Hush (16 page)

Zak's brain tangled at the thought of being alone with Acadia for even a moment. “Not that shit again, Gideon. Doesn't matter how many times you
say
it, it isn't true.”

“For the last two years you've been doing everything in your power to join Jennifer. I won't let that happen, and I've just about killed myself trying to keep you around. Take the girl to Caracas. Use the time to talk yourself out of doing anything more stupid than you have to.”

In his peripheral vision, Zak saw Acadia's gray eyes widen. God damn it.

Gideon pressed on grimly. “I've watched you, Zak, and I've talked until I'm fucking blue in the face. I can't seem to get through to you. You haven't just enjoyed all the extreme shit we're into; you've lived carelessly, irresponsibly,
stupidly,
and you've taken insane risks. You've done everything short of pulling a trigger on yourself. Maybe having to take care of someone else will remind you to live.”

Zak's fists clenched. “Same shit, different day. Already fucking proven I'm lousy at the job,” he snapped. “Want to risk her life to make your point?”

“Three days. Consider it an early birthday present.”

“I'd rather buy you that Bugatti Veyron.”

“Yeah. I know. Get to Caracas alive, and maybe you'll be able to do that, too.” Gideon clasped his shoulder. “Take care. See you in there.”

“Gid, this is fucking
insane
, don't—”

Unlike Shorty, Gideon had the third safety off as he aimed the automatic at Zak's chest. He stepped back. “I can help you out and end it for you here, or you can get Acadia back to safety. Your call.”

Acadia didn't move a muscle.

Zak half laughed. “Jesus, Gid …”

Gideon's eyes, so much like his own, were hard and ice cold as he repeated, “Call it, Zakary.”

A long, tense silence followed. Then, teeth clenched, Zak growled, “Fine.” Gideon wasn't going to shoot him, no matter the provocation. But Zak didn't want to exacerbate the already volatile situation. Gid was injured. A scuffle, however well intentioned, would hurt him.

The muzzle lifted from his chest, shifted until it pointed safely at the ground. “Good,” Gideon said quietly.

As he turned to go, Acadia stepped forward. “Wait a minute, here!” She pulled the stolen Uzi strap from her shoulder, rummaging in one of her many pockets with the other hand. “You can use this better than me,” she said quickly, “and here's in case you, uh …” She hesitated as she pulled out a handful of magical mystery protein bars. “Protein will give you energy.” She glanced over at Zak. “I'm giving your brother the GPS. You have one on your watch, right?”

“Yeah.” Zak wished he'd thought if it himself. On the other hand, Gid wouldn't need a GPS if they all stuck together.

Gideon accepted the handful of stuff Acadia handed him, shoving things into his pockets, then nodded at her, his smile quick, and Zak felt as if he'd been kicked in the stomach when she smiled back. Gideon pushed off into the jungle, and for a long moment, all they heard was the rhythmic, muffled
thwack!
of his machete slicing and dicing foliage.

“Fuckit,” Zak muttered.

Acadia's eyes were stormy as she spun to glare at him. “You tried to pawn me off on your
brother?
”

“It wasn't personal.” The idiot had broken ribs. How long did he—Double fuckit.

“I
slept
with you,” Acadia said tightly, color high on her cheeks. “That's pretty damned personal to me.”

“He would've protected you better.”

There were several beats of silence as she glanced at the wall of green where his brother had disappeared, then back at Zakary. “Too bad he
wouldn't
have shot you.”

She sounded pretty sure about that. “You don't know my brother,” Zak told her, only half in jest.

He'd never seen that expression on Gideon's face before. He didn't like it. Didn't like knowing Gid was worried about him. Didn't like that he'd been oblivious to that added layer of concern for years.

Didn't like—God damn it—that his brother might be right.

She cocked her head, gaze steady. “Do you have a death wish?”

Did not giving a shit if he was alive or dead count? “Why? You gonna make a run for it?”

“No. Because two of us have a better chance of getting out of here alive than one,” she said tightly. “If it wasn't for you, I'd be sipping umbrella drinks with my friends right now. You got us into this freaking mess, you'd better get us out in one piece. At least now I have a heads-up. Let's go.”

Now he not only had to worry about Gideon out there, hurt and on his own without anyone to watch his back, but he had to make sure neither he nor Acadia croaked, just to prove a fucking point. Great.

He started walking.

“Hey!” She grabbed his wrist. Her pale, slender fingers looked incredibly fragile against his tanned skin. He could break those delicate bones without even trying. The fact that she believed he had a death wish, and still touched him, intrigued him.

Worse, through miles of jungle trekking, through running, being chased, and God only knew what the hell else, he could still smell the faint delicate sweet musk of night-blooming jasmine rising from her skin.

“Aren't you going to bring the other Uzi?” She hung on with tenacity instead of brute strength. The hot pink of her flushed cheeks made her gray eyes seem almost translucent, and a stream of dappled sunlight from above lit her mussed blond hair into a halo.

Zak yanked his hand out of her grasp and continued walking when he could, hacking and shoving aside vines when he couldn't. “I don't like guns.”

“You don't li—You shot that—”

“Clubbed.”

“That's splitting hairs.” She sounded breathless as she trotted to keep up in a clear section that allowed him to pass through more quickly. “You couldn't have taken out those men without it.”

Leaves drifted to the lush ground around them. He glanced up to find three tiny black monkeys following them, swinging high above their heads, chattering as they leaped hand over hand from branch to branch. They weren't scared of him either. Did he want Acadia Gray scared of him?

