This has just been a big year for me in that way that you’re aware of as its happening. My heart changed. I’m not the girl, or the writer, I was when I started out three years ago. That’s a good and inevitable thing, but accepting change is as hard for me as it is for every other human on this wonderful, shitful marble we call earth. Many highs and lows have been poured into the pages of this book and I’m glad it’s over, even as I miss writing about Sam and Scott. I hope you enjoy So Wild as a whole and lovely thing.
Thank you to Jessica Cale, a completely sick editor and friend, who manages to present cutting insights in a way that doesn’t lead to me weeping into a bucket of chicken. What a skill!
Thank you to Qween Koleson, who line edits like a fucking boss and leaves fun comments that make me smile just when I’m about to flip my desk over. Fuck Oxford commas forever.
Thank you to Timothy Jame who sent me baby pig GIFs, forced me to go out for brunch when I got square eyes and generally being a Caramello center of a person.
Thank you to Skye Warren and Tessa Bailey, who give amazing feedback/assistance whenever I ask for it because they’re fucking amazing people and so nice it hurts. Love you, both.
Thank you to my girls. You make me laugh, you lift me up, you make me sad for those chicks who say they can’t be friends with women because they’re too bitchy. As Tabby would say ‘get woke, cunt.’
Thank you to Hbomberguy, Contrapoints and Internet Comment Etiquette whose YouTube videos kept me laughing during my breaks.
Thank you to sugar-free cans of Mother—wait did I say thanks? I mean fuck off. You’re trash. You don’t even have the decency to be Diet Dr. Pepper. When my kids all have gills I will blame you.
A final thank you to my sister. My beating heart. My life began when you did <3
About Eve Dangerfield
Eve Dangerfield has loved romance novels since she first started swiping her grandmother’s paperbacks. Now she writes her own tales about complex women and gorgeous-but-slightly-tortured men. Eve currently lives in Melbourne with her boy. When she’s not writing she can usually be found juggling a beer, her phone and a lipstick. Not literally, she’s notoriously bad at juggling. You can find more details and sign up for her cheerfully bonkers newsletter at www.evedangerfield.com
Eve Dangerfield hath various social media accounts
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Eve Dangerfield hath written other books
Something Borrowed
Something Else
Taunt
Open Hearts
Act Your Age
Degrees of Control
Locked Box
Captivated (coauthored with Tessa Bailey!)
Locked Box
Remastered edition
by Eve Dangerfield
Chapter 1
Julia Bennett had been Brenthill Police Station’s IT person, or ‘computer girl’ as she was still often called, for over a year. IT was a thankless job at the best of times but most days it seemed like Brenthill was striving to be voted ‘Least Technologically Capable Organization in Human Existence.’ There were old cops who longed for the days of secretaries and notepads, young cops frustrated by the outdated technology, general computer illiteracy, and some sexism thrown in just for fun. Today alone she’d taught an old geezer how to use a wireless mouse, uninstalled more malware than she’d thought possible to download, and been bailed up by a shifty-looking constable who wanted to make his web history disappear. The cop tried to pass off his incriminating searches as investigative, but they both knew he was lying.
They were always lying.
Three years she’d spent getting her Bachelor of Design, another two earning an Advanced Diploma in Professional Game Development and all that had culminated in spending her days deleting weird porn in the same backwater town she’d grown up in. Her mother, when she wasn’t poached in wholesale Russian vodka, used to say Brenthill was like quicksand; it smelled bad and it sucked you down. The older Julia got, the truer that statement became. All her life her responsibilities had kept her from throwing her belongings into her car and heading for the nearest airport, but on days like today it was tempting to do what her mother had done and just get the fuck out of Dodge.
