The nothing that was always full of something.
Grundy was a businessman, probably, since ones tended to arrive in suits with grand plans for the reef and what they could make it into. Anything from clusters of glamping facilities to elite floating casinos. Luxury theme parks. They never got off the ground, of course; between the public protests, the strict land use conditions and the flat-out no that the local leaseholder gave on development access through their property, her tour-for-one usually ended up being a tour-of-one. She never saw them, their business suit or their fancy development ideas again.
Which was fine; she was happy to play her part in keeping everything around here exactly as it was.
Mila shed the rest of her wetsuit unselfconsciously, stretched to the heavens for a moment as the ball bearings tinkled around her bikini-clad skin and slipped into the khaki shorts and shirt that identified her as official staff of the World Heritage Area. The backpack sitting on the sand bulged first with the folded wetsuit and then with bundled snorkelling gear, and she pulled her dripping hair back into a ponytail. She dropped the backpack into her work-supplied four-wheel drive then jogged past it and up towards the point overlooking the long, brilliant bay.
She didn’t rush. Ones were almost always late; they underestimated the time it took to drive up from the city or down from the nearest airport, or they let some smartphone app decide how long it would take them when a bit of software could have no idea how much further a kilometre was in Western Australia’s north. Besides, she’d parked on the only road into the meeting point and so her one would have had to drive past her to get to Nancy’s Point. So far, hers was the only vehicle as far as the eye could see.
If you didn’t count the bobbing catamaran beyond the reef.
Strong legs pushed her up over the lip of the massive limestone spur named after Nancy Dawson—the matriarch of the family that had grazed livestock on these lands for generations. Coral Bay’s first family.
‘Long way to come for a strip-show,’ a deep voice rumbled as she straightened.
Mila stumbled to a halt, her stomach sinking on a defensive whiff of old shoe that was more back-of-her-throat taste than nose-scrunching smell. The man standing there was younger than his name suggested and he wasn’t in a suit, like most ones, but he wore cargo pants and a faded red T-shirt as if they were one. Something about the way he moved towards her... He still screamed ‘corporate’ even without a tie.
Richard Grundy.
She spun around, hunting for the vehicle that she’d inexplicably missed. Nothing. It only confounded her more. The muted red of his T-shirt was pumping off all kinds of favourite drunk uncle kind of associations, but she fought the instinctive softening that brought. Nothing about his sarcastic greeting deserved congeniality. Besides, this man was anything but uncle-esque. His dark blond hair was windblown but well-cut and his eyes, as he slid his impenetrable sunglasses up onto his head to reveal them, were a rich blue. Rather like the lagoon behind him, in fact.
That got him a reluctant bonus point.
‘You were early,’ she puffed.
‘I was on time,’ he said again, apparently amused at her discomfort. ‘And I was dropped off. Just in time for the show.’
She retracted that bonus point. This was her bay, not his. If she wanted to swim in it before her shift started, what business was it of his?
‘I could have greeted you in my wetsuit,’ she muttered, ‘but I figured my uniform would be more appropriate.’
‘You’re the guide, I assume?’ he said, approaching with an out-thrust hand.
‘I’m a guide,’ she said, still bristling, then extended hers on a deep breath. Taking someone’s hand was never straightforward; she never knew quite what she’d get out of it. ‘Mila Nakano. Parks Department.’
‘Richard Grundy,’ he replied, marching straight into her grasp with no further greeting. Or interest. ‘What’s the plan for today?’
The muscles around her belly button twittered at his warm grip on her water-cool fingers and her ears filled with the gentle brush of a harp. That was new; she usually got anything from a solo trumpet to a whole brass section when she touched people, especially strangers.
A harp thrum was incongruously pleasant.
‘Today?’ she parroted, her synapses temporarily disconnected.
‘Our tour.’ His lagoon-coloured eyes narrowed in on hers. ‘Are you my guide?’
She quickly recovered. ‘Yes, I am. But no one gave me any information on the purpose of your visit—’ except to impress upon her his VIP status ‘—so we’ll be playing it a bit by ear today. It would help me to know what you’re here for,’ she went on. ‘Or what things interest you.’
‘It all interests me,’ he said, glancing away. ‘I’d like to get a better appreciation for the...ecological value of the area.’
Uh-huh. Didn’t they all...? Then they went back to the city to work on ways to exploit it.
‘Is your interest commercial?’
The twin lagoons narrowed. ‘Why so much interest in my interest?’
His censure made her flush. ‘I’m just wondering what filter to put on the tour. Are you a journalist? A scientist? You don’t seem like a tourist. So that only leaves Corporate.’
He glanced out at the horizon again, taking some of the intensity from their conversation. ‘Let’s just say I have a keen interest in the land. And the fringing reef.’
That wasn’t much to go on. But those ramrod shoulders told her it was all she was going to get.
‘Well, then, I guess we should start at the southernmost tip of the Marine Park,’ she said, ‘and work our way north. Can you swim?’
One of his eyebrows lifted. Just the one, as if her question wasn’t worth the effort of a second. ‘Captain of the swim team.’
Of course he had been.
Ordinarily she would have pushed her sunglasses up onto her head too, to meet a client’s gaze, to start the arduous climb from stranger to acquaintance. But there was a sardonic heat coming off Richard Grundy’s otherwise cool eyes and it shimmered such a curious tone—like five sounds all at once, harmonising with each other, being five different things at once. It wiggled in under her synaesthesia and tingled there, but she wasn’t about to expose herself too fully to his music until she had a better handle on the man. And so her own sunglasses stayed put.
‘If you want to hear the reef you’ll need to get out onto it.’
‘Hear it?’ The eyebrow lift was back. ‘Is it particularly noisy?’
She smiled. She’d yet to meet anyone else who could perceive the coral’s voice but she had to assume that however normal people experienced it, it was as rich and beautiful as the way she did.
‘You’ll understand when you get there. Your vehicle or mine?’
But he didn’t laugh—he didn’t even smile—and her flimsy joke fell as flat as she inexplicably felt robbed of the opportunity to see his lips crack the straight line they’d maintained since she got up here.
‘Yours, I think,’ he said.
‘Let’s go, then.’ She fell into professional mode, making up for a lot of lost time. ‘I’ll tell you about Nancy’s Point as we walk. It’s named for Nancy Dawson...’
* * *
Rich was pretty sure he knew all there was to know about Nancy Dawson—after all, stories of his great-grandmother had been part of his upbringing. But the tales as they were told to