The Billionaire of Coral Bay

by Nikki Logan

  He held the board up again, the words newly written.

  NOT U/GROUND WINE CELLAR...

  The whale shark swam back through between them, doing its best to drag her eyes off the man wiping the board clean again and back onto the true ocean spectacle, but Mila paid it no heed, other than to be frustrated by the spectacular length of the shark as it blocked her view of Rich. As soon as it passed, she read the two words he’d replaced on the board. Her already tight breath caught altogether.

  SPAWN BANK.

  She pushed her feet and gasped for air above the surface. Water splashed and surged against her body, buffeting her on two sides. Using the clustered snorkelers for reference, she stroked her way towards them with already weary muscles. Just out of voice range, another snorkeler rose above the splash. The only head other than hers poking out of the water while the massive shark dominated attention below.

  Rich.

  They swam directly towards each other, oblivious to any monsters of the deep still doing graceful laps below them. But when they got close, Mila pulled up short and slid her mask up onto her head.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Her arms and legs worked in opposition to keep her stable in the undulating water.

  ‘I got your email,’ Rich answered, raising his mask too. His thick hair spiked up in all directions.

  ‘You could have just replied,’ she gasped as the gently rolling seas pitched her in two directions at once.

  Rich swam a little closer and Mila turned to keep some distance between them. As life-preserving as the four metres’ clearance she was supposed to give the whale shark. They ended up swimming in a synchronised arc in the heaving swell, circling each other.

  ‘Yeah, I could have. But I wanted to see you.’

  Hard enough to speak as all her muscles focused on keeping her afloat without the added complication of a suddenly collapsing chest cavity.

  She didn’t waste time with coyness. ‘Why? To break the news in person?’

  His voice was thick as he answered. ‘It’s not a resort, Mila. It’s a technology centre. The Wardoo Northern Studies Centre.’

  Labs. Accommodation for researchers.

  Incongruous to smell hot chocolate over the smell of fresh seawater and marine diesel, but that was hope for you...

  ‘It has a helipad, Rich.’

  He ignored her sarcasm and answered her straight. ‘For a sea rescue chopper.’

  She just blinked. Hadn’t they talked about that the night on the Portus? The difference it would make to lives up here?

  Her voice was as weak as her breath, suddenly. ‘And the spawn bank?’

  ‘Subterranean. Temperature-controlled. Solar-powered. You can’t keep that stuff in a fish freezer, Mila. It’s too important.’

  She circled him warily in the water.

  ‘Why?’

  There it was again. Such a simple little word but it loomed as large as the whale shark now swimming away in the distance.

  A wave splashed Rich full in the face. ‘Is this really where you want to have this discussion?’

  ‘You picked it,’ she pointed out.

  Mila could see all the tourists making their way back to their respective boats, ready to go and find another shark at another location. But, in the distance between them, she saw something else. The flashing white double hull of the Portus. Poised to whisk Rich away from her once again.

  He puffed, as the swell bobbed them both up and down.

  ‘A state-of-the-art research and conference facility appealed to the government’s interest in improving the region.’ He swam around her as he spoke but kept his eyes firmly locked on hers. Effort made every word choppy. ‘It satisfies the need for facilities for all the programmes running up here.’

  The scientists, the researchers. Even the cavers. They would all have somewhere local to work now.

  She wanted to reply but didn’t. Breathing was hard enough without wasting air on pointless words. Besides which, she didn’t trust herself to speak just yet.

  His eyes darted to the Portus, to his sanctuary, but it was too far away to provide him with any respite now. ‘They didn’t have the funding for something like that; it had to be private investment.’

  And who else was going to invest in a region like this for something like that, if not a local?

  Mila lifted her mouth above the waterline. ‘I can’t imagine Wardoo will ever make enough to pay for a science centre. Even with kickbacks from your tenants.’

  ‘The centre should pay for itself eventually. With grants. And conference business. The emergency response bit, WestCorp will be covering.’

  His breath-stealing revelation was interrupted by the burbling arrival of Mila’s charter boat alongside them; it towered above and dozens of strangers’ eyes peered over the edge at them. Rich passed the little whiteboard back to whoever he had borrowed it from and waited until she was able to scrabble aboard the dive platform. Gravity immediately made its presence felt in muscles that had been working so hard to keep her afloat and away from the whale sharks. Rich had a quick word with the crew and the charter chugged happily over to the Portus and waited as they transferred from one dive deck to the other.

  Moments later, the twenty curious tourists were happily heading off after another whale shark sighting signalled by Craig in his Cessna high above them.

  A science centre. Rich was planning on building an entire facility so that all the work being done on the reef could be done locally, properly and comfortably. No more long-haul journeys. No more working out of rust-flecked transportables or four-wheel drives. No more vulnerable, fish-filled freezers for her spawn. The researchers of Coral Bay would have facilities at least as good as the visitors who flocked here in the high season.

  It was a godsend in so many ways.

  But Rich has used it to buy his way to holding onto the revenue-rich coastal strip, a flat inner voice reminded her.

  He could have just freed himself of Wardoo and run, a perkier voice said. He didn’t have to come back.

