New Series. New Book. Special Excerpt.

A Place to Stay in my new Rangelands series is about small-town love, the people who live and work there, and those newcomers who step in at the most unexpected times and find home.
And its up for pre-order now.
​
Plus,  read a special  excerpt from Chapter One!

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A remote outback town where she can become someone new—and maybe find a forever love?
 
Rachel Meade is a woman with a past she wants to escape from. Finding herself in Mt Maria, a small outback town in Western Australia, she thinks she’s found a place to stay.
 
Before she knows it, Rachel is corralled into helping with the Tidy Town competition by the Dramatic Society widows who have a tendency to gossip and take charge. It’s not in her plan, but she finds herself allowing friendships to develop. She’s even more surprised by her growing attraction to the town’s engaging senior police officer.
 
Ex-detective Senior Sergeant Luke Weston knows anything and everything happens in the country, and he’s seen it all—stolen chickens, pub fights and alleged cheating for the Tidy Town competition are only some of the puzzles Mt Maria offers Luke. He’s been playing for Rachel, thinking maybe she’s the one. Then he gets news that the Crime Squad are looking for her, and he’s ordered to get close and stay close. Is Rachael in trouble, or is she the trouble?
 
Luke is fighting his attraction to a woman he might have to take into custody, and it looks like he’s going to be arresting more than one person before the end of the week.  Luke needs to restore peace in his corner of the outback, but he knows he’s not going to get out of this without getting his heart busted.
 
With her past catching up with her, Rachael has to decide whether it’s time to cut and run again, or whether this time she’s found the person—and the place—to finally heal her heart. 

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Pre-order now available:
eBook releasing 21 November
paperback (Aus and NZ only) 5 December

Booktopia 
​Angus & Robertson Bookworld
Amazon Australia
Amazon.com
Amazon UK
iBooks 
​Kobo

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​Excerpt from A Place to Stay

