Chapter 28
Twenty-eight
The front of Finn’s house was nothing but a simple door and broken bike parts for decor.
But out the back?
Well, it was a whole new world…
There was a stone-edged firepit where the fire crackled low, with coals glowing red and gold like embers stolen from the sky.
A well-used barbecue plate was rigged for the specially spiced meats Finn had thrown over the flames, sending out a scent that could summon gods, devils, and every hungry soul in between.
Bree had told Taryn that the man did a mean barbecue, but she’d never imagined how.
Starting with the way Finn prepared the meat with his own secret blend of spices, then worked over the coals like it was a religion, to cook with dedication and style.
It was the most masculine way for a man to cook.
She sipped her beer slowly, watching Finn move with his usual grace, tongs in hand, shirtless, with jeans low on his hips, allowing the ink and shadows to dance across his body with each flicker of the flames.
Behind him stretched an outback view that would take decades to dissect, where open plains stretched to meet rolling silhouettes of hills that got lost on the darkened horizon.
And above?
The stars didn’t twinkle here. They burned like they had a secret to share, and a world to watch over.
She now understood what Izzy meant about needing time to stare at the stars, and out here, they were better than any movie.
‘A few more minutes and we’re good to go.’ Finn nodded at the meat resting on the edge of the grill.
‘Take your time. No one’s rushing this.’ Not with that view.
But he’d taken the meal to the next level.
Barbecuing thick slices of pineapple and mango alongside skewers of colour and flavour: red onion, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, button mushrooms, corncobs, and bright red capsicum, brushed over with a buttery herby glaze.
All courtesy of the food fairy. Altogether, it was like nature’s candy on a stick.
‘Oh, wow,’ she said, licking her fingers. ‘This is criminally good.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
They settled beside each other on the fallen logs near the fire, with knees bumping and eyes trained on the flames, to eat in comfortable silence.
With the meal over, she said what had been bothering her the most. ‘I need to go back to the pub tonight.’
‘Are you heading out early?’
‘Not for a few more days. But I’ve got things there. Clothes … my pill.’
That made him look.
‘I didn’t exactly pack for an overnight stake-out followed by a… well, you.’
His lip twitched into that smouldering smirk.
‘You are both a god and the devil of pleasure in bed, Finn Wilde. And I say that with the full exhaustion of a woman who forgot her contraceptive schedule because you fried my brain.’
‘Didn’t realise I had that much power.’ But he unleashed a smile that made her heart skip.
‘Take the ego boost while you can, cowboy.’
‘I’m no cowboy.’
‘And I’m still going back for the pill.’
Finn didn’t argue, and he didn’t offer to take her either. Which somehow made it worse.
She blurted out the next part, the adulting part of grown-up sex. ‘We never talked about protection.’
‘We didn’t talk much at all. We didn’t even finish sentences…’
There was another grin, this one they shared.
‘But I’m clean. Last test was post-Queensland. Haven’t been with anyone since.’
‘Okay. Thanks for telling me. And me too…’ Not that she going to admit it had been way too long—which might have explained her lack of sanity to rush the guy.
‘You scared?’
‘A little.’ She barely nodded.
‘Yeah. Me too.’
There was another stretch of silence, accompanied by the crackle of the campfire.
‘Can I ask you something else?’ she said, keeping her eyes on the coals.
He gave the smallest nod.
‘How did you get that pardon from Commissioner Andrew Bannon?’
He turned his head slightly as if to study her.
‘Feels like we’re past secrets now,’ she added. ‘And that’s the only official question I haven’t asked. What is your connection to—’
‘Drew?’ Finn rubbed the back of his neck, as if fighting the tension creeping into his shoulders.
He stared at the fire for a few moments, then finally said, ‘Were you ever in a police station at ten years old?’
‘No. Military bases and embassies, sure.’
‘Well, I was. So was Bree. It’s how we all met.
’ His voice softened at her name. ‘Bree’s father had just killed her mother in their kitchen.
And they were trying to work out where to send her.
Me? My mum had just been raped, and the detectives were making her go through the mugshots.
