back up to the surface. That was not a thought she was about to entertain. He was a one, for a start, and he was here to exploit the very reef he was currently going crazy over. Though if she did her job then maybe he’d change his mind about that after today.
‘Seen enough?’ she asked when he caught up with her.
His mask couldn’t hide the disappointment behind it. ‘Is it time to go in?’
‘I just want to show you the drop-off, then we’ll head back to the beach.’
Just was probably an understatement, and they’d have to swim out of the shallow waters towards the place the continental shelf took its first plunge, but for Richard to understand the reef and how it connected to the oceanic ecosystem he needed to see it for himself.
Seeing was believing.
Unless you were her, in which case, seeing came with a whole bunch of other sensations that no one else experienced. Or necessarily believed.
She’d lost enough friends in the past to recognise that.
Mila slid the mouthpiece back into her snorkel and tooted out of the top.
‘Let’s go.’
* * *
Richard prided himself on being a man of composure. In the boardroom, in the bedroom, in front of a media pack. In fact, it was something he was known for—courage under fire—and it came from always knowing your strengths, and your opponents’. From always doing your homework. From controlling all the variables before they even had time to vary.
This had to be the least composed he’d been in a long, long time.
Mila had swum alongside him, her vigilant eyes sweeping around them so that he could just enjoy the wonders of the reef, monitoring their position to make sure they didn’t get caught up in the current. He’d felt the change in the water as the outer reef had started to rise up to meet them, almost shore-like. But it wasn’t land; it was the break line one kilometre out from the actual shore where the reef grew most abundant and closest to the surface of anywhere they’d swum yet. So close, the waves from the deeper water on the other side crashed against it relentlessly and things got a little choppier than their earlier efforts. Mila had led him to a channel that allowed them to propel themselves down between the high-rise coral—just like any of the reef’s permanent residents—and get some relief from the surging waves as they’d swum out towards a deeper, darker, more distant kind of blue. The water temperature had dropped and the corals started to change—less of the soft, flowy variety interspersed with dancing life and more of the slow-growing, rock-hard variety. Coral mean streets. The ones that could withstand the water pressure coming at them from the open ocean twenty-four-seven.
Rich lifted his eyes and tried to make something out in the deep blue visible beyond the coral valley he presently lurked in. He couldn’t—just a graduated, ill-defined shift from blue to deep blue to dark blue looking out and down. No scale. No end point. Impossible to get a grip on how far this drop-off actually went.
It even had the word ‘drop’ in it.
His pulse kicked up a notch.
Mila swam on ahead, rising briefly to refill her lungs and sinking again to swim out through the opening of the coral valley straight into all that vast blue...nothing.
And that was where his courage flat ran out.
He’d played hard contact sports, he’d battled patronising boardroom jerks, he’d wrangled packs of media wolves hell-bent on getting a story, and he’d climbed steep rock faces for fun. None of those things were for the weak-willed. But could he bring himself to swim past the break and out into the place the reef—and the entire country—dropped off to open, bottomless ocean?
Nope.
He tried—not least because of Mila, back-swimming so easily out into the unknown, her dark hair floating all around her, mermaid tail waving gently at him like a beckoning finger—but even that was not enough to seduce him out there. The vast blue was so impossible to position himself in, he found himself constantly glancing up to the bright surface where the sunlight was, just to keep himself oriented. Or back at the reef edge to have the certainty of it behind him.
Swimming out over the drop-off was as inconceivable to him as stepping off a mountain. His body simply would not comply.
As if it had some information he didn’t.
And Richard Grundy made it his priority always to have the information he needed.
‘It’s okay,’ Mila sputtered gently, surfacing next to him once they’d moved back to the side of the reef protected from the churn of the crest. ‘The drop-off’s not easy the first time.’
No. What wasn’t easy was coming face to face with a limitation you never knew you had, and doing it in front of a slip of a thing who clearly didn’t suffer the same disability. Who looked as if she’d been born beneath the surface.
‘The current...’ he hedged.
As if that had anything to do with it. He knew Mila wouldn’t have taken him somewhere unsafe. Not that he knew her at all, and yet somehow...he did. She just didn’t seem the type to be intentionally unkind. And her job relied on her getting her customers back to shore in one piece.
‘Let’s head in,’ she said.
There was a thread of charity in her voice that he was not comfortable hearing. He didn’t need anyone else’s help recognising his deficiencies or to be patronised, no matter how well-meant. This would always be the first thing she thought of when she thought of him, no matter what else he achieved.
The guy that couldn’t swim the drop-off.
It only took ten minutes to swim back in when he wasn’t distracted by the teeming life beneath them. Thriving, living coral turned to rocky old reef, reef turned to sand and then his feet were finding the seafloor and pushing him upwards. He’d never felt such a weighty slave to gravity—it was as indisputable as the instinct that had stopped him swimming out into all that blue.
Survival.
Mila struggled a little to get her feet out of her single rubber fin and he stepped closer so she could use him as a brace. She glanced at him sideways for a moment with something that looked a lot like discomfort before politely resting her hand on his forearm and using him for balance while she prised first one and then the other foot free. As she did it she even held her breath.
Really? Had he diminished himself that much? She didn’t even want to touch him?
‘That was the start of the edge of Australia’s continental shelf,’ she said when she was back on two legs. ‘The small drop-off slopes down to the much bigger one five kilometres out—’
Small?
‘And then some of the most immense deep-sea trenches on the planet.’
‘Are you trying to make me feel better?’ he said tightly.
And had failing always been this excruciating?
Her pretty face twisted a little. ‘No. But your body might have been responding instinctively to that unknown danger.’
‘I deal with unknowns every day.’
Dealt with them and redressed them. WestCorp thrived on knowns.
‘Do you, really?’ she asked, tipping her glance towards him, apparently intent on placating him with conversation. ‘When was the last time you did something truly new to you?’
Part of the reason he dominated in business was because nothing fazed him. Like a good game of chess, there was a finite number of plays to address any challenge and once you’d perfected them the only contest was knowing which one to apply. The momentary flare of satisfaction as the challenge tumbled was about all he had, these days. The rest was business as usual.
And outside of business...
Well,