I don’t understand them.
“We have nothing in common.”
“Come on,” she chided.
He looked over her head, towards the door, not seeing it.
“They’re … mediocre. They’ve never really done anything real, never used all their resources, been the best they can be. They’ve never challenged their pathetic little precepts, found out what they can achieve. Dad turned down a partnership in a big, prestigious firm of architects to play around with cheap little small town projects. He gets excited about extending a porch. They’re living a half life.”
Glancing back at her, he saw she looked shocked, and he was surprised to feel diminished by it. He wondered what on earth had possessed him to open his soul to her like that. She was a subject, for God’s sake, a job.
His stomach churned. “So, where were they going when they piled into the bridge?”
She hesitated, looking wary. “They were coming to visit me.”
“So it’s your fault? You killed them?”
Kier had never seen anyone go that white so fast. He kept his face blank as he watched her swallow, watched her hands grip the chair under her like she had at breakfast. Like she expected the ground to shift under her.
“I’ll bet you were pressing them to come visit, too, really excited about it, pestering them to get on up there.”
When he saw her start to shake, he fought the urge to stand up and walk away. He felt like someone trampling wildflowers underfoot. He felt sick.
Do it, McAllister. Do your job.
“Maybe Dad didn’t want to travel, thought the weather was too bad, but, no, you told them it would be okay, didn’t you? So impatient to see them.”
He leaned in to her across the table, and she edged back away from him, turning her head aside, eyes tight closed, face like marble. Her profile was achingly beautiful.
“When did the guilt hit, Jenny? Did you think, I killed them, straight away, or did you try to work out what they were worth first? Maybe that was the plan. Were they redundant when you started your new work, Jenny? Did you hope they’d crash, Jenny? Hell, maybe you rigged the tyres—”
“Stop it.” It was only a thread of a whisper, choked and strangled. A voice like that from her mouth was a travesty, like a dejected eagle in a cage, obscene, horrific.
“Sure, I’ll stop it. Tell me who you work for.”
“The N-National Park,” she stuttered. Her mouth was trembling.
“Not the cover, Jenny, the real one,” he said.
“There isn’t a real one!” She shook her head, violently. “I mean that is the real one! I am Jenny Waring. I work for the Lake District National Park Authority. I was in America on an exchange programme. I’ve never killed anyone before. I …”
“You’re not kidding anyone, Jenny. Who do you work for?”
“Stop it, please.”
“Come on, Jenny.”
“Stop it.”
“You can do better than that.”
“Why don’t you let me go?” she shrieked at him, finally, her voice breaking, her face crumpling.
“I’m not going to let you go, Jenny,” he shook his head. “Not till you tell me what I need to know.”
He only had a moment’s warning, seeing the intent in her tear-filled eyes, the shift of balance, the shuddering breath she took.
Jenny launched herself over the table at him, no regard for where she might end up, fingers reaching for his face. He jerked back and sideways, catching at her wrists, twisting. Her body hit the table at the same time he got out of his chair and away, and her own momentum tumbled her over the edge of the table to the floor. Keeping his grip on her wrists, he dropped to one knee between her and the rocking table.
Fighting to keep his voice level, he said, “I didn’t say you could do that, Jenny.”
She lay on her side, eyes wide, chest heaving. She had to be in pain. If only from landing on her hip on the stone floor. Kier could feel the soft skin on the inside of her wrist bunching and pinching under his fingers.
But when she spoke, her voice was steady. “You don’t have a right to know. You don’t deserve to know.”
Steady or not, the words were drenched in desperation.
“I can take any right I choose to take, Jenny. Don’t forget that.”
He let her go and got up, and she just lay there, letting her cheek press on the cold, dusty floor. Every time she breathed, another twisted lock of hair fell forward over her face, obscuring her blank stare. The blue-white skin on her inner wrist was already bruising.
With something approaching disgust, Kier remembered his arrogant resolution that he never physically harmed his subjects.
