How to Get Over Your Ex by Nikki Logan Page A

your staff are frightened of you.’ And then, at his frown, ‘If death is the
only way they can get in your good books. Even metaphorically.’
    He stared ahead at the road, letting that sink in.
    ‘You value loyalty that highly?’ she risked.
    He took a moment answering, but when he did it wasn’t with the
same light tone that they’d been firing back and forth since the war-games
ended. ‘I’ve not had a lot of it in my life.’
    ‘Who from?’
    But of course he wasn’t going to answer that. And no matter how
many hours of fun they’d just had, it didn’t give her much of a right to
ask.
    Instead he turned to her, brightly, and said, ‘Want to grab
something to eat on the way?’
    No. But she wasn’t ready to go home alone, either. Maybe she
could wheedle some clues out of his assistant, Casey. Now that she was a super
spy and all. Then again, Casey probably hadn’t stayed as an assistant to a man
as exacting as Zander Rush for as long as she had by chatting casually about his
private business.
    She’d have to be smarter than that.
    She matched the brightness of his smile. And the fakeness.
    ‘Sure.’

SIX
    June
    ‘It’s a good ten kilometres longer than a regular
marathon,’ the spectator perched next to Georgia on a fold-out chair said, his
eyes firmly on the bend in the road they were sitting by. ‘But it’s only a
club-training day so it doesn’t count as an ultra-marathon. It’s just a good
run.’
    Georgia chuckled. Calling a fifty-three-kilometre run ‘good’
was like calling her drive up from London in her gran’s borrowed car ‘brief’.
Though getting herself to the starting point up towards the Scottish border
reminded her just how long it had been since she’d taken herself right out of
London.
    Too long.
    So even if this was the craziest and most spontaneous of bad
ideas, it at least had the rather pleasant silver lining of getting her out into
fresh, brisk, northern air.
    The event didn’t run adjacent or even near to the actual
Hadrian’s Wall remains; disappointing but understandable. The past two thousand
years hadn’t been kind to them already, the last thing they needed was forty
sweaty runners and their support crews plodding along their length. But the
route trundled along paved roads and tracks and along a river in one place, and
so Georgia was able to drive ahead, park, and set herself up at strategic
locations with the other spectators to watch them go by.
    She quickly realised that Zander would be in the front half of
the pack, though not right at the front. Those spaces were occupied by the elite
professional runners and their support crews. But he wasn’t too far behind, sans
support crew. Last stop she’d practically hidden in the shrubbery as the pack
ran by, keen for Zander not to spot her on the side of the road. But as she’d
watched him steadily plod past she realised he wasn’t paying the slightest bit
of attention to the spectators. He was just lost in a zone of his own. The zone
that got this tough job done.
    She’d had a good poke around a Roman ruin and Hadrian’s Wall
itself and still been ready at this next vantage point twelve kilometres along
for the moment he came jogging along the track.
    ‘Here they come,’ the man said in his thick accent, standing.
He readied himself with squeeze-bottles of energy drink and a pair of bananas
and stepped up to the road edge in case his runner needed supplies. Georgia
stepped back into his considerable shadow so that she was partially screened
from the runners.
    Just in case.
    Zander stood out in the field, both for his height and also his
electric-green vest top. So she watched for that. Only about a dozen runners
passed her before she saw the flash of lime and she tucked back even further
into her companion’s wake. As before, Zander was totally focused on the path
ahead and, not expecting anyone to be out here for him, he wasn’t looking for
anyone. That meant his eyes were locked forward,