-blue underworld, his eyes still managed to stand out as they locked on hers.
And he smiled.
The candyfloss returned with a vengeance. It was almost overpowering in the cloistered underwater confines of her mask. Part of her brain knew it wasn’t real but as far as the other part was concerned she was sucking her air directly from some carnival tent. That was the first smile she’d seen from Richard and it was a doozy, even working around a mouthful of snorkel. It transformed his already handsome face into something really breath-stealing and, right now, she needed all the air she could get!
She signalled upwards, flicked her fin and was back above the glassy surface within a couple of heartbeats.
‘I’ve spent so much time on the water and I had no idea there was so much going on below!’ he said the moment his mouth was free of rubbery snorkel. ‘I mean you know but you don’t...know. You know?’
This level of inarticulateness wasn’t uncommon for someone seeing the busy reef for the first time—their minds were almost always blown—but it made her feel just a little bit better about how much of a babbler she’d been with him.
His finless legs had to work much harder than hers to keep him perpendicular to the water and his breath started to grow choppy. ‘It’s so...structured. Almost city-like.’
Mila smiled. It was so much easier to relate to someone over the reef.
‘Coral polyps organise into a stag horn just like a thousand humans organise into a high-rise building. It’s a futuristic city...with hovercraft. Ready for more?’
His answer was to bite back down onto his snorkel’s mouthpiece and tip himself forward, back under the surface.
They drifted on for another half-hour and she let Richard take the lead, going where interest took him. He got more skilled at the suspension of breath needed to deep snorkel, letting him get closer to the detail of the reef, and the two of them were like mini whales every time they surfaced, except they blew water instead of air from their clumsy plastic blowholes.
There was something intimate in the way they managed to expel the water at the same time on surfacing—relaxed, not urgent—then take another breath and go back for more. Over and over again. It was vaguely like...
Kissing.
Mila’s powerful kick pushed her back up to the surface. That was not a thought she was about to entertain. He was a one, for a start, and he was here to exploit the very reef he was currently going crazy over. Though if she did her job then maybe he’d change his mind about that after today.
‘Seen enough?’ she asked when he caught up with her.
His mask couldn’t hide the disappointment behind it. ‘Is it time to go in?’
‘I just want to show you the drop-off, then we’ll head back to the beach.’
Just was probably an understatement, and they’d have to swim out of the shallow waters towards the place the continental shelf took its first plunge, but for Richard to understand the reef and how it connected to the oceanic ecosystem he needed to see it for himself.
Seeing was believing.
Unless you were her, in which case, seeing came with a whole bunch of other sensations that no one else experienced. Or necessarily believed.
She’d lost enough friends in the past to recognise that.
Mila slid the mouthpiece back into her snorkel and tooted out of the top.
‘Let’s go.’
* * *
Richard prided himself on being a man of composure. In the boardroom, in the bedroom, in front of a media pack. In fact, it was something he was known for—courage under fire—and it came from always knowing your strengths, and your opponents’. From always doing your homework. From controlling all the variables before they even had time to vary.
This had to be the least composed he’d been in a long, long time.
Mila had swum alongside him, her vigilant eyes sweeping around them so that he could just enjoy the wonders of the reef, monitoring their position to make sure they didn’t get caught up in the current. He’d felt the change in the water as the outer reef had started to rise up to meet them, almost shore-like. But it wasn’t land; it was the break line one kilometre out from the actual shore where the reef grew most abundant and closest to the surface of anywhere they’d swum yet. So close, the waves from the deeper water on the other side crashed against it relentlessly and things got a little choppier than their earlier efforts. Mila had led him to a channel that allowed them to propel themselves down between the high-rise coral—just like any of the reef’s permanent residents—and get some relief from the surging waves as they’d swum out towards a deeper, darker, more distant kind of blue. The water temperature had dropped and the corals started to change—less of the soft, flowy variety interspersed with dancing life and more of the slow-growing, rock-hard variety. Coral mean streets. The ones that could withstand the water pressure coming at them from the open ocean twenty-four-seven.
Rich lifted his eyes and tried to make something out in the deep blue visible beyond the coral valley he presently lurked in. He couldn’t—just a graduated, ill-defined shift from blue to deep blue to dark blue looking out and down. No scale. No end point. Impossible to get a grip on how far this drop-off actually went.
