Run Among Thorns

by Anna Louise Lucia

  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?”

  Threw a pretty woman to the wolves.

  “Nothing much,” he said, automatically. “Just routine.”

  The shower started. Alice stuck her head back round the door and grimaced comically at him. “Shuffling paper and bullshitting the boss?”

  Something like that. “Yeah,” he said.

  The wind was driving rain at the windows like a crowd of people throwing gravel at the panes.

  The sound was background music to Jenny’s waking consciousness, a constant white noise that took some time for her to identify. She shifted a little in bed, snuggling down into the duvet in search of warmth. She had that Monday-morning feeling, trying to hold the day at bay by concentrating on keeping warm and snug. There was a strange sense of dread like a shadow at the back of her mind, as if the day held something she didn’t want to think about.

  Jenny opened gummy eyes, wondering why her muscles ached so much. She looked for her bedside clock but it wasn’t there. The duvet tucked tight under her chin was white, not green like at home, and the wall was knobbly and whitewashed, not papered.

  But that was right, because she wasn’t at home in Cumbria, England, she
was abroad learning about visitor management in the vast US National Parks. Except that this didn’t look like her temporary apartment, either.

  The world her subconscious had been trying to protect her from came back with a terrifying rush, drowning her mind’s eye in traumatic images, shivering her muscles with remembered fatigue and making her clamp her mouth shut, hard, on a wave of nausea that left her shaking and sweating.

  The bed was still comfortable, though, she thought wryly, and she had slept well, even though she’d had to keep to one side of it…

  She swallowed, a painful convulsion of a dry throat. Carefully she turned her head, squinting out of the corner of her eye, but the other side of the bed was empty. Tentatively, she snaked out a foot under the covers and found the bed still retained a lingering warmth from his body. Warmer than her, in actual fact, and she had to fight the urge to slide over into that warmth and let it sink in, deep.

  McAllister.

  As if on cue, he spoke.

  “Come and get your breakfast.”

  Jenny cautiously propped herself up on her elbows and looked through into the other room. He was up and dressed, moving about the kitchen. The little table was half laid.

  The thought of food set her stomach growling and rolling. She wasn’t sure if she could eat, but she certainly needed to. Still clutching the covers to her, although McAllister didn’t seem to be looking, she shuffled off the bed and grabbed her clothes, pulling them on awkwardly under the duvet.

  Jenny pushed her hair off her face, wishing she could wash it, wishing she had clean clothes to wear, and went through into the kitchen.

  He glanced up at her as she approached the table.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  She hesitated. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  He looked up at her again, while bending to put spoons on the table. “There is no bathroom.”

  He had washed, though. His hair was damp, combed severely back from his broad forehead, but even as she watched, it was drying, springing back into a natural thick wave, the dark, almost black hair threaded through here and there with the tiniest bit of silver. She was suddenly aware of her hands hanging uselessly and awkwardly by her sides, and stuffed them in her pockets.

  She looked into his eyes, and found him watching her. Something inside her said, Uh-oh, but she tried to ignore it. His eyes were blue. Grey-blue, cold and impassive, but oddly stark and arresting. With a jolt she realised this was the first time she had really looked at him.

  Holding her gaze, he straightened. He was tall, she realised, mentally measuring against her brother, who was six foot one. McAllister was a shade taller, she thought, but broader, too, so it was hard to tell.

  There were lines on his face. Hard lines. Fanning beside his eyes, running from beside the arrogant curl of his nostrils to the corner of his mobile mouth. They gave his face a harshness that was strangely attractive, and added to the sense of power and menace she felt in his company.

  With something approaching panic, Jenny realised he was probably the most attractive man she’d ever been close to. For the moment, that was just another reason to hate him. The insistent pressure in her bladder brought her back to the issue at hand. She squared her shoulders.

  “If there’s no bathroom, show me a bucket, McAllister. I need the loo. Now.”

  He watched her for a moment more, making her wait, then went to the front door, fishing a key from his pocket. “Come with me,” he said, and she followed.

  The door was deadlocked, and he opened it, grabbing a red jacket from a hook beside the door, and putting it on before passing out of the cottage before her.

  It was still throwing it down, and she stood on the threshold, legs almost crossed, while he flipped up the hood on the expensive-looking waterproof jacket and watched her with impassive eyes.

  “Well?” he said.

  It was the water running off the eaves in a tinkling steady stream that finally defeated her. She ran out into the rain, gasping as its cold deluge battered her, following the figure that walked ahead of her like a red beacon.

  As she had expected, he stopped at the rickety hut and held the door as she rushed past him and stood shivering and dripping on wooden floor.

  “You have ten minutes. Then I’ll come and get you,” was all he said, shutting the door on her. She heard the sound of a bolt being drawn at the same time as she registered that there was no lock on her side of the door.

