Run Among Thorns (3 page)

The last few days just seemed like a bad dream. Insubstantial, unreal. But she knew what reality was, what was waiting for her. And she didn’t really want to wake up at all.

She refused to think about what had happened, refused to think about the place they had taken her to. Refused to consider the man beside her at the wheel. The man they had called McAllister.

Dazed and uncaring, she had gone with him when they told her to. Obeyed his terse instructions issued in a deep voice at the airport, on the plane, at the car rental, at the motorway services. And all the time he’d not let her out of his sight. Hardly looked at her, that was true, but never more than a few metres away from her. He’d made her use the disabled toilets so that he could stand guard outside.

They’d been travelling for ten hours, driving for two, and she was shattered. Deep bone tired, painfully weary. Jenny had slept a little in the car, on the plane, but dreams had kept jerking her awake.

How had she got to this? Her life had been simple. Dull, but simple. A nice job in a nice place, with nice people. A quiet home where she could just be herself. A car that was probably just a little too exciting for her needs. A cat, a hamster, some plants. A little exchange to America had sounded fun. Not deadly.

Not the sort of thing that was going to present her with one moment in time, one choice, that was going to change the whole course of her life.

She wanted to cry, but the skin of her cheeks was sore from the tears she’d shed at the facility. Until she’d worked out that they weren’t going to believe her, or get her a lawyer. Or the embassy. Jenny had learned to stop asking them what was happening. Even to stop asking for a glass of water, or a trip to the bathroom. Then it had been system shutdown, desperately trying to conserve her energy, even her sanity, while they shouted at her and threatened her.

Leaving had been a relief. Even if it had meant putting herself in this McAllister’s power. He was a big man, dark and intimidating, but that was about as far as her impression went. If someone had asked her to describe his face, she would have had trouble. She was just so tired.

So tired.

Suddenly, McAllister was slowing down on the long straight road that sliced between the ranked pines. He turned cautiously off the road onto a rutted track, little more than a firebreak in the planting. The track was littered with old branches and trimmings that snapped and jerked under the wheels as they climbed steadily towards the brow of the hill.

At the crest of the hill, he turned right onto another track and then left again, climbing another slope until they broke out into open country.

There in front of them, huddled into a little dip in the slope where a beck flowed by, was a little cottage. It was long and low, squat, built of the dark-grey stone that jutted out of the peat on higher ground, and whitewashed. The roof was slated, very low at the eaves, and there were short chimneys at either end.

Jenny looked at the two small, square windows on the side they approached, and thought about how dark it would be inside. A few yards away from the cottage, there was a rickety wooden shack, which spoke doom-laden volumes about the facilities the place offered.

McAllister pulled the Rover to a halt before they reached the beck. Craning her neck to see, Jenny could just make out a tiny plank bridge crossing the beck, but the track ended here.

She cast a glance at McAllister and found him looking at her.

“Honey,” he said, sarcasm built into every syllable, “we’re home.”

Chapter
        TWO

J
enny stood on the stone floor of the kitchen, and wondered what she was supposed to do. McAllister was moving about the place, unpacking groceries that had been in the car when they picked it up, and generally moving in.

She supposed she should be taking stock of her surroundings, looking for something that might help her, but she was so tired her legs were physically aching just keeping her up. She sat down on one of the two wooden chairs that were on either side of a round table with a plain blue tablecloth.

“I didn’t say you could sit down.”

She blinked, trying to take in his words. He didn’t stop stacking cans into an overhead cupboard, keeping his back to her.

He turned around. “Okay. I guess I should tell you the rules. It works like this, Jenny. I make the rules. You keep them. I change the rules. You keep them.” He moved closer, bracing his fists on the table opposite her, leaning in. Jenny could feel his breath on her face, see the detail of the stubble on his chin.

She put all her energy into not leaning back.

“Rule one: do what I tell you,” he said, menacing her with the tone of his voice, too. “Rule two: don’t try to escape. Rule three: the quicker you tell me what I want to know, the quicker you can get out of here.”

Or else?
Jenny didn’t have to think very hard about that one. They were alone, miles from anywhere, and he … he was built like a fighter, all muscle and whipcord. He pushed himself back off the table and went back to unpacking.

She took several deep, slow breaths, determined that her voice wouldn’t shake when she spoke. “What is it you want to know?”

He walked round behind her, to get to the boxes there, she supposed.

