Hush (13 page)

It was hard to tell just how many men crowded inside.
A whole damned herd by the sound and smell of them. The stink was overpowering.

“She needs water and medical care,” Zak told them, letting his voice trail off. The unspoken words to finish off
that
sentence were clearly “or do you want her to die?” Which would've been redundant, even for them.

The guerrillas discussed the situation in rapid-fire Spanish. They'd just divulged that Loida Piñero would return before nightfall, and she'd be pissed. God—if they'd waited even a few more hours to do this—

She peeked through the screen of her lashes as one of the twins—Gold Tooth—came very close to lean over her. Acadia smelled the rancid stink of sour body odor before she heard his booted feet. His breath, moist and fetid, washed over her face, and she had to dig her short nails into her waist to prevent herself from gagging.
Hurry, Zak.

In her slitted vision, she watched Zak step behind the men, as if to give them room. She let her eyes flutter fully open and whispered weakly,
“N-necesito a-agua, por favor.”

She caught a glimmer of silver on the soldier's dirty neck and recognized the chain that held her St. Christopher medal. Acadia wanted to reach out and grab it off him, and it took everything in her to maintain the ruse. The medallion and chain had been the last present her father had given her before he'd forgotten her name. He'd laughed as he had clasped it around her neck and said, “So you can travel safely to all those exciting places you're always reading about, Cady girl.”
God. She wanted her medallion back. Now.

But instead of lunging upward and blowing their entire escape plan, Acadia paid attention to what was happening just outside the door.

In a sliver of space between the men, she glimpsed Zak and his brother. Then Gideon was gone. She let out a shaky breath of relief. Almost there. The soldier wearing her necklace slapped her cheeks, and she opened her eyes fully, lest he break her jaw.

He started to turn from her, so Acadia gasped for air and broke into choking coughs so that he would focus on her and not realize Zak was just slipping back inside the hut.

She could've wept with relief as Zak, his tone uncompromising and angry, said, “If your leader hears that you didn't do what she told you, she's going to be pissed. Each of us is worth twenty million American dollars to her. Which of you wants to tell her that a prisoner died because you didn't follow her instructions?”

The men were silent, trading loaded glares.

Zak gestured with his seemingly bound hands. “If that happens on your watch, she's going do more than kick your ass. She told you an hour ago to bring us water. Do it already.”

Acadia reached out, then let her hands drop weakly.
“Por favor, señor. Agua.”

The men left, locking the flimsy door behind them.

Acadia sat up tailor fashion, resting her elbows on her knees. She stared at her hands blankly as her mind raced.

They'd taken her medallion back at the hotel. All right, so she'd resigned herself to never seeing it again. But now she had, and she damn well wanted it back. She hoped the eyedrops affected Gold Tooth first. And hardest.

The only problem now, she realized, was that they'd made such an issue about getting water that it was all she could think about. She'd talked herself out of acknowledging her parched mouth and the thirst that had dogged her since the early hours of the morning, but now the possibility of quenching her thirst was front and center in her mind.

Would the men poison themselves before they got her water? God, she hoped not.

“Piñero will be back tonight.” She addressed Zak's broad back. Perspiration stained his blue shirt, and his dark hair curled against his strong, tanned neck. It seemed like a lifetime ago when she'd kissed the sensitive nape. Laughing, he'd rolled her over and gently bitten her in return, his strong white teeth scraping the sensitive skin between her neck and shoulder—

“I hea—” He frowned, and his voice roughened. “Don't look at me like that.”

God, he'd turned just in time to see her
lusting
. Her cheeks got hotter. She blinked him into focus. Large, unhappy male. She sucked in a deep breath. “Maybe we should hang out in the trees until she gets back to camp,” she whispered. “Take the van …”

Zak turned back to the door. “Unless she's delayed, or changes her mind. We need daylight for this to work.”

“We need
transportation
for this to work,” Acadia told him, annoyed with him for thinking he was in charge, and with herself for forgetting she didn't like him.

