The Billionaire of Coral Bay

by Nikki Logan

  She called back over her shoulder. ‘Why don’t you build an undersea hotel? That would be awesome.’

  She refused to think of what she’d seen on his desk as a reasonable compromise. And she refused to let herself believe that the project was still open to amendment, any more than she could believe that she made the slightest difference to his secret plans.

  He’d signed it. In ink.

  ‘Or, better yet, don’t build anything. Just let Wardoo stand or fall on its own merits.’

  ‘It will fall.’

  ‘Then give up the lease, if that’s what it takes.’

  ‘I don’t want to give it up. I’m trying to save it.’

  She stared at him, her chest heaving. Even he looked confused by that.

  ‘If I surrender the lease,’ he went on after the momentary fumble, ‘then anyone could take it up. You could end up with a million goats destroying the land. If I keep the lease and don’t develop then the government will excise the strip and someone else will come in and do it. Someone who doesn’t care about the reef at all.’

  ‘Funny,’ she spat. ‘I thought that was you.’

  For a moment she thought that Rich was going to let her go with the last word still tasting like nail varnish on her lips. But he was a CEO, and people with acronyms for titles probably never surrendered the final word. On principle.

  ‘Mila, don’t go. Not like this.’

  But final words could sometimes be silent. And she was determined that hers should be. Besides which, her lungs were too full of the scent of earwax for adequate speech and the last thing she wanted was for Richard Grundy to hear her croak. So she kept moving. Her feet reached the timber dive platform. The jarrah deck’s isolation practically pulsed through her feet. Resonating with a kindred spirit, perhaps. She accepted Damo’s hand without thought and stepped into the tender, sinking down with her back firmly to the man she’d accepted so readily into her life.

  Nothing.

  No solo trumpet at Damo’s touch. No plinking ball bearings at the breeze rushing under the Portus. No fluttering of wings as her skin erupted in gooseflesh.

  It was as if every part of her was as deadened as her heart.

  Had he not taken enough from her this night? Now he’d muted her superpower.

  Behind her, Rich stood silent and still. Had she expected an eleventh-hour apology? Some final sense of regret? An attitudinal about-face?

  Just how naive was she, really?

  Richard Grundy was making decisions based on the needs and wants of his shareholders. She couldn’t reasonably expect him to put anyone else’s needs ahead of his own. And certainly not hers. She was his tour guide, nothing more. A curiosity and an entertainment. A woman he’d known only days in the greater scheme of things. It was pure folly to imagine that she would—or even could—affect any change in his deep-seated attitudes.

  Then again, folly seemed to be all Rich thought she was capable of here. In her quaint little shack with her funny little job...

  Damo had the good sense to stay completely silent as he ran her back to the marina and dropped her onto the pier. She gave him the weakest of smiles in farewell and didn’t wait to watch him leave, climbing down onto the beach and turning towards town. The tide was far enough out that she could wade around the rocks to get back to town and, somehow, it felt critical that she put her feet back in the water, that she prove to herself that Rich had not muted her senses for good.

  That he had not broken her.

  But there was no symphony as the water swilled around her bare feet. And as she turned to look out to the reef, imagining what was down there, there was no sound or sensation at all.

  Everything was as deadened as her heart.

  It was impossible to imagine a world without her superpower to help her interpret it. Or without her reef to help her breathe. And, though she hated to admit it after such a spectacularly short time, she was struggling to even imagine a world without Rich in it.

  To help her live.

  How had he done that? So quickly. So deeply. And—knowing what he’d done—how could she ever trust any of her senses ever again?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘I’VE GOT NEWS,’ her supervisor said down the telephone, his voice grave. ‘But you’re not going to like some of it.’

  Mila took a deep breath. There had been much about the past nine weeks that she didn’t like, least of all her inability to get the treacherous Richard Grundy completely from her mind. Whether she was angry at herself for failing to heed her own instincts or angry at him for turning out to be such a mercenary, she couldn’t tell.

  All she knew was that time had not healed that particular wound, no matter what the adage promised. And no matter how many worthy distractions she’d thrown at it.

  It was her own stupid fault that many of her favourite places were now tainted with memories of Rich in them. She had to go showing them off...

  ‘Go ahead, Lyle.’

  ‘First up... Wardoo’s lease has been renewed.’

  Her stomach clenched. Renewed, Lyle had said. Not refilled.

  Part of the emotional swell she’d been surfing these past months—up, down, up, down—was due to the conflict between wanting Rich to keep his heritage and wanting him to surrender his resort plans. If Rich kept Wardoo it meant he must have kept the coastal strip, which meant going ahead with the resort. But if he dropped the resort, it meant he must have given up Wardoo. And giving up Wardoo meant there was no conceivable reason for Rich to ever be in Coral Bay again.

  So, secretly craving an opportunity to see Rich again meant secretly accepting commercialisation of her beloved coast.

  ‘By the Dawsons?’

  How her stomach could leap quite that high while still fisted from nerves she didn’t know but it seemed to lurch almost into her throat, accompanied by the delicious hot chocolate of hope behind her tongue.

