by Cherry Adair
She arched her back and lifted, pressing herself firmly against his open mouth. He hummed his pleasure, which vibrated straight through her. The smooth wood beneath her bare skin was warming up, but it was still hard as she settled her behind down again.
“Maybe we could go into the bedr—Ahhh!” She practically levitated off the hard surface as he opened her with his tongue and unerringly found the swollen bud nestled in her folds.
Her hands tightened on her breasts as he swirled his tongue across the knot of nerves and gently, deliberately, closed his teeth around her.
The climax rolled through her in wave after wave after wave of glorious, Technicolor sensation, so that she couldn’t tell one from the next. The fireworks explosion at the end left her deaf, dumb, and blind as her sensory-overloaded body splintered into a thousand pieces.
“Good?” Zak asked, now standing between her limp, spread legs.
Her lashes fluttered up. “W-what?”
He slipped his forearm under her knees and slid her down to the very edge of the sideboard. “Just checking to be sure that was good for you.”
Acadia lifted a weak hand. “You need to ask?”
Zak chuckled as he wedged his narrow hips between her spread knees. “Ready for more?”
“N—Are you insane? I can’t breathe, let alone—Oh. My. God. Z-Zakary!” His penis was hard as a rock, thick and sleek, as he flexed his hips, plunging so far inside her in one powerful thrust that she shifted up the sideboard when she came again. He pressed a splayed hand on her quivering belly and kept pumping as she struggled to gather her scattered wits. Impossible.
The next climax rolled right behind the first until she couldn’t tell if she was coming over and over or if it was one giant climax that was going to kill her with pleasure. But what a way to go.
She came again, hard, and the lights did pinwheels around her as she felt the pounding of her heartbeat in every pulse point.
With a guttural cry, Zak collapsed on top of her, stealing the last sip of air from her already collapsed lungs. She didn’t have the strength to gasp for him to move.
Sweat glued their skin together, and he was still deep inside her. Acadia had never been more satiated. If she’d had an ounce of energy left she would’ve pulled up her pants and run far and fast, before he ripped out her heart and threw it over the edge of some distant killer mountain.
Right before he intended to snowboard the damn thing.
“Shower?” His voice was muffled against the hot, sweaty curve of her throat as he kissed her.
“Minute. Can’t walk.” Can’t breathe. Can’t talk. Can’t think straight.
“I’ll carry you.”
Acadia choked out a laugh. “Oh!”
Zak lifted her with his good arm and tossed her over his bandaged shoulder in a very efficient fireman’s lift, her bare ass right next to his lips. “Time for that shower.”
Since she was suddenly dangling down his back, she tasted his damp skin as she tried to push his pants all the way off his hips. It took a while before they made it to that shower.
THIRTEEN
Zak left Acadia sleeping and followed the dim light to the living room. Seated at the large mahogany desk, he picked up a pen and held it poised over a piece of hotel stationery.
The shadowed suite smelled of sex and the crushed flowers he’d stuffed back into the vase after picking them up off the floor. He smiled. He might just buy that credenza thing and have it shipped home to Seattle.
Although he played sports ambidextrously, could even manage to brush his teeth or fire a weapon with either hand, writing with his right hand was a laborious process. But the damned number thing hadn’t allowed him to sleep.
He was worried sick about his brother. Had that bitch captured him again? Was Gideon even now back in one of those stinking cells in the middle of fucking nowhere?
Zak rubbed his forehead. What had she said to her men the other day? “Hunt them until we find them. Kill either one on sight. Bring the other back.” He pressed two fingers into his eye sockets, trying to get rid of the numbers so he could concentrate.
Loida Piñero had ordered her men to kill one of them.
Why not both? She’d had proof of life. The ransom demand had been made. Why keep one? Kill the other?
