by Cherry Adair
“Oh! Yes, I—”
“Yeah,” Gideon answered over the woman, his voice laced with amusement.
Much as he’d have liked to lie on her thighs all day, Zak forced himself to sit up. The interior of the vehicle swam in his vision.
Her slender hands supporting his back, she said in a worried voice, “You probably have a concussion.”
He waited for the black snow to fade. “I don’t.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I know the difference.” He squinted until his brother, also sitting up, solidified. “Had it before.”
“Many, many times,” Gid added, scraping his long hair back and securing it with the leather thong he kept on his wrist. He looked like hell, probably felt worse, but smiled as he returned Zak’s searching look. “You look like shit.”
“Feel excellent,” Zak assured him, turning his head to look at the woman. Her shoulder-length streaky blond hair was disheveled, and her Persian-cat-gray eyes looked as serious as the situation warranted. Her hands were still on his back, braced on either side of his spine. Right where her heels had pressed just hours before.
He was relieved to see that she was dressed. Not in the little bit of nothing she’d worn the night before, which had consisted of about a yard of pale yellow silk, her blond hair curled enticingly around her lightly tanned shoulders, eyes smoky, smell mouthwatering. Now she wore sand-colored cargo pants and a sleeveless zippered vest over a pink T-shirt, last night’s makeup smudged beneath her eyes. Her hair was disheveled, and dirt streaked her face—tear tracks, he realized with a twist of his gut. But she didn’t seem to have any injuries. She’d been lucky, no thanks to him. Fury raced through him, startling him with its savagery. Those assholes had abused her, nearly raped her, and he’d been helpless to prevent any of it. He reined in his anger, because losing his temper when the object of his rage wasn’t around was a waste of time. It was going to take him a while to get over feeling so goddamned helpless. Again. He’d pack the new guilt on top of the boatload he was already carrying.
Tempted to touch her to make sure she was okay, Zak resisted the urge and kept his hands to himself. Besides, sympathy would probably make her fall apart. “How you holding up, Barbie?”
Her hands dropped away from the back of his shirt and she squared her shoulders as she said fiercely, “Acadia.” Her pale cheeks went a little pink. “Acadia Gray.” Scissoring her legs closed, she curled them under her and leaned against the wall, looking up at him as he staggered to his feet. “And to answer your rather obvious question, I’m fine. I always enjoy a hot sauna.”
Good. She was going to need that sense of humor. “Stop looking at me like I’m going to find some fucking magic carpet and fly us out of here,” Zak told her, annoyed as hell at seeing the hopeful look she was giving him. “In case you haven’t got it yet, this is not going to end well.”
“Zak—” Gideon cautioned.
“Oh, for—You have the emotional range of a freaking teaspoon, you know that?! Just because I’m blond doesn’t mean I’m stupid,” she said with asperity, talking over his brother. “And the way I’m looking at you is because I’m concerned about the severity of your concussion, and if you’ll be able to defend yourself when we eventually stop. Because I’m going to do whatever it takes to get away from these people before they—” She rubbed her throat as she swallowed, gave him a flinty look, and repeated, “Whatever it takes.”
His brother was watching him with narrowed eyes and a belligerent expression, which meant he wanted to say something that tasted bad. “Don’t say it,” Zak told him, then glanced back at Barbie. “Whatever it takes?”
“My father was a soldier.” Her chin tilted pugnaciously. “Whatever it takes.”
Zak looked at her slender body, her mass of messy blond hair, her slender hands. Her big, soft gray eyes. “Trained you, did he?”
She looked him in the eye. “Yes. He did.”
If Zak hadn’t been watching her so closely he would’ve missed her pupils dilating. It had taken him years to learn the tells when a beautiful woman lied to him. But he’d finally gotten it. Too late, but he’d learned. Eventually. He hated liars almost as much as he hated having anyone—male or female—depending on him. Especially a female.
“Good,” he told her. “I’ll keep you in the loop.”
She crossed her arms at her waist and gave him a level look. “Do that.”