  ‘Looks like they’re staying.’

  He’s staying. Impossible to think of Wardoo as WestCorp’s. Not when she’d eaten sandwiches with and stood in the living room with—and kissed—the the man who owned it.

  ‘I’m looking at a copy of an agreement that I’m probably not supposed to have,’ Lyle admitted. ‘Friends in high places. It’s not the whole thing, just highlights.’

  ‘And the coastal strip?’

  Please... There was still a chance that Rich had negotiated a different outcome. That he’d dropped the resort plans. Or that he’d found a way to keep Wardoo profitable without the coastal strip.

  Not the perfect outcome, but one she only realised in this moment that she would accept. As long as it wasn’t Rich trashing her reef...

  ‘It’s staying in the leasehold,’ Lyle admitted and her heart sank. ‘Not without conditions, though. That’s what I want to talk to you about.’

  She’d been the one to tell her boss about the government’s plans for the coastal strip, but she never told him about Rich’s development. Or that she was on a first name basis with the Dawsons.

  The hopeful hot chocolate wavered into a cigarettey kind of mocha.

  ‘What kind of conditions?’ she asked suspiciously. Though, really, she knew.

  The helicopters were probably circling Coral Bay right now, waiting for that helipad.

  ‘Government has approved a development for the Bay,’ he said.

  Courtesy of a two-month head start, that news didn’t send her to water, but it still hurt hearing it. Had she really imagined he would change his multi-million-dollar plans...?

  For her?

  The hot chocolate completely dissipated and Mila wrapped the arm not holding the phone around her middle and closed her eyes. She asked purely because she was not supposed to already know.

  ‘What kind of development, Lyle?’r />
  ‘Like I said, I’ve only got select pages,’ he started. ‘But it’s big, some kind of resort or hotel. Dozens of bathrooms or kitchens; it’s hard to tell. No idea why they’d need quite that many, so far from the accommodation,’ Lyle flicked through pages on his end of the phone, ‘but there’s lots of that too. Looks like a theatre of some kind, and a massive wine cellar, maybe? Underground, anyway, temperature-controlled. And a helipad of all things. It’s hard to say what it is. But it’s not small, Mila. And it can’t be a coincidence that it’s coming up just as Wardoo’s lease is resolved.’

  No. It was no coincidence.

  ‘Do you know where it’s approved for?’ she breathed.

  This was her last hope. Maybe he’d shifted its site further south, out of the Marine Park. Though really, wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?

  ‘There is a sketch map. Looks like it’s about a half-hour south of you. Nancy’s Point, maybe?’

  Ice began to crystallise the very cells in her flesh.

  So it was done. And at his great-grandmother’s favourite point, of all places.

  ‘Lyle, look through the documents. Is there any reference to a company called WestCorp anywhere in them?’

  Lyle shuffled while Mila died inside.

  ‘Yeah, Mila. There is a WestCorp stamp on one of the floor plans. Who are they?’

  Mila stared at the blank space on the wall opposite her.

  ‘WestCorp is the Dawsons,’ she breathed down the line.

  Lyle seemed as speechless as she was. ‘Dawsons? You’re kidding. They’re the last ones I would have thought—’

  ‘We don’t know them,’ Mila cut in. ‘Or what they’re capable of. They’re just a family who loved this land once. They haven’t lived here for decades.’

  ‘But still—’

  ‘They’re not for the reef any more, Lyle.’ She realised she was punishing him for Rich’s decisions. ‘I’m sorry, I have to go. Can you send me those documents?’

  This time his hesitation was brief. ‘I can’t, Mila. I’m not even supposed to have seen them. This was just a heads-up.’

  Right. Like a five-minute warning siren that a tsunami was coming. What was she supposed to do with that?

  ‘I understand,’ she murmured. ‘And I appreciate it. Thank you, Lyle.’

  It took no time to lock up her little office and get into her four-wheel drive. Then about a half-hour more to get down to Nancy’s Point, half expecting to see site works underway—survey pegs, vehicle tracks, a subterranean wine cellar. But there was nothing, just the same rocky outlook she’d visited a hundred times. The place Rich had first come striding towards her, his big hand outstretched.

  Impotence burned as bourbon in her throat. She tried to imagine the site filled with tourists, staff, power stations and treatment plants and found she couldn’t. It was simply inconceivable.

  And in that moment she decided to tell Rich so.

  If she didn’t fight for her reef, who would?

  There had been no communication between them since he’d left all those weeks ago but this was worth the precedent—now that it was a reality. But she wasn’t brave enough to talk to him face to face or even voice to voice. A big part of her feared what it would do to her heart to hear his voice right inside her ear, and what it would do to her soul to have to endure his justification for this monstrosity. She had a smartphone and she had working fingers, and she could tap him one heck of a scathing email telling him exactly what she thought of his plans to put a resort at Nancy’s Point. And she could do it right now while she was still angry enough to be honest and brave.

  Brave in a way she hadn’t been when she’d fled the Portus that night.

  She climbed back into her car and reached into her dashboard for her phone, then swiped her way through to her email app. She gave a half-moment’s consideration to a subject line that he couldn’t ignore and then began tapping on letters.

