Run Among Thorns (17 page)

“What I do doesn’t lend itself to teams.”

“What? No good cop, bad cop?”

His lip curled. “No.”

Good cop. Bad cop.

Good … bad … He grimaced as the back end shook a little too far on a tight bend.

“We need a new vehicle.”

For which they needed civilisation, and anonymity. But the clock was ticking. He didn’t much fancy being conspicuous when Kendrick reported in.
Stay out, Kendrick
, he thought, hoping he’d stay unconscious, as least for now.

Too much to hope for.

Jenny cleared her throat. “Kier?”

“Hmm?”

“How about a little four-year-old diesel hatchback?”

He glanced at her. Pale face, dark hair. Watchful eyes. He shrugged. “Sounds okay. Where is it?”

She fiddled with the seat belt again. “Look, we’re only half an hour or so from my home, we can just nip in and—”

“No.”

“Kier—”

“No.”

She kicked the underside of the dashboard, startling him.

“Will you
listen
to me?”

“It’s no good, Jenny,” he said, making an honest-to-God effort at sounding conciliatory. “We can’t turn up in the first places they’ll look.”

“But you said yourself that”—she gestured back over her shoulder—”gives us a head start. We don’t have to stop, it’s right there, surely—”

“We’d be stupid to contemplate it.”

“I don’t agree,” she snapped. “It’s close, it’s private, you can check it out from a distance, and if you see anything you don’t like, we can be out of there before they ever see us, we—”

“But we’ll be exchanging one vehicle they know for another. All they have to do is circulate the licence and we’re theirs.”

“But that’s just it. It’s not mine.”

He shot her a glance. She looked triumphant. “What do you mean?”

“A friend of mine was flying out to go travelling in Australia the same day I went to the U.S. I drove her down, and she left her car at my place. And since I was due back before her, she left me the keys.”

The road was straight. He took the chance to stare at her, good and long. “And you’re happy to drive it away.”

She blinked at him, looking self-conscious all of a sudden. And he knew that feeling, when problem solving had crossed some boundary and you hadn’t even felt it pass, hadn’t known you were on the other side, in new territory, until the ground under your feet felt different, and there was no way back.

“She’d give it to me, if I asked. I … we have to, don’t we?”

He didn’t tell her he’d been planning on helping himself to the first car he saw whose security measures he was familiar with. It didn’t seem fair.

“I don’t know, Jenny. It’s still a risk.”

“I can get you within a mile of the place without being seen. Check it out. We can leave if you see anything. That’s all.”

He shook his head. “First law—don’t go home, don’t visit friends, don’t—”

“Please?”

Don’t care.

“Jenny—”

“You were going to kill him.”

He snapped a look at her. The voice was breathless, the eyes wide, almost blank. That one had come out of the blue for her, too. He swivelled his head back to the road, but he was driving on autopilot.

“You tried to kill him,” she whispered again.

“Yeah,” he said, when he knew he should be saying,
yeah, I’m sorry, or yeah, but I had to. Anything rather than just, yeah
.

But, “yeah,” he said and wanted to say,
but I didn’t
, because that was important, too.

She was staring at him, he knew, as if it horrified her to be in the same vehicle with him. In the same country. One day soon, he would like her to look at him as if he … as if she … He shook his head, sharply, turning his hands on the wheel to settle the grip, braking with care for a small rise, because at the very least the tracking had to be shot, and—

“But you didn’t,” she said, for him. “You saved his life instead.”

All the dirty jobs he’d done in his life, and
done well
, damn it, all the times he’d pushed a little harder, gone a little further. Nothing had prepared him for this, nothing had been harder than this conversation—right here—in a smashed-up SUV, sitting beside a woman he had wounded and wanted to rescue.

“You made me,” he said, slowly, carefully, feeling his way, not daring to stop driving, never mind he had no idea what that last signpost had said.

“What? You take orders from me now?”

“No.”

“We all have choices, Kier.”