Zak didn’t want to think the worst, but he and Acadia were several days late for the rendezvous. Gideon could be having difficulties obtaining transportation out of the jungle. He, too, might have sought medical attention, for his broken ribs. Injuries festered in the hot humid climate … And if there’d been any internal bleeding … Fuckit. He couldn’t even think about it.
Christ. Zak’s brain was cluttered with what-ifs.
He picked up the phone and dialed Seattle to see if Buck had heard from Gideon yet. Zak looked at the clock on the wall and let the phone continue to ring. Anthony Buckner was one of the calmest men Zak knew. Nothing alarmed their partner, even at 5 a.m. and woken from a deep sleep, and God knew there’d been lots of those calls over the years.
Buck cut him off neatly. “Before you say anything, no, God damn it, I still haven’t heard from Gideon, or the kidnappers. And yes, I realize we have a policy, but I’m paying the ransom anyway. I’m in the middle of liquidating personal funds to cover it.”
Zak closed his eyes for a moment, his gratitude profound. A few years older than Gideon, Buck had been in on the ground floor when they’d had the idea for a revolutionary new Internet search engine. Buck had worked his ass off side by side with them to form ZAG Search, now the biggest search engine in the world. It was a hell of an accomplishment, and one that had made all three of them wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
Buck enjoyed the day-to-day grind, and Zak and Gideon had been happy to hand that off to him. The brothers worked hard, but they also played hard. What the hell was the point of all that money if they couldn’t enjoy it?
At one point, at the beginning, they’d matched each other in being workaholics. Long hours, longer meetings, code-grinding, and the legalities of it all had made for caffeine-fueled sessions that didn’t stop for hell or high water. But they had thousands of people to do the grunt work now.
The arrangement worked.
Buck was married, with two great teenagers and a very hot wife. He, Nikki, Zak, and Jennifer had been very close when Zak and Jen were first married. When their marriage had started falling apart, Nikki had taken Jen’s side, and Buck had stuck to Zak. Zak knew that his marriage difficulties had put a strain on his friend. And here the man was, paying multimillions of dollars out of his own pocket.
Christ, that showed Zak the kind of guy Anthony Buckner was—had always been. Zak heard his friend getting out of bed as he took the phone into the den of his lavish Queen Anne home in Seattle to talk without waking Nikki.
“What did you expect? Fuck the policy. It’s just money—you and Gid are more important. I’ve liquidated the sixty mil; picking it up later today.”
Zak clenched his fist. “Gideon didn’t leave a message on your home or private office line you might have missed?” He was grasping at straws. If his brother had contacted Buck in any shape or form, his friend would’ve said so. “Look, Gid could stroll in here in the morning none the worse for wear, but it might be good to have the money ready just in case. You should have used the company money.”
“I didn’t want you screaming about breaking company policy—and as your partner, and friend, I know you’re good for it. I’ll have the cash hand-delivered to you at the hotel. We’ll need to bring in security people,” Buck said. “We can’t mess around with a kidnapping. Especially not in Venezuela, where it’s considered a national pastime. If these guerrillas have Gideon in their clutches again … Shit. Sorry. You’ve gone through the variables yourself a million times, I’m sure.”
“At least.” Zak heard the chink of pottery as Buck poured himself a mug of coffee in the kitchen. He knew Buck’s house as well as his own.
“Try not to worry. I k
now exactly who to call. Zak, waiting for if or when Gid shows up at the Gran Meliá might be too late. Think about it. Let me liberate the cash and pull a team in, send them to you, just in case? An insurance policy. Okay, buddy? And then if you don’t need them, you and Gideon can use the company jet to come home.”
Zak and Buck discussed logistics and what assets could be liquidated immediately, then hung up. Buck was nothing if not efficient. He’d have their security people arrive in one of the corporation’s aircraft by nightfall. Cash in hand. Ready to hunt the guerrillas down if Gid hadn’t shown up by then.
It was a sound plan. Zak prayed he wouldn’t need to activate Buck’s security people. He wanted desperately to believe that his brother would amble in, with his too-long hair and that cocky, self-satisfied look that always meant he thought he’d won.