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Chapter One

Rachel Meade pulled the comb from the back of her head, threw it into the bag on the passenger seat and ran a finger under the collar of her blouse. She undid the top three buttons and attempted to let the caution that shadowed her life slip away. Hot air rushed through the opened windows of her old 4WD, whipping her hair across the frames of her sunglasses as Bono sang I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For full blast on the radio.
It was good to see the end of this day but the trouble she’d been involved in forty minutes ago had wormed its way from a concern, to a worry that wouldn’t budge. Would there be charges? Would they ask her to give a statement against those men? She didn’t want her name on anything official.
She fidgeted on the seat, suddenly desperate to discard the formal white blouse and black skirt she wore to work every day at the town hall in Mt Maria on the Western Australian edge of the Great Victoria Desert.
She didn’t know how this little town had survived the century since its beginning in the gold rush days, but she was grateful it existed. She felt a tug of appreciation for Mt Maria and its people. Well, some of them. Not the mine site workers who had swarmed into town a fortnight ago, causing trouble that started long before closing time at the hotel.
She stared at the road ahead: straight, wide, and empty, calming herself with the vista. The landscape was theatrical in its majestic, golden barrenness: vast blue sky creased the faraway horizon, with rich red earth, mulga woodlands and spinifex grass below. Ten more minutes and she’d be at the Laurensen place—the rental house she’d begun to think of as her own after years of moving away, moving on, moving anywhere. Mt Maria offered a truly outback lifestyle, the brochure had told her. And it was out the back of beyond. Which is why she’d moved here.
She hadn’t been looking for anything except normality and a sense of safety, and if she was lucky, she’d found both. If she stayed in this rangeland district long enough, the Laurensen place might even become known as the Meade place.
It sounded good, but she didn’t want to give the idea too much consideration, regardless of already having savoured the notion a few times too many.
Five fifteen and it was still as sweltering as it had been earlier that morning when she’d driven to work. At a hundred kilometres an hour, the air coursing through the car was like a blast from a heater on full power. The aircon hadn’t worked from the day she’d bought the vehicle, and there was nowhere to get it re-gassed out here, so she put up with it and enjoyed the exhilaration of air rushing over her.
Flashing lights reflected in the rear-view mirror.
She tensed. What now?
She brought the car to a stop, turned the radio off, pulled the sunglasses from her face and fastened two of the buttons on her blouse, reluctantly bringing back the cover she’d only just let loose.
The police car drew up behind. The lights flickered a jagged line across the breadth of the burnt-red road for a few seconds, then stopped. She checked the side mirror and held her breath as she recognised the officer getting out of the marked wagon, adjusting his cap and taking his time as he moved towards her car. Did they teach them how to walk like that? A contained stride, without haste but full of objective.
She’d seen too many cops in very different circumstances but this one put her on edge in a way she wasn’t accustomed to.
He came alongside the driver’s door, his shadow falling on her car and shielding her from the glow of the early evening sunshine. She moistened her lips and ignored the warmth building inside her that had nothing to do with the weather. Against all her better instincts, she was riveted.
He put his hands on the heavy equipment belt sitting on his waist. ‘Sorry about the lights. Didn’t mean to frighten you but I needed you to stop.’
‘I thought I must have been speeding,’ she said with a hint of a laugh, but it came out nervously.
He knocked the brim of his cap back with a finger, strands of short, dark brown hair visible above his ears and at the back of his neck. ‘Actually, I did clock you doing seven over the limit.’
‘Sorry.’
The tanned skin at the corner of his mouth creased with a smile. ‘I’ll overlook it this time.’
Well over six foot, built like a football player, he wore the blue of that intimidating uniform as though he’d been born in it, displaying authority with a laid-back demeanour and managing to make her feel as shy as the nineteen-year-old she’d once been. Too long ago. Too many broken dreams ago.
‘So what have I done wrong?’ It pained her to ask, but she had to appear normal because she had no intention of telling him or any police officer what had happened to her three months ago.
‘You haven’t done anything wrong, Rachel.’ He tipped his head, a familiar gleam appearing in his eyes. ‘Hi, by the way. How are you?’
She allowed him a smile, although truthfully it came almost naturally, which was another worry. She hadn’t seen him around town the last couple of days. She’d wondered where he was but hadn’t asked anyone.
‘I heard what happened outside the hotel,’ he said.
She remained still but her nerve endings roared to life.
‘Just wanted to check you were okay.’
‘Your constables helped. And it wasn’t just me, there were two other women being pestered.’
‘I know.’
‘So do you want to ask me a question or something?’ she asked, amazed at how well she was keeping it together.
Immediately, she realised she’d given him an opening. One she didn’t want him to take.
‘Well I have asked you out twice now,’ he said, a gentle glow in his eye. ‘But I didn’t follow you out here, flashing the lights, to ask you to have dinner with me.’ He paused, maybe giving her a chance to speak, but she kept quiet. ‘I saw you drive out of town in a rush. I got a bit worried about you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t have to apologise. Like I said, you did nothing wrong.’
Oh, God, but she had.
‘Will you come into the station tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘Tell me what happened?’
She’d left the scene as soon as the young constable had turned up and as soon as she’d known the other two women were okay. ‘There’s not much I can tell you,’ she said. ‘I was only on the periphery of it. The men were drunk. Noisy—you know—making a nuisance of themselves.’
‘Yes, they were,’ he acknowledged. ‘And they frightened you.’
He’d never know how much.
‘Thank you, Senior Sergeant Weston, but I’m fine.’
‘You can call me Luke. And I don’t make that offer to everyone around town. Only the chosen few.’
‘I’d prefer to keep it official.’ Her eyes were drawn to his uniform. He’d been a detective until a couple of years ago. She hadn’t asked why an ex-detective would be in charge of small outback town. She never asked questions, and hated answering them. The last thing she wanted was to add more trouble to her life.
She swallowed the sudden ache in her throat—a thick, choking longing so intense it puckered her heart. She breathed deeply and banished loneliness to some other place. She had solitude. Being lonely was something she’d have to put up with.
‘Rachel,’ he said, putting his hands either side of her car door as he leaned in to her, ‘what’s wrong?’
She shook her head, but couldn’t look at him. She’d thought the memories of her past were fading like the scars, but this last fortnight while she was lying her head off at the nice people around her, they’d returned. Worry about her past didn’t come only in her nightmares. It happened in the daytime too and the memories had returned earlier when those men at the hotel had surrounded her and two other women, drunkenly laughing and joking. Not vicious but behaving with thick-headed stupidity. They’d frightened the life out of her.
‘Hey,’ he said softly, breaking into her dark thoughts. ‘Rachel Meade. Hello. You still with me?’
A flash of guilt shot through her, but she managed to look up and to keep her focus on him. Rachel Meade was her fourth identity—if she counted her real one. He didn’t know that.

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​I hope my readers enjoy this first book in my new small-town series, and that new readers find the chance to immerse themselves in my kind of small-town life. 

Jennie

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​Booktopia 
​Angus & Robertson Bookworld
Amazon Australia
Amazon.com
Amazon UK
iBooks 
​Kobo

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