Hush (30 page)

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.

“When Gideon gets here, he's going to be exhausted, filthy, and hungry,” Acadia told him reasonably as they ate breakfast in the suite. “He won't want to sit down and compare notes. Let's go out and do our errands and come back in a few hours to give him a chance to recuperate.”

They hit the U.S. consulate first. Fortunately, Zak's fluent Spanish, and his forceful, polite insistence that they would
not
be returning to the scene of the crime to file a police report for their stolen papers, finally sank in. Acadia didn't think she wanted to hear one more time that no papers could be filed unless accompanied by a police report detailing the how, where, and why of the loss of their official papers.

Zak methodically, and patiently worked his way up a very long food chain until he received the correct answer.

They were to return in forty-eight hours to receive their paperwork. Acadia hoped that meant passports, because she couldn't leave the country without one. But passports, they were told, could take up to two weeks. They had to come from the States. Zak assured her that with the correct bribes he could shorten the time. But first they had to obtain the papers.

They hit a bank next. There, fortunately, Zak knew the bank president, who was called at home and would be there to attend to whatever Zak might need, within the hour.

Which Zak told her meant at least two hours in Venezuela.

“I'm starving,” Acadia told him as they stood in the bright sunshine outside the ornate marble-and-gilt bank. “Should we go back to the hotel for lunch and see if your brother's there?”

“We'll call Carina, see if Gid's arrived. Otherwise, no. Let's not waste time. I have a long list of purchases I'd like to make before we head back.”

Acadia smiled. “With nothing but your good looks to pay for things?”

“I got some walking money from Carina. We'll charge what we need to the hotel. It's already set up with her.”

They could walk into a store, charge whatever they purchased to the hotel, and that didn't seem at all strange to Zak? “Okay,” Acadia tucked her hand in his good arm. “Let's go shopping.”

There was a computer store conveniently located next door to a women's boutique. They split up at the door to the dress shop and agreed to meet in half an hour. Acadia wasn't much of a shopper. She either liked something or she didn't. It fit or it didn't. She could afford it or not. However, in this case, Zak came back and gave the store manager whatever information she needed to charge Acadia's purchases, then had her purchases sent to the hotel.

Zak's expression when he took in her new chocolate-and-cream wrap dress and high-heeled sandals made her heart leap with anticipation. The heat in his eyes, as his gaze did a slow trip up and down and up again, made her pulses skitter and dance. She hadn't had much time, but in that time she'd shopped like a madwoman and bought and applied makeup. She felt like a new woman.

He brushed the backs of his fingers across her cheek, his attention unmistakable. “You look … amazing.”

“Thanks,” Acadia gave him a slow, sexy smile filled with promise. With heels on, she was eye level with his mouth. He had a scrumptious mouth. Firm, and well shaped, and …

“You bought this dress to drive me to distraction, didn't you?” Zak accused, voice rough. His open hand slid from her face down her throat, until he got to the deep V between her breasts. He crowded her a little until Acadia's back was against the store's window, then ran a lazy finger up one side of the edge of the V and down the other.

He was tall enough to block out the sun, but it glinted off his hair and his strong brown throat. “You're aware we're standing on a busy street.” Because he was like a magnet, she found herself leaning in, hand on his chest. “In public,” she murmured as Zak dipped his head. “In broad dayli—”

Acadia's lips were there to meet his as his mouth brushed hers in a too-brief kiss that left her wanting more.

He smiled as he straightened. “Your eyes cross when you're horny, know that?”

They didn't cross—she didn't think—but it did take a few seconds for her vision to clear. “They do not.” She gave him a light punch to the arm. “You overestimate your charms, Mr. Stark. Who could possibly be horny standing in the middle of one of Caracas's busiest shopping districts?”