Only my old man was telling her to come home and pretend it never happened. ’
Taryn’s breath caught. She didn’t move.
‘I didn’t remember him back when I was ten. I remember being there, sitting beside Bree who was just as shell-shocked and scared as I was, two kids not fully understanding what was going on at that age. But he remembered me. Drew.’
‘The Commissioner?’
Finn nodded. ‘Back then, Drew was fresh out of the police academy. First day on the job, with no clue what to do. So, he offered Bree and me both a soda and some chocolate while the grown-ups argued about their bad life decisions.’
He pulled long and hard on his beer as if swallowing his emotions. ‘After that night, Mum forever lived in a valium stupor, even during the pregnancy. And Dad cradled his whisky, watching the weather from the front porch, flicking his cigarette butts in my direction.’
‘Pregnancy?’ Oh no. And the cigarette butts—what? She glanced over his heavily inked arms and hands.
‘I had a baby sister,’ Finn whispered, drawing her attention to his eyes, and the pain that made them darken.
He looked away. ‘Took her years to get her tongue around Miri and called herself Mi-wii. Even longer to try Miriam—that always came out like Miwiam.’ A rough laugh escaped him.
‘Damn cute kid she was, too.’ He scraped a hand down his face.
‘They say she killed herself, targeted by bullies for being different.’
Her gasp was quiet, but she felt his pain.
‘My old man had refused to get her diagnosed, to see if they could help her, because he didn’t think she was his kid.
And Mum didn’t want to admit she had an addiction that had affected Miri during the pregnancy.
And maybe Miri, that poor kid, never stopped wondering if Dad was right, that she was the product of… ’
Taryn gripped his hand, stunned by the blunt and yet brutal revelations. But the way he stared at the fire, he wasn’t done.
‘Three years after I first met Drew, there he was again. Same man. Same soda. I was thirteen, shirt torn, nose bloodied, and officially expelled from school. Bree sat beside me, not a scratch on her—except for the red handprint across her cheek.’
‘What happened?’
‘Some rich kid cracked a joke about my mum. By then, I understood what had happened to her. So did Bree. So she fired back a cracker about his mum and the pool guy. Turned out it was true, and he wasn’t happy about it, so he hit her.
And that’s when I lost it.’ He exhaled heavily with heat.
‘I laid that prick out flat in the dorm hallway, where he curled in a ball screaming for his mummy.’
She now understood why Bree and Finn were tight. ‘What happened?’
‘Bree got suspended. I got expelled. But the prick who’d started it, his parents wanted to press charges.
And that’s when Drew showed up… Even back then, he was a smooth-talking politician-in-training, who talked them down, promising to get the two troublemakers out of town.
’ Finn even grinned for a fleeting second.
‘Back then, Drew wasn’t some fed, he was just a Queensland city cop who’d upset someone and got sent bush. But he had pull in the right places. Made a few calls. And got us into another school.’
‘Your parents? Bree’s—’
‘We were bush kids. Back then, unless you had School of the Air and a generator that worked, you got shipped off interstate to boarding school.’
‘Right.’ That made sense.
‘So while Bree and I waited for the bus to take us to our new school, there was Drew in his shiny police uniform, babysitting us. His pen tapping against a word puzzle book—one of those grids where you find words hidden in little squares, like he was trying to crack a case. But that day he put us on the bus, I remember him saying to me, One day, when the world stops chewing you up, come find me.’
Taryn’s chest felt tight, the ache building behind her ribs. ‘You did.’
‘At sixteen. I’d stumbled onto a bunch of blokes stealing cattle out in the sticks during a muster.
They tried to cut me in, but I liked the boss and his family—and they stole that man’s stock.
So I dragged them to the local cop shop myself, in the cattle truck full of stolen beef.
And there was Drew. His printer had jammed, and he was swearing at everything that wasn’t nailed down, with another one of those half-finished word puzzle books on his desk.
’ Finn smiled faintly. ‘Didn’t need to remind him who I was.
He hadn’t forgotten the kid from his first day on the job.
