Run Among Thorns Read Online Free PDF Page B

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