Zak’s jaw hurt from clenching it so hard. Christ, it had been so long since he’d wanted to laugh that for a moment he didn’t recognize the ache in his chest. Most women would have curled into a fetal ball and stayed that way for the duration. She was practically coming out swinging. Warrior Barbie.
“Don’t tar her with the same brush as Jennifer,” Gideon warned, while he examined the wall that was between the cab and the rear of the van. He had to duck his head to move about.
“No tar and no fucking brush.” Zak’s mild amusement evaporated. “It’s a nonissue.”
She looked from one to the other. “What are you talking about?”
He shot her a cold look. “None of your business.”
“Everything is my business. We’re in this together.”
“Just because we’re in the same geographical space doesn’t mean we’re together.”
“Maybe they can shoot you first, and put us all out of our misery,” Acadia told him tartly. Then she immediately shut her eyes and dragged in a shaky breath. “Sorry …” Her eyes were still stormy when she opened them. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Even you. But we don’t stand a chance if we’re already fighting among ourselves.”
Braced stiff-armed against the erratic movement of the vehicle, Zak’s hand splayed over her head for balance. They were only a foot apart. Her pupils dilated as he stared into her eyes for a moment longer than was polite for strangers, because despite what they’d done in the early hours of that morning, they were still strangers. Intimate strangers, but strangers nonetheless. He knew more about this woman’s body than he knew about her.
“We’re not ‘fighting,’ we’re not buddies, and we’re not together. We just had sex.” It hadn’t been “just sex.” But the fact that he’d felt alive for the first time in years was none of her damned business. He didn’t want her clinging. Didn’t want her feeling needy and dependent because they’d slept together. Didn’t—damn it all to hell—want to feel anything seeing the tear tracks on her face.
Fortunately, he didn’t feel a damned thing right then other than irritation.
“Fine,” she told him sweetly. “Can we both agree you’re an ass?”
“I’ve been called worse.” Zak turned away as his brother moved from the front of the van to the back, but he heard the small expulsion of air as the blonde let out the breath she’d been holding.
“What we got?” he asked Gideon, who was trying the doors.
His brother turned to look at him. “A blind man who never saw what was right in front of his nose.”
Ah, shit. “Not this old refrain again. You want to speak ill of the dead now?”
Gideon gave him a dead-eyed snake look. “Couldn’t speak when she was alive. Can’t speak when she’s … not. When will be the right time, Zakary?”
“How about fucking never? This is hardly the time or the place.”
“Got somewhere you gotta be?” Gideon leaned a shoulder against the doors. He needed a shave, and with his hair scraped back off his face he looked like a pirate. Or—hell—a hero. The role suited him.
Zak touched a finger to the bump on his temple. “None of your damned business. Told you then, repeating it now. Leave it the hell alone once and for all.”
“Was not your fault.”
He had heard this verse and chorus before. About a hundred times in the last two years. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said to pacify his older brother, as he always did when Gideon tried to convince him that he couldn’t have done anything to prevent Jennifer’s death.
Zak’s jaw hurt from clenching his teeth, which didn’t help the hellish headache pounding through his skull. “And I wish you’d stop flogging a dead horse.”
Gideon, damn him, never would back down, and now wasn’t the exception. “Funny how quickly you forgot afterward that it hadn’t been working for a whi—”
“Shut up, Gideon. I mean it. I won’t lis—”
“While it’s vastly entertaining to hear you two bickering back and forth like two premenstrual schoolgirls,” the blonde said with annoyance, “maybe you could shelve the argument to concentrate on the here and now. We just turned off onto a different-surfaced road. What are you guys going to do when we stop?”
Gid, who still wore his metaphorical superhero merit badge, gave the seam between the doors a hard kick, then glanced over to smile reassuringly at her. “Strategize until they open the doors.”
“Then I suggest,” she told him, “we do just that, and quickly.”
It was a given that they’d have to erupt out of the van and use the element of surprise to take their captors unawares.