And from that moment on, he was on my back, telling me when I came of age and got sick of playing stockman, I should apply to the academy.
So I did. Drew wrote the recommendation himself.
Nicest thing anyone ever said about me—on paper, anyway. ’
The fire crackled, popped and sparked to the stars, Taryn silently listened as he paused, cradling that beer stubby in two hands.
‘But he did more than that… Drew not only backed my application, he also turned up to my graduation and stood right next to Bree, who I’d married by then.
Told me I could be more than a statistic and was worth something.
Which meant a lot back then.’ He drank deep, as if needing that breather for the next part.
‘Years later, when I was recruited for that undercover job, Drew warned me. Said the OIC had a bad rep, and being out-of-state, I wouldn’t have the same backup. Drew told me he couldn’t help if things went sideways. But I took the job anyway.’
‘That was a big bust.’
‘And that OIC still screwed me over. He blocked everything—including any messages—to make sure that bust stayed on track. My phone was full of messages from Bree, my old work partners, even Drew… and my son—that last message from my son…’ He dropped his head as if weighed down by the burden.
Taryn’s blinked as she sat taller. ‘You missed the message?’ She glanced up at him, eyes widening. ‘You missed it, like I did from Meghan, before she was murdered.’
He met her eyes, and something unspoken passed between them. ‘Yeah. I know…’
‘That’s why you gave me the file.’ She remembered that moment in the car and how he’d looked at her like he understood her.
Only he had. Deeper than anyone had before.
Even now, Finn looked at her with that same steady gaze that read everything about her like lines on a page.
‘You had that look, the one people wear when they’re living with a ghost,’ he said.
He was right.
Finn shifted, his gaze dropping to stare at the ground beneath his boots.
‘It was Drew who got me the pardon,’ he murmured.
‘Said I’d earned a second chance to build something good.
He’d remembered me as that sixteen-year-old, wanting to join the police just to be on the Stock Squad.
So I built this squad. For him. For Bree.
For what we all lost. But also for everyone in this region, and all those involved within the industry. ’
With her heart full, and eyes stinging, Taryn tried not to let the weight of it pull her under.
She suddenly understood why he fought so hard. Why he couldn’t stop. And why he owed Drew everything.
Lost in their thoughts for a while, she finally found her voice to say what she didn’t want to say at all, ‘I’m leaving in three days.’
‘I know.’
‘And I’m not asking you to say anything you don’t mean. We both know what this is.’
Finn looked at her like he wanted to argue.
But didn’t.
‘You don’t do goodbyes, right?’ she asked.
‘Not well. No.’
‘Then let’s not say it, because I’m used to leaving.’ That’s what happens when you’re a military brat. You’ve already got one foot out the door, never getting close to anyone.
He didn’t move for a moment. Just stared into the fire like he was weighing up the pros and cons. ‘So… we’ve got three days?’
Taryn lifted a brow. ‘Are you calculating the hours now?’
‘Not yet. But I figure we can use them.’
‘How? Spend my time on surveillance and smuggler spreadsheets?’
‘Worked last time.’ He slid his arm over her shoulders, bringing her close to his side. ‘And I think you should finish what you’ve started, with me… After all, Fed, you made the trek all the way out here for answers.’
‘Finn, no one can know about us. Because if they did, it’d be seen as a conflict of interest. Everyone and everything would be compromised.’
‘I know,’ he murmured with heaviness in his deep voice.
She stood slowly, brushing off her jeans. The firelight painted him in red and gold and shadow—this man who wore silence like armour, looked at her like she’d slipped through its cracks.
He rose with her. Close now.
So close.
‘Taryn.’
She turned into him like gravity wasn’t a choice.
‘But we’ll know, and I’ll never forget.’ He kissed her slowly—and for once, it wasn’t about heat or hunger. It was the preparation for a goodbye without saying it, even if part of her wanted to believe this could hold.
She knew how time, distance, and reality could strip even the best moments bare.
That the second she stepped back into her office, it would all fade like a half-remembered dream.
Where Finn might become nothing more than a name she whispered in the dark when the city got too loud.
And already knew she would never forget him.