Hush (15 page)

He observed how gingerly his brother knelt beside her, favoring his right side as he bent and giving a little involuntary grunt of pain. Acadia put a slender, dirty hand on his arm. “Hang on.”

She rose and felt down her right calf almost to her ankle.

Zak crouched beside the stream. “You're a regular Girl Scout,” he said sarcastically. “Got a water bottle in there?”

“Zak,” Gideon cautioned, giving him a puzzled glance.

She ignored the sarcasm. “I wish.” Acadia dug in an unseen pocket and pulled out a little silver triangle and popped it open. A folding cup. Of fucking
course
she had a
cup
on her. She dipped it in the water and handed it to Gideon.

Gideon lowered himself carefully to the ground, a hand on his ribs. Once settled, he accepted the water and drank, then dipped the cup back into the stream and gave her a grateful smile. “You're incredible.”

“I'm
prepared
.” She dipped her fingers into the stream
and rubbed them on the back of her neck with a sigh. “Although quite frankly, it never crossed my mind that what I packed would be this necessary. My friend Julia booked the river tour, but there were three nights of camping included, and I just … Well, you never know when you'll need—”

“A folding cup?” Zak muttered, annoyed with himself for letting her slip under his skin. Gideon was a likable guy. Of course she'd be attracted to him. The fact that she'd had that sassy mouth all over
him
just hours ago was beside the point. The friendly light in her eyes diminished when she looked at him. Fine. Zak wasn't trying to fucking make friends here.

This was a life-and-death situation, and he was the one responsible for the safety of all three of them. He didn't want the goddamned job, he hadn't asked for the goddamned job, hell, he wasn't qualified for the job, but no one else had stepped forward.

“Or eyedrops,” she said pointedly, then pulled out a foil-wrapped bar from a pocket on the side of her right knee. “Protein bar.” Then she went back for another and sat cross-legged on the spongy ground, lifting her hip to rearrange whatever was in a back pocket and using her teeth to tear the wrapping from each bar. She broke off an inch of each, then handed Zak and Gideon the balance.

“All right,” Gideon said as he leaned against a tree trunk and stretched out his legs. “Now you've got me curious. What else is in your magic pockets, sweetheart?”

While Zak knew that his brother was just as determined as he was to get the fuck out of all this green, he looked like he was settling in to score points with Acadia. Something about that made the hair on Zak's neck stand up. They didn't have time to sit here at all, let alone loiter around chatting like they were in a damned pickup bar.

Gideon was using
that
voice. The voice he used when he wanted to get into some attractive woman's pants.

Sorry, bro. Been there, done that.
And, God help him, he wanted to do it again.

Why the hell did
he
feel like a third wheel?

“I'm just happy you have them,” Gid answered—referring, Zak presumed, to her magic pockets. “And that you're along for the ride.” Gideon grinned as he shoved a hank of long hair over his shoulder and repositioned the webbed strap of the Uzi across his chest. His eyes were shadowed and his skin looked pale against a day's growth of beard. “Believe me, if I ever go on another survival adventure, I'm taking you with me.”

“I don't need another adventure, thank you. This trip was something my friends coerced me into doing to put a little spice in my life. I think even they'll admit this is going way farther than any of us intended.” Holding a piece of protein bar between her teeth, she made a “wait” motion with an upheld finger.

She took a tangle of rubber bands out of a breast pocket, untangled one, and handed it to Gideon. She closed her lips over the piece of protein bar and chewed as his brother acted like she'd just given him the keys
to the castle and scooped his too-long hair back and secured it.

“Marry me, woman.”

“No thanks,” she replied cheerfully. “I suspect you two live life a little too far out on a limb for my small-town-girl tastes. I presume you were going to jump the falls with your brother?”

“This week, jump the falls; next week, Alpine ice climbing.”

Acadia shrugged. “Ah, see there? This week,
see
the falls; next week, back to refolding pup tents at the store. We're just too different.”

Jump the falls, his ass. She was a terrible liar. “See the falls?” Zak queried silkily, and raised an eyebrow as her laughing gaze met his.

Zak ate the dense chocolate bar, glad to have it. For all he knew, Acadia, the pole dancer who
wasn't,
had a six-course gourmet meal secreted somewhere on her. “Right. When you kids have finished flirting, we need to get mov—”

He froze as all the ambient noise in the jungle suddenly ceased. Gideon and Acadia looked at him intently, Gid shifting quietly to get access to one of the handguns at his waist.

Zak pointed, held up a hand for them to stay put, and went to investigate. He was in the mood to beat the shit out of someone.

Marry me,
Zak thought as he picked his way carefully back the way they'd come. Gideon had never been married. He thought it was all fluffy fucking clouds and
roses. He thought once the “I do's” had been said, the love just grew and deepened and it all became some magical fucking fairy tale and ended with happily ever after.

Zak hated to disillusion his older brother, but real-life marriage wasn't sprinkled with fairy dust.

A wife would get under his skin. A wife designed to love the thrill of adventure as much as he and Gid did wouldn't be able to help herself; she'd climb into his head and twist him around, make him doubt himself. Make him face himself, stare down mortality in a way that had
nothing
to do with extreme adrenaline and everything to do with his own helplessness as she died in some fucking war-torn country without him there to save her. Like Jennifer.
Fuckit
. Gid would find out if he survived. Right now, Zak needed to concentrate on that.