This junction he stopped at, but he didn’t look for the signpost. He stared at the strip of black steering wheel between his two hands.
We all have choices
. And hers had been to walk out from between the pines, and get in his car.

He swore under his breath. “Which road?”

“What?”

“Which road for home?”

He felt rather than saw the tension go out of her, heard her delighted breath. Wondered if she felt as lightheaded as he did.

She was turning him into a fucking marshmallow.

But she wasn’t wrong.

She did get him within a mile of the place—more like half a mile, in fact—down a rutted, sunken lane that was “technically” a road, she said. No one used it except tractors and horses, and it was well covered until that last half mile where the track crested a small rise and showed the two white houses, joined at the hip, on the other side of the small valley.

Jenny told him the other house was empty, a property that would be rented, except tenants who wanted to live this deep in the country wanted something pretty for their money. Roses round the door.

He’d taken his time spying the land, but it looked clear to him. The track ran down to the front of the two-house terrace, and then, a hundred yards on was the regular road. Still single track, but metalled. And half a dozen ways off
that
road, according to Jenny, should they need a back door.

So he let in the clutch, and let the battered Rover trundle on down to the front door.

“How do you plan on getting in?”

Jenny slipped out the car. “The back door will be open.”

He frowned. “You left the back door open?”

“I usually do.”

“Doesn’t that invalidate the insurance?” he asked drily.

Her mouth tipped up at one side for a second. “Technically.”

He shook his head and watched her slip round the back of the white-painted box she called home.

From Jenny, he’d expected something more rustic, older. These were utilitarian houses, two of the fifties-built homes for farm workers, common in this area. A cubic concrete block, without charm or subtlety.

Only hers was the one with its angular awkwardness half-hidden by fading creepers and climbing flowers. Most of them were drooping in the chill of autumn, except the passionflower, whose unabashed blooms still dotted the greenery.

There was no front garden, just two steps down to the road. Jenny had disappeared behind a hedge that ran along the side of the house—presumably that surrounded the back garden.

She’d been too long.

McAllister slid out the battered Rover, scanning the countryside around them. Still and quiet, but not too quiet. A blackbird chattered happily in a young oak, a few hundred yards away. A couple of crows danced in the breeze over the hedgerow.

He crossed the lane to the cottage. The door was ajar. He pushed it open, peering in.

The front door opened straight into the living room, with the stairs directly opposite the door. She’d picked up the post and stacked a haphazard pile of letters, magazines, and junk mail on the hall table. Two white envelopes had slid off onto the dark-carpeted floor.

He stepped inside.

A door in the far corner, with a glimpse of the kitchen beyond. Back door? Probably. There was a front window, none on the side or back. The room was dark, and chilled.

Kier had no idea, not really, what he’d expected. An open fireplace and the stone hearth, certainly. He could easily see Jenny curled up in the high-backed armchair beside the fireplace, reading. There were books beside the chair, on the hall table, and in a neat pile on the bottom step of the staircase.

Behind the door was a row of coat hooks. At least, that’s what he assumed was supporting the mound of coats, hats and scarves. The ends of a couple of muddied ski poles stuck out from under a waterproof jacket, and there was even a pair of boots, strung up by their laces.

The sagging sofa, facing the fireplace, had a blanket draped artistically over its back, but it looked as if it was never used. The cheap, cotton rug in front of it had a couple of coal burns on the fringe.

On the chimney breast was a charcoal drawing of a raven, perched on a wizened tree. That suited her, he thought, studying the windswept lines of it. Mystical, but not flourishing or flashy. Real, natural.

“Jenny?” he called.

Then he heard the shower come on.

For half a breath he stared at the ceiling in disbelief, hands curled into fists. Then he took the stairs in three bounds, slamming his hand on the smooth, white-painted wall as he turned the corner onto the tiny landing. Jenny was just cracking the door on the bathroom.

She met his eyes, and grimaced. “Five minutes?” she asked.

“You
have
to be kidding me.”

“Just five minutes, McAllister,
please
.”