Of course it didn’t help that it was six o’clock on a Friday and her workday still hadn’t ended. Ordinarily, Julia cut and ran at five on the dot like everyone else, but she’d fallen afoul of Henrietta Brennan. Henrietta was one of those aggressively cheerful women who fluctuated wildly between sweetness and anger. Julia had no techniques to deal with her brand of demanding syrupiness other than immediately agreeing to anything she asked. Synch up her phone, laptop, and tablet? Done. Convert her holiday photos into a slideshow with which she could bore others to death? Done. Run out and get more toilet paper on her lunch break despite that having nothing to do with her job? Sure. But, today’s request had been a whole new breed of bother.
Henrietta had come into the break room, taken away Julia’s mug of nitrogen-strength coffee and said, “Please organize the entire computer section of the Brenthill Evidence Room and have it done yesterday, thanks.”
Julia should have said no. She should have put her foot down. Instead she’d crumpled like a cheap suit.
The Brenthill Evidence Room was the size of a modest garage. Much like a garage, it was full of useless crap—soggy backpacks, rusty bicycles, tangles of fake gold jewelry. Brenthill wasn’t exactly the criminal hub of Australia. The cheap government housing attracted a lot of bad behaviour but it mostly came in the form of graffiti, domestic violence, and domestic violence’s mean old daddy—drunk and disorderly. When Henrietta said ‘computer section,’ Julia expected a couple of busted monitors and a USB cord. She was wrong. Three years ago the cops had busted a guy collecting computers from the tip. The former postal worker’s goal had been to build a CPU capable of overthrowing the government. The man was insane—he couldn’t have overthrown a kindergarten—but the cops seized the would-be doomsayer’s ‘assets’ and instead of chucking them back in the tip where they belonged, they became an almighty mountain of evidence. What Henrietta assured her was a ‘quick job’ was in fact a war of man versus machine. Julia scraped herself on exposed copper wires four times as she untangled dirty cords and slid heavy monitors onto shelves. She spent two hours alone bagging floppy disks. Floppy disks. And they were blank.
Initially, Henrietta had been supervising—i.e. drinking tea, checking her phone and chatting with passersby—while the trusty computer girl took care of business. Then her daughter had been stung by some kind of bee and, overwhelmed with maternal responsibility, she’d fled, propping the door open with a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica and begging Julia to stay and finish the job.
She shouldn’t have agreed. Brenthill might have a lax ‘this is a country town, let’s all go play lawn bowls’ attitude but she wasn’t authorized to mill about the property office. If the station inspector found out she’d been in a position to steal all the weed and floppy disks, she and Henrietta could get fired. And yet, what else was she supposed to do? Stand up for herself? Not be such a pushover?
“Fat chance,” Julia muttered, wrestling with a tangle of grimy headphones, all of which wanted to strangle her.
A burst of masculine laughter filtered into the office and she felt a familiar tumbling sensation in her gut. She knew it wasn’t him, his voice was deeper, but her body tingled at the mere possibility. She stopped packing evidence and listened.
“Why not Italian?” the guy said. “Last time we had Thai my curry had a hair in it.”
A woman giggled. “That was your own hair. I want roti bread, we’re doing Thai.”
“Anything else we’ll be doing tonight?”
Even though the people had no idea she was listening Julia ducked her head, blushing at the intimacy of their words. She knew it was Constable Greg Ford and Senior Constable Melanie Bastow. After six months o
f flirting, it appeared they were finally getting it on. That made sense: cops tended to screw, date, and marry other cops. Presumably, it was easier to be with someone who understood the hours and the stress. That’s what he’d done. Married a policewoman, bought a nice place, probably had loads of sex using genuine police handcuffs as props.
Julia cringed and forced her mind to return to the computer cables. Nightmare Fantasy Land was not a place worth visiting on a Friday night. Or ever. She began working on the last of the fractured mainframes when her phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out to see her sister’s face flashing up on the screen, her tongue protruding, her blue eyes crossed. She answered the call. “Hey, Ash.”
“Hey, back. Why aren’t you home?”
“I got asked to stay back in the evidence room, which is incredibly unlawful considering all the meth I could lay my hands on right now.”