Suddenly his big hand fisted in the back of her T-shirt, hauling her to her feet, knocking the chair aside, so that it fell with a crack on the stone-flagged floor. He all but threw her away from him, towards the middle of the room. When she staggered, limbs liquid with shock, she saw him coming at her with a gun.

She froze, stood there, desperately fighting the urge to run, knowing in some still-functional part of her brain that would be stupid and pointless. Her heart beat in slow, painful strokes.

“I want to know how you turned a situation like this,” he stopped a bare pace away, and levelled the nasty little automatic at her, “into a situation in which three men lay dead and you were still standing.

“Well, what about it?” he said. “Are you going to give me a demonstration of how you do that, little Jenny Waring?”

So they had come all the way across the Atlantic just for him to ask the same questions they had shouted at her until she was numb. It didn’t make any sense.

Nothing made any sense.

She stared at the gleaming metal of the gun. There was something attractive about the sheen on the barrel, something seductive about it. It was death and drama, poisoned chocolate, delicious and deadly.
Alan would know what it was
, she thought, with an odd detachment.

Jenny saw a tiny tendon in Kier’s hand leap as he tightened his finger on the trigger. She closed her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” he taunted. “You handled the others perfectly well. Charlie, and Craig, and little Barry. Can’t you do the same to me?”

Jenny said nothing, tried to blank her mind, tried to go inside herself to get away. But every time she relaxed her rigid hold on her thoughts, the images of that day flashed across the inside of her eyes like a series of freeze-frame shots, making her whole body jerk, making her gasp and struggle to think of something else.

She could hear, feel him move closer, felt the cold whisper of the gun against her forehead. At the touch of it, a racking sob escaped her, and she clamped her jaw tight until it hurt.

“What’s the matter, Jenny? Don’t you want to kill me like the others?”

She opened her eyes, stared straight ahead of her. “I don’t ever want to do that again, Mr. McAllister,” she said.

He was standing up against her left shoulder, leaning in to her, trying to menace her. Succeeding, she thought, bleakly. She was just so tired her fear didn’t show. She felt empty, drained. Vulnerable. She was aware of the warmth of his body at her side, the breath that stirred her hair. She could just see the jut of his shoulder at the periphery of her vision.

He backed off, snapping the safety on, slipping the gun in the back of his waistband. He eyed her up and down. “Seeing as we are going to be living in each other’s pockets for as long as it takes, sweetheart, you’d better call me Kier.”

The endearment on his lips was a travesty, taunting her. Jenny felt it like a slap to the face. His voice, his manner, even the way he moved was a sneer, and she wondered dazedly why it upset her so much.

She took a breath, tried to sound reasonable. “Please, will you leave me alone?” she saw the derision in his eyes, and rushed on. “I haven’t had a moment’s peace since … since it happened. I need to think. Please.” She hated herself for sounding so weak, but her head was spinning, aching. She just needed time to work out how she felt, what had happened. Who she was.

He snorted. It wasn’t an attractive sound. “It’s exactly my job to make sure you don’t get any time alone to think. The answer’s no.”

Jenny’s head was filled and overspilling with questions, one running into the other, deafening her. She still felt dull, stupid, thickheaded.

All at once she was aware of something clear and positive, a desire that was simple and easy to achieve. “I want to sleep,” she said, moving for the first time since he’d threatened her and glancing around the cottage.

He indicated the high wooden bed. It looked like a remnant from the seventeenth century, but the linen on it was fresh, gleaming white, and clean. “Help yourself.”

Jenny looked around, at a loss. There wasn’t any privacy at all. The two rooms that were all the cottage had to offer ran into one through a big double doorway. There were no doors. There was an old iron curtain rail, but no curtains. There were no cobwebs or dust on the rail, not like some of the corners of the ceiling, and Jenny realised with a flash of insight that the curtains had been removed. She wondered at her own perception.

She turned back to Kier, who stood, arms crossed, watching her with an ugly half smile on his face. “I want to get undressed,” she said, in a small voice. She still wore the same clothes she wore to work that awful day, and they made her feel lousy.

“Go ahead,” he said, and made no move to leave, or turn around.

With a sick feeling, Jenny realised he wasn’t going to give her any privacy at all. She turned her back on him and went to the bed. Keeping her back turned she undressed quickly to her underwear, conscious all the time of his gaze on her. She’d never been an exhibitionist, and undressing like this in front of him broke the last precious fragments of her nerve, till her fingers trembled on fastenings and buttons and she screwed her eyes tight shut against the tears that overflowed. She was tired, that was all.
That was all
.