Steam was billowing round her head, dampening the curls around her forehead, crimping them more. She closed her eyes in apparent bliss as the damp heat reached her face.

“You said five minutes to get the keys. That was ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, come on, McAllister! I’m covered in mud and … and stuff, I’m shattered, I’m stiff—”

He shook his head at her. “Come on.” Reaching out, he grabbed her wrist where her hand was braced on the half-open door.

And she gasped.

Oh, she caught it back, clamped her teeth shut on it. Her eyelids flickered and her mouth set, and she never said another thing, although her arm was rigid in his hold.

But, God help him, he knew a woman in pain when he saw it.

He let go of her wrist and caught her hand instead. She tried to tug them free, saying, “No, it’s nothing. Leave it.” But he tightened his hold on her slim fingers and peeled back the sleeve of her overlong jumper with his other hand. Jenny went still.

Her skin was rope burned, pinched and scraped, redraw and angry. He hissed a breath through his teeth at the sight, bending his head to examine this arm, then her other one. This was her payment for hauling him back on the bank. He knew how much he weighed, knew how much the force of the water had added to that. He was stunned, not so much for her strength, but for the willpower that drove it.

And he felt guilty as hell.

The scrapes were clean as could be expected, not serious—they’d heal. But they had to be stinging to hell and back and she’d never said a word.

Only she’d turned the shower on.

He glanced up under his brows, scowling. “I told you to let go. Remember?”

She scowled right back. “So I didn’t, so you didn’t get swept away. Live with it.”

He straightened, and looked down at her for a moment, still holding her fingers lightly. There was a tension holding him, and he could see it scared her in the way she held herself rigid, and refused to look away. Anger faded. He swallowed the bitter taste of guilt and cleared his throat.

“The shower will clean these, okay?”

She blinked at him. Not what she’d expected, no.

“We’ll cover them later if they need it,” he continued. “Probably the air will do them good.”

The shower hissed behind her, filling the bathroom with steam that crept out onto the landing in tentative tendrils. “Uh, yeah,” she said, and with a little awkwardness, disentangled herself from his grip on her fingers.

“Did you find the keys?”

“Um,” she swept her damp hair off her cheek. “Yes. Yes, they’re on the table by the door.”

“I’ll check the car over and keep an eye out. Don’t be long.”

“Five minutes,” she said again, and ducked back into the bathroom.

For a moment he stood there, shaking his head. When he heard her starting to undress, he turned on his heel, and took to the stairs again.

Chapter
        NINE

H
er bedroom was cold.

Jenny tucked the towel tighter over her breasts, and hurried across the varnished floorboards.

Of course it’s cold
, she thought.
It’s been standing empty for
— Her mind stuttered over the weeks and days, time blurring. She gave up trying to work it out.

She went to her chest of drawers, rummaging for trousers and tops, one hand on the towel she’d wrapped round her hair.

But the jeans and cargos and shorts looked like someone else’s clothes. Some ordinary, outdoorsy, quietly self-possessed woman with a soft streak that was an inconvenience. Someone who wanted a dog, but thought leaving it alone all day would be cruel. Who thought she ought to grow vegetables, but reasoned flowers were less time-consuming. A woman who knew short hair was practical, but grew her hair long anyway.

They were a stranger’s clothes.

Her face felt stiff, her movements jerky. The scrapes on her wrists and hand stood out lividly, and she pulled an outfit out randomly and started to dress.

Even her bedroom looked odd to her eyes. Neat, and … and somehow inconsequential. Unimportant.

The house didn’t fit her anymore. It was calm, and she wasn’t calm any longer. It was restrained and—oh, Lord—she was
not
restrained now.

It was anchored, and she was lost at sea.

“Jenny?” Kier called up the stairs, sounding impatient, and she dragged on her socks while calling, “Coming!”

She slipped on a pair of walking shoes, shook the towel from her head, snatched up a hair clip from the cut-glass dish on top of the chest of drawers, and ran downstairs, twisting the damp mass into a coil.