The competition between them had kept their close relationship lively. The Stark brothers had been best friends, confidants, all their lives. The ten-month age difference had forged a deep friendship and love that Zak was terrified to lose. Hell, he didn’t have a single childhood memory without Gid in it.
An insurance policy, he told himself. That was all the precautions were. An insurance policy. Because if he didn’t see the whites of his brother’s eyes within the next twenty-four hours, he was marching back into the jungle to track that bitch down and retrieve his brother himself.
The wheels were set in motion. Buck would be calling the bank manager and getting his ass out of bed right now. There was nothing Zak could do but wait. Pressing his fist between his eyes, he wrote down the numerals—625355565—as they scrolled through his mind in a continuous crawl.
What the fuck did they mean? Or was he trying to make sense of something that was completely irrational and nonsensical? He joined those numbers to another clump, although in his mind they all ran together like a fucking ticker tape.
55836232859675625355565
Too many late-night stock market number crunches all coming together in a concussion?
Ridiculous.
He used the pen and slashed the numbers into twos, then stared at them. Nothing came to mind. He rewrote them and broke them up into threes. Again nothing.
Frustrated, he tore the top sheet off the small pad, then started tearing the paper into small squares.
He heard Acadia’s soft footfall on the plush carpet and reached out his arm to tug her in close. He’d instructed the concierge to stock the bathroom with jasmine-scented products, and the fresh, familiar scent of Acadia’s skin made him horny as hell. He couldn’t get enough of her. He felt remarkably calm and centered around her. Relaxed and comfortable in a way he’d never felt in all the years he’d been with Jennifer. One-handed, he untied the loosely belted tie on her white terry-cloth robe, then slid his hand between the fabric and her incredibly soft skin.
“Couldn’t you sleep?” she asked softly, leaning her hip against his arm and running her fingers gently through his hair as she peered over his shoulder to his doodles and bits of ripped-up notepaper. “What are you working on?”
Zak hesitated. Somehow, having Acadia know about his hallucinations didn’t bother him at all. He had a disloyal thought—that he’d never have told Jennifer about it. In six years of marriage, they’d actually never had that level of trust. Jen would’ve somehow figured out a way to use what she would’ve perceived as a weakness to bring him to his knees, and she would have done it in such a way that it would’ve taken a long, long time for Zak to realize he’d been razor-cut and was bleeding out.
“I have sequences of numbers running through my brain.”
She took the information in smoothly, soft eyes searching his face. “When did that start? After you were hit on the head before we were taken? God, Zak I knew you had a concussion! You still have a bump, and the bruise—”
“You’d think it was a concussion. But not unless it was a delayed reaction. No. The numbers started at the mission.”
“After you died.”
Zak huffed out a laugh. “Actually, after I came back to life. Okay, this is odd, but it isn’t some newly developed sixth sense or anything woo-woo like that. I think it might be a hallucination. Or some sort of brain malfunction. Maybe I need a reboot. Or a shrink.”
She gave him a worried look. “Have Carina call a doctor. Preferably a specialist—”
“If I still have the problem, I’ll see someone back in Seattle.”
“Are you …” She sighed. “Yes, I see you are. Okay, for now let’s try to figure out what it is.” Her fingers kept lifting, then dropping, strands of his hair as she leaned against his good shoulder. “What kind of numbers?”
He skimmed his palm down the satin-smooth skin of her hip, releasing the scent of night-blooming jasmine. He inhaled deeply before answering, “No idea.”
“I’m pretty good with numbers. Want me to look?” She slid around to perch on his lap.
“You don’t think I’m nuts and hallucinating?”
“Yes to the former, but that has nothing to do with these numbers,” she replied, a smile in her voice. “And grounds for concern if the latter,” she teased, shifting to get comfortable, thereby making him extremely uncomfortable, as she was sitting directly on his erect dick. He slid his hand inside the open robe to cup her breast.
