The Billionaire of Coral Bay

by Nikki Logan

  He scanned the sheer cliffs for camouflaged little faces. ‘What are they, half mountain goat? Don’t they fall off?’

  ‘They’re born up there, spend their lives leaping from claw-hold to claw-hold, nibbling on the plants that grow there, sleeping under the overhangs, raising their own young away from most predators. They’re adapted to it. It’s totally normal to them. They would be so surprised to know how impossible we find it.’

  He fell back into rhythm with her gentle paddling. Was she talking about wallabies now or was she talking about her synaesthesia?

  The more he looked, the more he saw, and the further he paddled, the more Mila showed him. She talked about the prehistoric-looking fish species that liked the cold, dark depths of the creek’s uppermost reaches, the osprey and egrets that nested in its heights, the people who had once lived here and the ancient sites that were being rediscovered every year.

  It was impossible not to imagine the tourist potential of building something substantial down the coast from a natural resource like this. An eco-resort in eco-central. Above them, small openings now occupied by wallabies hinted at so much more.

  ‘The cavers must love it here,’ he guessed. He knew enough about rocks to know these ones were probably riddled with holes.

  ‘One year there was a massive speleologist convention and cavers from all over the world came specifically to explore the uncharted parts of the Range. They discovered nearly twelve new caves in two days. Imagine what they might have found if they could have stayed up here for a week. Or two!’

  ‘Why couldn’t they?’

  ‘There just aren’t any facilities up here to house groups of that size. Or labs to accommodate scientists or...really anything. Still, the caves have waited this long, I guess.’ Her shoulders slumped. ‘As long as the sea doesn’t rise any faster.’

  In which case the coastal range where the rock wallabies clung would go back to being islands and the exposed rock they were exploring would eventually be blanketed in corals again.

  The circle of life.

  They took their time paddling the crumbled-in end of the gorge, looking closely at the make-up of the towering walls, the same shapes he’d seen out on the reef here, just fossilised, the synchronised slosh of their oars the only sounds between them.

  The silence in this beautiful place was otherwise complete. It soaked into him in a way he’d never really felt before and he finally understood why Mila might have thought that open ocean wasn’t really that quiet at all.

  Because she had this to compare it to.

  ‘So, I’m thinking of coming back on the weekend,’ he said when they were nearly done, before realising he’d even decided. ‘For a couple more days. I’ve obviously underestimated what brings people here.’

  They bumped back up against the re-establishing sand bar and Mila clambered out then turned to him with something close to suspicion on her pretty face. After the connection he thought they’d just made it was a disappointing setback.

  ‘I’m only booked for today,’ she said bluntly. ‘You’ll have to find someone else to guide you.’

  Denial surged through him.

  ‘You have other clients?’ He could get that changed with one phone call. But pulling rank on her like that would be about as popular as...earwax.

  ‘No, but I’ve got things on.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘An aerial survey of seagrasses and some whale shark pattern work. A tagging job. And the neap tide is this weekend so I’ll be part of the annual spawn collection team. It’s a big deal up here.’

  Rich felt his chance at continuing to get quality insider information—and his opportunity to get to know Mila a bit better—slipping rapidly away.

  ‘Can I come along? Two birds, one stone.’ Then, when she hesitated awkwardly, he added, ‘Paid, of course.’

  She winced. ‘It’s not about money. I’m just not sure whether that’s okay. Most of our work isn’t really a spectator sport.’

  It was a practical enough excuse. But every instinct told him it was only half the truth. Was she truly so used to only ever seeing developers the one time? Well, he liked to be memorable.

  ‘Put me to work, then. I can count seagrass or study the...spawn.’

  Ten minutes ago that would have earned him another throaty laugh. Now, she just frowned.

  ‘Come on, Mila, wasn’t it you who asked when I’d last done something completely new to me? This is an opportunity. A bunch of new experiences.’ He found the small tussle of wills disproportionately exhilarating. ‘I’ll be low-maintenance. Scout’s honour.’

  She shrugged as she bent to hike her side of the kayak up, but the lines either side of her flat lips told him she wasn’t feeling that casual at all.

  ‘It’s your time to waste, I guess.’

  He only realised he’d been holding his breath when he was able to let it out on a slow, satisfied smile. More time to get a feel for this district and more time to get his head around Mila Nakano.

  * * *

  The return trip felt as if it took half the time, as return trips often did. But it was long enough for Mila to carefully pick her way out to the front of the Portus and slide down behind the safety barrier on one of the catamaran hulls. Rich did the same on the other and—together but apart—they lost themselves in the deep blue ocean until they reached the open waters off Coral Bay again. Over on her side, the water whooshing past sang triumphantly.

  Regardless, she shifted on the deck and let her shoulders slump.

  She’d been rude. Even she could see that. Properly, officially rude.

  But the moment Rich had decided to return to Coral Bay for a more in-depth look she’d felt a clawing kind of tension start to climb her spine. Coming back meant he wasn’t a one any more. Coming back meant that none of the remoteness or the politics or the environmental considerations had deterred him particularly.

  Coming back meant he was serious.