It even had the word ‘drop’ in it.
His pulse kicked up a notch.
Mila swam on ahead, rising briefly to refill her lungs and sinking again to swim out through the opening of the coral valley straight into all that vast blue...nothing.
And that was where his courage flat ran out.
He’d played hard contact sports, he’d battled patronising boardroom jerks, he’d wrangled packs of media wolves hell-bent on getting a story, and he’d climbed steep rock faces for fun. None of those things were for the weak-willed. But could he bring himself to swim past the break and out into the place the reef—and the entire country—dropped off to open, bottomless ocean?
Nope.
He tried—not least because of Mila, back-swimming so easily out into the unknown, her dark hair floating all around her, mermaid tail waving gently at him like a beckoning finger—but even that was not enough to seduce him out there. The vast blue was so impossible to position himself in, he found himself constantly glancing up to the bright surface where the sunlight was, just to keep himself oriented. Or back at the reef edge to have the certainty of it behind him.
Swimming out over the drop-off was as inconceivable to him as stepping off a mountain. His body simply would not comply.
As if it had some information he didn’t.
And Richard Grundy made it his priority always to have the information he needed.
‘It’s okay,’ Mila sputtered gently, surfacing next to him once they’d moved back to the side of the reef protected from the churn of the crest. ‘The drop-off’s not easy the first time.’
No. What wasn’t easy was coming face to face with a limitation you never knew you had, and doing it in front of a slip of a thing who clearly didn’t suffer the same disability. Who looked as if she’d been born beneath the surface.
‘The current...’ he hedged.
As if that had anything to do with it. He knew Mila wouldn’t have taken him somewhere unsafe. Not that he knew her at all, and yet somehow...he did. She just didn’t seem the type to be intentionally unkind. And her job relied on her getting her customers back to shore in one piece.
‘Let’s head in,’ she said.
There was a thread of charity in her voice that he was not comfortable hearing. He didn’t need anyone else’s help recognising his deficiencies or to be patronised, no matter how well-meant. This would always be the first thing she thought of when she thought of him, no matter what else he achieved.
The guy that couldn’t swim the drop-off.
It only took ten minutes to swim back in when he wasn’t distracted by the teeming life beneath them. Thriving, living coral turned to rocky old reef, reef turned to sand and then his feet were finding the seafloor and pushing him upwards. He’d never felt such a weighty slave to gravity—it was as indisputable as the instinct that had stopped him swimming out into all that blue.
Survival.
Mila struggled a little to get her feet out of her single rubber fin and he stepped closer so she could use him as a brace. She glanced at him sideways for a moment with something that looked a lot like discomfort before politely resting her hand on his forearm and using him for balance while she prised first one and then the other foot free. As she did it she even held her breath.
Really? Had he diminished himself that much? She didn’t even want to touch him?
‘That was the start of the edge of Australia’s continental shelf,’ she said when she was back on two legs. ‘The small drop-off slopes down to the much bigger one five kilometres out—’
Small?
‘And then some of the most immense deep-sea trenches on the planet.’
‘Are you trying to make me feel better?’ he said tightly.
And had failing always been this excruciating?
Her pretty face twisted a little. ‘No. But your body might have been responding instinctively to that unknown danger.’
‘I deal with unknowns every day.’
Dealt with them and redressed them. WestCorp thrived on knowns.
‘Do you, really?’ she asked, tipping her glance towards him, apparently intent on placating him with conversation. ‘When was the last time you did something truly new to you?’
Part of the reason he dominated in business was because nothing fazed him. Like a good game of chess, there was a finite number of plays to address any challenge and once you’d perfected them the only contest was knowing which one to apply. The momentary flare of satisfaction as the challenge tumbled was about all he had, these days. The rest was business as usual.
And outside of business...
Well, how long had it been since there was anything outside of business?
‘I went snorkelling today,’ he said, pulling off his mask.
‘That was your first time? You did well, then.’
She probably meant to be kind, but all her condescension did was remind him why he never did anything before learning everything there was to know about it. Controlling his environment.
Open ocean was not a controlled environment.
‘How about you?’ he deflected as the drag of the water dropped away and they stepped onto toasty warm sand. ‘You don’t get bored of the same view every day? The same reef?’