Her sister laughed. “Good luck with that. Anyway, Blake invited us to a two-day camping rave thing on his property. It kicks off tonight. You keen?”
Julia pulled two half-melted cords apart with a snap. “I dunno, I’m kind of tired.”
“Liar. You want to sit at home and scribble pictures for your game.”
Julia frowned. “The pitch needs to be done by the end of the month. I need to work. And they’re not scribbles.”
She could practically hear Ash rolling her eyes. “All you ever do is work. You need to get laid. How long has it been? A month? Two months?”
“An irrelevant amount of months. Scarlet Woman is my boyfriend and she needs all my love and attention.”
“You can’t screw a video game. I hope you know that.”
“No, Ashley, I didn’t know that. I’m breathlessly awaiting the day Scarlet Woman gains a physical body and drills me against a wall.”
There was a short pause and Ash sighed. “Are you coming to this party or not? Because that hot dreadlocks guy is gonna be there and I want to have sex with his face.”
“Then have sex with his face. You don’t need me there for that.”
“He’s a gamer, and having a computer genius there will be a great icebreaker—”
“I am not a computer genius. Stop saying that?”
“—besides, guys always think we’re twins. Another excellent icebreaker.”
“Sure, play on people’s incest fantasies, that’s cool.”
“—and aren’t you the least bit curious about how a beautiful man’s dreadlocks would feel running over your naked body?”
“No.”
Ash exhaled irritably. “What is your deal? You’re snarky, even by your already low standards. Did you see your cop or something?”
Julia’s heart thumped hard against her ribs. “No, I haven’t seen him.”
“You’re just hoping to see him?”
She winced. Her sister played up the party girl white-trash angle but she wasn’t the least bit dumb, in fact when it came to other people’s duplicities, she didn’t miss a trick.
“No, and he’s not my cop,” Julia protested. “He’s just one of the many cops I fix shitty, outdated computers for.”
“Except much sexier, apparently.”
“And much more married,” Julia said, partly to her sister, mostly to herself.
Her phone beeped, informing her the battery was nearly empty. “I’ve gotta go. If you don’t hear from me, have a great weekend. Say hi to Blake and the gang.”
“I will. Just think, now you’ll have the whole place to yourself to unleash all your married-cop sexual energy upon.”
Julia closed her eyes. “That’s disgusting, goodbye.”
With one last snigger, Ash hung up.
“Heathen,” Julia announced to no one in particular.
On the pathetic-ness scale, bailing on a party to draw pictures in your bedroom had to be an eight, but the effort it would require to get dressed up, make fake smiles and awkward conversation until people were drunk enough to let go of their nervousness…who could be bothered? It was so much easier to go home, cuddle the dogs, and work on Scarlet Woman. Love and sex had the potential to be amazing but they required risk. They meant taking a guy to bed only to discover he was bad at oral and his cock smelt funny and his dirty talk made you wince and you had to lie there in the dark, crafting the text message you’d use to end it, even as he snuffled away at your genitalia.
Fuck that. Love and sex were a gamble. Work and leftover Chinese food were satisfying, if slightly pathetic, guarantees. Julia finished packing the last of the computer cords, standing on her tippy toes to place them high on the shelf. She was five-eleven in boots and this was one of the only circumstances in which she was grateful for her height; reaching the top of shelves, no boyfriend or stepladder required.
“Well that’s that,” she said just to hear the words echo around her. She dusted her hands on her black jeans, picked up her satchel, and strode to the door.
She stopped dead, blinking furiously because her eyes had to be mistaken. The door was closed. The reinforced, locked-from-the-outside door was closed. With slick fingertips, she reached for the handle and turned. It didn’t budge. White-hot panic licked up her wrists like fire. She shook the handle again, making it rattle like a machine gun. Nothing. Her chest expanded and contracted, expanded and contracted. Someone, some life-ruining, IT woman-hating idiot, had pushed the encyclopedia to the side, locking her in the property office. Julia moaned softly as the true horror of her situation hit her like a freight train. Brenthill was a twelve-hour station. There was no night shift, there was no weekend shift, and it was almost seven o’clock on a Friday evening.
