by Nikki Logan
‘Then what? Why do I need to feel safe with you?’
She’d not seen Rich look anything but supremely confident since he’d first come striding towards her with his hand outstretched at Nancy’s Point. Now he looked positively bewildered. And a little bit sick. It helped ease the whiff of nail varnish that came with the devastation.
This whole conversation stank more than an industrial precinct.
‘Because you’re so wary and I...’ He greyed just a little bit more as his actions dawned on him. ‘Oh, God, Mila—’
‘Way to go, bro!’ Craig called as he breezed past them with a hand raised in farewell and marched towards the little shed that served as the airfield’s office.
Rich was way too fixated on her face to acknowledge his departure, but it bought them both a moment to take a breath and think. Mila fought her natural inclination to distrust.
Richard Grundy was not a serial killer. He hadn’t just spiked her drink in a nightclub. He wasn’t keeping strangers locked up in a basement somewhere.
He’d worn something he thought would make her comfortable around him.
That was all.
Mila could practically see his mind whirring away in that handsome head. He dropped his gaze to the crushed limestone runway and when it came back up his eyes were bleak. But firm. And she registered the truth in them.
‘I wanted to ask you to dinner,’ he admitted, low. ‘And I wanted you to feel comfortable enough around me to say yes.’
‘Do I look comfortable?’
He sagged. ‘Not even a little bit.’
But every shade paler Rich went helped with that. He saw his mistake now and something told her that he very rarely made them. Old habits died hard, yet something in his demeanour caused a new and unfamiliar sensation to shimmer through her tense body.
Trust.
She wanted to believe in him.
‘Why would you care whether I come to dinner or not?’ Which was coward-speak for, Why do you want to have dinner at all?
With me.
‘You intrigue me,’ he began. ‘And not because of the synaesthesia. Or not just because of it,’ he added when she lifted a sceptical brow. ‘I just wanted to get to know you better. And I wanted you to get to know me better.’
‘I’m not sure you improve on repeat exposure, to be honest.’
Conflict shone live in his intense gaze. He battled it for moments. Then he decided.
‘You know what? This was a mistake. My mistake,’ he hurried to clarify.
‘Big call from a man who never makes mistakes.’
His laugh was half-snort. And barely even that.
‘Apparently, I save them up to perpetrate in one stunning atrocity.’ His chest broadened with one breath. ‘I succeed in business because of my foresight. My planning. Because I anticipate obstacles and plan for them. But I’m completely out of my depth with you, Mila. I have no idea where the boundaries are, never mind how I can control them. But that’s a poor excuse for trying to game you.’ He stepped out from under the shade of the Cessna’s wing. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve shown me and I wish you all the best for the future.’
He didn’t try and shake her hand, or to touch her in any way. He just delivered an awkward half-bow like some lord of a long-ago realm and started to back away. But at the last moment he stopped and turned back.
‘I meant what I said, Mila, about you being exceptional for a whole bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with your synaesthesia. There’s something about how you are on that reef, in this place...I think you and your super-connectedness to the world might just hold the secret to life. I don’t understand it, but I’m envious as hell and I think I was just hoping that some of it might rub off on me.’
He nodded one last time and strode away.
A slam of freshly made toast hit her. Sorrow. Rich was saying goodbye just as she’d finally got to meet the real him. Just as he’d dropped his slick veneer and let her in through those aquamarine eyes—the colour that always energised her. She would never again know the harp strains of his touch, or the coffee of his easy company or the sugar-rush of his sexy smile. He would be just like every other suited stranger she’d ever guided up here.
A one.
She wasn’t ready to assign him to those dreaded depths just yet. And not just because of the rapidly diminishing oak moss that made her feel so bereft. She’d spent her life being distanced by people and here was a man trying to close that up a little and she’d gone straight for the jugular.
Maybe she needed to be party to the distance-closing herself.
Maybe change started at home.
‘Wait!’
She had to call it a second time because Rich had made such long-legged progress away from her. He stopped and turned almost as he stepped off the airfield onto the carefully reticulated grass that lined it. Some little voice deep down inside urged her that once he’d stepped onto that surface it would have been too late, that he’d have been lost to her.
That she’d caught something—barely—before it was gone for ever. ‘What about the coral spawn?’
He frowned and called back. ‘What about it?’
‘You can’t leave before you’ve seen it, surely? Having come all this way.’
His face grew guarded and she got toast again as she realised that she’d made him feel as bad about himself as others had always made her feel.
‘Is it that spectacular?’ he called back warily.
‘It’s a miracle,’ she said, catching up. Puffing slightly. More aware of someone than ever before in her life. ‘And it should start tonight.’
He battled silently with himself again, and she searched his eyes for signs of an angle she just couldn’t find.
‘It would be my first miracle...’ he conceded.
‘And the moon has to be high to trigger it so, you know, we could grab something to eat beforehand.’ She huffed out a breath. ‘If you want.’