This Jenny threw him so far off course, so far out of his usual mould, he couldn’t even rely on his professionalism anymore. He’d been this close to really damaging her, and now he was this far from self-disgust.
The woman tied him up in knots.
There were three men in the room when John Dawson entered. Three very different men, in three different poses. Davids was flying the desk, sat foresquare behind it, hands folded on the jotter. To his left, Groven occupied another chair, contriving to look as if all the other people in the room were there by his permission only. Despite the fact it was Davids’s office.
The other man Dawson had never seen before. But he knew him from the file. He didn’t look much different from his photo, only the camera hadn’t quite captured the reality of all that arrogance, only the potential of it.
His name was Kendrick.
Davids spoke. “Make your report, Dawson.”
“McAllister called in last night, as scheduled. Although he has made no progress as yet, he is confident this will be a short job.”
Kendrick snorted, and turned back from the window. “And the girl?”
“She’s tired, out of her depth, and threatened,” John replied, not making much of an effort to keep his concern out his voice.
“You don’t approve?” Groven asked.
He managed to look surprised and answer quick enough. “Approve? The project was approved by Davids, sir, that’s not my role.”
“True, true,” Davids said with false affability.
Groven was impatient. “Remember that.”
“Sir.”
Davids’s eyes flicked back and forth between them. He’s lost power, John thought suddenly. Groven’s an employee, just like I am. So why is Davids deferring to him? He wasn’t a field agent—he thrived on the regularity of his job, the predictability. Everything was shifting subtly, and he didn’t like it.
“Well,” said Davids. “If he’s thinking this is going to go fast, we’d better be prepared. Dawson, you need to charter a flight for a team.”
“Yes, sir. Who’s travelling?”
“I am,” said Kendrick, the only man in the room who was smiling.
The rest of the day passed quickly for Jenny because she wasn’t paying it any attention.
Most of the time she just sat at the table, sometimes dozing with her head pillowed on her arms. McAllister moved about the place and outside, but she didn’t much care what he was doing. She’d stopped keeping tabs on where he was. Didn’t even jump now when he came close.
He put tinned soup in front of her at lunchtime. And although it was tomato, which she didn’t really like, she ate it anyway, just to get it done. Once or twice she looked up at him, trying to see him as the man who’d hurt her. But all Jenny saw was a powerful, mesmerising man, who had everything she was cradled in his hands, and seemed somehow reluctant to meet her eyes.
At dinnertime she really couldn’t eat, but oddly, he didn’t press her. After he had eaten and cleared up, he went outside, and once, when she glanced out one of the tiny windows, she saw him with the bonnet of the SUV up, bent over the engine. In the background the wind was harassing the tops of the pines.
Jenny didn’t think about what he’d said, about what she’d said. She didn’t think about killing those three me
n. She spent all her meagre energy on keeping her mind blank and calm, and not going out of her mind.
She pictured blackness, and breathed deep. But even then he passed through the darkness like a beacon.
Wreckers, she thought, obliquely. Eighteenth-century thieves and murderers who would set false lights on the shore to bring gallant ships in to the rocks, like moths to a flame, singeing their wings, drowning them in the midnight surf.
Kier was a wrecker. And she had to know the false light from the true.
Wearily, limping from her bruised hip, she got up and went to bed.
Jenny dreamt.
She was in a room like the cell they had taken her to at the facility. She had a gun in her hand. People were walking into the room one by one, and she was shooting them.
They kept coming, and she kept shooting, until the room was full of bodies and the scent of blood, and she was clambering over them until she reached the ceiling. Still they came, filling the room, pressing against her, till she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Couldn’t open her mouth to scream.
Then she was awake, but the dream hadn’t ended. She was held, suffocating. Arms were pinning her down, trapping her against something solid that smelt hot. There was a sound in her ear, but she couldn’t make it out over the sound of her own gasping, wrenching sobs. She heaved in another breath and heard Kier’s voice saying, “Shhh, stop it,” felt Kier’s chest move under her cheek.
