Run Among Thorns Read Online Free PDF Page A

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