Hush (19 page)

“I'll take a mint.” Shit, his voice sounded thready and weak. He'd give a fortune for a safe place to lie down for an hour.

Acadia dug the almost-empty container out of her pocket and shook two into her hand. “Good idea.” She gave him a concerned look as she placed the small mints in his outstretched palm. “The sugar might help.”

He was way beyond the help of a couple of candies.

And while Acadia doggedly kept putting one foot in front of the other, his strength was ebbing with each step. Sooner than he would have liked, dusk crowded out the little bit of blue sky visible through the dense foliage. It would be full dark within the hour. They had no shelter other than whatever he could jerry-rig together, an all but impossible task when it was dark. He kept an eye out for a likely place to stop. The dappled greens blurred ominously in his vision.

“We need to find a place to stop for the night.” He
caught himself on a tree trunk, his vision wavering as though he were seeing everything underwater. His legs buckled. Not good.

“What am I looking for?” Her voice sounded far away, as if heard through a tunnel.

He frowned, trying his damnedest to focus. “Thick underbrush … Branches … Cove—”

EIGHT

Z
ak?” Acadia glanced over her shoulder when he didn't finish the sentence. “Is something—Oh, crap, crap, crap!” His long body was sprawled on the ground several yards behind her. Racing to his side, she dropped to her knees in the spongy dirt. His face was gray, his breathing labored, and he was clearly unconscious. Her heart did a triple Axel as she frantically looked around.

“For what?” she muttered under her breath. “A paramedic?”

Pressing her fingers against the unsteady pulse behind his ear, Acadia wished she knew which was good. Fast or slow? What could she do about his pulse, anyway? What could she do about
any
of this mess? Sitting back on her heels, she cocked her head, straining to listen through the constant sound of the jungle for any sign of the bad guys. It wouldn't surprise her one bit if they jumped out of the bushes now. Murphy's Law was in full freaking effect.

Thank God the jungle was quiet. Relatively, anyway, considering all the various squeaks and squawks coming
in stereo from the shrubs around them and the canopy above. Then she heard a heavy
plop
. Followed by a patter of large drops.

Rain
. Rain? She tilted her face, anticipating a light, misting cool-down, but it was nothing so tame. Like an upended bucket, water sluiced from the canopy, a torrent drenching her to the skin instantly. “No. No. No, freaking no!”

Coughing at the unexpected mouthful, she quickly covered Zak's face with her body. Darkness descended faster than she could've imagined, turning the foliage into a spooky curtain. She could barely see the leaves in front of her face, and God only knew what those red eyes were looking back at her.

Acadia shivered, although she wasn't cold. She forced herself to think, logically prioritizing what had to be done in order of importance. Zak. He needed shelter, someplace dry, so she could tend his wound. Since she couldn't carry him, she had to produce a miracle from somewhere right where he'd fallen. She started by pulling some of the larger leaves that were at hand, making an impromptu tent over his face and over his shoulders to protect him from the downpour.

Dragging sodden strands of hair from her face and neck, she got to her feet, pulled a penlight from a pocket, and did a three-sixty to study the terrain. She needed to find the best spot to set up camp. Finally, luck was on their side. About twenty feet away was a dense curtain of thickly leafed shrubs, a decent hiding place and at least some kind of shelter from the storm.

She found a fallen stick, using it to poke and beat the bushes. Vigorously. A small capuchin monkey, its long, silky black hair waterlogged, raced out of the foliage. Acadia sprang back, biting back a shriek, and stared back at it as it sat looking at her before it darted up a tree trunk to observe her from a safer distance.

Pressing a hand to her rapidly beating heart, she addressed her audience. “You don't have the keys to a Jeep, do you?” The little guy tilted his white face and watched her with big, unblinking eyes. “How about a luxury suite with room service?” The monkey's tail curled around his body, and he cocked his head the other way. “No, I see,” she said solemnly. “You're also shit out of luck as far as resources go.” She paused. “What's that, you say? Hurry up before Zak drowns? Got it.”

He scaled the tree and disappeared into the rain while she peeled open the flap covering a long, hidden pocket running down the outside of her right pant leg. Her friends had teased her mercilessly about bringing the tiny tent. It weighed only forty-four ounces, but that was added to the weight of all the other stuff secreted in her clothing. Really, she'd wondered if she'd need it, but brought it anyway.

Thank God she'd decided to err on the side of caution. Score another one for Acadia Gray. She stomped down a small area under one of the taller bushes, flattening small branches and leaves to make a softish spot big enough to pitch the tent. In spite of the fact that she sold camping equipment seven days a week, she'd never gone camping in her life. But she'd practiced pitching
tents in her backyard so she could show customers how to do it. Rain or shine, every make and model number.

She could do this.

It wasn't as easy in the dark, in punishing rain, with the glow of animal eyes at various levels watching her. Acadia was all fingers and thumbs as she set up the thin, flexible arch pole and used her boot heel to set the stakes in place. The tent was small, even for one person, but it was better than braving the dark all night in the pouring rain.

After a few seconds of indecision, she shrugged, then unbuttoned her vest and took it off, then thought
what the hell
and stripped off her sweat-soaked T-shirt as well. Being free of the weight and the clinging fabric actually felt great. The rain felt like a warm shower set on pulse massage, sluicing the sweat and grime off her skin as she finished putting up the tent.