  Subject: Nancy will turn in her grave!

  * * *

  ‘All right, folks, time to get wet!’

  Mila sat back and let the excited tourists leap in ahead of her. If they’d been nervous earlier, about snorkelling in open ocean, the anxiety dissipated completely when they spotted their first whale shark, the immense shape looming as a shadow in the water ahead. There were two out here, but the boat chose this one to centre on while another vessel chugged their passengers closer to the other one. But not too close...there were rules. It was up to the tourists to swim the distance and close up the gap between them.

  Not everyone was a natural swimmer and so every spare member of crew got in the water with them and shepherded a small number of snorkelers each. Each leader took an underwater whiteboard so they could communicate with their group without having to get alongside them or surface constantly. Easier when you were navigating an animal as big as a whale shark to be able to keep your eyes on its every move.

  The last cluster slipped off the back of the boat and into the open water in an excited, splashy frenzy.

  That left Mila to go it alone—just how she liked it. She’d eased herself right out onto the front of the big tourist boat where none of them thought to go and so she hadn’t had to sit amongst them with the smells and sounds of unfamiliar people. Now, she gave the captain a wave so he knew she was in, and slid down quietly and gently into the silken water.

  It was normally completely clear out here, barring the odd cluster of weed floating along or balls of fish picking at the surface, but the churning engines of two boats and the splashing of the associated snorkelling tourists made the water foggy with a champagne of bubbles in all directions. Easy to forget what was out here with them when she couldn’t see it, but Mila swam a wide arc to break out of the white-water. As the boats backed away from the site, the water cleared, darkened and then settled a little. The surface turbulence still rocked her but, with her head under, it was much calmer. Calm enough to get on with the job. She looked around her at the light streaming down into the deep blue, converging on some distant point far below, her eyes hunting for the creature so big it seemed impossible that it could hide out here.

  The first clue that it was with them was the frenzied flipper action of the nearby tourists, then a great looming shape materialised in slow motion out of the blue below them straight towards her. The whale shark’s camouflage—the very thing she’d come to photograph—made it hard for Mila to define its distinctive shape until it was nearly upon her, but it did nothing more dramatic than cruise silently by, its massive tail fanning just once to propel it the entire distance between the other tourists and her group. Everyone else started swimming to keep up with it while Mila back-pedalled madly to get herself out of its way.

  She dived under as it passed her, and she got a good view of the half-dozen remoras either catching a ride on the shark’s underside or using its draught to swim against its pale underbelly. She swung her underwater camera up and took a couple of images of the patterning around its gills—the ones that the star-mapping software needed—and then watched it disappear once again into the deep blue. But she knew it wouldn’t be gone long. Whale sharks seemed to enjoy the interaction with people and this one circled around and emerged out of nothing again to swim between them once more. Mila photographed it on the way back through in case it wasn’t the same one at all, then set off after its relaxed tail, swimming back towards the main group of tourists. Two boatloads were combined now, all eager to see the same animal.

  As she approached, a staff member in dive gear held up a whiteboard with four letters on it.

  R U OK?

  Mila gave him an easy thumbs-up and he turned and focused on the less certain swimmers. It was more exhausting than many expected, being out here in the open current and trying to swim clear of a forty-foot-long prehistoric creature.

  Mila let herself en
joy the shark, the gorgeous light filtering down through the surface and the sensations both brought with them. She attributed whale sharks with regal qualities—maybe her most literal association yet—and this one was quite the prince. Comparatively unscarred, spectacular markings, big square head, massive gaping mouth that swallowed hundreds of litres of seawater at a time. When it wasn’t gulping, it pressed its lips together hard to squeeze the headful of water out through its gills and then swallow what solids were left behind in its massive mouth. To Mila, the lips looked like a vaguely wry smirk.

  Her chest squeezed and not because of exertion.

  She’d seen that smirk before. But not for months.

  She back-swam again, to maintain the required safety distance, and watched the swimmers on the far side of the animal move forward as it swam away from them. Another carried a whiteboard, but he wasn’t a diver and he wasn’t in one of the company wetsuits. Mila tipped her head and looked closer.

  The snorkeler wrote something on his board with waterproof marker then held it aloft in the streaming light.

  NOT...

  She had to wait for the long tail of the whale shark to pass between them before she could read it properly.

  NOT EN SUITES... LABS.

  What? What did that mean? She straightened to read it again, certain she’d misread some diving instruction. The man wiped it off with his bare arm and wrote again. Something about the way he moved made her spine ratchet straighter than even the circling whale shark did. But she could not take her eyes off his board. He held it up again and the words were longer and so the letters were smaller. Mila had to swim a little closer to read them.

  ROOMS NOT 4 TOURISTS.

  4 RESEARCHERS.

  Her heart began to pound. In earnest. She tried to be alert to what the shark was doing but found it impossible to do anything other than stare at that whiteboard and the man holding it.

  ‘Rich?’

  She couldn’t help saying it aloud and the little word must have puffed out of the top of her snorkel into the air above the surface to be lost on the stiff ocean breeze.