The birds had stopped singing. Now the jungle was a silent wall of dripping, humid vegetation as every living creature lay low. This wasn't your standard
oh, shit, a jaguar
silence. Humans were present. The jungle recognized the difference.

And so did he. They weren't even trying to be subtle.

Two men shoved their way through the undergrowth, coming straight toward him. Pug Face and Shorty. Neither looked up to see him standing right there in their path, feet spread, Uzi held over his shoulder like a baseball bat.

The men looked like shit. Pale and sweaty, and not too steady on their feet. Hardly a fair fight, but Zak wasn't feeling particularly fair at that moment.

They stood between him and a steak, a cold beer, a colder shower, and a clean,
empty
bed.

Instead of ducking out of sight, Zak charged. He swung the metal stock of the Uzi at Pug Face like a club before the man saw it coming. The flat edge hit him head-on in the nose with a satisfying crunch and spurt of blood, and drove bone and cartilage through the soft tissues. Up into the guy's brain. He dropped like a rock, dead before he hit the ground.

Zak stepped over Pug Face's prone body while Shorty was still fumbling to get his weapon in a position to fire. The electrical tape holding the grip assembly to the rear magazine well was firmly in place, but the ratchet on the bolt-retracting slide was giving him trouble in this humid heat. His sweat-slick, shaking hands tried to unlock the bolt so he could fire.

At this close a range, just three feet, Zak knew a 9mm Parabellum round would make a sizable hole in him, if Shorty ever got his shit together. He flexed his knees. “That's why I hate guns,” Zak told the man in colloquial Spanish, straightening his back. “Never ready when I'm ready. Now, this?” He bent from the hip socket. “
This
is ready.”

Using a baseball grip on the sixteen-inch barrel of the machine gun, he swung it like a golf club. As every pro said, it was all about the follow-through. Golf was a boring-as-hell game, but Zak had found a more creative way to use his skill. Just as Shorty switched gears and pulled the Taurus from his belt, the stock of the Uzi slammed up into his chin, knocking him on his ass.

A bullet discharged from the handgun and scared the crap out of a flock of red-and-green parrots, causing them to catapult through the treetops, shrieking and flapping their wings. Zak's heart rate hadn't elevated in the slightest. Maybe Jennifer had been right. He was dead, he just didn't know it.

Even when he staggered back in reaction to the bullet that slammed into his shoulder, he didn't feel anything, emotionally or physically. But that round of fire was exactly what he'd been trying to fucking avoid. Might as well have sent up a here-I-am-come-and-get-me flare.

SIX

Z
ak picked up his shirt, which had dropped during the scuffle, shrugged it on and hastily did up the buttons, then hoisted the Uzi back onto his shoulder.

Just in time; when he glanced up, Acadia and his brother stood waiting for him, and this time his heart did a little skip. Delayed reaction, he figured. He bent down to the first man to hide the blood already seeping into his shirtfront. He checked for pulses. Zip. “Both dead. Help me hide the bodies, then let's get cracking. That round of fire will pinpoint our direction.”

Surreptitiously he snatched the bandana from Shorty's pocket. Christ only knew what kind of crap was on it, but it was better than nothing. He shoved it between his skin and his shirt. The webbed strap of the Uzi would keep it in place until he had time to see how bad it was.

“Were you …?” Gideon indicated the blood on Zak's shirt when he straightened.

“Shorty's nose. I'm fine.” No point worrying him. Zak had been shot before. It was going to hurt like hell soon enough, and whining wasn't going to get the bullet out.

Gideon helped him shove the bodies under a clump of dense foliage.

“We have to split up.” Gideon gave Zak a hard look as he straightened. “Yeah, they
will
keep following, but we'll reduce the numbers if they have two trails to follow.”

Zak didn't need to see the color of Gideon's skin to know he was in serious pain. “No. We stay together; safety in numbers.”

“I'll swing back, way back, cover your ass while you get Acadia to safety.”

Gideon wasn't listening. A common complaint Zak had about his brother. They were both strong-willed and stubborn, but Gid took the prize. “We don't have time to debate this. Two now, more right behind them if our luck doesn't hold. We stay together.”

“We split up. Don't waste time arguing, Zakary. I'll travel faster by myself. We'll meet up in what? Two days? Gran Meliá?”

It did make a certain amount of sense.
If
both parties were uninjured. Fuckit. Gideon wasn't going to budge from this. If he said they had to split up, no matter how fucking ridiculous it was, he wasn't going to listen to any amount of logic.

“You take her,” Zak ordered, resigned. “She'll be safer with you. We'll meet up at the Gran Meliá Hotel in two days, three at the m—”

Gideon cut him off. “No.” He checked the clip in his sidearm, then glanced at Zak.

Zak turned to look fully at his brother. “Of course she'll be better off with you, Gideon. And you know it.”

“Excuse me.” Acadia took a step forward. “I get a say in this.”

Both men ignored her. This was an argument that had been simmering for two years. Gideon was dead wrong.

“No,” Gideon repeated flatly. “I won't take her with me. You'll have to suspend your fucking death wish until you get her safely to Caracas.”