Yeah, Zak realized, he sure as hell did. And had been doing whatever he could to foster that attitude ever since he'd woken up that morning with a cockstand and a gun held to his head.

He didn't need a shrink to tell him it was because she had a fucking way of knocking small chinks out of the wall he'd built around himself. He could feel the drafts. She talked too damned much, and she saw too much with those soft eyes that missed nothing.

She was like a fucking Weeble—he just couldn't knock her down. And while he admired her for it, the trait annoyed him at the same time. “Warranted,” he told her, forging on. “Now our lives aren't in imminent danger. No guns. This'll do.” He held up the wicked-looking
two-foot-long machete, realizing that far from working out his aggression on those two yahoos, he was now more pissed than ever.

“I'm not crazy about guns either.” She came up beside him and threw him a wary look. “But Piñero and her men could still come after us any minute, and at least we could fire warning shots to hold them off. Or something.” She stopped dead in her tracks. “Can I at least go back for it?”

Zak's grip around her upper arm tightened as she pulled in the opposite direction. “Leave it.”

“You are insane.
They
don't mind guns and have plenty of them. We
needed
that. How are we going to protect ourselves?”

“You have that.” He indicated the Taurus revolver stuck in her belt, then held up the machete. “I have this. Get the lead out. I want to beat my brother to Caracas.”

“Why do you do that?”

“What? You don't like honesty?”

“That's not honesty,” she told him, shaking her head until her messy ponytail swung. “Why do you always turn into a jerk again? Just as I start to like you.” She didn't say it with any level of heat, but he believed her.

And didn't like that it bothered him.

“You would've hated me eventually,” he said, gaze straight ahead. “I just saved you time.”

She wasn't easily intimidated, which was both damned irritating and, yeah, he allowed to himself, a little—
just a little
—intriguing. Shit. He didn't want to be intrigued.
He wanted out of this jungle, and wanted the gray-eyed tagalong out of his life for good.

He consulted the GPS on his watch, thought about the one she'd given his brother, and had to admit she'd pulled her weight, plus some, on this little adventure. He headed in the general direction of the river and decided to wait until the last minute to make camp.

Darkness was for feeding, and they were food.

Acadia's footsteps crunched behind him, and he thought about Gideon out there in the wet forest alone. Stupid bastard called
him
careless and irresponsible? Zak snorted. As far as he was concerned, Gideon was way out of line. The extreme sports they enjoyed so much made them
both
crazy thrill-seekers.

That was the way it had always been. It was the way they'd lived for most of their adult lives. Nothing had changed since Jennifer had … since Jennifer. She'd come along, as crazy for it as they were with her constant forays into war-ravaged countries, pushing her nose into dangerous shit for the story—or at least she had
said
it was for the story. But he knew.

He recognized a kindred soul. Jennifer had lived for the rush.

And died by it.

It changed nothing
, he told himself silently. The brothers had always tackled the highest mountain, the steepest ice waterfall, the fastest track. Slash, slice, hack. And it sure as hell wasn't any different now as he chopped a path through the understory, his burning muscles fueled by hot anger. The machete was sharp, and Zak used it to
good effect, hacking through the vegetation as fast as he could, leaving debris in his wake. He knew he might as well paint a fluorescent arrow behind them, but at this point, speed was more valuable than stealth. The bastards would catch up, he suspected sooner than later with a nice clear path to follow.

They knew the jungle; he didn't. But he was a hell of a lot more determined to stay alive than they were to kill him. He hoped.

Acadia's breathing was a little irregular, but she was holding her own and keeping up. He slashed through a tangle of vines as thick as his wrist, and a shower of small red spiders rained down on them. She cut herself off mid-cry, staying right on his heels as she brushed them off herself, then swept the little suckers off his shoulders and back while they walked. She was like a mother monkey picking fleas off its baby.

But Zak didn't tell her to stop, even after the spiders were long gone. He liked the feel of her hands on him, even if it wasn't sexual. Which was weird. And entirely unwelcome. But he didn't say anything as she took advantage of every opportunity and space to walk beside him.

Even though he was using his right arm to wield the machete, his left shoulder burned as if someone were holding a red-hot poker to it. Zak ignored the pain. Eventually the site would go numb; until then he'd ignore it.

She didn't shriek when they encountered a Colombian giant tarantula eight inches across, bobbing and wiggling its pink spiny legs inches from her face, or later, when
they almost tripped over a python as thick as her own thigh hanging lazily from a low limb.

A dog-size tapir shot across their path, squealing as it ran through the heavy undergrowth. That was good news. Meant they were getting closer to water. At least they were heading in the right direction.

“We're cutting a map for anyone to follow us, aren't we?” Acadia suddenly asked, and he didn't have to see her face to know it was a rhetorical question. They hadn't spoken for half an hour; Zak suspected it was a record for his loquacious fellow escapee.

“No way to avoid it.” And better him than his injured brother.
Damned idiot
. “If we're lucky, we're several hours ahead of anyone following us.” He doubted the guerrillas would wait that long. Sick or not, they'd be on their trail before Piñero returned from making her ransom demands. Zak bet those guys would rather die puking and shitting in the jungle than face their boss when she come back to find the prisoners gone. As if reading his mind, a flock of tiny yellow-and-black troupials catapulted out of the trees and swooped overhead.

Birds flew
away
from danger.

Shit. Hadn't heard a damned thing. They'd shown up a hell of a lot faster than he'd anticipated.

Zak wrapped his arm about Acadia's waist and pulled her tight against his hip. Her eyes went wide. She didn't have to be told that the other shoe had just dropped.

SEVEN