eggs were spread across more baskets. Thirty-eight baskets, to be specific.
‘What did Irish Grandma give you?’ Rich glanced at her dark locks. ‘Not red hair...’
‘One of my brothers got that,’ she acknowledged, stopping to consider him before sliding her sunglasses up onto her head. ‘But I got Nan’s eyes.’
Whoa...
A decade ago, he’d abseiled face-first down a cliff for sport—fast. The suck of his unprepared guts had been the same that day as the moment Mila’s thick dark lashes lifted just now to reveal what they hid. Classic Celtic green. Not notable on their own, perhaps, but bloody amazing against the richness of her unblemished brown skin. Her respective grandparents had certainly left her a magnetising genetic legacy.
He used the last of his air replying. ‘You’re a walking billboard for cultural diversity.’
She glanced away, her mocha skin darkening, and he could breathe again. But it wasn’t some coy affectation on her part. She looked genuinely distressed—though she was skilled at hiding it.
Fortunately, he was more skilled at reading people.
‘The riches of the land and sea up here have always drawn people from around the world,’ she murmured. ‘I’m the end result.’
They reached her modest four-wheel drive, emblazoned with government logos, halfway down the beach she’d first emerged from, all golden and glittery.
‘Is that why you stay?’ he asked. ‘Because of the riches?’
She looked genuinely horrified at the thought as she unlocked the vehicle and swung her long sandy legs in. ‘Not in the sense you mean. My work is here. My family is here. My heart is here.’
And clearly she wore that heart on the sleeve of her Parks Department uniform.
Rich climbed in after her and gave a little inward sigh. Sailing north on the Portus had been seven kinds of awesome. All the space and quiet and air he needed wrapped up in black leather and oiled deck timber. He’d even unwound a little. But there was something about driving... Four wheels firm on asphalt. Owning the road.
Literally, in this case.
At least for the next few months. Longer, if he got his way.
‘Is that why you’re here?’ she asked him, though it looked as if she had to summon up a fair bit of courage to do it. ‘Drawn by the riches?’
If he was going to spend the day with her he wasn’t going to be able to avoid the question for long. Might as well get in front of it.
‘I’m here to find out everything I can about the area. I have...business interests up here. I’d like to go in fully informed.’
Her penetrating gaze left him and turned back to the road, leaving only thinned lips in its wake.
He’d disappointed her.
‘The others wanted to know a bit about the history of Coral Bay.’ She almost sighed. ‘Do you?’
It was hard not to smile at her not so subtle angling. He was probably supposed to say What others? and she was going to tell him how many people had tried and failed to get developments up in this region. Maybe he was even supposed to be deterred by that.
Despite Mila’s amateurish subterfuge, he played along. A few friendly overtures wouldn’t go amiss. Even if she didn’t look all that disposed to overtures of any kind—friendly or otherwise. Her job meant she kind of had to.
He settled into the well-worn fabric. ‘Sure. Take me right 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
