Gideon

by Cherry Adair

  She’d already balanced speed within the context of how many shooters, how far away they were, and how quickly they were advancing. Clearly she wasn’t trying for a bull’s-eye. She was aiming for their chests. He had the same rule: Shoot as fast, and as many, as he could. Kill, maim, or incapacitate.

  Two men to the left of her quarry dropped, bullet to the chest for one, through the eye of the other. She was a good marksman. Good to know, but he couldn’t hang around admiring Riva’s skill. He had his own people to kill. His rule of thumb was to hit each of them at least once. They couldn’t be allowed to run away. This was the last stand at the OK Corral.

  “Good one!” Riva yelled as he got a two-fer by shooting through and through and getting two men with one round.

  Gideon processed, at ultrahigh speed, the rapidly unfolding events. The men’s fast advance. Angélica cradling the Uzi like a beloved child, hatred and grim determination painted like a neon sign on her butt-ugly face. Gideon squeezed off a measured shot just as she shifted. Instead of striking her, the shot hit the man on her flank. Fuck. She kept running, nimbly jumping over his body as he fell.

  While Gideon’s focus was on Angélica, he couldn’t exclude secondary, lateral, targets. Tunnel vision wasn’t an option.

  Angélica was his primary target, but her men also shot at them and those men were starting to fan out.

  Late afternoon painted the robin’s egg blue sky with crimson and black streaks, magnifying the droplets so they looked like tiny glass marbles with swirling colors as they dropped. The whole damn scene looked like Dante’s inferno.

  The cacophony of sounds—the thunder of the falls, the incessant whiz of bullets, the cries of the men hit, the screams of the men fallen—was joined by the screeches of several large, carnivorous birds circling overhead.

  Bullets ricocheted off tree trunks, scattering bark and leaves. Jagged chunks of their sheltering rock flew as someone got off a good shot at them.

  Gideon looked right. Seven men flanked Angélica.

  Missed her, but got three in rapid succession.

  Bam. Bam. Bam.

  He looked left, including Riva in his scan in passing. She remained firing and focused. He looked right again. Squeezed off another shot. No one went down. Someone screamed from the left, his voice high-pitched and faint over the sound of the water and the cries of swooping birds.

  Gideon looked for the men with Angélica, then realized she was no longer where she’d been moments before. He frowned. Andrés, too, was MIA. With any luck, he hoped, dead. “See Angélica or Andrés?” he yelled as the unmistakable burn of a bullet creased his upper arm.

  “Fucking hell.” The Glock dropped from his hand in reaction. His left hand worked just fine, and he continued squeezing the trigger of the MP7A1, spraying the remaining men as they zigged and zagged to reach them.

  One by one, he and Riva took the remaining men down. It had been one hell of a fucking battle, but there was no joy in looking over the bodies on the killing field. The men had fought liked trained warriors, full of lethal intent, yet they’d been ineffective. Relief that gunfire was no longer whizzing at them was fleeting, because Mama and Andrés weren’t lying among the dead. Riva put a hand on his forearm. “They split.”

  “Fuckit.”

  “Let’s get going,” she responded. “Before the bitch from hell returns. I couldn’t sleep now anyway.”

  He grabbed her by the hand. “Come on.” He took three steps in the opposite direction of where they were supposed to head.

  She shook her head, taking one step with him but otherwise standing her ground, trying to free her hand from his grasp. “We’re going the other way.”

  “Detour.”

  “No time.”

  “Yes. Time. No one will find us there. We’ll be there in ten minutes. Cool bath in clear water. Supplies. Bandages. Let’s go. Now. And goddammit Riva, we’re staying there for two hours. We need to regroup and your head needs a bandage,” he said, his words urgent, but his tone calm.

  Gideon realized that for the first time in months, he felt right. He was acting true to himself, and that feeling gave him the power to look in her beautiful, dark eyes and know he was making the right move. “Because right now, I don’t give a damn about the ANLF, or the SYP, or Mama, or Maza, or whether I’m Gideon Stark or Sin Diaz. All I care about is Riva Rimaldi and the world can goddamn stop turning, but I’m going to damn well focus on you.”

