thornily

The sudden doubt sprang thornily upright in his mind.

Sitting in an Upper West Side cafe near his home, he seemed a bit shy, almost thornily self-aware.

On a dark and snowstormy night in late March 1994, Chris Sheridan visits his sometime lover, Grace Winslow, to tell her what he has recently learned about their respective family histories, whose misfortunes have been thornily intertwined.

Almost deserted, but for a solitary fisherman in a small boat close under the shadow of the bridge; a comfortable, squarely-built fisherman stripped to shirt and hose, and bristling thornily with black curls and black bush of beard.