What was she supposed to do?
Admit to herself that her boobs had turned into hypersensitive traitors, protesting against her bras that were suddenly a smaller cup size?That she might be growing a brooding Finn clone, while the real one was out there playing enemies-to-lovers in reverse?
Come on.She’d done her research on Dr Google’s web of wisdom, spurred on by a double dose of late-night panic attacks, to conclude that she couldn’t be knocked up.Not when she’d always been particular about her contraception.Every time.Only for her body to have the audacity to hit the fertile on-switch and turn her ovaries into supercharged babymakers.Just.Like.That?!
There’s no way she was even close to being ready to think about howhe’dreact—not when she was still trying to convince herself the whole thing was a false alarm brought on by stress, bad lighting, and one too many cheese toasties.And that her suddenly developed aversion to bacon, which made her want to cuddle the toilet bowl, was perfectly normal.
Denial was a perfectly valid coping strategy.
And right now, it was the only thing keeping her focused on the job, especially when there were so many others counting on her.
Finn and his team were still fighting to keep their squad alive, chasing cattle thieves through the outback’s dust.Her family was still grieving for Meghan and needed some justice that no one else seemed willing to give them.And the poor townsfolk of Elsie Creek, who depended on the integrity of those stockyards, didn’t even know they were being played by someone they trusted.
Taryn’s department was trusting her to be impartial, thorough, and professional—even if she was strictly hypothetically, absolutely denial-fuelled, completely unconfirmed, half in love with the man she’d been sent to audit.
Taryn didn’t have the luxury of spiralling.
Not now.
Not when the whole damn house of cards was ready to fall.
So she squared her shoulders, tied her hair into a no-nonsense knot, and turned back to the files.Her personal crisis could wait, because she had work to do.
She scrolled through the draft report on her screen for the umpteenth time, only this time the numbers seemed sharper against her headache.
Performance metrics.Compliance charts.Live export impacts.And the model for the Northern Territory Federal Stock Squad that Finn had been trialling.
The one that shouldn’t have worked.
Only—it had.
Brilliantly.
In just under twelve months, while based out of Elsie Creek Police Station, the Stock Squad’s case load had recovered over $16.4 million in stolen livestock and rural assets.
If it were a business, the cost-to-recovery profit ratio would’ve sent shareholders into a frenzy.
Yet this wasn’t a business.This was a federal department.
And that was just part of the bigger picture…
Especially when some bureaucrat—who’d never left their air-conditioned office—had decided the Northern Territory Police could reduce their entire Stock Squad to, literally, a generic email address on a website.
That’s it.
No team.No boots on the ground.Just an inbox somewhere in Darwin, collecting dust.
Not that she blamed the cops out there.After having spent time inside the Elsie Creek police station, Taryn could see they were pulling off miracles on a shoestring budget.These officers weren’t underperforming.They were badly under-resourced, while trying to do a job in a sprawling playing field, so unique to the Northern Territory, it was incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t live and breathe it.
Before the Stock Squad had set up camp in the Batcave, over 92% of reported stock thefts went nowhere.They became cold cases, scattered across the outback like cow-shaped tumbleweeds.
Now?They were closing nearly 70% of those cases, most within weeks, not years.
Stock theft reports across the Territory had jumped—not because livestock theft was suddenly trending, but because, for the first time in years, graziers were actually reporting thefts, because they believed someone might do something about it.
It was the kind of turnaround that made other departments twitchy.And made career bureaucrats whisper words like unsustainable and disruptive, like the nerdy kid in the playground whining because someone else figured out how to win their game.
The Northern Territory Government had ignored the problem for so long, they’d stopped even pretending to care.Which, considering how much the cattle industry propped up the Territory’s economy, was either criminally negligent or impressively stupid.