  Is he even ‘back’? the cynical voice said. He’s owned and run it for years without ever setting foot on the property. You still might never see him again.

  I’m seeing him now, aren’t I...?

  Yes. She was. Fulfilling her most secret hopes. The ones she’d pushed down and down until the only place they could be expressed was in her dreams. Mila stripped off her mask and snorkel and dropped them on the dive deck but left her flippered feet dangling in the deep.

  Ready for a fast getaway.

  ‘Do you even want Wardoo?’ she challenged without looking at him.

  ‘I thought I didn’t,’ he admitted, casting the words to the sea like she had. ‘Not if I couldn’t make it profitable. I thought it was just a business like any other to me. A means to an end. A millstone even.’

  ‘But it’s not?’

  ‘Turns out I’m more northern than I thought,’ he quipped. ‘I didn’t know how much until that night on the Portus. After we’d been there and I was able to conceptualise what I’d be losing.’

  Mila studied her waving fins in the undulating water below the Portus.

  ‘Wardoo was an emotional sanctuary when my mother died, and I’d forgotten how much. I let myself forget. I painted a picture of what it could be—full of children, full of love—and all of that came rushing back when I faced the reality of losing it. That’s why I was reluctant to go out there; I feared it wouldn’t make my decision any easier.’

  She remembered his quietness at Jack’s Vent. Were those the thoughts he’d been struggling with?

  ‘And what about the reef?’ she pressed. ‘How was discovering that going to help you make your decision?’

  ‘I needed to know what I was up against with the development. See it as the governm
ent sees it.’

  ‘Sure.’ She looked sideways at him. ‘Who better to ask than a government employee?’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you, Mila. Someone with your passion and connectedness. I thought I was just getting a guide to show me around. I didn’t mean to exploit your love for the reef.’

  ‘Okay, so you’re sorry. Is that what you came all this way to say?’

  Rich frowned. ‘You likened Wardoo to the Portus, that last day I saw you,’ he said. ‘And I spent a lot of time thinking about that, of all the reasons it wasn’t true. Except that, eventually, I realised it was. I don’t hesitate to let other areas of WestCorp’s operations pay for maintaining and running the Portus because she’s become a fundamental part of my survival. She makes me...happy. She’s important.’

  ‘Except the land isn’t important to you,’ she reminded him.

  He found her eyes. Stared. ‘It is to you.’

  A whale shark bumping up against her legs couldn’t have rocked her more. Cherry-flavoured confusion whirled in her head.

  ‘You signed a fifty-year lease—’ she grappled ‘—you’re building an entire science and rescue facility. You’re changing all your big corporate plans...to please me? Someone you’ve known for a few days at most?’

  No. There had to be another angle here. Some kind of money trail at work.

  Rich turned side on to face her.

  ‘Mila, you have a handle on life that I’m only beginning to understand. You are just...in tune. You dive into life with full immersion. Before I met you I would have scoffed at how important that was in life. I’m pretty sure I did scoff at it, until I saw it in action. In you.’ He brought them closer, but still didn’t touch her. ‘I envy what you have, Mila. And I absolutely don’t want to be the one to take it from you.’

  Uneasiness washed around them.

  ‘You’re not responsible for me, Rich,’ she said tightly.

  ‘I don’t feel responsible, Mila. I feel...grateful.’ He swung his legs up under him and pushed to standing. ‘Come on, let’s get warm.’

  She was plenty warm looking up at all that hard flesh, thanks very much.

  Without accepting his aid, she also stood and used the short, arduous climb up the Portus’ steps to get her thoughts in order. On deck, Rich patted at his face and shoulders with one of the thick towels neatly piled there.

  ‘I’m a king in the city, Mila. Well-connected, well-resourced. I have colleagues and respect and a diary full to overflowing with opportunity. Busy enough to mask any number of voids inside. But you called me empty and disconnected—’ and lonely ‘—and you named all the things I’d started to feel so dramatically when I came here. To this place where none of those city achievements meant squat. A place that stripped me back to the essence of who I am. I hated being that exposed because it meant I couldn’t kid myself any more.’

  ‘About what?’

  He tucked himself deeper into the massive towel.

  ‘Losing my mother so young hit me hard, Mila. Being sent away to school just added to that. I was convinced then that if I played by life’s rules then I would be rewarded with the certainty that had just been stripped away from me. The rules said that if you worked hard you would be a success, and that with success came money and that people with money got the power.’

  ‘And you wanted power?’ she whispered.

  ‘As a motherless eight-year-old abandoned in boarding school? Yes, I did. I never wanted life to happen to me again.’

  Mila could only stand and stare. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Yeah, everything was going great. All my sacrifices were paying off and I was rising through the ranks nicely. And then my father’s heart ruptured one day while I was busy taking an international conference call and I couldn’t get there in time and he died alone. Life stuck it to me, just to remind me it could. So I worked harder and I earned more. I forsook everything else and I stuck it back to life.’

  ‘And did that work?’ she breathed, knowing the answer already.