  She’d guided Rich today because that was her job. But she’d let herself be disarmed by his handsome face and fancy boat and his apparently genuine interest in the reef and cape. Her only comfort was that he still had to get past the Dawsons—and no one had ever managed that—but she still didn’t want him to think that she somehow endorsed his plans to develop the bay.

  Whatever they were.

  Regardless of the cautious camaraderie that had grown between them, Richard Grundy was still her adversary. Because he was the reef’s adversary.

  She cast her eyes across the deep green ocean flashing by below the twin hulls. Rich sat much as she did, legs dangling, spray in his face, but his gaze was turned away from her, his focus firmly fixed on the coast as they raced south parallel to it. No doubt visualising how his hotel was going to look looming over the water. Or his resort.

  Or—perish the thought—his casino.

  Knowing wouldn’t change anything, yet she had to work hard at not being obsessed by which it would be.

  They met on the aft deck as the catamaran drew to an idling halt off Bill’s Bay an hour later. Behind them, the sun was making fairly rapid progress towards the horizon.

  ‘It was good to meet you,’ she murmured politely, already backing away.

  Rich frowned. ‘You say that like I won’t be seeing you again...’

  The weekend was four days away. Anything could happen in that time, including him losing his enthusiasm for returning. Just because he was eager for it now didn’t mean he’d still be hot for it after the long journey back to the city and his overflowing inbox. Or maybe she’d have arranged someone else to show him around on Saturday. That would be the smart thing to do. This could quite easily be the last she ever saw of Richard Grundy.

  At the back of her throat the slightest tang began to climb over the smell of the ocean.<
br />
  Earwax.

  Which was ridiculous. Rich was virtually a stranger; why would her heart squeeze even a little bit at the thought of parting? But her senses never lied, even when she was lying to herself. That was unmistakably earwax she could taste.

  Which made Saturday a really bad idea.

  She hurried down to the dive platform on one of the Portus’ hulls when Rich might have kissed her cheek in farewell, and she busied herself climbing aboard the tender when he might have offered her a helpful outstretched hand. But once she was aboard and the skipper began to throttle the tender out from under the Portus she had no real excuse—other than rudeness—not to look back at Rich, his hands shoved deeply into his pockets, still standing on the small dive platform. It changed the shape of his arms and shoulders below the T-shirt he’d put on when they’d got back aboard, showing off the sculpted muscles she’d tried so hard not to appreciate when they were snorkelling. Or when they brushed her briefly while they were paddling the kayak.

  ‘Seven a.m. Saturday, then?’ he called over the tender’s thrum and nodded towards the marina. It would have sounded like an order if not for the three little forks between his blue eyes.

  Doubt.

  In a man who probably never second-guessed himself.

  ‘Don’t look for me,’ she called back to him. ‘Look for the uniform.’ Just in case. Any one of her colleagues could show him the area.

  She should have scrunched her nose as the tender reversed through a light fog of its own diesel exhaust, but all she could taste and smell in the back of her throat was candyfloss. The flavour she was rapidly coming to associate with Rich.

  The flavour she was rapidly coming to crave like a sugary drug.

  She was almost ashore before she realised that the presence of candyfloss in her mind’s nose meant she’d already decided to be the one who met him on Saturday.

  * * *

  The first thing Mila did when she got back to her desk was jump online and check out the etymology of the word portus. She’d guessed Greek—some water god or something—but it turned out it was Latin...for port. Duh! But it also meant sanctuary, and the imposing vessel certainly was that—even up here, where everything around them was already nine parts tranquil. She’d felt it the moment she’d stepped aboard Rich’s luxurious boat. She could only imagine what it was like for him to climb aboard and motor away from the busy city and his corporate responsibilities for a day or two.

  No...only ever one. Hadn’t he told her as much?

  What were those corporate responsibilities, exactly?

  It took only moments to search up WestCorp and discover how many pies the corporation had its fingers in. And a couple of media stories that came back high in the search results told her that Richard Grundy was the CEO of WestCorp and had been since the massive and unexpected heart attack that had taken his father. Rich had been carrying the entire corporation since then. No wonder he’d been on the phone a lot that morning. No wonder he didn’t have time to use his boat. The Internet celebrated the growth of WestCorp in his few short years. There were pages of resource holdings and she lost interest after only the first few.

  Suffice to say that Mr Richard Grundy was as corporate as they came.

  Despite that, somewhere between getting off the Portus and setting foot back on land she’d decided to definitely be the one to meet him on Saturday. Not just because of the candyfloss, which she reluctantly understood—biology was biology and even hers, tangled as it was with other input, was working just fine when it came to someone so high up on the Mila Nakano Secret Hotness Scale—but because of the earwax.

  Her earwax couldn’t be for Rich—she just didn’t know him well enough—it had to be for the reef. For what a company like WestCorp could do to it. If she left him in the hands of anyone else, could she guarantee that they’d make it as abundantly clear as she would how badly this area did not need development? How it was ticking along just fine as it was?

  Or should she only trust something that important to herself?

  She reached for her phone.

  ‘Hey, Craig, it’s Mila...’

