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, how long had it been since there was anything outside of business?
‘I went snorkelling today,’ he said, pulling off his mask.
‘That was your first time? You did well, then.’
She probably meant to be kind, but all her condescension did was remind him why he never did anything before learning everything there was to know about it. Controlling his environment.
Open ocean was not a controlled environment.
‘How about you?’ he deflected as the drag of the water dropped away and they stepped onto toasty warm sand. ‘You don’t get bored of the same view every day? The same reef?’
She turned back out to the turquoise lagoon and the deeper blue sea beyond it—that same blue that he loved from the comfort and safety of his boat.
‘Nope.’ She sighed. ‘I like a lot of familiarity in my environment because of—’ she caught herself, turned back and changed tack ‘—because I’m at my best when it’s just me and the ocean.’
He snorted. ‘What’s the point of being your best when no one’s around to see it?’
He didn’t mean to be dismissive, but he saw her reaction in the flash behind her eyes.
‘I’m around.’ She shrugged, almost embarrassed. ‘I’ll know.’
‘And you reserve the best of yourself for yourself?’ he asked, knowing any hope of a congenial day with her was probably already sunk.
Her curious gaze suggested he was more alien to her than some of the creatures they’d just been studying. ‘Why would I give it to someone else?’
She crossed to their piled-up belongings and began to shove her snorkelling equipment into the canvas bag.
Rich pressed the beach towel she’d supplied to his chest as he watched her go, and disguised the full-body shiver that followed. But he couldn’t blame it on the chilly water alone—there was something else at play here, something more...disquieting.
He patted his face dry with the sun-warmed fabric to buy himself a moment to identify the uncomfortable sensation.
For all his success—for all his professional renown—Rich suddenly had the most unsettling suspicion that he might have missed something fundamental about life.
Why would anyone give