She turned back out to the turquoise lagoon and the deeper blue sea beyond it—that same blue that he loved from the comfort and safety of his boat.
‘Nope.’ She sighed. ‘I like a lot of familiarity in my environment because of—’ she caught herself, turned back and changed tack ‘—because I’m at my best when it’s just me and the ocean.’
He snorted. ‘What’s the point of being your best when no one’s around to see it?’
He didn’t mean to be dismissive, but he saw her reaction in the flash behind her eyes.
‘I’m around.’ She shrugged, almost embarrassed. ‘I’ll know.’
‘And you reserve the best of yourself for yourself?’ he asked, knowing any hope of a congenial day with her was probably already sunk.
Her curious gaze suggested he was more alien to her than some of the creatures they’d just been studying. ‘Why would I give it to someone else?’
She crossed to their piled-up belongings and began to shove her snorkelling equipment into the canvas bag.
Rich pressed the beach towel she’d supplied to his chest as he watched her go, and disguised the full-body shiver that followed. But he couldn’t blame it on the chilly water alone—there was something else at play here, something more...disquieting.
He patted his face dry with the sun-warmed fabric to buy himself a moment to identify the uncomfortable sensation.
For all his success—for all his professional renown—Rich suddenly had the most unsettling suspicion that he might have missed something fundamental about life.
Why would anyone give the best of themselves to someone else?
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_4ab6c5ad-a9c2-539c-b3a5-59ea791cf39b)
MILA NEVER LIKED to see any creature suffer—even one as cocky as Richard Grundy—but, somehow, suffering brought him closer to her level than he’d yet been. More likeable and relatable Clark Kent, less fortress of solitude Superman. He’d taken the drop-off experience hard, and he’d been finding any feasible excuse not to make eye contact with her ever since.
Most people got no phone reception out of town but Richard somehow did and he’d busied himself with a few business calls, including arranging for the boat he knew of to meet them at Bill’s Bay marina. It was indisputably the quickest way to get to the gorges he wanted to see. All they had to do was putter out of the State and Federal-protected marine park, then turn north in open, deregulated waters and power up the coast at full speed, before heading back into the marine park again. They could be there in an hour instead of the three it would take by road. And the three back again.
It looked as if Richard would use every moment of that hour to focus on business.
Still, his distraction gave her time to study him. His hair had only needed a few strategic arrangements to get it back to a perfectly barbered shape, whereas hers was a tangled, salt-crusted mess. Side on, she could see behind his expensive sunglasses and knew just how blue those eyes were. The glasses sat comfortably on high cheekbones, which was where the designer stubble also happened to begin. It ran down his defined jaw and met its mirror image at a slightly cleft chin. As nice as all of that was—and it was; just the thought of how that stubble might feel under her fingers was causing a flurry of kettledrums, of all things—clearly its primary role in life was to frame what had to be his best asset. A killer pair of lips. Not too thin, not too full, perfectly symmetrical. Not at their best right now while he was still so tense, but earlier, when they’d broken out that smile...
Ugh...murder.
The car filled with the scent of spun sugar again.
‘Something you need?’
He spoke without turning his eyes off the road ahead or prising the phone from his ear, but the twist of the mouth she’d just been admiring told her he was talking to her.
She’d meant to be subtle, glancing sideways, studying him in her periphery, yet apparently those lips were more magnetic than she realised because she was turned almost fully towards him. She snapped her gaze forward.
‘No. Just...um...’
Just obsessing on your body parts, Mr Grundy...
Just wondering how I could get you to smile again, sir...
‘We’re nearly at the boat launch,’ she fabricated. ‘Just wanted you to know.’
If he believed her, she couldn’t tell. He simply nodded, returned to his call and then took his sweet time finishing it.
Mila forced her mind back on the job.
‘This is the main road in and out of Coral Bay,’ she said as soon as he disconnected his call, turning her four-wheel drive at a cluster of towering solar panels that powered streetlights at the only intersection in the district. ‘It’s base camp for everyone wanting access to the southern part of the World Heritage area.’
To her, Coral Bay was a sweet, green little oasis existing in the middle of almost nowhere. No other town for two hundred kilometres in any direction. Just boundless, rust-coloured outback on one side and a quarter of a planet of ocean on the other.