His smile, when it came, was like a Coral Bay sunrise. Slow to start but eye-watering when it came up over the ridge. It was heralded by a tsunami of candyfloss.
‘That won’t be weird? After...’ He nodded towards the plane.
Cessna-gate?
‘No,’ she was quick to confirm. ‘It wasn’t the brightest thing you’ve done but I believe that you meant no harm.’
His handsome face softened with gratitude. But there was something else in there too, a shadow...
‘Okay then,’ he said, pushing it away. ‘I’ll meet you at the marina at six?’
Her breath bunched up in her throat like onlookers crowding around some spectacle. It made it hard to say much more than, ‘Okay.’
It was only at the last moment that she remembered to call out.
‘Bring your fins!’
CHAPTER SIX
RICH BRACED HIS feet in the bottom of the tender as it puttered up to the busy pier, then leapt easily off onto the unweathered timbers without Damo needing to tie up amongst the dozen boaters also coming ashore for the evening.
Mila had been on his mind since he’d left her earlier in the day, until the raft of documents waiting for him had forced her out so that he could focus on the plans.
I believe that you meant no harm, she’d said.
Purposefully wearing one of her synaesthesia scents was only a small part of the hurt he feared he might be gearing up to perpetrate on this gentle creature. A decent man would have accepted another guide, or gone back to the city and stayed there. Made the necessary decisions from afar. A decent man wouldn’t be finding reasons to stay close to Mila even as he did the paperwork that would change her world for ever. A driven man would. A focused man would.
He would.
Was there no way to succeed up here and ge
t the girl?
Deep down, he knew that there probably wasn’t.
Mila wouldn’t be quite so quick to declare her confident belief in him if she knew that he had the draft plans for a reef-front resort sitting on his desk on board the Portus. Or why he was so unconcerned about any eleventh-hour development barriers from the local leaseholders.
Because he was that final barrier.
He was Wardoo.
And Wardoo’s lease was up for renewal right now. There was no time to come up with another strategy, or for long-winded feasibility testing. Someone was going to develop this coast—him, the government, some offshore third party—and if he didn’t act, then he would lose the coastal strip or the lease on Wardoo. Possibly both.
Then where would Mila and her reef be?
Better the devil and all that.
* * *
He waved Damo off and watched him putter past incoming boats, back out towards the Portus’ holding site beyond the reef. As the sun sank closer to the western horizon, it cast an orange-yellow glow over everything, reflected perfectly in the still, mirrored surface of the windless lagoon. Did Mila dislike golden sunsets the way she distrusted yellow fish? He couldn’t imagine her disliking anything about this unique place.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ a soft voice said behind him. ‘I could look at that every day.’
Rich turned to face Mila, standing on the marina. He wanted to comment that she did look at it every day but the air he needed to accomplish it escaped from his lungs as soon as he set eyes on her.
She wasn’t wet, or bedraggled, or crunchy-haired. She wasn’t in uniform. Or in a bikini. Or any of the ways he’d seen her up until now. She stood, weight on one leg, hands twisted in front of her, her long dark hair hanging smooth and combed around her perfectly made-up face. All natural tones, almost impossible to see except that he’d been remembering that face without its make-up every hour of the day since he’d left on Tuesday and comparing it subconsciously to every other artfully made-up female face he’d seen since then. That meant he could spot the earthy, natural colours, so perfect on her tanned skin. A clasp of shells tightly circled her long throat while a longer strand hung down across the vee of smooth skin revealed by her simple knitted dress, almost the same light brown as her skin. The whole thing was held up by the flimsiest of straps, lying over the bikini she wore underneath. She looked casual enough to walk straight out into the glassy water, or boho enough to dine in any restaurant in the city. Even the best ones.
‘Mila. Good to see you again.’ Ugh, that was formal. He held up the snorkelling gear he’d purchased on his way back to the Portus that morning. ‘Fins.’
Her smile seemed all the brighter in the golden light of evening and some of the twist in her fingers loosened up. ‘I thought you might have left them on the boat by-accident-on-purpose. To get out of tonight.’
‘Are you kidding? Miss out on such a unique event?’
She chewed her lip and it was adorable. ‘I should confess that not everyone finds mass spawning as beautiful as I do.’
‘Seriously? A sea full of floating sex cells. What’s not to love?’
She stood grinning at him long enough for him to realise that he was standing just grinning at her too.
Ridiculous.
‘Want me to drive?’ he finally managed to say. ‘It’s such a long way.’
His words seemed to break Mila’s trance and her laugh tinkled. ‘I think I can handle it.’
He rolled around in that laugh, luxuriating, and his mind went again to the stack of plans on his desk.
Jerk.
It only took three minutes to drive around into the heart of Coral Bay. On the way, she asked him about his day at large in town and he asked her about hers. They filled the three minutes effortlessly.
And then they ran flat out of easy conversation.
As soon as they stepped out of her four-wheel drive in front of the restaurant, Mila’s body seemed to tighten up. Was she anticipating the sensory impact of sharing a meal with dozens of others, or the awkwardness of sharing a meal with him? Whichever, her back grew rigid as her hand lifted to push the door open.