  That thought had her standing there for a while, considering the possibility of him walking in on her. Then she gave herself a shake. She had ten minutes, so she’d better use them.

  After taking care of pressing business, Jenny saw there was a bowl of water on a stand, and a speckled mirror hanging on a nail above it. Keeping her head down, she scrubbed her face in the cold water, drying it on the least grubby part of her jumper. Glancing up without thinking, she caught sight of her reflection.

  Not me, she thought. Please don’t let it be me. He’ll have me for breakfast.

  Jenny took a deep breath that shook despite her best efforts and tried to reclaim the logical, sensible mind that had been her best companion through bad times and good. Her emotions … well, they had let her down more times than she could tell. That wholehearted, free and easy side of her had her throwing her heart into the breach and laying herself open to hurt so easily. Jenny feared it with all the logic she could lay claim to. She knew she needed to rely more on her sensible, reasonable, intelligent mind.

  She used it now to try to find positive things about her situation.

  I am out of the facility. The layers of security that had prevented her from leaving were now contracted to one man, one moor, one forest. And it was the type of country she knew—and could master.

  I have been able to sleep. They’d kept her awake for what had seemed like days, although before long she’d lost track of time completely. Sleep healed the mind and body, Jenny told herself, and her resources were coming back online. She tried to ignore the persistent ache in her muscles, and the clammy touch of weak-from-hunger dizziness.

  I am back in my own country. She knew her rights here, that was for sure. They weren’t going to bulldoze her into accompanying unidentified men in suits by telling her it was procedure.

  The little realist in her almost laughed. Rights were all well and good when you could exercise them. First she needed to get to civilisation, to get help. She thought of her brother, and wished he wasn’t off adventuring again. Wished, with a little pang,, that her all-conquering father hadn’t failed to conquer the blow-out that had sent both Mum and Dad into the oblivion of a car accident statistic. Dad? Mum? Remember me? I need you.

  But there was no answer. There were only her own eyes looking back at her, with the knowledge in them that she was her own worst enemy. She shivered.

  The bolt rattled and the door opened, and McAllister conducted her back to the cottage in silence.

  “Do you have any family?”

  Jenny blinked. So they were making small talk now?

  She studied his face across the breakfast table. It was calm, impassive. Like they were having an ordinary conversation in an ordinary world. The menace of the day before was gone. The man who had terrorised her yesterday had all but disappeared; only little movements, little gestures he made reminded her of him.

  He tightened his hand on the spoon to eat his breakfast, and she remembered that same jump of tendon and sinew around the butt of a gun. His lips closed on a mouthful of cornflakes, and she remembered his mouth shaping the words, Don’t you want to kill me?

  It was like one of those innocuous nightmares she used to get when she was a child, where everything kept changing, where she’d put her drink down on a table and when she turned back to it there was no drink, no table, not even the room she remembered.

  There had been fresh clothes waiting for her when she’d stumbled, dripping and freezing, into the kitchen. They were draped over the end of the bed with a towel. She had
dried and changed quickly, remembering her promise to herself not to be fazed, but she kept her back to him, and tears pricked her eyes again.

  When she’d done, she’d found him sitting at the table, munching his way through a bowl of cereal, and she had warily gone to sit down opposite him.

  She watched him now, somehow fascinated, and forgot what he’d asked her.

  He reached suddenly across the table, and she flinched, throwing up her hands to protect her face, her breath short, gasping. Kier stilled, hand outstretched, and she could feel his eyes moving over her face, felt it physically, like a touch. Slowly he picked up the milk.

  Jenny slowly lowered her hands back to her lap, and lifted her head. Their eyes met. Then, God damn it, he smiled at her.

  It was a fabulous smile, warm and toothy and devastatingly seductive. Jenny felt panic rise in her like a flood, drowning her, choking her. Because she was bright enough to know she was running scared, scared enough to know she was vulnerable. Vulnerable and lonely and desperate, so her usual armour was woefully thin. And God knew, this man had ammunition that could pierce it.

  It somehow seemed the final insult, that she would be attracted to her jailer.

  The panic ebbed, leaving her limp and fatalistic. She remembered other men, who’d found it so easy to make her trust them. Other men, who’d found it easy to pick and choose, leaving her empty. So easy.

  She felt sick.

  “Do you have any family, Jenny?” he asked again, softly, pouring more milk over his mountain of cornflakes, acting like he wasn’t her enemy.

  In spite of her fear, or perhaps because of it, she answered him.

  “I have a brother. He’s older than me. Five years older.”

  “And you’re, what? Twenty-seven?”

  You know how old I am, you bastard. “Twenty-six.”

  He flicked a glance at her again, and she wondered suddenly if she’d spoken her first thought aloud. Then he turned back to his breakfast, curling one arm around the bowl and leaning on his forearm.