Next stop, Africa.
Richard’s eyes narrowed as they entered town and he saw all the caravans, RVs, four-by-fours and tour buses parked all along the main street. ‘It’s thriving.’
His interest reminded her of a cartoon she’d seen once where a rumpled-suited businessman’s eyes had spun and rolled and turned into dollar signs. It was as if he was counting the potential.
‘It’s whale shark season. Come back in forty-degree February and it will be a ghost town. Summer is brutal up here.’
If he wanted to build some ritzy development, he might as well know it wasn’t going to be a year-round goldmine.
‘I guess that’s what air-conditioning is for,’ he murmured.
‘Until the power station goes down in a cyclone, then you’re on your own.’
His lips twisted, just slightly. ‘You’re not really selling the virtues of the region, you know.’
No. This wasn’t her job. This was personal. She forced herself back on a professional footing.
‘Did you want to stop in town? For something to eat, maybe? Snorkelling always makes me hungry.’
Plus, Coral Bay had the best bakery in the district, regardless of the fact it also had the only bakery in the district.
‘We’ll have lunch on the Portus,’ he said absently.
The Portus? Not one of the boats that frequented Coral Bay. She knew them all by sight. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might have access to a vessel from outside the region. Especially given he’d only called to make arrangements half an hour ago.
‘Okay—’ she shrugged, resigning herself to a long wait ‘—straight to Bill’s Bay, then.’
They parked up on arrival at the newly appointed mini-marina and wandered down to where three others launched boats for a midday run. Compared to the elaborate ‘tinnies’ of the locals, getting their hulls wet on the ramp, the white Zodiac idling at the end of the single pier immediately caught her attention.
‘There’s Damo.’ Rich raised a hand and the Zodiac’s skipper acknowledged it as they approached. ‘You look disappointed, Mila.’
Her gaze flew to his, not least because it was the first time he’d called her by her name. It eased off his lips like a perfectly cooked salmon folding off a knife.
‘I underestimated how long it was going to take us to get north,’ she said, flustered. ‘It’s okay; I’ll adjust the schedule.’
‘Were you expecting something with a bit more grunt?’
‘No.’ Yes.
‘I really didn’t know what to expect,’ she went on. ‘A boat is a boat, right? As long as it floats.’
He almost smiled then, but it was too twisted to truly earn the name. She cursed the missed moment. A tall man in the white version of her own shorts and shirt stood as they approached the end of the pier. He acknowledged Richard with a courteous nod, then offered her his arm aboard.
‘Miss?’
She declined his proffered hand—not just because she needed little help managing embarkation onto such a modest vessel, but also because she could do without the associated sounds that generally came with a stranger’s skin against hers.
The skipper was too professional to react. Richard, on the other hand, frowned at her dismissal of a man clearly doing him a favour.
Mila sighed. Okay, so he thought her rude. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had assumed the worst. And she wouldn’t be seeing him again after today, so what did it really matter?
The skipper wasted no time firing up the surprisingly throaty Zodiac and reversing them out of the marina and in between the markers that led bigger boats safely through the reef-riddled sanctuary zone towards more open waters. They ambled along at five knots and only opened up a little once they hit the recreation zone, where boating was less regulated. It took just a few minutes to navigate the passage that put them in open water, but the skipper didn’t throttle right up like she expected; instead he kept his speed down as they approached a much larger and infinitely more expensive catamaran idling just beyond the outer reef. The vessel she’d seen earlier, at Nancy’s Point. Slowing as they passed such a massive vessel seemed a back-to-front kind of courtesy, given the giant cat would barely feel their wake if they passed it at full speed. It was only as their little Zodiac swung around to reverse up to the catamaran that she saw the letters emblazoned on the big cat’s side.
Portus.
‘Did you think we were going all the way north in the tender?’ a soft voice came to her over the thrum of the slowly reversing motor.
‘Is this yours?’ she asked, gaping.
‘If she’s not, we’re getting an awfully accommodating reception for a couple of trespassers.’
‘So when you said you were “dropped off” at Nancy’s Point...?’
‘I didn’t mean in a car.’
With those simple words, his capacity to get his mystery development proposal through where others had failed increased by half in Mila’s mind. A man with the keys to a vessel like this in his pocket had to have at least a couple of politicians there too, right?