Stockholm syndrome
, she told herself firmly. That was the only thing that made rational sense. Was it the right syndrome? Technically, Zak wasn't her captor, but—hell, she'd take any excuse she could get for her inexplicable response to him.

“Who exactly made you boss of me, anyway?” she demanded. “I don't remember casting my vote. And just as a refresher,
I
was the one who cleaned your wounds while you were unconscious, gave your brother aspirin for his headache, had the tool to cut off our cuffs,
and
gave us a way to incapacitate all those men out there without firing a shot.”

He glanced over his shoulder and gave her a cold, dismissive, arrogant glance. “If it works.” He turned back to look outside, his long, elegant fingers clamped around the bars. “Fine. We'll take a fucking vote. Hope like hell your poisoning plot takes down the guerrillas. Follow our trail in back out,
and
stick around our entry point to wait for Piñero to return.”

“That has my vote.”

“And if she decides to wait until tomorrow?” he countered.

It was like he was testing her, which ticked her off even more, considering she'd been the resourceful one in this situation. “We follow her tracks and walk to the nearest town.”

“On the road?” he said, with a slight mocking tone.

“Yes.”

“In broad daylight?” This time his sarcasm came through loud and clear, and her temperature spiked for a whole different reason.

“I haven't thought it through,” she said through her teeth. “But yes, why not?”

“Because more than half the population in these parts are criminals of one sort or the other; because three Americans, one of them a light-eyed blond
woman
, and another
injured
, will be picked off like they have targets on their backs. Because we have no idea where the fuck the nearest village is, and Piñero could drive up right behind us, and the next time she kidnaps us she won't be so nice about it. That enough reason for you?”

She sagged back against the wall, feeling like a punctured balloon. “We aren't going to follow the road?”

“Did you
see
a road?”

“No, but we got here, at least part of the way, on a paved road. I think I remember the turns—”

“Or,” Zak cut in, “your fiendish plot works, the men are out of action, and we take a short walk through the jungle until we hit the river. Hire a boat and have a late steak dinner in Caracas tonight. Let me know when you're ready to cast your vote.”

She was starting to really hate him. “How far's the river? Do you even know which way it is? What if it's a really long walk?”

“
Walking
won't kill us. What's out there hunting at night will. We have a narrow window of opportunity before dark. Lie down; they're coming back.”

Fuming, Acadia stretched out on the slab. She didn't bother closing her eyes. Every time she thought Zakary Stark was a nice guy, he did or said something obnoxious to change her mind. The fact that he was all kinds of sexy, and turned her on without trying to, was the irritating icing on the cake.

Gold Tooth shoved a plastic cup through the bars at Zak. He made a crude suggestion that Acadia only vaguely understood, but her whole body flushed with fiery humiliation.

A big fat steak dinner accompanied by about a gallon of ice water, in Caracas,
alone
, sounded more and more appealing.

THE GUERRILLAS WERE DROPPING
like flies, which surprised the hell out of Zak. He would have thought the eyedrop thing was an urban legend, but damned if it wasn't working.

Gideon had emptied the whole container of drops into their guards' new bottle of rum. Within an hour, most of the men were puking their guts out, two were unconscious, and the rest seemed to be confused and lethargic as they staggered into the trees clutching their bellies. A bloodless coup.

“I can take some of the crap in your pockets, lighten the load some,” Zak offered, glancing at Acadia over his shoulder.

She gave him a cool look. “The weight's evenly distributed.” The woman went from hot to cold and back again on a dime. He didn't even try to figure her out. The way she'd pulled up her hair made her look like a sexy girl-next-door.

Which was, as any red-blooded man knew, the most dangerous and subversive kind of female. He turned away from her smooth skin and the drugging fragrance of jasmine.

Blue Bandana was trying to give his brother water. And failing. Gold Tooth couldn't hold the cup. Water splashed into the grass at his feet. Blue Bandana went back for more. “Don't be so fucking stubborn,” Zak told Acadia as he tracked the last holdout, now carrying the almost-empty rum bottle, back to his twin.
Finish it, asshole
. “You're going to have to run.”