‘Would it be crazy to suggest eating on the beach instead?’ he asked before the noise from the restaurant reached more fully out to them. ‘The lagoon is too beautiful not to look at tonight.’
As was Mila.
And he didn’t really feel like sharing her with a restaurant full of people.
He watched her eagerness to seek the solace of the beach wrestle with her reluctance to be so alone with him. After what he’d pulled earlier, who could blame her? Sharing a meal in a crowded restaurant was one thing; sharing it on a moonlit beach made it much harder to pretend this was all just...business.
‘I’m scent-free tonight,’ he assured her, holding his hands out to his sides. Trying to keep it light.
‘If only,’ he thought he heard her mutter.
But then she spoke louder. ‘Yes, that would be great; let’s order to go.’
And go they did, all of one hundred metres down to the aptly named Paradise Beach, which stretched out expansively from the parking area. The tide was returning but, still, the beach was wide and white and virtually empty. A lone man ran back and forth with a scrappy terrier, white sand flying against the golden sunset. The dog barked with exuberant joy.
‘This looks good,’ Rich said, unfolding the battered fish and potato scallops.
‘Wait until you taste it,’ she promised as the man and dog disappeared up a sandy track away from the beach. ‘That fish was still swimming a couple of hours ago. They source locally and daily.’
Talking about food was only one step removed from talking about the weather and it almost pained him to make such inane small talk when his time with Mila was so limited.
He wanted to see the passion in her eyes again.
‘Speaking of swimming, why exactly are we heading out into spawn-infested waters?’ he encouraged. ‘More volunteering?’
‘This one’s work-related. My whole department heads out at different points of the Northwest Cape on the first nights of the eruption to collect spawn. So we have diverse genetic stock.’
‘For what?’
‘The spawn bank.’
He just blinked. ‘There’s a spawn bank?’
‘There is. Or...there will be, one day. Right now it’s a locked chest freezer in Steve Donahue’s fish shed, but some day the fertilised spawn will help to repopulate this reef if it’s destroyed. Or we can intentionally repopulate individual patches that die off.’ She turned to him, her eyes glowing as golden as the sunset. ‘Tonight we collect and freeze, and in the future they’ll culture and release the resulting embryos to wiggle their way back onto the reef and fix there.’
‘That sounds—’ Desperate? A lost cause? ‘—ambitious.’
‘We have to do something.’ She shrugged. ‘One outbreak of disease or a feral competitor, rising global temperatures or a really brutal cyclone... All of that would be gone.’
His eyes followed hers out to the darkening lagoon and the reef no longer visible anywhere above it. The water line was nearly twice as far up the beach as it had been when the Portus set him ashore. He didn’t realise there were so many threats to the reef’s survival.
Threats that didn’t include him, anyway.
‘And how do you know it will be tonight?’
‘It’s usually triggered by March’s full moon.’
He glanced up at the crescent moon peeking over the eastern horizon. ‘Shouldn’t you have done this last week, then?’
‘By the time they’ve grown for ten days, the moonlight is dim enough to help hide the spawn bundles from every other creature on the reef waiting to eat them.’ She glanced out to the horizon. ‘It will probably be more s
pectacular tomorrow night but I like to be in the water for the first eruptions. Not quite so soupy.’
‘Sounds delicious,’ he drawled.
But it didn’t deter his enjoyment of his seafood as he finished it up.
‘How far out are we going this time?’
He hated exposing himself with that question but he also liked to be as prepared as possible for challenges, including death-defying ones. Preparedness was how you stayed alive—in the boardroom and on the beach. There was nothing sensible about swimming out onto a reef after dark.
He’d seen the documentaries.
‘The species we’re after are all comfortably inside the break.’
Comfortably. Nothing about this was comfortable. It was testament to how badly he wanted to be with Mila that he was entertaining the idea at all.
They fell to silence and talked about nothing for a bit, Mila glancing now and again out to the lagoon to check that the spawning hadn’t commenced while they were making small talk.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she eventually said, bringing her eyes back to him. ‘How come the captain of the swim team doesn’t like water? And don’t mention your jet ski,’ she interrupted as he opened his mouth. ‘I’m talking about being in water.’
Given how she’d opened herself up to him about her synaesthesia, not returning the favour felt wrong. Yet going down this path scarcely felt any better, because of where he knew it led. And how she might judge him for that.
‘I’m hurt that you’ve forgotten our first snorkel already...’
Her green eyes narrowed at his evasion.
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. ‘I like to be the only species in the water. Swimming pools are awesome for that.’
‘Spoken like a true axial predator. You don’t like to share?’
‘Only child,’ he grunted. But Mila still wasn’t satisfied. That keen gaze stayed locked firmly on his until he felt obliged to offer up more. ‘I like to know what I’m sharing with.’
‘You know there’s more chance of being killed by lightning than a shark, right?’