He looked down at her. “Did you walk out of the roach motel under your own steam?” Zak hoped like hell they hadn’t knocked her out as they had him, while she was naked, and …
She nodded. “There are five soldiers in front. Maybe more.”
Doable. If there were only that many when they got there.
Gideon rubbed the back of his neck as he looked around the empty space. Like Zak, he’d already ascertained there was nothing they could use as a weapon. “This make and model carries six passengers in the cab.”
Zak nodded. “Then we wait.” He slid down the hot metal wall to sit, knees drawn up, a few feet away from her. Gideon sat nearby. “Uzis,” Zak told his brother. “KA-BARs. Various handguns. More brawn than brain.”
“Yeah. Saw when they grabbed me on my way to see what all the screaming was about.”
Barbie screaming. Zak would have that earworm with him for a while. If he’d kept his dick in his pants, she wouldn’t be here right now. So, whether he liked it or not, he was stuck being responsible for her for the duration. And he was going to be responsible for her death unless some fucking miracle presented itself PDQ.
A sheen of perspiration made her skin glow. She absentmindedly used the short sleeve of her T-shirt to wipe the sweat from her face. The smudged makeup beneath her eyes made them appear even larger and a lot more vulnerable. Her lips were the same color as her nipples, a soft defenseless rose color. Her mouth hadn’t felt helpless surrounding his—
Zak wrenched his gaze from her mouth, from his visceral memory of where it had been the night before. Damn it to hell. Just looking at it was evocative and a turn-on.
He noted that she had a scratch on her upper arm. Another small one on her wrist. A fingerprint-shaped bruise on her wrist. They’d marked her. Zak’s temple throbbed, and he had to consciously ungrit his teeth.
“Stop looking at me like that!” she told him crossly, the pulse at her throat, damp with perspiration, throbbing in time with his own rapid heartbeat. “I wonder where we are. They could’ve driven us in circles for the past three hours, although I—”
“No circles,” Zak said shortly. “If it’s been almost three hours, at an average of fifty miles per, we’ve gone about a hundred and fifty miles.”
“You’ve been awake this whole time?”
“Not all,” he told her honestly, because she was clearly annoyed at what he was sure was some perceived moral infraction.
“Actually,” she said, looking quite pleased with herself, “you and your friend were unconscious for the start of this little road trip, and I believe we were going a little faster when we headed out of town. We only slowed down when we hit the country roads about, oh, maybe two hours ago? So I think we—”
“My brother, Gideon.” Jesus. What a sanctimonious little thing his fellow captive was. “And approximately twenty minutes works. We’re certainly still within Canaima National Park.”
Situated in southeastern Venezuela, the park ran along the border with Guyana and Brazil. The vast area was mostly unpopulated and consisted of rolling savanna, dense jungle, palm groves, and sheer cliffs as well as steep, flat-topped mountains. They hadn’t done any climbing; that just left them somewhere within a three-million-hectare area. Approximately the size of Maryland, most of it dense jungle.
Underbrush had been striking the sides of the vehicle for several minutes. This wasn’t merely a dirt road; they were penetrating jungle. Fuckit.
She got to her feet, stumbled, grabbed his shirtfront, pulled away as if burned, then spread her boots for balance. It took a moment as she swayed, trying to find her center of gravity in the moving vehicle; then she gave him an earnest look.
Christ, she had pretty eyes. Big and soft with long dark lashes. Eyes that trusted him to keep her safe. He had news for her: he’d already failed that test. I’m the last fucking man you should trust, Zak thought savagely. Payback was a bitch. It was his own personal hell that had thrown them together, because Zakary Stark couldn’t protect any woman. He knew it. His brother, despite his protests and excuses, knew it, and she was going to learn it soon enough. The hard way.
“I think if we put our minds to it we could figure it out exactly.” She frowned in concentration. “Give me a minute.”
He dragged in a breath, got a hint of hot jasmine, and blew it out. “I appreciate your confi—” The sound of the engine changed as the van slowed down. He met his brother’s eyes and indicated he’d go left. Gideon nodded and moved into position on the right of the doors.
