‘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 him didn’t focus on Nancy’s great love for the land and visionary sustainability measures, as the guide’s did, they were designed to showcase her endurance and fortitude against adversity. Those were the values his father had wanted to foster in his son and heir. The land—except for the profit it might make for WestCorp—was secondary. Barely even that.
But there was no way to head off the lithe young woman’s spiel without confessing who his family was. And he wasn’t about to discuss his private business with a stranger on two minutes’ acquaintance.
‘For one hundred and fifty years the Dawsons have been the leaseholders of all the land as far as you can see to the horizon,’ she said, turning to put the ocean behind her and looking east. ‘You could drive two hours inland and still be on Wardoo Station.’
‘Big,’ he grunted. Because anyone else would say that. Truth was, he knew exactly how big Wardoo was—to the square kilometre—and he knew how much each of those ten thousand square kilometres yielded. And how much each one cost to operate.
That was kind of his thing.
Rich cast his eyes out to the reef break. Mila apparently knew enough history to speak about his family, but not enough to recognise his surname for what it was. Great-Grandma Dawson had married Wardoo’s leading hand, Jack Grundy, but kept the family name since it was such an established and respected name in the region. The world might have known Jack and Nancy’s offspring as Dawsons, but the law knew them as Grundys.
‘Nancy’s descendants still run it today. Well, their minions do...’
That drew his gaze back. ‘Minions?’
‘The family is based in the city now. We don’t see them.’
Wow. There was a whole world of judgement in that simple sentence.
‘Running a business remotely is pretty standard procedure these days,’ he pointed out.
In his world everything was run at a distance. In a state this big it was both an operational necessity and a survival imperative. If you got attached to any business—or any of the people in it—you couldn’t do what he sometimes had to do. Restructure them. Sell them. Close them.
She surveyed all around them and murmured, ‘If this was my land I would never ever leave it.’
It was tempting to take offence at her casual judgement of his family—was this how she spoke of the Dawsons to any passing stranger?—but he’d managed too many teams and too many board meetings with voices far more objectionable than hers to let himself be that reactive. Besides, given that his ‘family’ consisted of exactly one—if you didn’t count a bunch of headstones and some distant cousins in Europe—he really had little cause for complaint.
‘You were born here?’ he asked instead.
‘And raised.’
‘How long have your family lived in the area?’
‘All my life—’
That had to be...what...? All of two decades?
‘And thirty thousand years before that.’
He adjusted his assessment of her killer tan. That bronze-brown hue wasn’t only about working outdoors. ‘You’re Bayungu?’
She shot him a look and he realised that he risked outing himself with his too familiar knowledge of Coral Bay’s first people. That could reasonably lead to questions about why he’d taken the time to educate himself about the traditional uses of this area. Same reason he was here finding out about the environmental aspects of the region.
He wanted to know exactly what he was up against. Where the speed humps were going to arise.
‘My mother’s family,’ she corrected softly.
Either she didn’t understand how genetics worked or Mila didn’t identify as indigenous despite her roots.
‘But not only Bayungu? Nakano, I think you said?’
‘My grandfather was Japanese. On Dad’s side.’
He remembered reading that in the feasibility study on this whole coast: how it was a cultural melting pot thanks to the exploding pearling trade.
‘That explains the bone structure,’ he said, tracing his gaze across her face.
She flushed and seemed to say the first thing that came to her. ‘His wife’s family was from Dublin, just to complicate things.’
Curious that she saw her diversity as a complication. In business, it was a strength. Pretty much the first thing he’d done following his father’s death was broaden WestCorp’s portfolio base so that their 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