Kier was moving about the room, checking it out when she reached the bottom step. He looked up, just as she had a flash of déjà vu, and she realised that he, too, was remembering the first time he’d taken her to the cottage, when he’d checked the locks on doors and little windows establishing the place as her prison.

It’s different
, she told herself fiercely,
it’s different now
. But a little shiver worked its way up her spine, and suddenly she was miserable, an alien in her own home, bound by her own heart to a man she
shouldn’t
trust. Kier’s eyes narrowed and he came across the room to her. He came to a stop scant inches from her, tipping his head on one side, studying her face. She forced herself not to back away and looked up at him steadily, while inside she fought a rising wave of panic, white-tipped and destructive.

“You okay?” he asked, and his voice was so gentle, so sincere, that the wave broke, foamed, and ebbed away, leaving her jittery emotions smooth as sea-washed sand. Her shoulders dropped, and she closed her eyes. “I ache,” she said, honestly, and felt his fingers skim her jaw so lightly it was like a brush of heat on her chilled skin. He dropped his hands to her arms and lifted them to examine her wrists again. “They’ve cleaned up well. Do they hurt?”

“Not much,” she said. His unexpected tenderness unnerved her.

It was like falling into a chasm, when you didn’t have to be afraid of falling anymore. It would be so easy to give herself up to him. To let him take care of her. So easy. But she would lose herself in the process. Be absorbed by his strident personality, and lose her own.

Loving him, living with him, was as beguiling as sleep to the exhausted, but it would be like dreaming of being awake.

Ay, there’s the rub. To sleep perchance to dream.

Her mother had always quoted Shakespeare, too.

To thine own self be true
, she would say,
and it must follow, as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man
.

It may be a garbled misquote, but she knew what she meant. Being with Kier would be to put aside all of herself. An attractive enough proposition at the moment, sure, but ultimately …

Jenny gave herself a mental shake. It was not as if he was offering, after all. She had no illusions about herself. Just a little kindness from him and she was unravelling, God help her.

She had to be true to herself, above all.

“Come back to bed.”

John paused, pants in hand, looking over his shoulder at his wife. Alice’s face was half-buried in the pillow, wispy hair covering her eyes. One shoulder peeped over the covers, smooth and sleek.

It was tempting. Even with Kendrick’s call still pounding in his head, it was tempting. So easy to crawl back in there and forget.

She snuffled sleepily, and turned a little onto her side to face him, eyes drifting half-open. “What was it?”

“Work,” he said.

Her brow wrinkled. “What’s the time?”

“After four in the morning.”

She half-sat up then, blowing the wisps out of her eyes. He bent and pulled on his pants, trying to remember if he had a shirt already ironed.

“What on earth do they need you for at this time?” She was vacillating between outrage and concern, by the high pitch of her morning-husky voice.

Damage control
, he thought. “One of our overseas guys needs some help. It’s nothing serious.”
Liar
. And who had Jenny? Was she safe?

“Nothing
serious?
At four a.m.?”

There was a fresh shirt in the closet. He pulled it on, and concentrated on fastening the buttons. And remembering the procedure for issuing international arrest warrants.

Kier pulled the Rover off the motorway and onto the bridge at the junction. He needed to think about where they were headed.

There had been enough notes in the stash bag to buy breakfast, which was good, since he was entirely uncomfortable about using his card again. Beside him, Jenny finished the last of the coffee and sighed with satisfaction.

“Kier? Why have we stopped?”

“I need to work out where to go from here.”

“Well, what are you looking for?”

He ignored her, trying to think.

“For God’s sake, Kier, talk to me! What do you need?”

With an effort he pulled his attention away from the traffic passing below them. It couldn’t hurt to bring her into this, not really.

“I … we need somewhere to stay briefly. I don’t want to be anywhere public, so no hotels or motels, you understand?”

She nodded once, emphatically, drawing her brows together as she bent her mind to the problem. He loved the fact she hadn’t paused to crow or to trot out some other cutting remark, but straightway got down to the crux of the matter. A woman in a million.