“No.” Julia slapped the closed door. “No, no, please no.”
She froze. Digging through her bag, she pulled out her phone, which was hovering at a terrifying one percent battery. She called Ash. It rang once, twice, three times. Julia held her breath, sheer panic boiling inside her like liquid insanity.
“Jules? What’s—” Her sister’s voice disconnected.
“Shit!”
Before Julia knew what she was doing, she’d flung her phone across the room. It shattered against a shelf of power tools with a tinkling crash. She gripped her hair. How many years of bad luck did you get for smashing your phone? A million? She forced away thoughts of herself going utterly insane and tried to think. There was still a chance someone was in the building. Julia flung down her satchel and banged on the door like it was a war drum. “Hello? Hello? I’m trapped in here!”
Long seconds passed and her palms and neck grew slippery. There was no food in the property office, no bathroom…Christ, was there even enough air? She bashed at the door, trying not to scream like a victim in a horror film. She couldn’t die in here, not when Scarlet Woman was painfully close to completion. Not when the best relationship she’d ever had was one night when she was eighteen.
Throwing caution to the wind, Julia screamed. How had this happened? How could she have been stupid enough to agree to work alone in a lockable room? She screamed again and this time she kept going until her throat burned and her eyes watered. She was breathless, teetering on the edge of blackout when she heard the most beautiful sound in the world. Footsteps, blessed human footsteps.
“Hey! Hey! Is someone in there?”
It was a man’s voice, calm and controlled. Instantly she knew it was a cop and relief blasted through her so all-encompassing, she could barely speak. She slapped at the door trying to tell her would-be rescuer she was alive and in need of evacuation.
The cop rapped on the door. “Hang on a second. I’ll go get the spare keys.”
There was a pounding of feet as her rescuer dashed away. Julia inhaled, trying to calm her racing heart. The footsteps returned. Whoever this cop was, he was quick.
Julia wiped a hand across her sweaty forehead. “Oh my God, please let me out!”
“Don’t worry, Henri, I’ve got this.”
Ooh, the cop thought the actual property administrator was the one entombed in Brenthill�
��s evidence room? That was awkward. Then again, who cared? He could think she was Humphrey Fucking B Bear if it got him to let her out. There was an agonizingly long rattle of the keys, a muttered curse, and then the door clicked open. Julia didn’t think she’d ever heard a sexier sound. She and the cop both turned the handle at once, jamming the door once more.
Julia laughed and let go, allowing him to pry the door open. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m going to nominate you for Cop of The Ye—”
Her mouth went dry. It was him. Of course it was him. She was locked in a room, making a total dick of herself. Why wouldn’t it be him?
Senior Constable Max Connor’s gaze moved over her. His eyes were as dark as Julia remembered, so black you could barely make out the pupil. “Julia? What are you doing in here?”
“I-I…” She stared blankly at him, wondering if she’d remembered to wear mascara today.
“Seriously, what happened here?”
Max’s facial expression was a study in amusement and condescension, both things Julia could have happily gone without seeing. She felt her cheeks heat up. If only she’d been given the choice, she’d have gladly starved to death in the property office to avoid this.
“I was, uh…I was helping Henrietta file some computer stuff and someone kicked away my encyclopedia, which was holding the door open because I don’t have a key. Although it’s not my encyclopedia, I found it in here, which is weird because that means someone committed a crime using an encyclopedia. Which is weird.”
Max’s brows drew together, as though he couldn’t quite figure out how someone could be so ridiculous. “You shouldn’t be in here unsupervised.”
He braced his hands on his hips, the meeting point between broad chest and muscled thighs. The silver wedding band on his finger glinted at Julia accusingly.
“I know I shouldn’t but Henrietta had to go,” she said. “Her daughter was stung by some kind of…” Julia stared into Max’s face and completely lost her train of thought.
So Wild Page 35