The Billionaire of Coral Bay by Nikki Logan

Author:Nikki Logan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2017-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT ONLY OCCURRED to Mila as she pulled up out the front that Rich was the first person she’d ever brought into this place. When she needed to liaise with work people she usually drove the long road north to the department’s branch office or met them at some beach site somewhere. She never came with them here, to the little stack of converted transport modules that served as both home and office.

Safe, private spaces.

Rich stood by her four-wheel drive, looking at the two-storey collection of steel.

‘Are those...shipping containers?’

The back of her mouth filled with something between fried chicken and old leather. She looked at the corrugated steel walls in their mismatched, faded primary colours as he might see them and definitely found them wanting.

‘Up here the regular accommodation is saved for the tourists,’ she said. ‘Behind the scenes, everyone lives in pretty functional dwellings. But we make them homey inside. Come on in.’

She led him around the back of the efficient dwelling where a weathered timber deck stretched out between the ‘U’ of sea containers on three sides—double-storey in the centre and single-storey adjoining on the left and right. He stumbled to a halt at the sight of her daybed—an old timber dinghy, tipped on an angle and filled with fat, inviting cushions. A curl of old canvas hung above it between the containers like a crashing wave. He stood, speechless, and stared at her handiwork.

‘You’re going to see a bit of upcycling in the next quarter-hour...’ she warned, past the sour milk of self-consciousness.

Mila pushed open the double doors on the sea container to her left and stepped into her office. Despite the unpromising exterior, inside, it looked much like any other workspace except that her furniture was a bit more eclectic than the big city corporate office Rich was probably used to. A weathered old beach shack door for a desk, with a pair of deep filing cabinets for legs. An old paint-streaked ladder mounted lengthways on the wall served as bookshelves for her biology textbooks and her work files. The plain walls were decorated with a panoramic photograph she had taken of her favourite lagoon, enlarged and mounted in three parts behind mismatched window frames salvaged from old fishing shacks from down the coast.

Rich stared at the artwork.

‘My view when I’m working,’ she puffed, fighting the heat of a blush. ‘Could you put that by the door?’

He positioned the opaque tub by the glass doors so that the moonlight could continue to work its magic on the coral spawn within until she could freeze them in the morning. Those first few hours of moonlight seemed critical to a good fertilisation result; why else had nature designed them to bob immediately to the surface instead of sink to the seafloor?

She killed the light and turned to cross the deck. ‘I inherited this stack from someone else when I first moved out of home, but it was pretty functional then. I like to think I’ve improved it.

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