A tiny knot of stubborn anger curled in her stomach, displacing the nausea. Sod him. She swore to herself, then and there, she wasn’t going to give him another opportunity to shock or dismay her. From now on, everything he did to upset her she would take in her stride, never let on if he wounded her.

When Jenny pulled her jumper over her head she thought he made a sound, but she ignored him and climbed awkwardly onto the high bed. She pulled her hair out from under her neck and tucked it up on the pillow, turned on her side, pulling the covers up over her shoulders, and closed her eyes.

This was not going to work.

Kier turned back from the sight of her curled like a sleepy child in the bed, and went to get a glass of water. Oh, he’d played this game with women before. Better-looking women than Jenny Waring, as it happened. It wasn’t any sort of misplaced sense of chivalry about the weaker sex.

It was just the feeling he’d had when she undressed that bothered him. He was a red-blooded male, God knew, and, let’s face it, he’d liked what he saw, but it wasn’t lust that had disturbed him.

When she’d peeled off her jumper, before that mass of dark hair tumbled down again and hid her back, he’d seen the vicious bruise that discoloured her skin just below her left shoulder blade. It was from when Craig had jabbed her with his pistol. The bruise was big and purple, with its edges still red and swollen, and he’d been overtaken by a rush of anger. And something else, something that had felt like protectiveness, rusty as that urge must be.

That was going to complicate matters some, he knew.

Because the only thing Jenny needed protecting from round here was him.

Dawson sat in his car outside his house. The burgundy Corolla parked in the driveway told him that Alice was home again from—where was this latest trip?— somewhere north, he remembered. Something to do with forests and mountains and fresh, wholesome air.

Being married to a successful travel journalist had seemed like a good idea, years ago. He hadn’t minded all the trips and travelling—why should he? She got free flights and they’d done a lot of travelling together, in the early days.

He didn’t even really mind it at all now—not the thing itself, exactly, just the by-product. Alice wrote well; he enjoyed her articles. Her job paid well. She was pretty, fun, independent in a way that stimulated him, that he admired.

She just wasn’t there very often.

John came home to an empty house most days, and he had a whole
relationship
thing going with the microwave. And Alice occasionally lunched with some of the check-in girls from the airport.

Mostly he “lunched” with the potted palm on his desk.

He let his hands fall from the steering wheel into his lap, trying to conjure up the enthusiasm to unsnap the seat belt. The next-door neighbour’s kids had left bikes abandoned on their scraggly front lawn. On his lawn there was just… lawn. He’d cut it again this weekend, and water it. Probably he’d service the mower.

Grimacing, he freed himself from the belt and went on inside.

From the hard breathing and whirring noise coming from the second front room, the one with the glaring yellow paint job they’d never got round to changing, Alice was working out.

“Hey,” he called, dropping his keys on the pile of mail on the hall table. “Nice trip?”

“Great!” she gasped, but the pedalling didn’t falter. “The maples were turning, and Josh got some great shots. I’m thinking I’ll sell this article all over.”

He nodded, thumbing through bills and junk mail. “Good.” Josh was the freelance photographer who often travelled with her, when he wasn’t snowboarding or surfing somewhere. Dawson wondered where he got the energy.

“There’s a salad and some cold chicken in the fridge.”

“You’ve already eaten?” he asked, one foot on the bottom step of the grey carpeted stairs.

“Yeah, when I got in.”

He grunted, and started up the stairs, loosening his tie.

Alice joined him in the bedroom, towel in hand. She’d cut her hair again, going for something very short and wispy this time. He supposed it suited her, and wondered when she’d had it cut.

“You want the shower?” she said.

“Nope.” He hung his jacket and trousers in the closet. Sweats or jeans?

When he turned back, sweats in hand, Alice was slipping the last of her underwear off. She still had a good figure; she’d always had a good figure. Slim and indefinably capable. Her bottom didn’t sag; her breasts were still pretty much perfect. There was a time when the unexpected sight of her naked had rendered him almost brainless with lust. Now he studied her with a level of detachment that he found almost distasteful. Embarrassing.

She caught him staring, and grinned, misinterpreting him completely. He forced a smile and pulled on the sweats, saying nothing. She’d expect sex later. And it wouldn’t be a hardship, not really.

But it shamed him to admit he’d rather sit down to dinner together and talk.

Skipping past him to the en suite bathroom, she said, “What did you do today?”