“No hanky-panky. Let’s take a look. What’s the confetti for?”
“I thought if I wrote each number on a separate piece of paper, I could move them into groups. See if anything emerged that made any kind of sense.”
“Do we have them written down as you see them?”
He reluctantly uncapped his fingers from the velvety softness of her left breast and flipped the page so she could see.
Her lashes fluttered against her cheeks as she read the numbers. Then she looked up to meet his eyes. “How do they appear to you? What do they look like?”
“They run across the bottom of whatever I’m looking at, like the crawler on a news program, or a ticker tape.”
Chewing her lower lip in concentration, she nodded. “Look at that wall over there. How big are the numbers?”
“They take up less than ten percent of what I see.”
“Is there a beginning, a middle, and an end?”
Zak slid his hand back to stroke her breast again. Like a worry stone. Or a freaking addiction. “Far as I can tell it’s on a continuous loop.”
She picked up the pen and tapped it as she considered the numbers in front of her. Her hair tickled his lips, and the smell of jasmine would forever remind Zak of her. “Social Security number? Bank account number? Swiss bank account number?” She rubbed the top of her head on the underside of his chin. “How about a longdistance phone number card and PIN code, or house number? Somewhere you lived growing up?”
“I didn’t think of a house number—but no, not that. And I don’t know all my account numbers off the top of my head, but I can take care of that with one call to my financial adviser in the morning.”
He buried his face in the silky strands near her neck. While Acadia was as complicated as a string of unrelated numbers running through his brain, she was considerably easier to distract. “It’s not pi.” Or a dozen other improbable theories.
“As in apple?”
She glanced over her shoulder and gave him a smug and sassy grin. “Pi is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space,” she rattled off easily. “The same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius—What?”
“You memorized that?”
“Wiki. I read it just for kicks. But yes. I pretty much remember weird stiff like pi.” The pen tap-tap-tapped. “Having problems with any circles lately?”
“Would this be considered a circle?” Zak pinched her nipple lightly between his fingers and felt her whole body shudder. She pressed down on his swollen dick and shifted enough to make him grit his teeth.
“Not in this instance, no. We need a computer.
”
“Yeah. The hotel would supply one, but I thought I’d wait till morning and go buy one instead.”
Acadia twisted around until she straddled him face-to-face. The robe accentuated her lithe body and beautiful, perfectly sized breasts. Just looking at her made Zak catch his breath. “In that case, since it’s the crack of daybreak … let’s go back to bed and get some sleep.” Bed, good idea.
Sleep, not hardly.
“I bet in the morning Gideon will be here,” she continued softly, “starving and ready to rumba. And with proper rest, maybe your brain will reboot and the numbers will go away.” She reached up and slid her fingers along his lips as he opened his mouth to argue. “And if that isn’t the case, then the three of us will figure out your number problem, no sweat.”
ZAK’S BROTHER DIDN’T CHECK into the hotel during the predawn. And neither did Zak’s brain reboot. He was still seeing the scrolling numbers. Acadia could tell he was loath to leave the next morning, but he needed a phone and a computer. And though Carina had supplied Acadia with a pair of black pants and a crisp white shirt, and the clothes fit fine, she needed clothes of her own if she was going to stick around with Zak for a few more days while she waited for her paperwork to go through. If it could even be done within a few days. She had no idea how long it would take: weeks, months? She had no identification on her at all.
She had to go to the American consulate, and she needed to access her bank account. Now that they were back in civilization, she didn’t expect Zak to pay her way. She wouldn’t have accepted it before she’d won the lottery; she didn’t need it now. She didn’t bring up her need for her own money and her own clothes, because she knew he’d argue with her, and she wasn’t in the mood to fight.
She wanted to enjoy his company for as long as they had left together, however short a time that was; then she’d pull up her big-girl panties and mope when she was alone. But until the second she was, she was going to enjoy every minute in Venezuela with Zak.