With the small penlight tucked into her topknot like a miner's light, she went back for Zak. He hadn't moved. When she bent to place her arms under his shoulders, his eyes flickered open, and he gave her a puzzled, upside-down look. His brow furrowed. “Give me … minute,” he managed thickly, the words slurred. “Walk.”

Seriously? He could barely lift his eyelids, let alone his entire body from prone to upright. But if he could try, maybe she could get him into place without any more damage to his shoulder. “That'll help,” she admitted. “Let's see if it's possible.”

She walked around so she could help him to his feet, holding his arm tightly against her body. His knees
buckled and this almost sent her flat on her back, but she managed to spread her feet and brace him. Holy crap, he was heavy.

She used every ounce of strength she hadn't known she had left to hold him upright. The narrow beam of the flashlight danced across the raindrops and illuminated several pairs of small, red eyes watching their every move.

That tent suddenly looked like heaven. “All right, big guy, let's—” As he leaned heavily against her, something crept across the hill and valley of her breast.
Really
? She only glanced down when Zak's fingers skimmed lower to cup her rain-slick breast and pebbled nipple.

This had to be the least of her problems.

“Warm,” Zak murmured, even as he nuzzled her ear.

The man could hardly stand, but here he was, rolling one callused thumb over her nipple with the precision of a surgeon.

The intensity of the storm, and possibly the danger as well, had heightened all of her senses, including touch.

And it felt good.

Acadia squeezed her eyes shut, the wild incongruity of the situation fighting with the warmth pooling between her legs. “Zak, you're going to fall over any minute—”

“Will you catch me?” His lips moved over her earlobe, and she jumped out of her sodden skin as his teeth closed over the sensitive flesh. “Nice landing. Soft.”

Her breath caught as his palm cradled her breast, and her grip tightened on his arm. “Seriously,” she breathed, and failed utterly to sound as resolute as she'd wanted.

“Am serious,” he murmured as his lips traced a line of kisses across her jaw. The rain pounded over them both, warm and suddenly too damned intimate. Like an exotic shower. Or a tropical paradise.

Or trouble
.

“You're weak from loss of blood,” she told him. Her voice strangled in her chest as his fingers squeezed her erect nipple, his other hand sliding over her wet nape.

“Prob'ly,” he agreed, entirely too cheerfully given how heavily he was leaning on her. His mouth teased at the corner of hers, and she shuddered.

“You have—” She turned her head to look into his eyes, to check to see if his pupils were dilated—that was a sign of a concussion, wasn't it?—and knew she had made a mistake as his lips closed over hers.

The rain covered them, glued them together, as his grip at the back of her neck held her still. His mouth caught at her lower lip, teased and nibbled until her own lips parted on a sigh. Eager, with a whole lot more energy than she would have given him credit for, his tongue swept into her mouth to taste her.

A dip. A flick. She felt more than heard his groan as his fingers tightened at her nape. “'S nice,” he murmured against her lips.

More than nice, she realized. And even worse, completely insane. He was hurt! Somehow, she didn't think St. Christopher was equipped for this kind of stuff. Taking his wrist, she extricated his hand from her breast. He sounded drunk. The heavy weight of his arm around her
shoulders made it hard to walk. But it beat trying to drag him bodily to the tent.

“All right,” she said with as much asperity as she could muster. “It's time for you to lie down, Zak.”

“Don' think this is the right time, sweetheart,” he mumbled as Acadia, panting from the exertion, leaned him against a broad tree trunk and started unbuttoning his saturated shirt.

Now
he decided to be sensible? “That's because you have a one-track mind, big boy.” Dried blood—the
only
dry thing around—had stuck the fabric to his wound despite the gauze she'd used. She let the rain beat on it for a while, then reached for his belt buckle. “We don't want to sleep in wet clothes, right?”

He gave her a sexy, lopsided grin. “Sleep naked.”

So did she. But if he were in her bed, she wouldn't be sleeping. That thing she'd just set up was a one-woman tent. Somehow, she was going to have to share it with him. She knew at least one of them wasn't going to get any sleep.

Crap. She got one arm out of the sleeve, no easy feat when the soaking wet fabric clung to him like a second skin. “Good to know,” Acadia told him dryly as she picked a fat bug off his chest and flicked it off her fingers into the darkness.

“God, you're pretty. Sunny.
Happy
, for crissake. Don' get it,” he mumbled.

She reached up to gently push his dripping hair out of his eyes. “
You're
pretty darn irresistible when you're out of it and forget to be a jerk, Zakary Stark.”

Reaching out, he traced his thumb over her lower lip. “Sexy. Resourceful. Sexy …”

He was apparently making a laundry list of her attributes, she thought, amused. He wasn't this chatty when he was his normal self. She wondered when last he'd
been
his normal self. According to Gideon, not for a while. His wife must've been a paragon of wonderfulness to make a man like Zak not want to go on without her.

Acadia felt a pang of envy. She couldn't imagine what it would be like to be loved by a man that much. “That's me,” she told him, keeping her voice cheerful as she tried not to imagine what might be surrounding them right now. As flimsy as the small tent was, it was a layer of protection between them and the critters. “Sexy and definitely resourceful.”