The tender’s skipper expertly reversed them backwards, right up to the stern of the Portus, where a set of steps came down each of the cat’s two hulls to the waterline. A dive platform at the bottom of each served as a disembarkation point and she could see where the tender would nest in snugly under its mother vessel when it wasn’t in use. Stepping off the back of the tender and onto the Portus was as easy as entering her house. Where the upward steps delivered them—to an outdoor area that would comfortably seat twelve—the vessel was trimmed out with timber and black leather against the boat’s white fibreglass. Not vinyl... Not hardy canvas like most of the boats she’d been on. This was leather—soft and smooth under her fingers as she placed a light hand on the top of one padded seat-back. The sensation was accompanied by a percussion of wind chimes, low and sonorous.
Who knew she found leather so soothing!
The colour scheme was conflicting, emotionally, even as it was perfect visually. The tranquillity of white, the sensuality of black. Brown usually made her feel sad, but this particularly rich, oiled tone struck her more specifically as...isolated.
But it was impossible not to also acknowledge the truth.
‘This is so beautiful, Richard.’
To her left, timber stairs spiralled up and out of view to the deck above.
‘It does the job,’ he said modestly, then pulled open two glass doors into the vessel’s gorgeous interior, revealing an expansive dining area and a galley twice as big as her own kitchen.
She just stared at him until he noticed her silence.
‘What?’
‘Surely, even in your world this vessel is something special,’ she said, standing firm on the threshold, as though she needed to get this resolved before entering. False humility was worse than an absence of it, and she had a blazing desire to have the truth from this man just once.
On principle.
‘What do you know about my world?’ he cast back easily over his shoulder, seemingly uncaring whether she followed him or not.
She clung to not and hugged the doorway.
‘You wouldn’t have bought the boat if you didn’t think it was special.’
He turned to face her. ‘It wouldn’t be seemly to boast about my own boat, Mila.’
‘It would be honest.’ And really, what was this whole vessel but big, mobile bragging rights? ‘Or is it just saying the words aloud that bothers you?’
He turned to face her, but she barrelled on without really knowing why it affected her so much. Maybe it had something to do with growing up on two small rural incomes. Or maybe it had something to do with starting to think they might be closer to equals, only to be faced with the leather and timber evidence very much to the contrary.
‘I’ll say it for you,’ she said from the doorway. ‘The Portus is amazing. You must be incredibly relaxed when you’re out on her.’ She glanced at the massive dining table. ‘And you must have some very happy friends.’
‘I don’t really bring friends out,’ he murmured, regarding her across the space between them.
‘Colleagues, then. Clients.’
He leaned back on the kitchen island and crossed his ankles. ‘Nope. I like silence when I’m out on the water.’
She snorted. ‘Good luck with that.’ He just stared at her. ‘I mean it’s never truly silent, is it?’
He frowned at her. ‘Isn’t it?’
No. Not in her experience.
She glanced around as the Portus’ massive engines thrummed into life and they began to move, killing any hope of silence for the time being. Although they weren’t nearly as loud as she’d expected. How much did a boat have to cost to get muted engines like that?
Richard didn’t invite her in again. Or insist. Or cajole. Instead, he leaned there, patience personified until she felt that her refusal to step inside was more than just ridiculous.
It was as unfriendly as people had always thought her to be.
But entering while he waited felt like too much of a concession in this mini battle of wills. She didn’t want to see the flare of triumph in his eyes. Her own shifted to the double fridge at the heart of the galley.
‘I guess lunch won’t be cheese sandwiches out of an Esky, then?’
The moment his regard left her to follow her glance, she stepped inside, crossing more than just a threshold. She stepped wholly into Richard’s fancy world.
He pulled the fridge doors wide. ‘It’s a platter. Crayfish. Tallegio. Salt and pepper squid. Salad Niçoise. Sourdough bread.’
She laughed. ‘I guess I was wrong, then. Cheese sandwich it is.’ Just fancier.
He turned his curiosity to her. ‘You don’t eat seafood?’
‘I can eat prawns if I have to. And molluscs. They don’t have a strong personality.’
That frown just seemed to be permanently fixed on his face. ‘But cray and squid do?’