  And he knew, even as he spoke calmly and rationally, somewhere out there, Angélica Diaz and his ex-best fucking friend Andrés, were planning something much, much worse than a surprise attack with a hoard of their men.

  The evening sun painted the falls a shimmering, ever-moving metallic copper. Thundering water competed with the raucous cries of scavengers who’d come to feast on the dozens of bodies.

  She and Gideon had separated an hour earlier, although he’d tried to talk her into them going together. They’d agreed on a half-mile round-trip, then each went in a different direction, forging into the trees to see if they’d run across either Angélica or Andrés. She hadn’t. But unless Gideon had killed them in the last hour, they were out there, waiting. Probably for full dark.

  Even softly-filtered through the misty spray of the falls, the visual that greeted her return to the scene of battle was the stuff of nightmares. Riva had never before witnessed such a surreal picture of chaos and carnage. Death, yes. But this didn’t compare to the dead people she’d seen in her job. And she’d seen plenty of dead people. As justified as those deaths had been, sometimes she still had nightmares about the bloodshed she’d been part of. What worried her was that each time it seemed to get a little easier to stomach. She doubted this would fall into the get a little easier to stomach category.

  She’d never observed animals in their native habitat doing what wild animals did. It was as fascinating to watch as it was repulsive.

  Keeping an uneasy eye on the more than a dozen yellow-headed vultures circling overhead, she saw a dozen more that had already staked their claim on the corpses, plucking out eyeballs and tearing off chunks of flesh. None seemed to notice or care that a couple of living humans walked among them. She wanted to keep it that way.

  Two black and white king vultures, with their showy, multicolored heads, ripped open bodies with their strong beaks so their yellow-head brothers could feast. The watchful eyes of the jungle denizens gave her an itch in the middle of her back, as if she had a target drawn on it, and one that would attract more than one kind of predator.

  Getting the hell away from here, and killing Angélica and Andrés, would alleviate that problem.

  Determined to kill Gideon, they wouldn’t stop hunting him until they accomplished their goal. She’d be collateral damage. They might’ve made a tactical retreat, but Riva knew with utmost certainty they were just biding their time. She also knew with the same determination and certainty that they had to be eliminated before they negatively impacted her mission.

  Gideon emerged from the trees up ahead, and Riva went to join him, ignoring the carnage around her, weaving and dodging as she went. Running right now would be a big freaking mistake, but her heart raced as if that was what she was doing. Annoyed by the profound relief she felt at seeing him, she intersected him on the flat, grassy stretch between the tree line and the rocks at the edge of the falls.

  “Nothing?” She gave him an inquiring look, one eye on the predators spread out over the grassy area a couple of hundred feet away. Not nearly far enough, as far as she was concerned. Animals were as untrustworthy and unpredictable as humans.

  Gideon shook his head, grabbing her arm to guide her around a determined column of army ants, a formidable force on the jungle floor, and even more so now as they swarmed over the bodies like a living blanket.

  Damn. So he hadn’t seen the duo either. Since it was a waste of time attempting to be heard, he pointed to the falls, and they headed in that direction together.

  The stink of the bodie
s, simmering like stew in the heat and moisture, was already strong enough to make her eyes water and gorge rise. The animals and insects, however, liked it as they feasted on the all-they-could-eat buffet.

  Growling and hissing, two pumas fought over a bloody arm, even though there were plenty to go around. The ground shifted, undulating like a living creature as the insect population made their own claims.

  A jaguar, sleek and beautifully spotted, flattened its ears, growling low in its throat, yellow eyes watchful as they gave him a wide berth. He wasn’t afraid, and he sure as hell wasn’t leaving his meal. Mouth and chest wetly red, he remained poised to attack anyone or anything that came near.

  Five curious red-and-green-winged macaws flew in close, as if on a reconnaissance flight, then swooped upward. Seed-eaters, they had no interest in carrion, and were not willing to challenge the feeding predators. They were dispatched with speed by an arriving harpy eagle, gray wings spread in aggression.