“Go crouch in back,” Zak told her. Nowhere to take cover. No way he and Gid could mitigate what was about to go down. “Keep your head down.”
Her chin jerked up and her soft eyes got flinty. “That’s ridiculous. I can help y—”
“Barbie, unless you have a death wish, a secret skill, or a SAM hidden in a pocket, go back there and make yourself inconspicuous.” Zak didn’t wait to see if she did what he ordered. He moved into position beside the sealed doors as the van shuddered to a stop.
Zak counted off. One … two … three … four …
A metallic scrape …
The doors were flung open, letting in a flood of white-hot sunlight and exposing three armed guerrillas who stood in a row, blocking their way. With wild cries, Zak and Gideon leaped from the back of the van like unexpected ninja jack-in-the-boxes.
Zak took down the two on the left, Gid the guy on the right. It wasn’t neat, and it wasn’t finessed, but the element of surprise was damned effective. Zak knocked out the taller guy, who was wearing a blue bandana. The second man, shorter and stockier, was the guy who’d held him down for the knockout blow back at the hotel. A bonus.
As they scrabbled in the long grass, the guy struggled against the twisted strap of his Uzi and kicked and shouted invectives as Zak beat the shit out of him. Zak staggered to his feet, the guy’s camo shirtfront clutched in his fist. The guerrilla was still yelling, still struggling to untangle himself from the webbed strap slung diagonally across his body. Zak grabbed the son of a bitch around his bull neck and brought up his knee in a swift move that broke his nose with a satisfying crunch. It was a twofer. The man fell into the long grass unconscious.
He and Gideon shot each other a grin, then split up to go around the van to see who else they had to deal with.
“Shit.” Zak stopped dead in his tracks, his way blocked by the butch commando guerrilla from the hotel.
“Sí.” She looked Zak up and down; her unpleasant smile didn’t reach her black eyes. “On your knees.”
Since he’d seen how accurate she was with the H & K when she’d blown a man’s head off point-blank in the hotel room, he sank to his knees.
The vividly green vegetation, mostly grasses, closed around his thighs and came almost to his waist. The gr
ound was spongy and damp, and smelled swampy.
On the other side of the van, his brother’s loud curse was abruptly cut off, and the sound of a scuffle followed. Seconds later, Gideon was herded around the front of the van, Uzis pointed at his spine, ahead of two more guys dressed in camo.
“Loida—”
“¡Héctor! Joder chamo, que tonto eres.” Clearly not happy that her man had used her name, the woman cursed him fluidly in rapid Spanish as he brought Gideon to stand beside a kneeling Zak.
Apologetically the man mumbled, “Lo siento, lo siento, lo siento.” Shoving Gideon to his knees, he sent a nervous glance in the direction of his leader and asked tentatively, “Piñero?”
“¡Húevon!” Loida Piñero slugged him in the jaw with her elbow for using her either of her names, knocking the hulking guy on his ass. He got up, giving her a hot look.
She pointed the business end of the Heckler & Koch at him. “¡Ya basta!”
He put up a hand, still nursing his jaw. “Sí, jefa, sí.”
As they said in the local vernacular, she was the “goat who pissed the most.” The boss. Clearly the one in charge, clearly the one whom the men had been waiting for at the hotel, and just as clearly the one they were all afraid of. She’d taken out the man attacking Acadia without a moment’s hesitation, without a blink. She looked like one scary dude, with a bandolier of bullets slashing across her flat chest, a wicked-looking KA-BAR knife in the scarred scabbard strapped to her thigh, and an H & K G3K assault rifle held like an extension of her arm.
As Héctor used the side of the van to pull himself to his feet, the woman glanced coldly at the men watching from the sidelines. They too were armed to the teeth. She did not look happy as she shot fulminating glares at them. “I will deal with you later,” she snapped in low Spanish, clearly pissed about something. “Morales. Goito. López. Asegure los presos.”
She was okay about broadcasting their names.