Jenny turned towards him again, half-lifting her hand in a gesture of recognition. “I’ve got it!” she hesitated then, obviously unsure of herself. “At least, I think I have.”

“Go on.”

“Well, it does have a link to me, and if they’re looking for us, we won’t be hard to find, but I suppose it would do in the meantime?”

“Well? What is it?”

“Alan’s house. My brother?” She tipped her head to one side, apparently trying to read his expression. He wished her luck.

He mulled it over. Yes, they would trace them there soon enough, but it might just be unlikely enough to do in the short term. Since he was tossing the rule book out the window, he might as well set a match to it first. His best guess was they would be expecting him to go to ground, not go visiting her relatives. They’d have to move on quick again, but…

“Is Alan at home?” he asked.

“Oh, no, he’s out and about at the moment. Last postcard was from Norway, but there’s no telling where he is at the moment, only I know he’s not due back for another month. We’d have the place to ourselves.”

He glanced at her sharply, in time to see the swift look of consciousness that followed that last remark, convincing him she hadn’t meant it to sound like it did. She looked embarrassed, and moved by he knew not what impulse, he quickly tried to smooth over the slip.

“What’s he doing in Norway? I thought he was a landscape gardener.”

“He is, well, he owns a landscaping firm, it’s just that he goes off on long trips from time to time. He has the wanderlust, you know, so he works for a while and then travels for a while. He bought a good-sized house as a base after my parents died.” She shifted and stared out the window at a line of trucks thundering down the inside lane. “They had a lovely house in Kent, but neither of us actually wanted to live there.”

He remembered taunting her with the death of her parents, and belatedly recalled that they had to have been killed on this very road. He reached out and laid a hand over hers where it lay still on the seat. She turned and looked at him, wary and watchful.

“Where exactly was the accident, Jenny?”

Her expression was carefully blank, but she answered him easily enough. “On the M6,” she said, gesturing out the window. “They hit a bridge just north of Junction Thirty-Four. Outside Lancaster.”

He turned her hand over in his and laced his fingers through hers. They lay, limp and unresponsive in his grip. “Whatever I said before, Jenny, you know that was just a line. It wasn’t your fault.”

The look in her eyes told him exactly what she thought about his crass attempt to reassure her. “Fine,” she said, with a smile that was false and brittle. Sighing, he extricated his fingers from hers, and laid them on the gearshift.

“We’re going to York, right? That’s where your brother’s house is?”

“Right.”

He eased the car into first and pulled away smoothly.

“Well?”

Groven was snappish, and John wondered for the tenth time why he’d ended up speaking to this man, not Davids, when he dialled the emergency out-of-hours number. It should have been Davids. It had always been Davids before.

“There’s been,” he hesitated. “An incident.” And that was a world-class euphemism for the shit they were in now.

Groven snorted, fingers tapping on the short report John had printed barely an hour before. “You don’t say. What’s his condition?”

“Whose?” asked John dryly. “Kendrick, or the policeman he assaulted when he discharged himself?”
Or Jenny’s?
But he wasn’t about to share that anxiety with Groven.

“Kendrick.”

“He gave no indication of his state of health when I spoke to him. The hospital would have liked to have kept him in another night, citing concussion and trauma. The policeman, it might interest you to know, is in a coma.”

“Don’t get smart with me, Dawson.”

“Sir.”

“And where is McAllister?”

“We have no information on that.”

“What the hell do we pay you for? Trace the car, his transactions, his …”

“He’s made no transactions. We can’t find his vehicle. No other vehicle has been reported stolen in the last twelve hours. If you want my advice—”

Groven glowered at him. “I don’t need your
advice
, Dawson. But since we pay you to do this shit, I suggest you tell me what you have in mind.”

He swallowed that one, because this was Groven, after all. “As far as we know, McAllister only has that one base in the UK. So he’s going to be looking for somewhere to hunker down for a while. I
suggest we
concentrate on anywhere we can place Waring in the last couple of years. He might use a bolt hole of hers.”