  “There’s a small cave just behind the water,” Gideon yelled, indicating a midpoint with the barrel of the MP7A1 in his right hand. In his left he still carried his Glock. Riva held both her SIG and KA-BAR knife, the AK slung over her shoulder where she could easily reach it. There’d be no letting down her guard until they were safely in Santa de Porres.

  She lip-read the words she missed, and nodded before he stalked off, long legs eating up the ground, putting as much space between them and what was behind them as possible. Taking a moment, she removed her headset. There hadn’t been a crackle so far. Disappointed that even at this elevation she couldn’t make contact with control or her team, she twisted around to shove the comm into an outside zipper compartment on her bag as she caught up with Gideon.

  The thin, wet cotton of his tank top clung to his hard body and his damp pants hugged his muscular legs and prime ass. Water gleamed on his bronze skin, defining his shoulders and highlighting the curve of his well-defined biceps. All ruined by streaks of dried and wet blood. His face, his shoulder, both arms…

  “You okay?” He shot her a puzzled glance.

  Good thing she wasn’t a woman who blushed. It would be unfortunate if she killed herself falling down the waterfall because she was staring at his ass. Get a freaking grip, Rimaldi! “Where?” she mouthed. She didn’t see any cave opening as she searched the surrounding area.

  He pointed about twenty feet straight ahead, into the middle of the falls. “Not huge, but big enough for our needs right now.” Oblivious as to where those words just took her, he stopped at the edge of the grassy bank. The thirty-foot-wide cataract of opaque water plummeted in a straight, flat sheet from a plateau a hundred feet above her. The water at the first base spumed over an almost level talus of large boulders, and from there cascaded over the rock shelf another five stories, in a churning froth, down to the base.

  “Here.” He held out his hand as he stepped onto a wet boulder as tall as he was. “Take my hand. It’s slippery as hell right here, and I’m too tired to climb down there to get your broken and battered body if you fall.”

  Riva put her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers. Ridiculously, holding his hand made her feel invincible, and at the same time hellishly weak. Which in turn made her want to pull away from him. Her balance had always been exceptional and training had honed it. Still, she stepped where he stepped on the slick rocks, and didn’t look down.

  “Why would I fall if you won’t, Stark?” she shouted, clutching his hand because, damn it, it felt good to do so. “Are you going to keep going macho on me until I take you down? I am a soldier, remember?”

  “Yeah, and a damn good one. Maybe I just need to hold on to you so I don’t plummet to my death, did you think of that?”

  “I think you’re full of crap.” Since most of their dialogue was swept away in the roar of water, the exchange had no heat.

  He pulled her up beside him onto a flat-topped rock a couple of feet in front of the sheet of water. “There’s a deep hole three feet to your left the minute you get inside. Stay right behind me and keep right to circumvent it. Ready? Hold your breath, going through.”

  Riva barely had time to suck in a breath before he yanked her from one flat surface to the next, pulling her through the curtain of water. It felt like walking into a brief, hard, cold shower.

  The temperature dropped a pleasant ten degrees inside the cave. The moving shadows of the water closed them off from the drama outside. Riva glanced around as she squeezed water out of her braid. The cave, approximately fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep, rose to about a foot over Gideon’s head. The front section was wet, the back, moderately dry.

  The changing coppery shimmer of the water made it appear that she was inside a translucent stained-glass window. The movement painted shifting lines of bronze on Gideon’s face and arms.

  Maintaining eye contact, a predatory gleam in his eyes, he shrugged off and dropped his backpack. “Drop the bag.”

  Riva shivered. She was soaking wet. Cold. The pack was heavy, and she was so damn spent she could barely blink. “Give me a sec—”

  “Time’s up.” Ripping the straps of the heavy bag off her shoulders, and down her arms, he let it thud to the ground, then pushed her backward against the rock wall. “What the fuck do you expect from me when you look at me like that, Rimaldi?”

  The naked hunger on his face stole Riva’s breath. Inappropriately, her stomach growled. “I’m starving,” she said thickly, struggling to toe off one boot. No easy task. It was wet and still had the laces tied. She almost gave herself a hernia forcing it off her foot.