Her heart warmed just thinking about them and it helped to loosen her bones just a little. ‘Very much so. Particularly crayfish. They’re quite...optimistic.’
He stared—for several bemused moments—clearly deciding between quirky and nuts. Both of which she’d had before with a lot less subtlety than he was demonstrating.
‘Is it going to bother you if I eat them?’
‘No. Something tells me I won’t be going hungry.’ She smiled and it was easier than she expected. ‘I have no strong feelings about cheese, either way.’
‘Unlucky for the Tallegio then,’ he murmured.
He pulled open a cabinet and revealed it as a small climate-controlled wine cellar. Room temperature on the left, frosty on the right. ‘Red or white?’ he asked.
‘Neither,’ she said regretfully. Just looking at the beading on the whites made her long for a dose of ocean spray. ‘I’m on the clock.’
‘Not right now you’re not,’ he pointed out. ‘For the next ninety minutes, we’re both in the capable hands of Captain Max Farrow, whose jurisdiction, under international maritime law, overrules your own.’
He lifted out one of the dewy bottles and waved it gently in her direction.
It was tempting to play at all this luxury just for a little while. To take a glass and curl up on one of those leather sofas, enjoy the associated wind chimes and act as if they weren’t basically complete strangers. To talk like normal people. To pretend. At all of it.
‘One glass, then,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
He poured and handed her a glass of white. The silent moments afterwards sang with discomfort.
‘Come on, I’ll give you a tour,’ he eventually offered.
He smiled but it didn’t ring true and it certainly didn’t set off the five-note harmony or the scent of candyfloss that the flash of perfect teeth previously had. He couldn’t be as nervous as she was, surely. Was he also conscious of how make-believe this all was?
Even if, for him, it wasn’t.
She stood. ‘Thank you, Richard.’
‘Rich,’ he insisted. ‘Please. Only my colleagues call me Richard.’
They were a good deal less than colleagues, but it would be impossible now to call him anything else without causing offence. More offence.
‘Please, Mila. I think you’ll like the Portus.’ Then, when she still didn’t move, he added, ‘As much as I do.’
That one admission... That one small truth wiggled right in under her ribs. Disarming her completely.
‘I would love to see more, Rich, thank you.’
The name felt awkward on her lips and yet somehow right at the same time. Clunky but...okay, as if it could wear in comfortably with use.
The tour didn’t take long, not because there wasn’t a lot to look at in every sumptuous space but because, despite its size, the Portus was, as it happened, mostly boat. As Rich showed her around she noted a jet ski securely stashed at the back, a sea kayak, water skis—everything a man could need to enjoy some time on the water. But she saw nothing to indicate that he enjoyed time in it.
‘No diving gear?’ she commented. ‘On a boat with not one but two dive decks?’
His pause was momentary. ‘Plenty to keep me busy above the surface,’ he said.
Something about that niggled in this new environment of truce between them. That little glimpse of vulnerability coming so close on the heels of some humble truth. But she didn’t need super-senses to know not to push it. She carried on the tour in comparative silence.
The Portus primarily comprised of three living areas: the aft deck lounge that she’d already seen, the indoor galley and the most incredibly functional bedroom space ever. It took up the whole bow, filling the front of the Portus with panoramic, all-seeing windows, below which wrapped fitted black cupboards. She trailed a finger along the spotless black surface, over the part that was set up as a workspace, complete with expensive camouflaged laptop, hip-height bookshelves, a disguised mini-bar and a perfectly made up king-sized bed positioned centrally in the space, complete with black pillow and quilt covers. The whole space screamed sensuality and not just because of all the black.
A steamy kind of heat billowed up from under Mila’s work shirt. It was way too easy to imagine Rich in here.
‘Where’s the widescreen TV?’ she asked, hunting for the final touch to the space that she knew had to be here somewhere.
Rich leaned next to the workspace. ‘I had it removed. When I’m in here it’s not to watch TV.’
She turned to face him. ‘Is that because this is an office first, or a bedroom first?’
The moments the words left her lips she tried to recapture them, horrified at her own boldness. It had to be the result of this all-consuming black making her skin tingle, but talking about a client’s bedroom habits with said client was not just inappropriate, it was utterly mortifying.
‘I’m so sorry...’ she said hurriedly.
