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.’
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