  “So am I.” Rough and urgent, Gideon closed his hands around her face, curving them to shape her skull. His more green than hazel eyes sparked hungry and slumberous with desire. Heat emanated from his body, and his musky, emphatically male odors of sweat, rain, wet cotton and his own essential, indefinable him sent Riva’s senses swimming. “God, so am I.”

  His mouth softened, sensuous and unsmiling. “Keep wiggling against me like this, I’m going to go off like a rocket.”

  Riva tried to toe off her other boot, but she was distracted by his mouth, and the way his hands molded her body. And, if those things weren’t enough, she was totally taken off her game by the tantalizing, and out of reach, press of the hard bar of his penis.

  “That’s it,” he growled, plundering her mouth with no more preliminary forays.

  Heat prickled her skin as if she had severe sunburn. The warm slickness of his tongue clashed with hers. He tightened his fingers, pulling her hair in the process, and the small sting shot her arousal up several notches.

  He bit her lower lip, then lifted his mouth from hers a fraction of an inch. “Take down your hair,” he ordered in a harsh, gravelly voice as he dropped his hands to grip her hips, and slid his knee between hers to press at the juncture of her thighs right where she needed it.

  Squeezing her eyes shut, Riva shuddered, the sensation so piercing, so necessary, she couldn’t move. Seconds later, she pulled her braid over her shoulder. Gideon’s dark eyes held hers as she slid the elastic off her braid. Her wet hair brushed cold against her throat as she picked it loose with trembling fingers.

  He ran a line of hot kisses up the underside of her raised arm as she unwound the strands. Goose bumps sprang up when he stroked his tongue up the sensitive skin of her inner arm. Something sweetly painful unfurled in her chest as he kissed his way from her inner elbow, to her forearm, to her hand, to her temple.

  Combing his fingers through the bumpy wet strands, he smiled a predator’s smile, spreading her hair around her shoulders like a cape. “Spectacular…better than I ever imagined.”

  Her hair, too dark, and far too thick to cut practically short, had always been the bane of her existence. As a teenager, Riva had wanted silky, blonde hair. Now she was glad for the long black weight of it as it fell between Gideon’s fingers.

  With a shiver, she arched her throat for his mouth as he gathered her hair in both hands and resumed kissing her.
He surrounded her. The blazing heat of his body scorched her from breast to knees, setting her internal thermostat to a roiling boil. Squeezing her thighs around the muscular pressure of his knee, Riva wrapped her arms around his waist, then curved her hands down to grip the flexing muscles of his butt.

  Fully aroused, the hard length of his penis pressed against her thigh. Riva stroked a hand over his hip and ran a finger along the edge of his arousal. “This. Now,” she instructed, shifting to grant him better access.

  His expression tense, she read his searing, primitive intensity on the taut muscles of his face. A look that heated Riva to her very core.

  His chest vibrated, but he reached between them with one hand to undo the top button of her pants. Straightening his legs, he stood between her spread feet.

  Struggling, she couldn’t get the second damned boot off. She whispered, kissing the tense cords of his neck as she worked at it with her bare toes, “You know, this always sounds better in theory than in application.” Hard fast sex was good. Hard fast sex on a horizontal surface was better.

  “Wrong.”

  He was a magician. With sleight of hand, he made her pants slide down her legs to her feet. Her booted feet. “It’s not…” Possible.

  Hmm. Apparently, it was.

  Still kissing her, he slid a large, warm hand down her thigh, then hooked his palm under her knee. Ahh. That.

  Riva stood on tiptoe and slid her unshod foot through the pants leg, freeing her up to wrap her leg around his waist, opening herself. Taking him in her hand, she stroked along the smooth length of his jutting penis, then cupped the weight of his balls.

  Gideon flung back his head with a groan, then brought his hand down to cover hers, squeezing his fingers hard over hers. “As amazing as that feels, I want in.” Gripping her hips in both hands, he lifted her up, then brought her down, hard, so he entered her.