Rich held up a hand and the smile finally returned, lighting up the luxurious space.
‘My own fault for having such a rock star bedroom,’ he joked. ‘I didn’t buy the Portus for this space, but I have to admit it’s pretty functional. Everything I need is close by. But who needs a TV when you have a wraparound view like this, right?’
She followed his easy wave out of the expansive windows. There was something just too...perfect about the image he created. And she just couldn’t see him sitting still long enough to enjoy a view.
‘You work when you’re on board, don’t you?’
Those coral-coloured lips twisted. ‘Maybe.’
Mila hunted around for a topic of discussion that would soak up some of the cotton candy suddenly swilling around the room. ‘Where do your crew sleep?’
The business of climbing down into one of the hulls, where a small bed space and washing facility were, gave her the time she needed to get her rogue senses back in order.
‘...comfortable enough for short trips,’ Rich was saying as she tuned back in.
‘What about long ones?’
He glanced out of the window. ‘WestCorp keeps me pretty much tethered to the city. This is shaping up to be the longest trip I’ve taken since I got her. Three days.’
Wow. Last of the big spenders.
‘Come on.’ He straightened, maybe seeing the judgement in that thought on her face. ‘Let’s finish the tour.’
The rest of the Portus consisted of a marble-clad en suite bathroom, appointed with the same kind of luxury as everywhere else, and then a trip back out to the aft deck and up a spiral staircase to the helm. Like everything else on the vessel, it was a wonder of compact efficiency. Buttons and LED panels and two screens with high-tech navigation and seafloor mapping and a bunch of other equipment she didn’t recognise. The Portus’ captain introduced himself but Mila stood back just far enough that a handshake would be awkward to ask for. She’d rather not insult a second man today. Maybe a third.
‘Two crew?’ she murmured. The vessel was large enough for it, but for just one passenger...?
‘It’s more efficient to run overnight. Tag-teaming the skippering. Get up from the city faster. I left the office at seven two nights ago and woke up here the next morning. Same deal tonight. I’ll leave before sunset and be back in Perth just in time for my personal trainer.’
Imagine having a boat like this and then rushing every moment you were on her. This gorgeous vessel suddenly became relegated to a water taxi. Despite the wealth and comfort around her, she found herself feeling particularly sorry for Richard Grundy.
Captain Farrow pressed a finger to his headset and spoke quietly, then he turned to Rich.
‘Lunch is served, sir.’
‘Thanks, Max.’
They backtracked and found the sumptuous spread and the remainder of the wine set out on the aft deck. The deckhand known as Damo lowered his head respectfully then jogged on tanned legs up the spiral stairs to the helm and was gone.
Rich indicated for her to sit.
The first thing she noticed was the absence of the promised crayfish. In its place were some pieces of chicken. The little kindness touched her even as she wondered exactly how and when he’d communicated the instruction. Clearly, his crew had a talent for operating invisibly.
‘This is amazing,’ she said, curling her bare legs under her on the soft leather. The deep strains of wind chimes flew out of the back of the boat and were overwhelmed in the wash, but they endured. Mila loaded her small plate with delicious morsels.
‘So how long have you worked for the Department?’ Rich asked, loading a piece of sourdough with pâté and goat’s cheese.
It wasn’t unusual for one of her tour clients to strike up a personal conversation; what was unusual was the ease with which she approached her answer.
She normally didn’t do chatty.
‘Six years. Until I was eighteen, I instructed snorkelers during the busy season and volunteered on conservation projects in the off-season.’
‘While most other teens were bagging groceries or flipping burgers after school?’
‘It’s different up here. Station work, hospitality or conservation. Those are our options. Or leaving, of course,’ she acknowledged. Plenty of young people chose that.
‘Waiting on people not your thing?’
She studied her food for a moment. ‘People aren’t really my thing, to be honest. I much prefer the solitude of the reef system.’
It was the perfect in if he wanted to call her on her interpersonal skills. Or lack of.
But he didn’t. ‘What about working on the Station? Not too many people out there, I wouldn’t have thought.’
‘I would have worked on Wardoo in a heartbeat,’ she admitted. ‘But jobs there are very competitive and the size of their crew gets smaller every year as the owners cut back and back.’ She looked out towards the vast rust-coloured land on their port side. ‘And back.’
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