Jenny burst into movement, struggling against his grip, trying to push away. His hands tightened to the point of pain, and he hissed in her ear.
“Stop it,” he warned. “Keep still or you’ll hurt yourself.”
Her incredible hair was in his face, her legs tangling with his, her breasts crushed against his chest. The warmth and scent of her flooded his senses and sent the blood rushing to his groin. He cursed, thickly, pressed his lips near her ear so he knew she could hear him.
“Damn it, Jenny, stop! Don’t make me hurt you.”
Under the circumstances it was a ridiculous thing to say, but it stopped her. At least he hoped that was what stopped her, but he could be wrong, because her last little wriggle had thrown her thigh across the hard ridge of his erection and now she was utterly still on him, her breathing shallow.
He flexed his fingers on her arms, taking a deep controlling breath.
“Okay. Get off,” he said.
She lifted her head and looked at him. He could see her eyes cross slightly as she tried to focus. She looked bewildered again, as if she’d expected him to take advantage of the situation, and he wondered with a spurt of anger what sort of a bastard she took him for.
Exactly the sort of bastard you are, McAllister.
Chapter
FOUR
Later that night, the rain came down again in earnest. McAllister heard it, dozing uncomfortably in the armchair in the corner of the bedroom. In the half light shed by the oil lamp he’d put on the table in the kitchen, he watched Jenny sleeping again. It seemed she had drifted off fairly quickly again, after he’d left. At any rate, she was asleep when he came back in from a short walk. A couple of times she’d stirred, sleepily sweeping her hair off her neck. Now she lay on a pillow of her own hair, pale skin against a dark-painted background.
The way that sight made him feel kept him at a distance more effectively than his own pride, although both were working together to keep him in this chair. When he should be in that bed. Crowding her. Making her uncomfortable.
Except it was backfiring. Again. The only one feeling uncomfortable was him.
So here he was. Listening to the rain thunder on the slates, the beck outside gradually roaring louder. Occasionally that sound was punctuated by large splashes, and he knew clumps of turf were being undercut by the flow, and torn free of the bank.
The cottage was safe enough. After he’d rebuilt it, he’d visited once shortly after a real bastard of a flash flood. The beck had shifted, wearing itself a new channel, cutting through the peat. But the building stood on a small rise, almost imperceptible, but enough to keep its feet dry. There was granite under that rise, that kept the beck at a safe distance. It moved away from the cottage sometimes, but never towards.
Jenny shifted in her sleep, and he tensed, remembering how he’d woken to her sounds of distress earlier that night. On duty, hardly sleeping, he should have been perfectly in charge of the situation, even used it to his advantage. Instead there had been a spurt of panic, and, God help him, he’d reacted to it, and to the sudden need to comfort her. To hang on to her until she calmed.
Here in the half light, half-asleep, half-afraid, he couldn’t classify that need. Couldn’t rationalise it.
It wasn’t just her obvious femininity, that fragility fired with the flame of strength that was so elementally woman. He’d worked on women before, without having to deal with the tedious interruption of emotion. In any case, she wasn’t his type.
Those liaisons that meant enough to be classified as relationships, rare as they were, had always been with the type of well-formed, confident woman who recognised the ground rules he established. They had been, as a rule, but not exclusively, curvaceous, tanned blondes. And, as a rule, he hadn’t had any trouble acquiring them. Certainly they had been nothing like the pale-skinned, dark-haired little creature in his bed.
Perhaps it was a growing uncertainty in his chosen career. He did what he did because he was good at it. The best at it, in plain fact. He was afraid that wasn’t proving to be enough of a reason anymore.
What if he was slipping? What if he was losing the edge? What if he was going to have to resign himself to joining another profession where he would be just another ordinary worker, while parts of his mind withered and died, never needed, never used.
He sighed, trying to pinch out the tension between his eyes.