  Rich slid her a sideways look and it was full of despair. ‘I thought so. And then I came here. And I met you and I saw how you didn’t need to compete with life because you just worked with it. Symbiotically. Like the creatures on the reef you told me about with all their diversity, working together, cooperatively. You owned life.’

  Rich looked towards the coastline—burnished red against the electric blue of the coastal reef lagoons.

  ‘I don’t own it, Rich. I just live it. As best I can.’

  ‘I’d worked my whole life to make sure that I got life’s best, Mila. I upskilled and strategised and created this sanitised environment where everything that happened to me happened because of me. Not because of someone else and sure as heck not because of capricious life! And then I discover that you’re just getting it organically...just by being you.’

  ‘Rich...’

  ‘This is not a complaint, Mila. Just an explanation. I got back to Perth and I was all set to go ashore for that critical ten a.m., and then it hit me, right between my eyes.’

  ‘What did?’

  ‘That I didn’t want to be a Grundy any more.’

  Mila frowned. ‘What do you want to be?’

  His brows dipped and then straightened. His blue eyes cleared and widened with resolve. ‘I think I want to be a Dawson.’

  She gasped.

  ‘The Dawson—the one you described to me that first day we met and spoke of with such respect. Protector of the reef. Part of the land up here. Part of the history. I want you to look at me like someone who built something here, not just...mined it for profits.’

  She realised. ‘That’s why you wanted to keep the Wardoo lease?’

  ‘Now I just have to learn how to run it.’

  Mila thought through the ramifications of his words. ‘You’d give up WestCorp?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll transform it. Play to my own strengths and transition away from the rest. Get back to fundamentals.’

  Nothing was quite as fundamental as grazing the animals that fed the country.

  ‘You have zero expertise in running a cattle station,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I have expertise in buying floundering businesses and building them back up. That’s how WestCorp got its start. About time I applied that to our oldest business, don’t you think? See what it could be with some focus. Besides, as you so rightly pointed out, I have minions. Very talented minions.’

  She could see it. Rich as a Dawson. Standing on Wardoo’s wrap-around verandas, a slouch hat shielding him from the mid-morning sun, even if it was only once a month. But she wasn’t in that picture. And, despite saying all the right things, he wasn’t inviting her.

  This was just a mea culpa for everything that had gone down between them. Nothing more.

  ‘If anyone can do it,’ she murmured, ‘you can.’

  Her heart squeezed just to say it. Having him be twelve hundred kilometres away was hard enough. Having him here in Coral Bay yet not be with him would be torture. But she’d done hard things before. And protecting herself was second nature.

  ‘Nancy would be proud of you, Rich.’

  It was impossible not to feel the upwelling of happiness for him; that this good man had found his way to such a good and optimistic place.

  ‘I’m glad someone will because the rest of my world is going to be totally and utterly bemused. I’m going to need your help, Mila,’ he said, eyes shining. ‘To make a go of it.’

  Earwax flooded her senses. She knew he didn’t mean to be cruel, but what he asked... It was too much. Even for a woman who had hardened herself against so much in the past. She couldn’t put herself through that.

  She wouldn’t.

  He would have to find someone else to be his cheer squad as he upturned his life.


  ‘You don’t need me,’ she said firmly. ‘Now that you know what you want to do.’

  Confusion stained his handsome face. ‘But you’re the one that inspired me.’

  ‘I’m not some kind of muse,’ she said, pulling her hair up into something resembling a soggy ponytail. ‘And I’m not your staff.’

  He reeled back a little. ‘No. Of course. That’s not what I—’

  Tying up her hair was like breathing to her—second nature. Yet she couldn’t even manage that with her trembling hands. She abandoned her effort and clenched them as the smell of processed yeast overruled the heartbreak.

  ‘I recognise that I’m a curiosity to you and that my quirky little life here is probably adorably idyllic from your perspective, particularly at a time when you’re facing some major changes, but I never actually invited you to share it. And I’m not obliged to, simply because you’ve had an epiphany about your own life.’

  Rich frowned. Stared. Realised.

  ‘I’ve lost your faith,’ he murmured.

  ‘It’s been nine weeks!’ Anger made her rash but it was pain that made her spit. ‘And you just roll up out of the blue wanting something from me yet again. Enough to even hunt me down two kilometres off—’

  She cut herself off on a gasp. Offshore...

  ‘You were in the deep!’ she stammered. ‘Way beyond the drop-off.’

  Rich grimaced. ‘I was trying not to think about it.’

  ‘You came out into the open ocean to find me.’ Where life was utterly uncontrollable. ‘With sharks and whales and...and...’

  ‘Sea monsters,’ he added helpfully.

  Maybe that was her cue to laugh. Maybe that would be the smart thing to do—laugh it off and move on with her life. But Rich had gone into the deep. Where he never, ever went.

  The yeast entirely vanished, to make way for a strong thread of pineapple.

  Love.

  The thing she’d been struggling against since the day she’d sat, straddled between his thighs, on the sea kayak on Yardi Creek. The thing she’d very determinedly not let herself indulge since the night she’d motored away from him all those weeks ago.