“And I will. How long?”

Whatever.
“Blue Bandana's the holdout. He wasn't drinking as much as the others. We'll give him another fifteen minutes to catch up.”

She lay back, closed her eyes. “Wake me when it's time to go.”

She was taking a nap?
Now?
Well, at least she'd shut up for a while.

Zak turned back to observe the goings-on outside. Gold Tooth was out cold. His twin chugged the remainder of the drugged rum and looked around, clearly worried and confused as hell. A man stumbled out of the tree line, made it two yards, and collapsed.

Zak knew for sure which direction they wouldn't go:
toward the entry point the guerrillas had chosen for their latrine.

Blue Bandana leaned against the cookhouse, clutching his belly. He shouted for help, but everyone had his own problems. The Uzi slid off his shoulder as he leaned over to puke.

“Let's go.”

Acadia was up on her feet like the goddamn Energizer Bunny. “About time.”

Zak kicked open the door and motioned to Gideon, who did the same. A few of the men gave them bleary looks as they converged, then ran across the clearing. One even reached weakly for his weapon, but that was the extent of their interaction with the escapees.

Miracle of miracles, her plan had worked.

As he ran, Zak helped himself to a machete from one guy, an Uzi from another, and several clips and half a dozen sets of plastic handcuffs from a third, then jogged over to the twins, who were sprawled close together. Zak undid the stainless steel band of his watch from Blue Bandana's scrawny wrist and quickly fastened it on his own. The man looked up at him with pain-filled eyes, then rolled his head to puke.

“Payback's a bitch,” Zak told him, with no small amount of satisfaction. Quickly, he stepped over the man's supine, twitching body, grabbed the other twin by his hair to lift the dead weight of his head, pulled the silver chain he'd recognized earlier over the bastard's neck, and let Gold Tooth's head thump back to the ground.
He stuffed the long chain and medallion into his breast pocket for safekeeping.

She'd better get herself a harder-working patron saint. So far, old St. Christopher hadn't given her anything even remotely close to safe travel. The thing about relying on anyone or anything was that they'd eventually let you down. Saint or person, they were all fucking fallible. Some more than others.

Except for Gideon—his brother had always been there, and no way was Zak going to let him die in this shithole. Not, he thought grimly, that a busted rib was a death knell, but Zak damn well wanted to make sure that was the extent of the injuries today.

He jogged over to join his brother and Acadia near the tree line.

Acadia, jaunty ponytail swinging, had an Uzi strap slung across her shoulder. Zak had never seen a more incongruous sight outside of the movies: a sexy blonde wearing an automatic as a fashion accessory. Gideon had gone shopping among the writhing bodies as well. He was loaded for bear with a machete, an Uzi, and God only knew what else. Zak shot him a grin, indicating with a jerk of his chin that they should get moving.

With Acadia between them, they ran for the cover of the trees and dense foliage. He and Gideon had decided they'd enter the jungle here, circle around the clearing, and start their trek toward the river several hundred yards out from their entry point.

They hacked at the undergrowth only as much as they
had to, preferring to push and crawl their way through so as to leave as little evidence of their passage as possible. Even a mediocre tracker would know their direction, but for the next couple of hours, no one from camp would be in any position to do any following. After that the jungle would have closed around them and blurred their passage. Or so their theory went. Zak sure hoped to hell they were right.

Acadia had gotten over her anger surprisingly quickly. Jennifer had always managed to sustain hers for days, sometimes weeks.

Gideon was in the lead, Acadia in the middle, Zak in back. Which left him in the perfect position to watch her curvy ass sway in front of him.

Damn.

He had a vivid memory of rubbing his cheek on the soft firm pillow of her ass before flipping her over to bury his face against the fragrant curve of her belly, then …

He'd slept with other women since Jennifer, but he'd never been
this
distracted by their very presence. He dropped back, letting the murmur of Gideon's voice and Acadia's soft response fade into the jungle ahead of him.