His rational mind knew he was seeking reasons to justify his uncharacteristic behaviour, but the same part of his mind knew he wasn’t going to find them. Not reasons he liked, anyway.
So he slid down in the chair, tipped his head back, blanked out his mind, and waited for dawn.
For a moment there was only the warm pleasure of waking up with a handsome man beside her bed, asking her to help him.
For a moment, Jenny just blinked blearily, admiring the tall, broad form filling out jeans and a soft denim shirt.
For a moment, she didn’t remember where she was, or even who she was.
Then she did.
She closed her eyes tightly, fighting the wave of nausea that accompanied the resurgence of memory, of yesterday’s remembered grief, of the fear that was dogging her.
McAllister’s words filtered through.
“I hate to disturb your rest,” he said, with rough sarcasm, “but I can’t do this by myself. And if you ever want to get out of here, I suggest you get up, get dressed, and come help.”
Jenny slipped out of bed, dragging the covers with her, and juggled covers and clothes. “Explain again. I was half-asleep.”
She ignored his impatient sigh and scowl, and concentrated on what he was saying.
“There was a flash flood in the night—”
Jenny looked back over her shoulder. “Is the cottage okay? Are we alright?”
He sighed again. “Shut up, Jenny, and listen to me, will you?”
Taken unawares, and still half-asleep, Jenny was reminded of a hundred similar exchanges with her brother. Without thinking, she smiled, and was still smiling when she pulled her shirt over her head and turned to face McAllister.
He faltered, and simply stared at her. She dropped the smile in a flash, and folded her arms.
“Well?” she said.
He blinked. Once. Twice. She saw the cords of his throat move as he swallowed, then carried on speaking.
“The beck moved. It’s washed the bank away from under the SUV. The hood is in the beck, the back wheels on the bank, and it’s well and truly stuck.”
She twisted her hair into a quick braid, and use
d a strand to twine round the end. “So? It’s a four-wheel drive. Drive it out. If you—”
“It’s stuck, Jenny.”
She shut her mouth with a snap, and watched him.
“I’m going to have to rock it up and back with a lever. You’ll have to do the driving. You up to that?”
Jenny pursed her lips and raised an eyebrow. The fizz of a challenge was waking her up fast, that little tingle even making her enjoy talking to McAllister like this. “The question is, are you?”
The water in the beck was down again, only a little swollen from last night’s rain. What had fallen had obviously pushed through the sodden bogs fast. Jenny could see the flattened grass and raw black peat where the water had passed. There were clumps sitting like islands in the middle of the flow, still shifting as the brown water swirled and sucked at them.
The car actually looked like it had just slipped forward, only there was only a short, dark trench behind the back wheels. As the bank had worn away, nearly two metres of it sucked into the water; the weight of the front end must have pulled it forward into the stream. The new bank edge was pressed up against the chassis just behind the front wheels. Squatting, Jenny could see the peat and torn grass, and heather was actually pressing against the tyre, too, so there would be a little traction as soon as the vehicle was jogged backwards.
The water was swirling around the front wheels and grill, gurgling around the bumper. She glanced down at McAllister, who was already up to his knees in the cold water. Jenny didn’t envy him that. It wasn’t winter yet, but up here it didn’t have to be, and that water had to be very cold indeed.
He had a rough-hewn timber pole, more than two metres long by her estimation. He’d obviously taken a short walk to the forest, then. Jenny wondered what he’d used to cut it down and strip the branches from it. From the look of it he’d used a billhook or a machete—the cuts where the branches had been removed were broad bladed and smooth. Thinking of weapons made her wonder where he kept it.
Jenny walked round to the driver’s side. The door was locked. “Keys, McAllister!” She had to raise her voice to ensure he heard her over the musical sound of the water passing. He propped the pole up against the front of the SUV and dug in his pocket, carefully tossing her the keys. She caught them easily, and got in.
Run Among Thorns Page 5