  A few minutes later she disconnected her call, reassured that the pilot of Saturday’s aerial survey could accommodate an extra body without compromising the duration of the flight. So that was Rich sorted; he would get to see a little more of the region he wanted to know about, and she...

  She, what?

  She’d bought herself another day or two to work on him and convince him exactly why this region didn’t need his fancy-pants development. It happened to also be another day or two for Rich to discover how complicated she and her synaesthesia were to be around but, at the end of the day, the breathy anticipation of her lonely heart had to mean less than the sanctity and security of her beloved reef.

  It just had to.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘WE’RE MAPPING WHAT?’ Rich asked into the microphone of the headset they each wore on Saturday morning as the little Cessna lifted higher and higher. Coasting at fifteen hundred feet was the only way to truly appreciate the size and beauty of the whole area.

  Dugongs, Mila mouthed back, turning her face out towards a nook in the distant coast where the landforms arranged themselves into the kind of seagrass habitat that the lumbering animals preferred. ‘Manatees. Sea cows.’

  When he just blinked, she delved into her pocket, swiped through an overcrowded photo roll and then passed the phone back to him.

  ‘Dugong,’ she repeated. ‘They feed on the seagrasses. They all but disappeared at the start of the century after a cyclone smothered the seagrasses with silt. The department has been monitoring their return ever since.’

  She patted the sizeable camera that was fixed to the open window of the aircraft by two heavy-duty braces. ‘Their main feeding grounds are a little south of here but more and more are migrating into these sensitive secondary zones. We’re tracking their range to measure the viability of recovery from another incident like it.’

  The more she impressed upon him the complexity of the environmental situation, the less likely he would be to go ahead with his plans, right? The more words like ‘sensitive’ and ‘fragile’ and ‘rare’ that she used, the harder development would seem up here. Either he would recognise the total lack of sense of developing such delicate coast or—at the very least—he would foresee how much red tape lay in his future.

  It couldn’t hurt, anyway.

  Rich shifted over to sit closer to her window, as if her view was any more revealing than his. This close, she could smell him over the residual whiff of aviation fuel. Cotton candy, as always, but there was something else... Something she couldn’t identify. It didn’t ring any alarm bells; on the contrary, it made her feel kind of settled. In a way she hadn’t stopped feeling since picking him up at the marina after four days apart.

  Right.

  It felt right.

  ‘Craig comes up twice a day to spot for the whale shark cruises,’ she said to distract herself from such a worrying association. To keep her focus firmly on work. She nodded down at the four white boats waiting just offshore. ‘If he isn’t scheduled to take tourists on a scenic flight then I hitch a lift and gather what data I can while we’re up here.’

  ‘Opportunistic,’ Rich observed.

  ‘Like the wildlife.’ She smiled.

  Okay, so he hadn’t technically earned the smile, but she was struggling not to hand them out like sweets. What was going on with her today? She hadn’t gushed over Craig when she saw him again after a week.

  They flew in a wide arc out over the ocean and Rich shifted back to his own window and peered out. Below, areas of darkness on the water might have been the shadow of clouds, reef or expansive seagrass beds.

  ‘We’re looking for pale streaks in the dark beds,’ Mila said. ‘That’s l
ikely to be a dugong snuffling its way along the seafloor, vacuuming up everything it finds. Where there’s one, hopefully there’ll be more.’

  Until you saw it, it was difficult to explain—something between a snail’s trail and a jet stream—but, as soon as you saw it, it was unmistakable in the bay’s kaleidoscopic waters.

  They flew lower, back and forth over the grasses, eyes peeled. When she did this, she usually kept her focus tightly fixed on the sea below, not only to spot an elusive dugong but also to limit the distracting sensory input she was receiving from everything else she could see in her periphery. Today, though, she was failing at both.

  She’d never been as aware of someone else as she was with Rich up here. If he shuffled, she noticed. If he smiled, she felt it. If he spoke, she attended.

  It was infuriating.

  ‘Is that one?’ Rich asked, pointing to a murky streak not far from shore.

  ‘Sure is!’ Mila signalled to Craig, who adjusted course and took them closer. She tossed a pair of binoculars at Rich and locked onto his eyes. ‘Go you.’

  Given the animal she was supposed to be fascinated by, it took her a worryingly long time to tear her eyes away from Rich’s and focus on the task at hand.

  Through the zoom lens of her camera it was possible to not only get some detail on the ever-increasing forage trail of a feeding dugong but to also spot three more rolling around at the surface enjoying the warmest top layer of the sea and the rising sun. Her finger just about cramped on the camera’s shutter release and she filled an entire memory card with images. Maybe a dozen or so would be useful to the dugong research team but until she got back to her office she couldn’t know which. So she just kept shooting.

  Rich shook his head as they finished up the aerial survey. ‘Can’t believe you get paid to do this.’

  ‘Technically, I don’t,’ Mila admitted. ‘I’m on my own time today.’

  He turned a frown towards her and spoke straight into her ear, courtesy of the headsets. ‘That doesn’t seem right.’

  She looked up at him. ‘Why? What else would I do with the time?’